Tommy "Northbound" Delgado sits in the wheelhouse of his 45-foot fishing vessel at Montauk Harbor, sorting through paperwork that would make a tax attorney weep. Three different state fishing permits. Two separate logbooks. A printed email from a marine biologist asking if he'd mind recording water temperatures. A notice from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission about yet another regulatory meeting.

The black sea bass in his hold—beautiful fish, two to four pounds each—don't care about any of it. They just know the water here is finally cold enough.

"Northbound" isn't his legal name. He got the nickname about eight years ago when he started chasing black sea bass farther up the coast than his father ever had to. Now he's got commercial fishing permits for New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, because the fish move faster than the regulations. If you want to make a living, you follow the fish. Even if it means operating three different businesses under three different rule books.

How did you end up needing permits from three states?

Black sea bass used to be a North Carolina fish. Virginia, maybe Maryland on a good year. My dad fished them occasionally in the '90s as bycatch, but they weren't the target. Now? They're everywhere up here. We're pulling them off Block Island, off the Cape, places where twenty years ago you wouldn't have seen them at all.

The thing is, fish don't respect state boundaries. Shocking, I know. But our management system is built entirely on the assumption that they do, or at least that they stay put enough that you can draw lines on a map and have those lines mean something. Black sea bass used to have a pretty stable range, so you could say "okay, New York gets this quota, Rhode Island gets that quota" and it roughly made sense.

Now the fish are moving. They've shifted something like 250 miles north in the last few decades.¹ The management system is having a nervous breakdown, basically.

So if I want to fish where the fish actually are, I need permits from multiple states. Which means I'm paying fees to three different states, following three different sets of regulations, filling out three different logbooks, and attending meetings in three different capitals when they decide to change the rules. Which is constantly.

That sounds like an administrative nightmare.

[laughs] That's putting it mildly. Last summer I caught black sea bass in Rhode Island waters in the morning, moved north and caught more in Massachusetts waters in the afternoon, and then spent two hours that night figuring out which logbook to record what in. Rhode Island wants you to report by trip. Massachusetts wants you to report by area. New York wants... honestly, I can't even remember what New York wants this year because they change it.

And here's the thing that makes you want to put your head through a wall: the fish don't know they've crossed state lines. They're just following the temperature gradient. They're doing what they're supposed to do. We're the idiots trying to manage them like they're going to stay in neat little boxes.

Your father fished these waters. What would he make of this?

[long pause, looking out at the harbor]

Dad passed in 2019, but I think about that a lot. He fished Georges Bank for forty years. Mostly cod and flounder. Groundfish. That was the bread and butter. He had one permit, one set of regulations, one community of guys he knew at the dock. When I was a kid, you could predict the seasons. Not just when the fish would show up, but which fish. You knew what you'd be catching in June versus September.

Now? I don't know what I'm going to pull up sometimes. Last month I caught a bonito. A bonito. Those are supposed to be farther south. But the water's warm enough now that they're showing up. Meanwhile, the cod are basically gone from around here. They've moved north or deeper where it's colder.² The flounder are shifting. Everything's moving.

Dad would've hated the paperwork. But I think the thing that would've broken his heart is that all his knowledge—forty years of knowing where to fish, when to fish, what the water should feel like in July—a lot of that's just obsolete now. Not because he was wrong, but because the ocean changed the rules.

The phrase "non-stationarity" keeps coming up in fisheries management discussions. What does that actually mean day-to-day?

[pauses]

Okay, so "stationarity" is this assumption that the system is basically stable. Yeah, you have good years and bad years, but you're operating within a predictable range. The fish populations go up and down, but they average out. The distribution might shift a little seasonally, but they come back to the same general areas.

That's what all our management is built on. We set quotas based on stock assessments that assume the fish are going to be in roughly the same places, behaving in roughly the same ways, as they have historically.

"Non-stationarity" means that assumption is dead. The system isn't stable anymore. The fish aren't averaging out around some historical normal. They're trending in a direction. The distributions aren't shifting a little seasonally. They're shifting hundreds of miles and not coming back.¹ The whole baseline is moving.

Every decision is a gamble with worse odds than it used to be.

How do the regulations try to keep up?

[laughs bitterly]

They don't. I mean, they try, but it's like trying to update a map while someone's actively rearranging the landscape. By the time the science catches up and the management councils meet and the regulations get updated, the fish have moved again.

