NON-VOTING MEMBERS Doug Boyd...Texas Dale Diaz...Mississippi Campo Matens...Louisiana Harlon Pearce...Louisiana Corky Perret...

Transcription

1 GULF OF MEXICO FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL REEF FISH MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE Hilton Tampa Airport Westshore Tampa, Florida JANUARY -, 01 January, 01 VOTING MEMBERS Bob Shipp...Alabama Larry Abele...Florida Kevin Anson (designee for Chris Blankenship)...Alabama Martha Bademan (designee for Nick Wiley)...Florida Roy Crabtree...NMFS, SERO, St. Petersburg, Florida Pamella Dana...Florida Myron Fischer...Louisiana John Greene, Jr...Alabama Robin Riechers...Texas Kay Williams...Mississippi NON-VOTING MEMBERS Doug Boyd...Texas Dale Diaz...Mississippi Campo Matens...Louisiana Harlon Pearce...Louisiana Corky Perret...Mississippi STAFF Steve Atran...Population Dynamics Statistician Steve Bortone...Executive Director Assane Diagne...Economist Shepherd Grimes...NOAA General Counsel Ava Lasseter...Anthropologist Emily Muehlstein...Fisheries Outreach Specialist Phyllis Miranda...Communications Assistant Mark Mueller...GIS Analyst Charlotte Schiaffo...Administrative Assistant Carrie Simmons...Fishery Biologist OTHER PARTICIPANTS Greg Abrams...Panama City, FL Pam Anderson...Panama City Beach, FL Trip Aukeman...CCA, Tallahassee, FL Holly Binns...Pew Environment Group Heather Blough...NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL Buddy Bradham...St. Petersburg, FL 1

2 Steve Branstetter...NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL B.J. Burkett...Panama City, FL Shane Cantrell...Fishing Addiction Charters Scott Childress...Tampa, FL Jim Clements...Carrabelle, FL Bubba Cochrane...Galveston, TX Mike Colby...Clearwater, FL Jason Delacruz...Largo, FL Russ Dunn...NOAA, St. Petersburg, FL Libby Fetherston...St. Petersburg, FL Martin Fisher...FL Maurice Fitzsimmons...Daphne, AL Troy Frady...Orange Beach, AL Sue Gerhart...NMFS Bob Gill...FL Chad Hanson...Pew Environmental Trust, Crawfordville, FL Frank Helies...GSAFF, Tampa, FL Scott Hickman...Circle H Charters Stephen Holiman...NMFS, FL Peter Hood...NMFS, FL Mike Jepson...NOAA, St. Petersburg, FL Paul Johnson...Crawfordville, FL Mark Kelly...Panama City Beach, FL David Krebs...Destin, FL Brian Lewis...Clearwater, FL Jay Lugar...MSC David McCarron...Kennebunk, ME Russell Nelson...CCA, FL Dennis O Hern...FRA, St. Petersburg, FL Christine Package...NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL Ryan Patmintra...Senator Marco Rubio s Office, Tampa, FL Bonnie Ponwith...NOAA Samantha Port-Minner...Ocean Conservancy Sean Powers...University of S. Alabama, AL Lance Robinson...TX Bob Spaeth...SOFA, Madeira Beach, FL Phil Steele...NOAA Fisheries, St. Petersburg, FL Jessica Stephen...NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL Andy Strelcheck...NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL T.J. Tate...Gulf Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance, FL Bill Teehan...Tallahassee, FL Steve Tomeny...Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance Mark Tryon...Gulf Breeze, FL Bill Tucker...Dunedin, FL Russell Underwood...Lynn Haven, FL Bill VanDeman...Apollo Beach, FL David Walker...Andalusia, AL Ed Walker...Holiday, FL

3 Will Ward...Altamonte Springs, FL Donald Waters...Pensacola, FL Wayne Werner...Alachua, FL Megan Westmeyer...Charleston, SC Mike Whitfield...Lynn Haven, FL Daniel Willard...Environmental Defense, Austin, TX Jim Zurbrick...Jolly Rogers II Fisheries, LLC The Reef Fish Management Committee of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council convened at the Hilton Tampa Airport Westshore, Tampa, Florida, Monday afternoon, January, 01, and was called to order at 1:0 p.m. by Chairman Bob Shipp. CALL TO ORDER AND INTRODUCTIONS CHAIRMAN BOB SHIPP: We will convene the committee. I have a very few housekeeping announcements to make first. Some are actually not housekeeping, but as a reminder, cell phones, if you would please mute them. This is not a full council meeting. This is a Reef Fish Committee meeting and so we have not scheduled time for public testimony. We ve got an awful lot to cover in a day-and-a-half, but obviously anything that comes out of this committee meeting, you will be invited to make testimony at the Mobile meeting. Someone told me there was a football game tonight and so we will try to make sure we complete our afternoon business before the game. I want to introduce a couple of people, or at least one person. Sam Rauch, he s the one in the coat and tie. Sam is the Acting Fishery Director down from Silver Spring and, Sam, would you like to make a few comments? MR. SAM RAUCH: Thank you. I am Sam Rauch and I m the acting head of the National Marine Fisheries Service at the moment. I wanted to just make a few opening remarks that this is a very important meeting. I know it s very important to the people here in this room and it s very important to this region, but it is also important nationally. The issues you re facing right now are issues that other regions of the country are just starting to face. They are dealing with these issues as well and so what you do here today will have ramifications around the country, what you do here today and

