Last week marked a new turn in the 15-year old battle to protect Delaware Bay’s population of horseshoe crabs and the migratory shorebirds that depend upon them. For better or worse, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission adopted a new policy (called Addendum 7) thereby embracing the use of a complicated and untested model predicting sustainable levels of horseshoe crab harvest and an even riskier allocation scheme that loosens restrictions on industrial harvests of horseshoe crabs in MD and VA. The two moves will significantly increase the harvest of horseshoe crabs at a time when there are no objective signs of recovery in this long-suffering fishery.
Adopting these risky policies at this increasingly perilous time for red knots and other shorebirds deepens the division between the two most important constituent groups in this decade-long battle to control the fishery resources of the Bay.
At first, it would appear the two groups are those seeking the long-term recovery of the shorebird stopover and the bay’s fishermen wanting to earn a living. But a closer examination reveals this is really a battle of industrial fishing concerns that dominate the ASMFC and those concerned about the collapse of both the shorebird stopover and the bay’s fishery.
The reason is the ASMFC’s history of depleting fisheries for the sake of a strong commercial interest rather than imposing restrictions on everyone (larger commercial concerns and smaller local baymen) to prevent the desruction of species. Weakfish, the premier fish species of the bay, has been in long-term decline; some say never to return. Other sport fish like flounder or the migratory shad are not far behind. Atlantic sturgeon, once emblematic of a healthy bay system, are now gone and soon to be listed as an endangered species. All of this has occurred while the ASMFC has repeatedly abandoned risk-averse actions so as not to risk the ire of corporate fishery concerns until collapse is imminent. The ASMFC’s decision to curtail the menhanden fishery is only the most recent example.
Caught Menhaden. Photo by Marc Piché © 2007
Lauded a breakthrough, the ASMFC Menhaden Plan, was medicine long avoided. This small, abundant fish is the breadbasket of most coastal fish species, and one company , Omega Protein protected by Virginia politicians ( the company donated over $55,000 to VA Governor Bob McDonnell), has overharvested it. The company processes the fish to satisfy a rapidly expanded market in fish oil, pet foods and cosmetics. When these unmanaged and short-sighted harvests reached the point where even non-scientists (as described in scathing articles in Salon and the Baltimore Sun) could see the impeding collapse of all the fish depending on menhaden, then the ASMFC made its “breakthrough” to modestly restrict the harvest.
This is what is happening to horseshoe crabs. Risky moves are underpinning the corporate harvest of horseshoe crabs mostly for the sake of one company in VA who has significant political influence and is intimately familiar with members of the ASMFC horseshoe crab management board. At the behest of these corporate interests, the ASMFC approved two new adventures in fishery management. The first was a new statistical model (called the Adaptive Resource Management, or ARM, model) that would predict the proper level of harvest of crabs that would not interfere with the recovery of the Delaware Bay shorebird stopover. The second undermines the ARM Model. It is a little-understood allocation scheme that effectively re-assigns Delaware Bay breeding crabs, that winter off the Atlantic coast of MD and VA, to some other unknown breeding area, thus freeing them from the harvest restrictions imposed by the ARM model. The ARM model could have finally removed from the ASMFC the nasty tendency to overharvest it charges, but the allocation scheme effectively neutralized it.
For those waiting for horseshoe crabs to return to the bay in numbers once seen in the past, the wait just got longer.
