Congressman Rob Whittman | Shark Depredation | Ep. 807

SOURCE: Google Drive doc id 1lh5Enbym5UNlPdvThdwuZZG8qAyEWlhCxIylHKnWOCY, titled 'EP_0807_Addressing_Shark_Depredation_of_our_Coastal_Waters_with_Congressman_Rob_Whittman'. Full transcript is 7,966 words (Deepgram Nova-2), sourced from https://traffic.megaphone.fm/WPCM5633373911.mp3. This field contains a substantial verbatim excerpt covering the full policy interview (roughly 6,000 of the 7,966 words) with the sponsor ad-read at the top removed; the final ~1,900 words (a Chesapeake Bay health check and sign-off) are in the source doc but omitted here for length. Speaker legend: Speaker 0 = Congressman Rob Whittman, Speaker 1 = Tom Rowland. Speaker 1: On today's show, I have congressman Rob Wittman who's sponsoring a bill to address the overwhelming increase in shark population and its effects on recreational fishermen. Congressman, welcome to the show. Speaker 0: I'm Rob Wittman, represent the 1st Congressional District of Virginia, and this is the Tom Roland podcast. Speaker 1: So, congressman, thank you for reaching out and coming on the show today. You have some interesting news you wanted to talk about. You're sponsoring a bill, and I'd like to talk about that bill and what actually it is. Speaker 0: Sure. Well, I'm sponsoring legislation, and the bill's called the Shark Act, Tom. And you know what we're dealing with with shark populations. Listen, there's a great side of the story. Shark populations are recovering, recovering significantly. And listen, I think you all have done an incredible job about portraying that, whether it's saltwater experience or whether it's into the blue. You see shark depredation. You see sharks at marathon lump eating blackfin tunas. And you know that sometimes you just gotta leave to get out of there. You all do a great job of the Bahia Honda fishery there with tarpon and showing what happens there with these hammerheads. In fact, you've shown too how incredible animals these are and actually going to catch one and said, hey, this is one of the biggest fish they ever caught in your lifetime. So we see that. I mean, I've had the opportunity to travel to Florida and love catching tarpon, but also I'm a little disappointed when one gets eaten by either bull sharks or hammerheads. And then off the coast like North Carolina, where they rely on a charter fleet to be able to catch yellowfin tunas, now it used to be you'd hook 15 tunas and you'd lose one or two to sharks. You didn't mind doing that. But today, in many days, Tom, you hook 10 and lose 10. And it's a tremendous waste of the resource, and it's also something that is going to affect the survival of the charter industry, both inshore and offshore. We're seeing these sharks now eat bottom fish, eat red snapper. And for the first time ever, Tom, I've seen sharks starting to eat big, we call them red drum or redfish. It used to be the redfish and the sharks kinda live together. You'd catch some sharks and catch some redfish, and you'd never see sharks eat the redfish. Now we're seeing them eat these big forty and fifty pound reds, which is pretty disturbing to me. So in hearing and seeing all that, I looked at it and said shark depredation, as the term is used, is becoming a big issue. And I talked to a number of people across the spectrum, from folks like Guy Harvey and his foundation to the American Sport Fishing Association to the National Marine Manufacturers Association to the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Trust. Across the spectrum, everyone says we have to address this problem. And listen, this is not about killing sharks. This is about figuring out how do we, as sport fishermen, as recreational fishermen, coexist with sharks. How do we get to keep some of our catch? Listen, I understand sharks, we're living in their environment. I understand folks say, well, it's sharks just being sharks. But the question is how can we do this in a way that looks at shark populations in a sustainable way? How can we make sure the recreational fishermen get to enjoy what they do? And my bill puts together a panel of experts to say, let's talk about this. Let's bring everybody to the table and figure out how do we go about this. Speaker 1: Interesting. And so you're a 100% correct, in my opinion, in my experience, that the shark depredation is the highest I've ever seen in my lifetime. And everywhere we go, from Louisiana down to Key West, up to when we cross over to the Bahamas and fish over there, it's all over the place. I was trying to tell some people that aren't really fishermen about that. They were like, well, seems like sharks are on the decline, they're about to go extinct. I'm like, well, I don't know about global numbers, but I can tell you that is not the case in Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, over to the Bahamas. And it seems like it is very possible that maybe worldwide numbers could be going down, but other numbers are going way up at the same time. But how do you see, as you start to have this conversation, what do you see as possible solutions? Speaker 0: Well, listen, I've talked to a lot of fishermen, and there are certain technologies out there that claim to be capable of repelling sharks, of deterring sharks. And from the people that I've talked to that have used those, they've been used with limited success. So I think we have to look, is there a technology out there that can dissuade sharks? Are there things that we can do also to kinda move sharks out of an area? I don't know if that's even possible, but I think it ought to be one of the things that we talk about. Another thing that we need to address is that we see behavior of sharks changing. I think two things are happening, Tom. One is shark populations, anecdotally, I