4 over the course of the next year, as other fisheries deal with these stocks. I am encouraged by the leadership the council has shown on this issue so far and I am encouraged by the interest and participation on this issue. It s a difficult issue and it s an issue in which we re all going to have to work together. It s going to require us to think in new ways and look at new solutions. I have faith that under the leadership of the council we can do that and I want you to have a good meeting and thank you. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Thank you, Sam. The only other thing I would want to mention is to make clear that Doug Boyd, as Chairman of the Council, is also a member of each committee. I don t know why in the world he would want to vote on some of these contentious issues, but he does have a vote. With that, we ll start with the first item on the agenda, which is the Adoption of the Agenda. That s Tab SP, Number 1. Do I hear a motion to adopt the agenda? EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR STEVE BORTONE: Do you want to do the roll call for the membership? CHAIRMAN SHIPP: We have not done it for committee members before, but yes. Since this is a unique situation, let s do that. We ll have a roll call for voice recognition of the committee members and we will start on my left. MR. JOHNNY GREENE: Johnny Greene, Alabama. MS. MARTHA BADEMAN: Martha Bademan, Florida. DR. PAMELLA DANA: Pam Dana, Florida. MR. KEVIN ANSON: Kevin Anson, Alabama. MS. KAY WILLIAMS: Kay Williams, Mississippi. MR. SHEPHERD GRIMES: Shepherd Grimes, NOAA Office of General Counsel, Southeast Section. DR. ROY CRABTREE: Roy Crabtree, NOAA Fisheries. MR. PHIL STEELE: Phil Steele, NOAA Fisheries.

5 MR. DOUG BOYD: Doug Boyd, Texas. MR. ROBIN RIECHERS: Robin Riechers, Texas. MR. MYRON FISCHER: Myron Fischer, Louisiana. MR. CORKY PERRET: Corky Perret, Mississippi, but not a committee member. I m a council member. ADOPTION OF AGENDA CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Thank you all. Now, a motion to adopt the agenda, do I hear a motion to adopt the agenda? DR. LARRY ABELE: So moved. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Do we have a second? DR. CRABTREE: Second. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Any objections? The agenda is adopted. The second item is Approval of the Minutes, Tab SP, Number. Do I hear a motion to adopt the minutes? APPROVAL OF MINUTES MR. RIECHERS: So moved. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Do we have a second? DR. ABELE: Second. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Any objections? Okay. We re moving right along. The third item on the agenda is the Draft 01 Red Snapper Framework Action and the first item under Roman Numeral III is Analysis of the 0 Red Snapper Harvest and 01 ABC and that s Tab SP, Number (a) and Sean Powers will represent the SSC and give us a report. DRAFT 01 RED SNAPPER FRAMEWORK ACTION ANALYSIS OF 0 RED SNAPPER HARVEST AND 01 ABC DR. SEAN POWERS: Thank you, Dr. Shipp. Just to get everybody on the same footing here, this is a copy, and I think it s available to all of you, of the presentation the SSC received in November via webinar that Brian Linton gave.

6 We will be referring to this, a couple of times, I think, for some question and answer period, but if you go to the next slide, I want to give everybody some background here. This is, and this is important to understand, but this is an update of the projections. This is not an update. I think that gets lost. It s an update of the projections. All that is done is that the landings data are updated and then the model assumes all of the same things that it has before and so we don t get new CPUE indices and we don t get new fisheries-independent indices, but we simply run the model with the new landings and then get the projections from that. We had a lot of discussion over what the SSC needed. The SSC favored having an update, but the fact that we re having a benchmark right now put us into a situation where all we could have from their staff was an update of the projections. We don t have to go through all of those things, but essentially -- The SSC, and I ll give the SSC report here, the SSC met via webinar in November to discuss what action, if any, we would take on the new projections. In the past, the SSC has looked at projections and essentially the default has been to use our previous guidelines, but to revise the ABC recommendation based on the new yield stream. We have done this several times now for gag and we ve done it several times for red snapper and so essentially, we look at the projections and we use the same model and then we use the same guidelines and rationale. There was some debate at the SSC meeting. As you all know, the SSC has adopted percent of F SPR percent as our ABC recommendations and so we set the OFL. The OFL really is determined by the model and we don t have any -- Once we accept a model, we have an OFL, the overfishing limit. Once we adopted the AS model with the shrimp effort rebuild -- Remember, there were multiple models in the last formal update and the SSC has used the guidance for AS. The OFL is given to us by the model and then we decide what buffer we want. By convention, the first time we looked at the update, it was set at percent of the OFL. There were some at the SSC meeting that felt that that was too conservative and that having a percent buffer between the OFL and the ABC was, A, not consistent with the ABC control rule and, B, was too