There's this whole process, right? Scientists do surveys, they assess the stocks, they make recommendations. The councils meet. And these are stakeholder-involved processes, which sounds democratic but in practice means everything takes forever because you've got commercial guys and recreational guys and conservation groups and state representatives all fighting over the details. Then the regulations get implemented.

This whole cycle takes years.

Meanwhile, the fish moved last Tuesday.

And here's where it gets really absurd: the emergency authority under the Magnuson-Stevens Act—that's the federal law that governs fisheries—has really strict criteria for when they can skip the normal process and do something quickly.³ But they're hesitant to use it because, reasonably enough, you don't want to short-circuit the whole stakeholder process every time something changes.

Except now things are changing constantly, so the normal process can't keep up, but the emergency process isn't designed for the new normal either.

A system designed for stationarity trying to manage non-stationarity. It's not working.

What happens when the fish move into Canadian waters?

[long pause]

That's the nightmare scenario everyone's not talking about yet. Right now, it's complicated enough dealing with state jurisdictions. But we're already seeing species that used to be solidly U.S. stocks moving north into Canadian waters. Lobster is the big one. The Gulf of Maine lobster fishery is starting to see the northern edge of the population shift into Canadian territory.

If black sea bass keep moving north—and there's no reason to think they won't—at some point they're going to be a transboundary stock. That means international negotiations. Treaties. The kind of diplomatic process that makes state fisheries councils look speedy and efficient.

I've got friends who fish near the Canadian border, and they're already dealing with this with other species. You've got fish that don't respect the boundary, but the Coast Guard sure as hell does. You've got situations where the fish are in Canadian waters but the U.S. has the quota, or vice versa. You've got different scientific assessments from the two countries that don't agree on stock health.

And that's just with Canada, where we have relatively functional diplomatic relationships and similar management philosophies. What happens when species start crossing boundaries between countries that don't cooperate as well? What happens in disputed waters?

Are you optimistic about your ability to keep fishing in five years?

[shrugs]

I'm still here, aren't I? I've adapted this far. I'll keep adapting.

But I'm not going to lie and say it's sustainable. Not financially, not emotionally, not for the community.

The financial part is obvious. Three permits instead of one. Fuel costs going up because I'm traveling farther to where the fish are. Gear that might not be right for the species I end up catching. Insurance that keeps getting more expensive because apparently fishing is getting riskier. I'm making it work, but the margins are thinner every year.

The emotional part... look, I love this job. I love being on the water. I love the puzzle of finding fish. But it's exhausting when the puzzle keeps changing and you can't trust your own experience. My dad could look at the sky and the water and tell you what the fishing would be like. I've got apps and satellite data and I still don't know what I'm going to find.

And the community part is maybe the worst. Montauk used to have this whole culture around fishing. Everyone knew everyone, you'd share information at the dock, the buyers knew what you were bringing in. Now? Half the boats are gone. The guys who are left are fishing different species in different areas. We don't have the same shared knowledge base anymore. The new guys coming in—if there are new guys, which there mostly aren't—they're learning a completely different ocean than the one I learned.

So am I optimistic? I'm still fishing. Ask me again in five years.

What would you want people who don't fish to understand about this?

That the ocean is changing faster than our systems can adapt. And it's not just a fishing problem. It's a preview of what happens when the fundamental assumptions underlying how we manage natural resources stop being true.

We built this whole elaborate management system for fisheries. Federal laws, state regulations, international treaties, scientific surveys, stakeholder councils. And it was pretty good for a relatively stable system. It had problems, but it mostly worked.

Now the system isn't stable anymore, and all that elaborate infrastructure is just... creaking. Breaking down in slow motion.

And the thing is, fisheries management is actually one of the better-developed resource management systems we have. We've been doing this for decades. We have scientific data. We have legal frameworks. We have stakeholder input. If this system can't adapt fast enough, what happens to all the other systems that are less developed? Water management. Agriculture. Infrastructure planning. All of it is built on assumptions about climate and weather patterns that are becoming obsolete.

The fish are just the early warning system. They can move. They're moving. Everything else is going to have to figure out how to adapt to a non-stationary world, and we're not ready.

[He looks back at the paperwork on his desk, then out at the harbor where a dozen other boats are tied up]

But hey, at least I've got three states' worth of regulations to keep me busy while I figure it out.

Footnotes

1. https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainability/noaa-fisheries-grappling-with-fisheries-management-in-the-face-of-climate-change ↩ ↩²

2. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-our-changing-climate ↩

3. https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainability/noaa-fisheries-grappling-with-fisheries-management-in-the-face-of-climate-change ↩