So far, managers haven’t shown much appetite for accomplishing any of those three things. And anglers must be convinced, whether through education or enforcement, to comply with the existing bag limits. Managers must come up with a realistic estimate of recreational release mortality. That will require the Council and Board to adopt recreational catch limits that prioritize rebuilding the stock, even if that happens at the expense of recreational landings. There is little that managers can do about recruitment, which is largely dependent upon oceanographic conditions, but managers can adopt management measures that keep fishing mortality low enough to promote rebuilding. Hopefully, the rebuilding plan will succeed, but that success is contingent on two closely related questions: Whether bluefish recruitment is as robust as biologists expected when they drafted the plan, and whether fishing mortality can be maintained at a level low enough to permit rebuilding to occur. In 2021, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Council) and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management Board (Board), trying to restore bluefish abundance, adopted a rebuilding plan calculated to restore the stock within seven years. No data were available for years prior to that, but given how badly the stock was overfished in ’85, it’s likely that the overfishing began well before then, so it’s hardly surprising that the Sound no longer hosts anything near the number of bluefish that it did in the 1970s.
#Define bluefish update#
The bluefish’s decline was documented in a stock assessment update released in 2019, which found that the Atlantic Coast bluefish population had become overfished, and that it had been experiencing overfishing in almost every year since 1985. The few bluefish that remain are a mere shadow of what used to be. Today, the menhaden still fill the harbors, but they circle quietly, casually rippling the surface, unharried by predators below.
It happened every day, sometimes throughout the day, from June well into October. Every morning, in at least one local harbor, untold hundreds of bluefish, many of them weighing 15 pounds or more, would rip into packed menhaden schools as the first glimmers of light touched the water, churning the water white as waves of baitfish went airborne with a sound that resembled a waterfall. It’s difficult to describe what fishing for bluefish was like in Long Island Sound forty or fifty years ago.īack in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and for a while after that, bluefish defined the summer fishery along the Connecticut shore.
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