7 conservative and that that was essentially too much of a buffer and that the uncertainty around the ABC was not that great. Others on the SSC point out that the AS is just one of eight different models you could choose from. We ve been having discussions over this for a while now and most of the SSC believes the AS model is the most plausible model, but other models -- The continuity run actually has a much lower yield projected. We went back and forth and there were two motions that were presented. The first was to -- Neither one, and I should put this caveat, were in line with the ABC control rule. One of them had the spirit of the ABC control rule and that is to set the overfishing -- To set the ABC at a probability of zero overfishing. It turns out that you can t get zero. You have to go to 0., but what is the probability -- What is the ABC at 0.? That would set the -- The OFL, again, is set by the model,.. If you choose AS with shrimp rebuild, you would get. million pounds and that s the OFL. The ABC we chose -- If we chose to set it at 0. percent probability of overfishing, and so an extremely low probability of overfishing, we would get a number of. million pounds. That was rejected by a fairly close vote of six to seven. The rationale that was used for that essentially was that it was inconsistent with our previous advice. We have a 01 benchmark coming up and that this is just, again, a re-projection based on new landings and the indices and age comp are not updated. The next motion was to essentially do what we ve done with previous projections, which is stay consistent with our previous rationale, which is percent of F at SPR percent. That gives us an ABC recommendation of. million pounds. That was passed ten to three and so that one had a lot of support. Again, one of the rationale that was given also for this motion was that it was consistent with our previous advice. The PDFs - - If you looked at the PDFs, the probability distribution functions, around the overfishing, they don t have a real large spread on them. They are really sharp and that s one of the problems that we have with a lot of the PDF functions around the overfishing limit, is that they re very, very sharp because not enough of the uncertainty in the model parameters is captured.

8 Essentially, that is our recommendation, that the ABC be set at. million pounds. That is an increase from last year. It is not as much of an increase as we originally saw in the previous projections. Steven can tell us how far off all the different contrasts are, but I think it s about a 00,000 or 00,000-pound increase and we were scheduled for a 00,000 pound increase. MR. STEVEN ATRAN: The increase you re recommending is exactly half of what was originally recommended. DR. POWERS: Yes and so about -- We re giving you -- The increase is about half of what we originally recommended and that s driven by the fact that there was an overage last year and so the model projections won t be the same. There is an increase from last year. The SSC was divided, I would say, on how conservative it wanted that increase to be. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Dr. Powers, a couple of things. Kay, you start and then I think some others of us have some questions as well. Go ahead, Kay. MS. WILLIAMS: Actually, I have two items. Could you explain to us -- During the webinar, there was mention of yes, we are having a benchmark, but it s not a true benchmark and that it is a modified benchmark and could you tell us why we re having a modified benchmark instead of the normal benchmark and what the possible ramifications of that could be? That s my first question. DR. POWERS: I m not sure I remember that part of the conversation. My understanding is that this is a benchmark and everything is on the table. We don t have to keep the same modeling framework. There was some discussion that we might be, because Stock Synthesis may not be able to deal with the complexities of red snapper, we might have to stay with the original model, the Ketchum model, but everything is on the table to be changed. MS. WILLIAMS: All right and the reason I brought that up is because there was a lot of discussion about what the SSC needed and the information that they haven t been given in the past and even though we were having the benchmark, how yet we have yet went in and modified this benchmark assessment and yet something else is still going to be missing and I don t recall just what that was. But wasn t -- As I recall, there was a lot of discussion about

9 this and about the upcoming benchmark assessment that you will be dealing with, but at one point, dealing with Roberts Rules and what motion you could do or couldn t do, I felt like that the panel could have very well possibly went back to the previous motion that only failed, I think you said, by one vote, but because of being out of sequence or order according to Roberts Rules, they just kind of let it go and that bothered me. Is that what you recall? DR. POWERS: There was some complexities there and it was the one time that we would have liked to have had Shep there. I am just joking. We always love Shep. After the vote was six to seven, one of the -- That motion was declared failed by the Chair. A new motion was put on the table to go with percent of OFL as our ABC. In the beginning discussions of that motion, one of the people who had voted in the majority in the previous motion, so they voted to decline it, said that they wanted to change their vote and they wanted to reconsider the motion. Because it was a six-to-seven, it would have been a seven-to-six for the higher quota, essentially. He was ruled out of order because there was a new motion on the table. There was some discussion of that, that couldn t we just table the motion that were currently considering and it went back and forth and essentially, he was ruled out of order, where some of us thought that he wasn t out of order, because he was in the majority and he could bring it back up, but we didn t know what to do with a motion on the table. It was decided that we would vote on this motion and because it passed ten to three, we never did revisit it, yes, but there was some definitely -- There was concern about the process. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Thank you, Kay, and that s exactly what I wanted Dr. Powers to go through. Just so that the committee and everyone understands, it was a procedural issue that if it had been ruled another way, we could have had another one-and-a-half million pounds of quota. I don t have any argument with the process itself. The procedure was probably followed properly, but this is the bind we find ourselves in and since we re on the topic, I would like Dr. Powers to kind of walk us through the control rule issue and where we would have been if the SSC had adopted the control rule quotas and if you would do that, Dr. Powers, I would appreciate it.

