INTRODUCTION

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which was formed by the fifteen Atlantic coast states more than fifty years ago to assist in managing their shared coastal fishery resources, responded in 1997 to mounting pressure by beginning to prepare a plan for the coastwide management of the Horseshoe Crab fishery along the Atlantic coast.

The ASMFC Horseshoe Crab Fishery Management Plan (FMP) went through an 18-month-long, fast-track effort. The first public draft was released in August 1998. Throughout the month of September, public hearings on the draft FMP were held in various Atlantic states. A second, modified draft FMP was released in early October. Finally, in late October 1998, the ASMFC approved a Management Plan for the Horseshoe Crab Fishery. It was woefully inadequate.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Horseshoe Crab is a remarkable creature that holds enormous value for human health, states' economies, and coastal ecosystems. Despite all of these values outside of the realm of commercial fishing, the FMP for the Horseshoe Crab was undeniably reflective of the driving interest of the body through which it was created - a Commission that has represented the interests of watermen for half a century. The process by which the Plan was created makes the final result, while disappointing, hardly surprising. The composition of the Advisory Panel convened by the ASMFC to give advice on the social and economic impacts of the Plan was heavily biased toward commercial fishing interests. The Management Board that made the final decision on the content of the Plan was driven by a politically self-interested inclination for inaction and not by a desire to effectively manage the fishery. The ASMFC's various Panels and Boards dismissed the preponderance of data indicating a serious problem, and the Commission ignored repeated pleas to err on the side of conservation in the face of incomplete data.

Passing through this process, the FMP just kept getting weaker, progressing steadily from weak to utterly inadequate. Initially, the Plan called for a coastwide cap on landings of 25%. When the Plan was passed, the only remnant of this was a call to develop a cap in 1999 to be implemented in 2000. The loss of this cap means that Virginia's status as a loophole state for other states' regulations will continue. Initially, the Plan also called for a complete ban on hand harvesting of the Crabs during spawning season. This was weakened to a 2-day-a-week closure, and then that was further weakened to be non-mandatory. The ASMFC missed a golden opportunity to protect the Horseshoe Crab resource. The ASMFC's abdication of responsibility contradicted its mandate to consider the needs of multi-species interaction and to manage the resource to ensure long-term viability. The result was a politically-driven, ecologically-unsound FMP that endangers a natural phenomenon and an incredibly valuable resource.

EVOLUTION OF THE PLAN

In theory, the ASMFC was supposed to consider all of the values of the horseshoe crab and produce a management plan that reflected these considerations, but at no time did the Plan adequately protect these values. When it started, the draft FMP contained insufficient protections for the Crabs and for the species that rely on them. It went downhill from there, as the Plan got progressively weaker over time. When the ASMFC finally adopted it, the Horseshoe Crab FMP was just a pale shadow of the weak plan that it initially was.

After public information meetings in the summer of 1998, the first draft of the Horseshoe Crab FMP was produced in August 1998. The "Preferred Management Option" of the draft plan established a coastwide cap 25% below "reference period landings" (1995-1997 landings levels, though for some states, just 1996), and prohibited all harvest or landing of Horseshoe Crabs during their spawning season (April 15 - June 15). The years used for the reference period landings data, however, were the highest on record, meaning that a 25% cut would have had a trivial impact on protecting the Horseshoe Crab population. It would have done little to address the problem. National Audubon Society and other conservation organizations pushed for a 60-70% cut, in an attempt to return the fishery to the seemingly sustainable levels of the early 1990s and to ensure that enough Horseshoe Crab eggs would exist to feed the migratory shorebirds who relied on them. The Draft Plan was clearly inadequate.

Public comments, many of which encouraged higher cuts than 25%, were gathered in September. These were considered in mid-October by both the Technical Committee and Advisory Panel, which also considered a report by the ASMFC Peer Review Panel calling for substantial reductions in harvest. The recommendations of the Technical Committee and Advisory Panel resulted in a second draft FMP in October. This version still called for a 25% cap, but the restrictions on harvesting during spawning season were weakened. New Jersey and Delaware would keep their restrictions, but all other states were only required to have a 2-day-a-week closure, affording the Crabs very little protection during spawning. The Plan was now even more inadequate.

