Damaging Kingfish Closure Based On Absurd Shore-Catch Statistics
May 16, 2011
By Rusty Chinnis
The king mackerel fishing was hot but suddenly it was interrupted—halted by federal fisheries authorities on the basis of data that can only be described as a joke.
But no one was laughing.
A lot of money was lost. A lot of family fishing fun was wiped out.
Charter captains and other anglers off Miami, the Keys and West Florida were shut down from kingfishing on Jan. 13 when federal officials decided that a recreational quota was reached for the “Gulf Stock” of king mackerel.
And now the bombshell:
It turns out that the catch estimate that played a lead role in the shutdown included 124,802 kings caught from shore. Shore? Kingfish by the thousands and thousands from shore?
Have Florida Sportsman and all the other outdoor media, along with the newspapers and TV, missed covering all this great fishing from piers and beaches?
No. Fact is, the 124,802 shore-catch is the latest and most flagrant example of the wildly inaccurate data that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and federal fishery management councils use to regulate our fishing.
Worse yet, the same data is used routinely by Florida authorities for state-level deliberations and drafting laws that affect all fishermen.
Many government biologists will tell you privately that much of the data is weak at best and is subject to huge error factors. But at the same time, they'll argue that since the data is all there is, it must be utilized as if it were gospel.
“It's just plain stupid,” said one observer, “to take bogus statistics and use them because they're there. That's like looking at the wrong answers in an arithmetic class and accepting them anyway because they're the ‘best answers available'.”
So, where did the obviously inflated shore-catch of kings come from?
The numbers are part of NMFS' Marine Recreational Fisheries Survey. It's based on random telephone calls to the general public and in-person “intercept” interviews. Because of limited funding, often-inexperienced personnel and small samplings, the statistics have long been suspect.
Suspicions seem to be confirmed, in spades, as exemplified by the kingfish data.
How exactly did the 124,802 shore-catch total come about? We asked scientists in Miami, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee and Washington to please run through the raw material that produced this estimate—an estimate that resulted in a damaging shut-down that still has the recreational fishing industry reeling.
At presstime, we still were waiting for an explanation. We'll try again for the May issue.
Any reasonable explanation would be mighty tough to come up with because Florida's veteran sportfishing populace knows that few kings are taken from shore.
Dave Sork, for instance, has not seen or heard of a king mackerel being caught on the city pier at Anna Maria in the eight years he's been managing the facility. He did hear of a king caught in 1981.
Said Dennis Hart, second-generation owner of Hart's Landing in Sarasota: “I can't ever remember a king mackerel being caught from shore anywhere along Florida's West-Central Coast.”
The 124,802 kings supposedly caught from shore apparently stem from some kind of extrapolation based on isolated spots such as a handful of piers in the Panhandle. Phil Halstead, who fishes the Okaloosa Island Pier in Panama City and follows the action at two other piers in Pensacola and Panama City, says the three piers together could conceivably account for 5,000 kings in a good year. “But I don't know of any other place in the Florida Gulf Region that produces kingfish from shore. If you ask me, the 124,000 number is outrageous.”
Texas fishing is included in the Gulf picture. Could that account for big shore-catch reports? Hal Osborn, who heads that state's highly regarded monitoring program, estimates the overall Texas catch of kings at 8,000, with only a couple of piers that might yield a few kings from shore.
Just six months, May through October, accounted for the government's big shore-catch reports.
The records also reveal that a similarly large shore-catch figured in the 1990 closure—78,511 kings from shore.
But the implausibilities aren't limited to shore modes of fishing. While the estimated catch from private boats soared, the catch by charter boats fell by nearly 7,000 fish, even though the number of trips were up. Did charter captains lose their touch? Did they forget how to catch kings for a year?
For the South Atlantic stock of kings, the same types of aberrations pop up; though, fortunately, they did not lead to closures on the east coast where stocks are considered to be in more plentiful supply.
There again, few king mackerel were actually taken from shore, but the government figures claim a total in 1990 of 62,212. We all missed out on the action again? For 1991 the shore total plummeted to 16,223, even though the private-boat totals showed an increase from 242,493 to 324,532. Again, the charter captains seem to have lost it, dropping from 179,619 in 1990 to 131,302 last year.
All the totals, by the way, are for numbers of fish, not pounds.
An average size of seven pounds would bring that Gulf shore-catch to 837,614 pounds! That poundage gets into many different totals involving recreational fishing.
As noted in Florida Sportsman last month, and many times previously, quotas should not be used at all in the recreational fishery not only because the data is so suspect, but also because there is no way to adequately inform the general public (and law enforcement officers for that matter) about the latest stop-and-start dates.
The South Atlantic federal council recently decided to consider changing to straight bag limits (with annual changes if needed). Commercial closures, on the other hand, are historically workable because poundage catch figures are known and fisheries industry people are easily informed.
For sportsfishermen, the negative ramifications of faulty catch data are many.
For instance, federal authorities claim that recreational anglers are allocated 68 percent of the Gulf kingfish allowable catch. That has a reasonable sound to it until one realizes that the catch numbers are inflated by poor research and that recreational s outnumber commercial fishermen by more than 100 to one.
Also, it's important to remember that the same federal survey data turns up all the time in the work of the Florida Marine Fisheries Commission and the Florida Department of Natural Resources.
In the current battles over seatrout, it is claimed in official documents that recreational anglers take 73 percent of the total trout catch. Where does that figure come from? It comes from the same people who gave us those shore-catch figures from last year.
MFC member Ebbie LeMaster expressed his own skepticism about the data during recent trout talks. “These are the same biologists who were completely wrong about the kingfish stocks back when they were wiped out while everything the recreationals were saying turned out to be exactly correct.”
NMFS data played a major role in delaying the gamefish program that finally saved redfish because according to the statistics, sportfishing interests caught 88 percent of the total. The figure was doubted but couldn't be disproven statistically.
However, the stocks of redfish have multiplied dramatically without the commercial pressure, tending to show that recreational catches were far less significant than was claimed in comparison to commercial nets.
