Amendment 1 overall recreational harvest numbers begin to change once we start looking at the recreational estimates of gig harvest. It says in Amendment 1 that, “the 2002 recreational southern flounder gig harvest estimates and the 2002 MRFSS southern flounder hook-and-line harvest estimate were similar so the 2009 southern flounder stock assessment assumed the annual recreational gig harvest was equal the annual recreational hook-and-line harvest for the entire time series covered in the stock assessment.”
But if you look at the first table in this weekly update you can clearly see that recreational gig harvest and recreational hook-and-line harvest in 2002 was in fact NOT similar. In fact, gig harvest in 2002 was shown to be over 50% higher than hook-and-line harvest in the original FMP. So, to figure out why/how this gig harvest number changed I reviewed the 2009 southern flounder stock assessment that was used for Amendment 1.
The 2009 stock assessment says that the original estimate for recreational gig harvest included samples from commercial giggers and likely overestimated recreational harvest. So, this time, they decided to only use southeastern NC gig data and once commercial catches were removed from analysis, recreational gig harvests in 2002 were estimated between 189,926 to 218,008 pounds.
I could not understand how a 2-1/2 year study could have over calculated recreational gig harvest by 40% so I looked into the Assessment of the Gig Fishery for Southern Flounder in North Carolina (Watterson 2003). This assessment told a different story of the gig harvest estimates.
This assessment focused on the southeastern part of North Carolina but the study also extrapolated the harvest statewide and estimated that 441,005 pounds of southern flounder were harvested by gigs in 2002. The study then subtracted approximately 80,000 pounds of annually reported commercial gig harvest to give us the 361,539 pound of recreational gig harvest that we saw in the original FMP. Why the 2009 stock assessment disregarded this statewide estimate and only included recalculated estimates from the southeastern survey area is unknown to me.
Recreational Commercial Gear License (RCGL) landings were not used in Amendment 1 recreational harvest estimates. The amendment says, “Reliable RCGL harvest estimates prior to 2002 were unavailable because of considerable changes in the behavior of RCGL fishermen over the years. Because reliable RCGL harvest estimates were unavailable for the entire time series and because RCGL harvest of southern flounder was minimal compared to the total annual harvest, RCGL harvest was not included”.
2019 Amendment 2 to the Southern Flounder FMP
In Amendment 2 to the southern flounder FMP, we are now down to only two modes of recreational harvest; hook-and-line and gig (RCGL estimates were again decided not to be used for recreational harvest estimates).
In this amendment estimates of recreational hook-and-line harvest no longer used MRFSS. In this amendment we transitioned to the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP). For this stock assessment MRIP was using the telephone survey to estimate effort and an angler intercept survey to record catch and reported discards.
MRIP replaced MRFSS and began producing recreational hook-and-line harvest estimates in 2012. Amendment 2 also says, “Taking advantage of the new methodology, NOAA analysts produced new estimates of catch from 2004-2011 [and] for years prior to 2004, years for which the data do not allow application of the MRIP methodology, should be calibrated to the MRIP estimates using a ratio-of-means estimator.” This completely changed recreational hook-and-line harvest numbers and gave us two extra years of estimates (1989 and 1990).
Amendment 2 changed recreational gig harvest estimates once again. As far as I can tell the previous 2003 Assessment of the gig fishery in NC survey was completely disregarded for this amendment. In this amendment, estimates of recreational gig harvest was calculated using a mail survey from July 2010 to December 2015. According to the 2018 stock assessment, outliers from the survey were removed and an average of the estimated harvest ratios of gig to hook-
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