The recommendations of the Technical Committee and Advisory Panel were then weakened, and the Peer Review Panel's largely ignored, by the Management Board at the ASMFC annual meeting at the end of October. The Board eliminated the coastwide cap (even the inadequate 25%), instead dubiously proclaiming that it will develop a quota system in 1999 to be implemented sometime in 2000. The Board also mandated that New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland (who had already implemented strict regulations) had to maintain their laws and regulations relating to Horseshoe Crab harvest and landings, but the Board failed to close off Virginia as a loophole state. New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware implemented their regulations in late 1997 and early 1998, and their catches decreased markedly in 1998. Meanwhile, Virginia, which has no restrictions on landings, had its landings increase 25-fold. The very Crabs that the Mid-Atlantic states were trying to protect were just being landed in Virginia, and the ASMFC Plan did nothing to change this. Despite numerous comments from its member states and the public, the ASMFC passed a plan that ignored the situation, tacitly allowing this subversion of state conservation efforts to continue. To make matters worse, the Board also made the already inadequate spawning season restrictions non-mandatory, thereby effectively negating them.

The Plan's two good points are that it calls for data collection and monitoring and that it mandates the beginning of habitat protection, but beyond that, it is abysmal. The ASMFC missed a golden opportunity to take real action to protect the Horseshoe Crab resource, instead choosing to further weaken a draft plan that itself did not do enough to protect the Horseshoe Crabs and the species and people that rely on them. The ASMFC punted responsibility on establishing a coastwide cap and on regulating hand harvesting during spawning season, thereby contradicting its mandate to consider the needs of multi-species interaction and to manage the resource to ensure long-term viability. In the end, the Plan that passed was a weak, politically-driven, ecologically-unsound FMP that endangers a remarkable natural phenomenon and a resource that provides incredible value to wildlife, human health, and state economies.

A SKEWED PROCESS

While extremely disappointing, the final FMP is not overly surprising given the nature of the ASMFC. It is a Commission that has been representing the interests of fishermen and watermen for more than 50 years.

Advisory Panel

A glaring example of the ASMFC's leanings is the Advisory Panel that it convened to give the Management Board and Plan Development Team advice on the social and economic impacts of the various management options. The Advisory Panel gave its input when the public information document was prepared, when the first draft of the Fishery Management Plan was produced, and when the second draft was produced, just before final review and approval by the Management Board. The Panel is composed of 19 individuals. Of these, 15 are associated with the fishing industry in some regard (commercial, handpicker, trawler, pot, gillnet, conch, eel, manufacturer, dealer, processor, etc.). Only 2 of the 19 represent the biomedical industry, and only 2 represent the conservation community. A panel with a 15-4 edge to one side is not impartial.

While the Advisory Panel has no decision-making authority, the composition of the panel still indicates a definite bias in the advice given. Clearly, the ASMFC did not consider the various social and economic consequences of the management options equally; the impact on fishermen was given much more weight than the economic impacts on the biomedical and ecotourism industries, which generate millions more in revenue than the fisheries. Given the Commission's final plan, it is apparent that the ASMFC was not trying to do the most good for the most people, much less for the Crabs or the shorebirds.

Management Board

The Management Board had biases as well, though these were based more on politics and location. The Board members' positions were probably firmly established by the time they considered the final FMP. New England fishermen had repeatedly complained to their states that there was no data to support catch reductions in their area, and the states' delegates were more than willing to embrace that as an excuse for inaction. New York's delegate at the Management Board meeting repeatedly tried to undermine the Plan, pushing to defer the FMP until a later date, claiming that the increased numbers of landings were merely a result of better reporting, and arguing that implementation of a cap should be postponed. Virginia, meanwhile, was quite happy with the increased landings occurring in the state and therefore was also an active participant in weakening the FMP. Virginia's delegate, in fact, was the one who proposed the motion to postpone a cap until the year 2000 and to make the hand harvest restrictions non-mandatory. The motion, not surprisingly, was seconded by the delegate from New York. The data collection and habitat protection components were likely left in because the New England states and Virginia needed to come up with a Plan that New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland would approve. The entire process was actively being guided towards production of a Management Plan that would do as little as possible.

