The argument that commercial landings are reported under mandatory reporting programs and therefore “accountable” is a complete fiction.
By Brad Gentner
Gentner Consulting Group LLC
Anyone who has sat through a federal fisheries meeting in the last decade has heard the line; recreational anglers are unaccountable. Commercial landings are reported under mandatory reporting programs, the argument goes, while recreational catch is estimated from a voluntary survey, and therefore the recreational sector is not accountable.
The claim gets deployed to justify allocation outcomes, precautionary buffers, and in-season closures. The general presumption that one sector’s numbers are real while the other sector’s numbers are guesses. It is a useful argument for the people who make it. It is also, regarding what actually drives management, a complete fiction.
On Sept. 14, at the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, the Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC) presented its own description of how discards are collected and estimated in this region. Currently, recreational discards are driving the management bus in the region. Nobody framed it as a rebuttal to anything, but it is a rebuttal nonetheless, and the Council should read it that way.
Start with the commercial discard logbook, the program that supposedly makes commercial discards accountable. It covers a 20 percent sample of vessels holding a Gulf reef fish, South Atlantic snapper grouper, mackerel, dolphin wahoo, or shark permit. Those vessels self-report species, quantity, disposition, and reason for discarding. That is a voluntary instrument dressed in a mandatory permit condition, and the Science Center says so in plain terms. Its own 2024 comparison of logbook reports against observer records found the logbook less reliable than other sources wherever other sources exist, because of the rate at which vessels declare that no discards occurred. Across vertical line, troll line, gill net, and bottom longline gear, an average of 75 percent of discard reports declare no discard interactions at all. The Center also cites a lack of reporting accountability and recall bias in late submissions.
Consider what that number asserts about the fishery. Three-quarters of reported commercial trips – largely hook and line trips – on the same bottom, over the same reef complexes, in the same months, caught nothing they had to throw back. Meanwhile, the defining complaint of the recreational snapper grouper fishery is that anglers fishing identical gear over identical structure cannot stop catching undersized red snapper and cannot get a line down through them. Both of those things cannot be true. Gear selectivity does not switch off when a federal permit number is painted on the hull. What the 75 percent figure describes is not a fishery without discards. It is a reporting system without consequences.
It is so bad that the SEFSC does not recommend using commercial logbooks for estimating discards in the South Atlantic. The SEFSC has also said that recreational discard data is likewise unreliable, likely highly exaggerated and shouldn’t be for used for management. But it gets used to bludgeon the recreational sector anyway.
The observer program does not fill that gap either. Snapper grouper vertical line coverage has run 2 to 4 percent of sea days since 2022 and averages about 2 percent. Bottom longline runs 1 to 5 percent, averaging about 3.5 percent. South Atlantic penaeid shrimp coverage is under 1 percent of tow hours. The Science Center notes that most of the Southeast is observed at under 3 percent of effort, with pelagic longline the lone exception at roughly 10 percent. For comparison, the Northeast Science Center reports coverage of 5 to 63 percent across its fisheries, the Northwest Center 23 to 100 percent, and Alaska 15 to 100 percent.
Coverage rate is only half of the problem. The structural details matter more. An observer placement requires a minimum of three sea days, which excludes the day trips that make up much of the fleet. Vessels that used to take three day and longer trips have stopped in order to avoid having their trip observed. Smaller vessels running multi-day trips generally cannot be observed at all for safety reasons, including the absence of a bunk. Temporal selection periods may not align with fishing seasons. Selection depends on vessels notifying the program of a trip, and the Center reports compliance problems in the shrimp fishery where vessels simply took the trip without calling. Put those facts together and the result is unavoidable: a trip carrying an observer is a known and scheduled event, and what an observer sees is, at a 2 percent rate, a sample of behavior under observation rather than a sample of the fishery.