10 DR. POWERS: Before I do that, I will need the presentation back up, the last couple of slides in the presentation. Again, one of the reasons we did not revisit this topic was the fact that the next motion passed so overwhelmingly, ten to three. Now, what is obviously unclear is how individuals would have revoted and the argument was that if they felt that strongly about increasing the quota, they wouldn t have voted for the second motion. When we follow our ABC control rule, we have a range of probabilities of overfishing that the council has decided upon that we could go through. Essentially, it s 0. to 0. is the probabilities and we have a control rule that allows us to basically discount from 0. probability of overfishing down to the 0. level. This is your 01 and 01 and 01. These are the four models, because we all assume a rebuilding shrimp effort or effort consistent with the rebuilding plan. AS1 is the continuity run and AS is -- Continuity is continuity and AS1 and AS all make different assumptions about the relative importance of the age comp versus the importance of the fishery-independent indices. Essentially, the indices of abundance are telling us that the population is doing much better than the age comp is telling us they re doing and so there s various reasons why we have that disagreement and hopefully the new benchmark will help us resolve that disagreement. Essentially, if you look, we chose AS, which is one of the things that the SSC points out, is we re using the most optimistic model. Some of us view it as the most plausible, but either way, it is the model that gives us the highest yields. If we chose a probability -- The lowest probability we could choose from our ABC control rule is 0.. That would give us, right here, a quota of about. million pounds. That would be the most conservative we would be with our ABC control rule. Obviously a million pounds more than what we ve got right here, which was a probability of zero overfishing, or 0. overfishing, and so you re basically -- You have to realize how sharp that difference is and that s what we would like to see more, is a bigger spread on that probability distribution function, inserting more parameters that have uncertainty under them, because essentially this goes from a probability of zero to a

11 probability of one over about 1. million pounds and we don t think the science is that exact that we need to get more of a spread. Your answer, Bob, is it would be. million pounds. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: So two-million pounds more than the SSC recommended. One last question, Sean. The percent, what is the basis for that buffer, the percent of SPR or percent buffer? DR. POWERS: If you go back to the last time we had an official update on this -- The first time we had an update was 00? MR. ATRAN: That was the last update. DR. POWERS: Everything is re-projections of this 00 update. We did not have an ABC control rule in place at that time. We were working on the ABC control rule. The model also didn t produce PDFs, or probability distribution functions, around the overfishing limit and so we couldn t really use PDFs. Clay Porch and his staff fixed that problem one year later to give us PDFs, but the original rationale was one of the SSC members, who is not even on the SSC any longer, proposed percent of OFL and the idea with that was that used to be the default for OY, essentially, which we now know that OY is more in the council s purview than the SSC s purview. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Sean, can you give us a sense on why the majority of the SSC members would prefer not to go with the control rule and would rather maintain the consistency of the past? DR. POWERS: The reason why is because have not received another model, an update or a benchmark or anything, since that advice was set out and so why would we change our advice? That s the rationale. MS. WILLIAMS: I just wanted to make sure that I got this on the record. When I was asking them about the various levels of TAC, I asked them to consider, because we are allowed to and Magnuson says so, socioeconomic effect. They did not consider any and so there s none considered into the quota that they are recommending having to do with the socioeconomic effect, which you are allowed to consider when you set your ACLs, because they didn t have any information. There was no one there to give them any socioeconomic consequences one way or the other and so I feel that that being said, I m hoping

12 that this committee will take that into consideration when they make whatever recommendations is going to come out of here. DR. CRABTREE: Just a couple of things to bear in mind. The percent buffer, that s been a longstanding buffer that this council has established in the fishery management plan as the buffer between the maximum sustainable yield level and the optimum yield level. Then the other thing to bear in mind is this is the only buffer that we have in the fishery, that we ve set the quotas, the ACLs, at the ABC level. The guidelines talk about separating management uncertainty and scientific uncertainty, but we really haven t done that here. They are bundled in. If you look at the performance of the fishery in the past, we have, more often than not, had overages in the range of a million pounds. Last year, it was closer to a million-and-ahalf pounds and so if you take that as to some sense of what the management uncertainty is and if you consider that the buffer now is. million pounds, it s really not unreasonably large, given that there is a substantial amount of scientific uncertainty, but there s also a substantial amount of management uncertainty and they re all sort of combined into that percent buffer. I think it s something we can revisit when we get the new assessment. I believe the scientific uncertainty will reduce quite a bit, but we still have a lot of management uncertainty in this fishery in terms of our ability to close the fisheries on time in the recreational sector. MS. WILLIAMS: Roy, with that being said, I know in the past when we were waiting on assessments that you were allowed to release part of the quota, waiting upon the assessment coming forward and coming out and then releasing the second part of the quota after that. Could you not do that for 01 on the red snapper? I know we ve got to have -- They re recommending their quotas, the TAC, and I m sure there s some of us that feels that it should have probably been another million-and-a-half or two-million pounds and since we keep talking about this benchmark and since this was actually -- Some of this was tabled until we actually get that information and we re not going to get it at this meeting, but is there any way that you can set the TAC for 01 at a certain level and then come back and adjust it at whatever time, be it March or April or May, and release the other half, because