DATA IGNORED

The main vehicle by which the ASMFC supported its inaction was its claim of a dearth of good data. At the Management Board meeting, many remarked that the Reference Period Landings data were a joke and that no management plan could possibly be based on them. The ASMFC thus cried "lack of data" and decided to postpone a cap until more data had been gathered. The Management Board was correct in maintaining that the Reference Period Landings data were horrendous and that a coastwide cap should not be based on them. National Audubon Society and other conservation organizations had been arguing that point from the beginning.

The ASMFC was incorrect in two very key respects, however. First, there was not a complete lack of data. Continuing the pattern of bias, the ASMFC's various committees and boards chose some and ignored other data so as to support the preferred outcome of inaction.

Increased Landings

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has been collecting data on harvest and landings for decades, and the NMFS data shows exponential growth in the Horseshoe Crab fishery over the years, peaking in 1996 and 1997. The NMFS data was dismissed by the ASMFC with the assertion that it underreported the true catch and that it did so in an inconsistent manner. While the NMFS data may underreport the actual numbers, it still accurately reflects the order of magnitude changes that occurred over the years. From 1966 to 1975, the amount of Crabs landed coastwide was uniformly less than 100,000 pounds per year. Interest in reviving the use of Crabs for fertilizer boosted landings in 1976, but between 1977-1988, the amount decreased to and remained around 500,000 pounds. From 1989-1992, the numbers were consistently around 1 million pounds. Since 1993, with the exception of the remarkably high year of 1996 (around 5 million lbs.), the amount has been around 2 million pounds. The numbers within periods are very consistent, indicating that NMFS data, if low, is at the very least a good indicator of the trends of increased landings -- resulting in a landings curve that looks like this:

A badly flawed NMFS system would have had more widely varying numbers. The ASMFC Peer Review Panel, a group of four outside scientists chosen to review the ASMFC's assessment of the Horseshoe Crab stock, agreed in its report, stating that, "Although the data are imperfect, the numbers clearly indicate increases [in commercial landings] in recent years" (p.8). This NMFS curve is significant because in all other fisheries with which we are familiar, a landings curve like the one above is always accompanied by a correspondingly declining stock.

Even if one maintained that the NMFS data was unreliable, one could easily look at the demand for Horseshoe Crabs as bait over the past few years, which inarguably increased exponentially and was met. Logically, this would imply a dramatic increase in landings and harvest of Horseshoe Crabs.

Furthermore, the ASMFC discounted as flawed numerous studies that showed declining bird populations, Crab populations, and egg numbers. While each individual survey or study may have had some flaws, the preponderance of data pointed to markedly increased landings and significantly declining Horseshoe Crab populations. The data may not have been perfect, but it was the best that existed, and most of it pointed in the same direction. The ASMFC chose instead to poke holes in the data and highlight the failings. This serves no purpose other than to justify inaction on the part of the ASMFC and the watermen it represents. Inaction is less painful and controversial than imposing significant restrictions on a gold rush fishery, but it may very well prove to be extremely harmful to several species.

The Precautionary Principle

Claiming that lack of data justified its minimal actions is the second area in which the ASMFC Management Board was incorrect. The ASMFC Peer Review Panel stated quite explicitly in its report that "the lack of available information on horseshoe crabs does not justify maintaining the status quo. A review of fisheries around the world in the past 50 years provides numerous examples of fisheries increasing catch and effort (without necessary data collection) resulting in fishery and population collapses." The Panel thus urged that until the necessary information had been gathered, "a conservative management policy is required to decrease the probability of overfishing and population decline. The panel recommends reversing the increasing trend of catch and effort to substantially lower levels than has been the case in recent years" (p.6). The ASMFC Management Board clearly ignored the calls of the scientists it had commissioned to review its work.