It is not a random sample of effort, yet SEFSC treats it as one. While the SEFSC generates discard estimates with associated statistical errors, what are they measuring? Clearly not estimates representative of the population of all effort. That is not an accusation against commercial fishermen. It is an elementary property of any monitoring design with advance notice and thin coverage, and it is precisely the sort of non-sampling error that gets treated as disqualifying when it appears in recreational data.
Later in the same Council meeting, a second gap surfaced, and it is potentially more serious. Reef fish taken on commercial trips but not sold do not cross a dealer’s counter and are not captured in the dealer reporting stream that underpins commercial landings monitoring. Agency staff put the volume at roughly half a percent of landings, but that guesstimate isn’t actually accounted for in official landings. Set aside whether that is high or low and ask where such a number could come from. The defining property of the category is that these fish are outside the reporting stream. There is no frame to sample, nothing observed, and therefore nothing to estimate from. The agency has never tried to estimate this segment of underreporting. Half a percent is a wild guess about the size of a thing defined by its invisibility, offered without an error bound, by an agency that treats a published percent standard error as proof of unreliability when the number belongs to anglers.
There is a name for catch that leaves the water and is never reported to any authority, and the United States uses it constantly – it is illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU). The term is defined internationally, has three legs, and two of them are unreported and unregulated. Removals that carry no reporting obligation and pass through no regulatory accounting are unreported and unregulated catch whether or not anyone broke a rule. Fishermen are doing exactly what the regulations ask. But this country identifies foreign nations for IUU activity under the Moratorium Protection Act, conditions market access on traceability through the Seafood Import Monitoring Program, and lectures trading partners about catch documentation. Meanwhile, it carries a domestic category of unreported, unregulated reef fish removals whose magnitude it cannot bound and has not tried to. That is a considerably larger problem than any survey coefficient of variation, and it sits on the side of the ledger that is supposed to be the accountable one.
That is the real asymmetry, and it runs the opposite direction from the talking point. Recreational catch estimates are published with percent standard errors, revised when methods change, and subjected to external review that has been unusually public. Commercial discard estimates are built from a 20 percent voluntary-quality logbook and a 2 to 3 percent observer sample, are produced by several different methodologies depending on species and gear, and arrive at Council tables as point estimates of total annual discards by gear and subregion. The uncertainty is real in both cases. Only one data stream shows its work.
Commercial fishermen have shoved this rhetorical device into the management process and it has taken hold. And the device has an author. The agency that spent a decade describing the recreational sector as unaccountable is the same agency that designed, operates, and has repeatedly had to recalibrate the recreational data system it is pointing at. The Marine Recreational Information Program is not something the recreational sector built. Blaming the sector for the instrument is a way of avoiding the cost of fixing it, and setting the sectors against each other is cheaper than either fixing MRIP or funding observer coverage at rates other regions reached years ago.
The correction is not to level down by pretending commercial data are as coarse as everyone now knows the discard data to be. It is symmetry. Publish uncertainty for commercial discard estimates in the same form and in the same documents as recreational percent standard errors, so that Councils weighing an allocation can see both error structures side by side. Move Southeast observer coverage, or electronic monitoring, toward rates the Northeast, Northwest, and Alaska have demonstrated are achievable, and stop treating three percent as a budget constraint rather than a scientific choice. Require reporting of non-sale reef fish landings, which costs nothing but a rule and would close a domestic unreported catch category that this country would sanction a trading partner for maintaining. And retire the word “accountability” as an allocation argument until both sectors are measured on terms that can be defended in the same sentence.
Until then, what we have is not an accountable sector and an unaccountable one. We have one sector whose errors are estimated and published, and another, the commercial sector, whose errors are assumed away. Confusing the second for rigor has driven real allocation decisions, and it will drive more of them this winter unless the Council insists on seeing both sets of error bars.
Brad Gentner is a Fisheries Economist with 28 years of experience in federal fisheries management. He started his career as a Senior Fisheries Economist with the National Marine Fisheries Service and has been a consulting economist for 20 years with over 45 publications in commercial and recreational fisheries economics.
