Don’t think the summer flounder fishery will face an outright closure if arbitrary federal stock levels aren’t met by the equally arbitrary date of 2013? Think again.

South Carolina anglers are reeling over the closure of their prized red snapper fishery – despite stock levels being at such a level adequate to support a robust recreational fishery.
In March, the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council recommended that the National Marine Fisheries Service close the red snapper fishery temporarily while a new management plan was created.  A full ban on the fishery is expected to become law as early as June in order to meet the standards set forth by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), the federal fisheries law which was revised as recently as 2006 to include rigid “overfishing” requirements.  According to MSA, if best available science shows that a stock is overfished, the council must develop a fishery management plan to end overfishing immediately and rebuild affected stocks to maximum sustainable yield, not to exceed 10 years.

“In the long term, the current approach of fisheries management through restrictions alone is ‘old-school’ and brilliantly designed to fail by those who want it to,” said Charleston angler Jason Ward. “While fishermen support and understand that restrictions on size limits and bag limits are a necessary part of fisheries management, it cannot be the only tool,” Ward said.

The point that many fishermen and scientists are arguing is that the “best available science” used by fisheries managers has proven to be woefully inaccurate.  According to the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), recent research study conducted by Dr. Robert Shipp and Dr. Steve Bortone, experts in the field of red snapper population dynamics, revealed the overall stock of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is far more robust than the assessments coming out of NMFS, and have been on the increase since 1995.

“We know of no instance in the history of fisheries management where the stocks may be greater than virgin levels, but the constraints on harvest continue to be more stringent,” Dr. Shipp said in his report, which goes on to recount the socioeconomic importance of red snapper to both commercial and recreational fishermen and the negative economic impact that will result from ratcheting down unnecessarily on these fisheries as mandated by MSA.

The situation in South Carolina has chilling similarities to our own fisheries management woes in New Jersey. While summer flounder stocks are at record high levels — the number of summer flounder living off New Jersey has doubled since 1993 according to figures from the NMFS — recreational anglers face a shutdown of the fishery by 2013 due to inflexible provisions built into the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

“The situation with red snapper clearly illustrates the need for flexibility to manage rebuilding and rebuilt stocks, something the RFA has been saying all along,” said RFA director Jim Donofrio, Executive Director of the national sportfishing organization. “To impose such economic hardships on coastal economies based on arbitrary deadlines and outdated abundance estimates when the stocks are actually at abundance levels never seen before is inexcusable,” Donofrio added.

Ever tightening regulations thanks to the MSA have skyrocketed the minimum size limit for summer flounder in New Jersey from 15.5-inches in 2000 to 18.5-inches in 2009. The season has also been slashed from what was once a May through October fishery to a season beginning Memorial Day weekend and ending before Labor Day.