Cod Blights North Sea Advice
For the North Sea, the ICES advice paints an overall mixed picture this year. The fundamentals for the demersal stocks remain buoyant, but changes in the scientific perception of stocks have resulted in changes to headline advice. This is most dramatically seen in big upward swings of 211% and 177% respectively in the monk and sole advice following benchmarks this year. On the other hand, mixed fisheries considerations are being marred once again because of the advisory process for cod. Less conspicuously, changes in natural mortality estimates influence a wide range of assessments.
For cod it is a depressing rerun of last year, following the introduction of a multi-stock model with 3 sub-stocks – North West, Viking and Southern – with an overly precautionary approach being taken again to protecting the southern sub-stock, given unknown levels of mixing with the NW and Viking sub-stocks in quarters 2-4. In reality, any fishing pressure in the southern North Sea is bycatch and the risk generated by the whitefish fleets fishing in the northern North Sea on the southern sub-stock is likely to be very low. The advice also shows the southern sub-stock continuing to increase in biomass.
An advised cut of 38% on the 2024 TAC highlights once again, but even more starkly than last year, the dysfunction at the advice-management interface with the single stock advisory process having no regard for the management of discards in mixed fisheries. It assumes the fleet can somehow adapt to wild contradictions between headline advice and discards management policy. ICES’s own separate mixed fisheries analysis highlighted the problem last year with 35 out of 43 fleets forecast to choke under its cod advice. When this year’s mixed fisheries analysis lands in the autumn this contradiction will surely be laid bare once again. This situation harms the reputation of our sector but is a symptom of a system that has yet to formally embed the decision-making trade-offs that are crucial if we are to move beyond a perpetual state of conflict.
Haddock and whiting continue to command high biomass levels with another large 85% increase in advice for whiting – 148% on the 2024 TAC. For haddock, as the large 2019/20 year classes are fished out a 25% reduction in the advice is given, -5.5% on the 2024 TAC. The hake assessment sees a 28% advice reduction as biomass continues to decline from the very high levels seen in the 2010s. Saithe, which was also benchmarked this year, sees a modest increase in advice of 7%.
On flatfish, no doubt the offshore fleet will welcome the increase in sole advice after a sharp TAC contraction in 2024, though fish remain sparse inshore. The lemon sole assessment suffers from a data-poor procedure that bluntly cranks down the advice when the biomass is below the average in the time series, resulting in a 30% reduction. On the other hand, a welcome 25% increase in witch will mask the losses to the UK resulting from the realignment of the lemon and witch stocks under the Specialised Committee on Fisheries. As a result of these losses, and the separation of the lemon and witch TAC, longer term the UK is likely to remain vulnerable to the stock becoming a choke unless the scientific perception of the stock changes. There is a case for this as despite stable catches over 40 years, the stock has rarely been assessed as being above MSY Btrigger and never below Fmsy, suggesting that the reference points could be set too conservatively.