Numerous citizens and conservation organizations, including National Audubon, called for the ASMFC to err on the side of conservation and to follow the Precautionary Principle established by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The principle basically states that where threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage exist, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation ; put simply, "better safe than sorry." A group of scientists, government officials, lawyers, and labor and grassroots environmental activists from the U.S., Canada, Germany, Britain, and Sweden met January 23-25, 1998 at Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin to define and discuss the precautionary principle. After meeting for two days, the group issued the following consensus statement: "When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof" (Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly #586, Feb. 19, 1998). O'Riordan and Jordan explained the Precautionary Principle to be: " the intuitively simple idea that decision makers should act in advance of scientific certainty to protect the environment (and with it the well-being interests of future generations) from incurring harm." (O'Riordan, T & Jordan, A, 1994, 'The Precautionary Principle in Contemporary Environmental Politics', Environmental Values, 4: 3, p. 194).

The ASMFC Technical Committee and Advisory Panel at least partially considered this principle. Although their proposed 25% cut and 2-day-a-week closure of hand harvesting during spawning season would have been inadequate to protect the Horseshoe Crabs and the species that rely on them, at least it was something. The ASMFC Management Board, despite repeated pleas, entirely ignored this principle - and thus the Technical Committee, the Advisory Panel, and the Peer Review Panel as well.

CONCLUSION

Migratory shorebirds fly thousands of miles each spring to eat the excess eggs of spawning Horseshoe Crabs. The ASMFC Plan endangers this natural phenomenon, and the growing industry dependent on it, so that the Crabs can continue to be used as bait for eel and conch. The history of most fisheries indicates that although fishermen do not want to fish out the Horseshoe Crab, they probably will. An effective management plan for the Horseshoe Crab fishery must consider the needs of the shorebirds and other species, the long-term needs of the watermen, and the impact of any management options on the states' economies. Although its guidelines mandate consideration of multi-species interaction, the ASMFC chose instead to sacrifice the good of all for the short-sightedness of a few.

The final FMP plan is unacceptably weak, which is not surprising considering the process through which it was conceived. As it currently stands, the ASMFC management plan will not halt the decline of the Horseshoe Crabs and the migratory shorebirds that have depended on their eggs for thousands of years. In fact, it may very well contribute to the problem.

The ASMFC's postponement of a coastwide cap will create an incentive for fishermen to increase catch levels in the next couple of years. Should the ASMFC actually institute a cap in the year 2000, it will most likely be based on the harvest and landings levels of 1998 and/or 1999. It is very clear why Virginia pushed for this delay: the state's landings went up 25-fold in 1998, and with the ASMFC's perpetuation of the status quo in 1999, will likely stay at those high levels or get even higher. This means that any cut that may be implemented in 2000 will be from these exorbitant numbers, not from the lower ones of 1997 and before, and will thus have a minimal impact on Virginia's fishery. Now that they know that a cap is supposed to be implemented in 2000, other states will have the incentive to try to catch and land as much as possible as well, so that the cuts will not really have an impact on them either. The ASMFC's delay in implementing a coastwide cap provides tacit authorization for this avoidance.

This is sheer irresponsibility. The Horseshoe Crab population has crashed before. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Horseshoe Crabs were heavily harvested for use as fertilizer. The Crab population crashed hard, and it took several decades for the populations to recover. This should not be allowed to happen again. Until more data is collected, it only makes sense to return to the level at which there did not appear to be a problem. Based on NMFS data, that would be at around 1990 levels, indicating a coastwide level of harvests of roughly 1-2 million pounds (estimating roughly 4 pounds per individual). Such a reduction is not drastic but reasonable. Returning to pre-gold rush levels is the safest, most conservative way to assure the long-term prosperity of Horseshoe Crabs, migratory shorebird populations, and watermen. National Audubon Society urges the ASMFC to take real action along these lines when it reviews the Plan next year.

National Audubon Society also urges the ASMFC member states, especially the 1998 loophole state of Virginia, to pass their own strong regulations. These regulations should include a cap on landings and effort. To prevent the subversion of other states' conservation efforts, they should also include provisions that limit landings to those who have held state-issued licenses prior to 1998. Furthermore, the states should push the ASMFC to strengthen its FMP, perhaps turning it into a real tool for protecting the Crabs, the shorebirds, and all the other species involved.

The Horseshoe Crab is truly a natural treasure. After more than 350 million years of survival, it faces a serious threat from human interference. This remarkable creature, and the migratory shorebirds and other species that rely on it, deserve better than this woefully inadequate management plan, conceived by a Commission beholden to the short-sighted desires of a fishing industry it is meant to regulate.

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