13 I just hate for us to set a TAC at one level when we could have had it higher based on an assessment that we re going to have in just a month or two. DR. CRABTREE: I think the answer to that is yes. We have got an ABC now of. million pounds, which is several hundred thousand pounds higher than the current TAC. We have a framework amendment ready to make that increase. Now, the way I envision us dealing with the new assessment is the assessment workshop will be completed -- I m not sure exactly when the review workshop is, but I think we ll have some idea of what the outcome is likely to be by our April meeting. We could then request either an emergency rule or try to prepare a framework amendment to set the TAC again. It would be contingent on the fishing level recommendation, the ABC that the SSC gives us some time in May. We could ask for that in April and lay out that the ACLs will be set equal to the ABC or whatever and then we could try to implement that as quickly as we could after we get the new ABC from the new assessment. I envision that we will do that in one way or another and that if we get an ABC that is higher or lower or whatever it is, that we ll make the appropriate adjustment and do it as quickly as we can. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Roy, when you say as quickly as we can, is that possibly for the 01 season? DR. CRABTREE: Whether we can get it implemented before the recreational fishery closes or not, I don t know. That will be cutting it tight, but even if we get it done after the recreational season closes, we have authority under the regulations to reopen the fishery, as we did in 0, and allow some additional fishing. Recall in 0, after the oil spill, we had uncaught quota and we reopened the fishery for weekends and allowed fishing to continue and so yes, my anticipation is that we will allow that quota to be caught during the 01 year and whether it will be added on and extend the fishery or whether it will involve reopening would just depend on how the timing works out. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: My interpretation of your comments is that, despite the frustration we have with what occurred and the close 1

14 vote and the procedural problems, that the SSC will probably get a chance to readdress this whole issue before 01 is complete and is that correct? DR. CRABTREE: Yes, that s my view on it and so I think right now our best action is to work with what we have and then deal with this issue and the buffers when we have the new assessment and see what the SSC does at that time. If the scientific uncertainty is substantially reduced, I expect that they will probably at that time either follow the P* procedure or something closer to that. I don t have any idea what buffer that will give us, but it will give us a different buffer. What you re then going to have to consider is how much of a buffer do we need to take into account the management uncertainty, because what we don t want to start happening is exceeding the overfishing level, because if we do that, then we re allowing overfishing to occur and that s a bad thing and that s likely to throw recovery off and we don t want to do that. Even though we have had these overruns, we have not exceeded the overfishing level so far and the stock appears to be well on the path of recovery and we don t want to do anything that upsets that. DR. BONNIE PONWITH: Just so you understand what the dates are, right now the red snapper assessment is scheduled for late this month, the assessment workshop, late this month through early February. Then the review workshop is scheduled for the th of April through the rd of May and so that gives you a better feel for what the timing on the completion of that assessment is. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: When is our April meeting? In other words, it won t be finished before our April meeting and is that correct, Bonnie? DR. PONWITH: The review workshop starts on the th of April and so it will be offset. DR. CRABTREE: My hope is that once the assessment workshop is done, at that point we ll have an idea of what runs are on the table and what ABCs would correspond to those. It may be that it s a huge range and you just don t know, but I suspect it 1

15 won t be and we ll have some idea as to what s likely to come out of the review workshop and the SSC, but we could -- We did this with the South Atlantic Council recently with yellowtail snapper. We had a new stock assessment and we didn t have a fishing level recommendation from the SSC, but the council went ahead and asked for an emergency rule to adjust the ACLs to correspond with the new ABC and then they requested that and then when the Fisheries Service got the ABC from the SSC, we implemented the rule. I think if an emergency rule is the path we go down on this, I think you could ask for that in April, based on what we think it s going to be. We could then do the analysis and the paperwork that has to be done with this and get the number from the SSC and plug it in and put it in place. Now, even on that timeline, I don t know if we could get it in place before the recreational fishery closed, but we could reopen it, as I said, and then we would dump whatever extra the commercial fishery gets into their IFQ accounts at that time. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Any other comments? MR. RIECHERS: I want to go back to the issue of a little bit about the ABC control rule. Sean, you had, I think, indicated in your statements at least that you thought Motion 1 more or less had the spirit of our current control rule and is that -- Do you want to clarify on that a little bit, because it s not really necessarily in the notes here. DR. POWERS: The control rule essentially has us go through multiple levels to decide on which probability of overfishing we re going to decide on. P being 0. is way outside the range the council gave us, but it still uses that same spirit that we re going to use, essentially the probability distribution functions, as insight. Again, the problem with that is it assumes everything is based on that AS model. I think that s what the other SSC members were concerned with. MR. RIECHERS: But the advice from the last time was all based on the AS, wasn t it? DR. POWERS: Our advice since 00 has all been based on AS under the rebuilding shrimp effort, which is not the most -- Out 1

