NRB Testimony on Lake Trout Fishery

WGF Comments to the NRB on Opening a Lake Trout Fishery

Juvenile Lake Trout, photo by Katie Steiger-Mesiter, USFWS, via Flickr

Nick Hahlbeck of WGF’s Fisheries Work Group testified at the February meeting of the Natural Resources Board (NRB). WGF also submitted written testimony to the NRB with more details about our current opposition to opening a commercial bycatch harvest of lake trout in Lake Michigan.

Our key reasons for currently opposing this commercial bycatch fishery include:

1. Lake trout have not reached recovery goals.
2. What is being proposed is not necessarily a bycatch fishery.
3. Profit is privately held while costs are publicly funded.
4. DNR is not set up for management success.

You can read the full text of our testimony below, or in PDF form here. Do you have questions or comments about our work? Contact us! 

RE: Wisconsin Green Fire’s Comments on SS 114-24

Dear Chairman Smith and Natural Resources Board Members:

Wisconsin’s Green Fire is opposed to opening a commercial bycatch harvest of lake trout in Lake Michigan currently.

We support the vision of a sustainable and viable commercial fishery as outlined in the Lake Michigan Integrated Fisheries Management Plan, and it may be justifiable to include lake trout in such a fishery in the future. However, there are multiple ecological and management problems that need to be resolved before such a fishery could be considered sustainable and viable.

Problem 1: Lake trout have not reached recovery goals.

Rebuilding lake trout populations has required a lot of investment. Only in the last few years, after several decades of funding stocking, lamprey control, research, and more, are catch rates and proportions of wild fish in surveys finally substantially increasing. These long-awaited trends are encouraging signs that the investment is finally beginning to pay off, but they also highlight what a potential setback for lake trout from opening commercial harvest would cost in terms of time, effort, and money. Given the cost of getting back to this point if things go wrong, it is worth waiting for strong evidence of achieving the recovery goal—self-sustaining populations lake wide—before opening the population up to additional risks.

While available evidence does show that lake trout populations in Lake Michigan are headed in the right direction, it does not yet strongly indicate that populations can sustain themselves against mortality from natural, recreational, and commercial sources. Although catch rates of wild fish are increasing, they only make up about a third of the overall lake trout catch rate in Wisconsin surveys (Figure 10 here). Likewise, the proportion of wild fish in survey catch lake wide is only about 25% on average, and it varies widely from over 50% in some southern areas to under 10% in some northern areas (Figure 3 here). Surveys from Illinois waters corroborate the recent increasing trend in Wisconsin, but also the fact that wild proportions even in the southern areas where natural reproduction is highest are still far below 100% (Figure 8 here). For reference, contrast that with Lake Superior lake trout populations, for which a commercial bycatch fishery for lake trout is supported because over 98% of fish are wild in all five spawning areas surveyed (Figure 4 here).

These data show that although natural Lake Michigan lake trout populations are rebuilding, they have not yet recovered individually, let alone lake wide per the rehabilitation goal (see section 2 of the scope statement). Any claimed “harvestable surplus” of lake trout owes its existence to hatchery production. Even the scope statement itself agrees that “some areas of the lake are farther along in restoring lake trout than others, and the limited natural reproduction that is occurring is insufficient for lake trout to be self-sustaining.” These conditions do not provide the ecological basis for a commercial harvest.

Problem 2: What is being proposed is not necessarily a bycatch fishery.

A major selling point of the proposed fishery is that it is intended to utilize bycatch, i.e., the lake trout that are already caught unintentionally and discarded while fishing for whitefish. This is a good idea in principle; all else being equal, keeping fish that are already dead rather than dumping them back in the water is clearly less wasteful. But this scope statement leaves room such that all else may not be equal. What is bycatch today often becomes a target tomorrow when it is commercially prized and newly legal to harvest. As noted in the scope statement, a targeted fishery presents greater risks to the population. Protections against this potential shift are needed, but do not appear within the scope statement.

A true bycatch fishery would disincentivize lake trout catch, not incentivize it. For example, in Lake Superior, lake trout may be commercially harvested, but it is disincentivized intentionally by management measures where more lake trout catch means less commercial fishing overall. Higher lake trout catch rates lead to stricter limits on total gillnet footage that can be set annually, and reaching the lake trout quota closes commercial fishing effort for all species, not just further lake trout harvest.

In contrast, the scope statement does not appear to address commercial whitefish or overall fishing effort in relation to lake trout catch restrictions. Instead, the rule may address “disposition of lake trout caught as bycatch after a commercial licensee has fulfilled their individual lake trout allotment,” and “a mechanism for adjusting sport bag limits or season length in response to a new TAC or exceedance of the TAC.” Thus, there is a risk that this bycatch fishery could fail to disincentivize bycatch or even incentivize it, because the rule scope appears to allow continued commercial fishing for other species with continued lake trout discarding as usual once the lake trout quota is reached. Meanwhile, the recreational fishery may face consequences when the TAC (not the recreational quota) is exceeded, which means that recreational fishers may pay the price of lost harvest due to commercial fishing even if recreational fishing stays within its own quota.