16 of all the ones, there s a different -- There s a shrimp current effort, I think, that actually gives you a little higher of a quota, but out of the eight possible iterations, it s the most - - It s the seventh if you wanted to rank them in terms of yield, but yes, all of our advice has been off AS. MR. RIECHERS: To follow that up just a second, I mean then basically -- I understand the inconsistency is we re waiting on another benchmark assessment to actually then apply our current control rule, because we ve kind of gotten caught in this, at least for this species, where we haven t had a benchmark and so we re using a different control rule, though we ve tried to make those changes for all the other species we ve already dealt with. The first motion, in some ways, took that guidance or principle and went as far as you could with it without basically giving it any probability of overfishing, but still moved up that notion with what, at least by the SSC members believed, is the most realistic shrimp projection modeling at this point in time, if I read this correctly. DR. POWERS: That is correct. MR. RIECHERS: So we re just kind of -- We re waiting on a benchmark to change some things that we know we re going to change. The Motion 1 went a little bit closer to that notion with still a zero percent probability of overfishing and so while I understand the advice from the SSC, I also kind of question why we wouldn t at least take that half-step at this point, knowing that we re fixing to see the full assessment. Of course, as Roy truly points out, the assessment may tell us we have more fish or less fish. We don t know until we completely see the full assessment, but certainly the belief is, given some of the things we ve seen, is that it s going to be probably more liberal from a fish perspective at this point in time. DR. POWERS: I think there s a little bit -- Just to clarify. Originally, when we went with percent, we didn t even have PDFs and so we couldn t do anything else. Now, there is the mechanics, the actual mechanics, for us to follow the ABC control rules that are in place. We choose not to follow the ABC control rule because we don t think that we re capturing enough of the uncertainty with just the AS model run by itself. DR. CRABTREE: Sean, this is consistent with I think the last 1

17 three years worth of ABCs we ve gotten from the SSC. This is what you ve been doing, is not applying the control rule, but going with the percent buffer, right? DR. POWERS: That is correct and so what we do is when we have re-projections, as we ve had, we follow the same guidance, but let the number change based on the landings update. DR. CRABTREE: Of course, my concern would be that we change the way we re doing things, which we can do that, but we need to have a sound basis for why we re making a change and really, if you look at this, if anything, the uncertainty is likely greater now than it was two or three years ago, because the assessment is older than it was then. That would be my concern with it, that if the SSC was going to change what they re doing, they need to have a sound record showing what new information caused them to change their position on it. MR. RIECHERS: Roy, I don t disagree that they would need to have that sound basis and record. I guess part of it -- I guess I will ask the question of did they actually review those PDFs in coming up with this motion or whoever did proffer this motion? It s as close -- As you said, it at least contains the spirit of that. I guess my notion is that you went, in spirit, to what the new ABC control rule is going to lead us to and when you say we ve been doing it that way for three years, Roy, I don t think we truly had our control rule adopted until about a year or maybe eighteen months ago, if I m remembering right. DR. CRABTREE: It wasn t approved, but I would say it s been developed for that long. DR. POWERS: You re correct that the idea behind that was to say, okay, within the ABC control rule, how can we get the most conservative? Since we all agree we re not capturing enough uncertainty, how can we be the most conservative, but keep within the ABC control rule? DR. DANA: I noted in the webinar minutes that Ms. Williams had brought up the request to have socioeconomic impacts be considered and could you explain to me why they weren t? I understand the biology of the -- Your facts or your information is the biology of the fish stock, but it also, I would think, it would be incredibly important to consider the impact on the 1

18 fishing industry. DR. POWERS: A lot of the feelings on the SSC -- Well, there s two reasons. One, we have no document that synthesizes the effects of reducing of that buffer, what happens economically if we have a.-million-pound buffer versus a one-million-pound buffer. That s what Kay was referring to earlier, that we didn t have that information of what is the cost that we re balancing it. That s something that John Ward, who is on our committee, has harped on a lot, that we can t do a true risk analysis without having the cost on one side. Others feel that NS-1 trumps the socioeconomic considerations, that the biology must trump, that we have to get the biology right first before we can consider socioeconomics. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: I would just like to comment that National Standard 1 also mentions that we should achieve optimal yield. Now, we ve been defining that as percent, but we ve got a control rule now and so it s not just ending overfishing, but it s achieving optimal yield. MR. GRIMES: I would just say, in reference to what Dr. Powers said, I have spoken to the SSC about this and I come down in that second camp and I think the statute and the case law are clear that preventing overfishing is the primary concern. If you allow overfishing, you re not achieving optimum yield. Optimum yield is some step below that level of fishing which results in overfishing and so the primary objective is not allowing overfishing and in terms of calculating an ABC, everything I have heard is that ABC is a biological parameter and that s the total amount of fish that a stock is capable of sustaining. Now, that takes into account biological, physical, chemical, and I don t know what else, but they re not social and economic factors and that those weigh in once you determine how much harvest a stock can sustain. MR. RIECHERS: I don t want to belabor this point too much, but the reality of both of the scenarios that have been talked about here is that neither one of them will -- They re not projected to lead you to overfishing. The probability of overfishing is 0.0 percent in the first motion and percent in the second or it s percent less. It would be a different probability of overfishing. 1

19 Saying that we shouldn t bring the factors up between these two motions doesn t really hold water there. This is something that we have talked about for a long time around this council table, that the socioeconomic considerations need to get moved further up into this discussion process, and this is certainly a case where you re having two recommendations basically similar from the overfishing perspective and we should be looking at the socioeconomic considerations to help us determine how to make these choices moving forward. We do have to get that further up in this process and that s something we ve talked about for a long time around this table and we still haven t seemed to have achieved getting the analysis brought to groups like this or whatever the appropriate body is, but certainly this group should have had that in front of them when reviewing this, given that the tradeoff really isn t about overfishing or not overfishing, but it s about benefits of one level of harvest that doesn t create overfishing and another level of harvest that doesn t create overfishing. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Dr. Dana, do you want to comment to that? You opened this can of worms. DR. DANA: I just appreciate everyone s input on it. Sean had noted that the SSC had taken the most conservative stance and if you re taking the most conservative stance, then that just sparked in me that you probably aren t looking at socioeconomic at all and to me, that s vitally important, that aspect. DR. POWERS: I will respond, Bob, and reiterate kind of what Shep said. We view our job first as setting what the acceptable biological catch could be and remember the most conservative would be the continuity run, which we don t believe necessarily is there, but when some of the SSC members look at that model spread on there and look at AS and say, okay, that captures the uncertainty fairly enough and that million-and-a-half pounds is the difference between overfishing and not overfishing. Other SSC members look at all four of those and realize that, wow, there s a lot of different levels there and I don t feel comfortable going all the way to AS and so I mean it has to do a lot with each individual s best professional judgment of where that uncertainty is best captured and obviously the majority of the SSC felt that uncertainty involved more than just the AS model and that s why they didn t go with the probability and wanted something that encapsulated and incorporated more uncertainty, but, again, you are absolutely correct that our 1

20 primary point here is the biology. MR. GRIMES: Just two things. First, let s not make it appear or sound as though social and economic considerations don t play into this process. You set your catch limit equal to the ABC recommendation that you got from your SSC, whereas the National Standard Guidelines actually contemplate at least potentially a series of buffers that include a buffer between the overfishing limit and the acceptable biological catch and then another buffer between that ABC and your actual catch limit and then potentially even another buffer between your target. Now, in the case of red snapper, we ve kind of muddled things, perhaps, by just creating one large buffer and maybe that s the source of some of this debate, but there certainly are social and economic considerations that have been taken into account relative to the management of red snapper and have led to less buffer in other areas. It just seems to me that what it boils down to now, to respond a little bit to what Mr. Riechers said, is you have an ABC recommendation from your SSC and now you gave them the guidance and they have an ABC control rule and the control rule allows some variance from that control rule based on scientific opinion and informed judgment and all the rest and you have that ABC recommendation, which includes and takes into account things, risk of overfishing and all the rest of it. You have that guidance from them and a lot of the talk I hear around the table seems to suggest that because you don t like the end number that came out of it, perhaps you would go back and ask for a reconsideration in an attempt to seek some higher number. I have always cautioned that that creates an ugly record for us in that you have a scientific recommendation and you convened this body and they had all this discussion and then when you don t like the answer, you send it back to them and that s less than ideal. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: Shep, I think you re missing part of the point here. The point is that it was a procedural thing that resulted in their final vote and that it could have gone the other way had the procedure changed a little bit. I think that s what you re hearing from this committee, is some frustration that there was not a real strong agreement on what they decided, but fortunately, it looks like we re going to have time for them to readdress it anyway. 0

21 MR. GRIMES: I would say that the end result is a ten-to-three decision versus a six-to-seven decision that might have gone the other way. If I m looking to put my eggs into a basket that there s more scientific certainty in, I m going with the ten-tothree vote rather than the six-to-seven every time. DR. CRABTREE: One way to deal with these very narrow votes on the SSC would be to try and get them to become more of a consensus body. I know the South Atlantic Council s SSC now operates as a consensus body and that way, you don t get these one or two-vote decisions on it. I don t know how this would have gone, but at this point, regardless of how the vote might or might not have changed, the fact is we re going to have a new stock assessment and we re going to get a new ABC from the SSC and we re going to take the steps needed to implement that as quickly as we can and I don t know what more we can do really than that. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: I agree, Roy. Any other further discussion on this issue before we move on? MS. WILLIAMS: Just a couple of points. I agree with what Mr. Riechers had to say about our choosing between the two and since I was on the call and I could hear the frustration of the panel members with various information that they had asked for in the past and they hadn t received and now with the benchmark coming up so closely, every year we have went over pretty much what our SSC has recommended. We re still not -- We haven t reached this -- We re still undergoing overfishing, right? He s saying that we won t be overfishing if we went with either one of these, their recommendations, the first one that failed by like one vote or the one that passed the ten to three. We could actually choose either one of those. If this panel decided to consider the socioeconomic effects, since we will not be hurting the stock by choosing one or the other. You don t have to have an SEP to sit down and tell you what s the difference between another million-and-a-half pounds of fish. It s quite easy. It s jobs and food. That relates to dollars and wellbeing and this economy and the situation that we ve been in and even we don t know what kind of recreational season we re going to have with the various parameters that s going on now with our economic or our economy. 1