Lastly, the scope statement does not provide any baseline information about bycatch rates or amounts under status-quo fishing where there is no incentive to target lake trout. It is important to place the proposed commercial allocation (up to 20% of the TAC; section 3) in the context of catch levels that are actually incidental or unavoidable. Without this context, a separately managed quota for lake trout independent from existing fisheries (as above) is indistinguishable from how a targeted lake trout fishery might be managed. It appears from a trawling study that some information may be available for all gears; however, many of the studies referenced therein are unpublished, decades old, and/or from out of state, so it is difficult to tell how actual overall bycatch in Wisconsin waters of Lake Michigan may differ from the results of the trawling study (lake trout estimated as about 1.5% of total trawl catch on average). If stakeholders other than commercial fishers are to weigh in meaningfully on a rule where utilizing bycatch rather than allowing targeted harvest is the goal, they need to know what bycatch looks like first. That information is not currently transparently available.

Problem 3: Profit is privately held while costs are publicly funded.

The 2017-2026 Lake Michigan Integrated Fishery Management Plan states that commercial fisheries management is paid for almost entirely (92%) by sport and commercial license fees. The DNR takes in about $28.0 million annually in fees from fishing licenses and stamps (Figure 13 here). Conservatively assuming all 75 available commercial licenses in both lakes pay fees annually, at $900 per resident commercial license (application form here), that means well over 99% of the license fund that keeps commercial fisheries management going is bankrolled by recreational fishers.

The 2017 management plan newly added Vision III “A sustainable and viable commercial fishery,” and DNR listed pursuing alternative and adequate funding sources for commercial management as Goal A of this vision after acknowledging numerous public comments supporting the urgency of this issue (page 2 here). Yet since the plan’s creation, the DNR budget has only declined further, so it seems unlikely that this situation has improved. Adequately managing a new fishery, especially when the population fished is still recovering and needs more intensive monitoring and enforcement, adds new management costs. Therefore, either a funding plan needs to be in place before opening the fishery is considered, or the scope statement should note among the economic impacts on sport fishers in section 8 that they may face license fee hikes to fund adequate management.

Allowing harvest while stocking and recovery is ongoing is a trade-off, whether the harvest comes from recreational or commercial sources. However, the recreational harvest has paid for continued restoration activities, such that there is a significant benefit to the recovery effort and not just the recreational fishers to keep recreational harvest open. In contrast, the private profits generated by commercial fishing on the population, whose recovery has been funded almost entirely by recreational fishers, would benefit the industry exclusively. Making a private profit from a public resource that others are still paying to produce is not a fair approach to fishing for the same reason that cattle rustling is not a fair approach to ranching. Until the cost burden of commercial fishery management is distributed fairly relative to the benefits of the harvest produced, the fishery should not open.

Problem 4: DNR is not set up for management success.

Commercial fisheries management costs in the Wisconsin Great Lakes (both lakes) are around $540-740k in recent years. As described above, these costs will have to go up, likely substantially. Yet the legislature has repeatedly cut the DNR budget and restricted full-time staff positions, resulting in existing capacity shortages that will only get worse as new monitoring, enforcement, research, and administrative workloads are added with this proposed fishery.

The difference between having no fishery and a bycatch fishery is much larger than the difference between having a bycatch vs. targeted fishery, in terms of what is required for sound management. For example, it is relatively easy to detect illegal activity when all commercial harvest of lake trout is illegal and the presence of harvested lake trout is sufficient evidence of violation. In contrast, when some lake trout bycatch harvest is legal, effective enforcement requires tools to verify many aspects of the harvest—whether the lake trout were caught within the proper season and size limits, reported properly against the quota, landed in the jurisdiction they were caught, etc., even if the catch was truly incidental.

Without a clear commitment by the legislature in advance of opening the fishery to allow DNR to meet its capacity needs for good management, DNR will not be set up for success. History has shown that it is unsafe to assume that the horse is being placed before the cart, and leaving DNR scraping and scrambling for the essentials of good management after a rule is established is dangerous to the continued recovery of lake trout in Lake Michigan.

In summary

Lake trout in Lake Michigan are still recovering their reproductive capacity, largely through efforts funded by recreational harvest. The populations are not yet self-sustaining, which should be viewed as a minimum ecological prerequisite for sustainable and viable commercial harvest. Even if this rulemaking proceeds, the fishery is not set up for management success. There has been insufficient attention on a) perverse incentives that question whether it will be a “bycatch” fishery as advertised, and b) capacity shortages that call the quality of future management into doubt without a more detailed plan in advance. Wisconsin’s Green Fire opposes this effort in its current form and at the current time, and hopes that the vision for sustainable and viable commercial lake trout fishery may be achieved when these problems are resolved.

Wisconsin’s Green Fire is nonpartisan and independent. Our members represent extensive expertise in natural resources management, environmental education, environmental law and policy, and scientific research.

Thank you for your consideration of Wisconsin’s Green Fire’s testimony.

Sincerely,

Nick Hahlbeck

Wisconsin’s Green Fire

Fisheries Work Group