22 I don t see this panel, if they should decide to go with a higher TAC, ACL, based on some socioeconomics and the state of our industry and the dependency on this fishery -- I don t see where we would be wrong in choosing something other than what came out of the SSC as far as the ten-to-three vote. CHAIRMAN SHIPP: If there s nothing else, let s move on to the next agenda item, which is Tab SP, Number (b), Analysis of Recreational Bag Limits and Season Lengths, and Mr. Strelcheck. ANALYSIS OF RECREATIONAL BAG LIMITS AND SEASON LENGTHS MR. ANDY STRELCHECK: This is, I think, the first time we ve briefed you on our projections of the red snapper season length. Typically, we estimate the season length somewhere around the end of March or early April and provide you with information at your April or June council meetings. We have gone ahead and used preliminary data to use project forward the 01 season length, given the acceptable biological catch you just discussed and recreational/commercial allocations. The outline for the presentation, I ll be discussing the 0 recreational landings to date, the 01 season projections, impacts of state non-compliance, and in particular, the proposed regulations by Louisiana, and bag limit reductions that might aid in extending the season length for the coming fishing year. For 0, you can see the second column is what s been reported as of today s date. We have about percent of the landings that we re estimating that have been reported. About percent or so are still unreported and so we had to estimate them based on prior year s landing patterns. This is a fairly typical distribution for the last couple of years, where the private sector accounts for more than 0 percent of the overall recreational landings of red snapper. Charter and headboat account for about or percent and then Texas charter and private account for to percent of the total landings. Relative to the 0 quota, this is a 1.- million-pound overage, roughly percent of the quota. For season projections, Tab SP, Number (b), you can follow along with that report. Data sources for these projections -- I will add that this is a fairly simplistic approach that we ve taken. We ve used this in the last year or two and it seems to

23 be the better performing of our models, even though it s a very simplistic model. We use data sources of MRFSS recreational landings, headboat landings, and Texas landings as well as average weights from each of those data sources from the last seven years. We also incorporated data from the red snapper updated stock assessment projections. We received this data from Brian Linton and included projected average weights, projected yields and ABCs, as well as exploitable abundance. I want to add that in projecting the season length and where we ve probably failed, in some instances, in projecting the season length is estimating average weights and so the projections are heavily dependent on what our average weight is for the coming season. We used the 00 through 0 average reported weights to project for our 01 weight and this was done through a general linear modeling approach. We investigated several factors, but ultimately, it was a simple relationship between average weight and year that dictated what we felt was the best way of estimating 01 average weights. 0 data we did drop because of the oil spill and unusual fishing behavior that occurred in that particular year. The upper left corner of the graph, you can see the reported annual average weights as the green dots and the black line is the projection from the stock assessment and up until 0, actually even 0, our actual average weights that were being reported were following the stock assessment projection extremely well. However, in 0, you see the average weight jumped up much higher than the projected average weight for the stock assessment and continued a linear increase in average weight that was not projected by the stock assessment and just to give you an idea of the increase over time, this has been a twofold change in average weight since the rebuilding plan began in 00. You can see down in the bottom right corner that if you just take this data from the upper left graph and plot it, you can see that we have an extremely strong relationship between average weight and year and in fact, year was the only significant factor in this model. It explains almost percent of the variability and the last four data points, excluding 0, are following that line almost exactly.

24 This red point is what we re estimating right now as the average weight for 01, which would be. pounds. The range is. to.0 pounds. This year s average weight, for comparison, was.0 pounds and so that would be almost a seven-tenths of a pound increase compared to last year. We have average weight estimated for 01 and we also need the landings per day in numbers so that we can expand that and determine what s going to be landed on a per-day basis in pounds. We calculate in-season and out-of-season landings for 00 through 0. This was estimated using our ACL dataset from the Science Center, which essentially aggregates all sources of landings data that we receive in the Southeast. We calculated in-season landings simply as the total landings that would occur when the federal season is open and divide those by the number of days in the federal season to get an estimate of in-season landings per day. Once again, we fit this with a general linear model and year was a strong factor, in fact the only factor that was significant. We also calculated out-of-season catch rates, since there are a portion of the landings that occur out of season, and that is essentially seventy-three fish per day and we assumed that that rate would continue into 01. I wanted to note that we did investigate exploitable abundance. Because we have been on this strong increasing trajectory, you would expect that catches are going to go up as stock abundance goes up, but when we fit the model with exploitable abundance, this was not a significant factor. You can see that beyond 0 the projection estimate indicates that exploitable abundance is expected to greatly slow. However, at this point, we have no indication that it is slowing based on the 00 through 0 data. A similar, almost a duplicate graph, to the average weight, but if you plot in-season landings per day relative to year, you can see that it s an extremely strong fit to the data once again. percent of the variability is explained and we re estimating a little less than 1,000 fish will be caught on a per-day basis during the open season for red snapper. How do we arrive then at the season length? The 01 ABC approved by the SSC is. million pounds. You take percent