think are growing. So the first thing we need to do is let's do a proper stock assessment. Let's figure out exactly where the populations are today because the older stock assessments are very old. And remember too, as we talked about restoring shark populations, they're live bearers. And everybody says, oh, long gestation times, it takes a long time for them to recover. But remember, live bearers are different than free spawners, where they broadcast eggs and sperm and you hope that they fertilize and you have millions of these things and plankton eaters eat them and you maybe have a handful survive. Remember, these live bearers, when these little sharks hit the water, they have a high degree of survivability. So their mortality is much lower than egg spawners. So I think what we're seeing is an incredible success story. So the question is, how do we get a real handle on where shark populations are today? Anecdotally, as you've said, observationally from fishermen, I think we all know shark populations are at an all time high. Anecdotally, let's do a stock assessment to really put some scientific numbers behind it. And then secondly, let's figure out not only shark populations, but let's figure out too, are there certain things that are happening in areas that are sort of the dinner bell for sharks? I would argue, when a charter fishery goes to a certain area where we know the tunas are and sharks all of a sudden hone in on whatever it is, the sound of the engines there, as boats slow down to troll or when a boat stops. Are there little triggers there? And is there something that we can do that counters that signal, sort of the dinner bell that goes to sharks? I think there may be technologies out there that can do that. Speaker 1: So do you see any possibility that something like this in this bill would infringe upon fishing rights in the future? Like people would not be able to fish in certain areas where there are high degrees of shark depredation? Because I know that's where a lot of the anglers and the people listening to this podcast are like, well, I'm all about doing something about the shark problem, but not if it infringes upon my fishing rights. Speaker 0: Tom, I couldn't agree more. This is not what this is about. It's not about killing sharks. It's not about pushing fishermen out of certain areas and say, hey, the sharks get to have these areas. Just like as we talk about marine sanctuaries, I get concerned about those things too, because marine sanctuaries many times are where the fish live. And they said, well, you can fish the rest of the ocean, but listen, 90% of the fish live in 10% of the ocean. We don't wanna get pushed out of that 10%. That's not the issue or the intent with this bill. I wanna make sure that this is a situation where we can coexist, where shark populations can remain healthy. In no way, shape, or form should this be a situation where we say it's one or the other. And that's why the makeup of this group of people that would come together represents all the different aspects of it. And that's why we've gotten buy in from all of the sport fishing groups out there that have said shark depredation is a problem, and they will be very vocal to say pushing recreational fishermen out of certain areas where we have these shark intersections is not the way to go about doing this. Speaker 1: What about a commercial fisherman at the table? Would that have a say? Speaker 0: I think they would have to. The commercial fishermen have a lot of observational things that they can add. And listen, these sharks are having an impact on the commercial fisheries too. What I wanna make sure it doesn't become, there's not gonna be a predominance or a majority of commercial fishermen here. But I do think you have to have them in the conversation, because wherever the science ends up in shark populations, and we do allow shark harvest right now, the question is gonna be what part of a proper management program would that be. I think you have to have commercial fishermen at the table to say, here's what we're dealing with with sharks. It should not be the predominance there, and it won't be. But I do think you have to listen to their perspective. Speaker 0: Well, that certainly has to be within the realm. And remember, National Marine Fisheries Service, under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, is required to look at that part of how they manage these species. I think though you have to take a step back because we have old data on these shark populations. So let's get the most up to date data. So the first thing I think we need to do is a stock assessment. Let's have a very rigorous stock assessment, especially on large coastal sharks. What we're seeing is great hammerheads, dusky's, lemons, black tips. And we even see off the East Coast, it's amazing to me, when I grew up we used to catch a bunch of sandbars, and if you caught a 30 or 40 pound sandbar it was a big fish. We're seeing 150, 175, sometimes 200 pound sandbars now eating this tuna. So something's going on there. There's a very healthy population of sharks. So let's do the stock assessments, and I think that can inform fisheries managers to say, okay, then what role would a sustainable harvest play in those populations? And again I wanna emphasize, because I don't want folks to think this is about killing sharks, it's not. It's about how do we manage this. And National Fisheries Service is charged with doing this. Speaker 1: And the data that you're referring to is old data, the stock assessment. Why are we operating on old data? Have we not been taking stock assessments over the last ten, fifteen years? Speaker 0: Well, we haven't done any recently. A lot of the studies on sharks are tagging studies, a great example is great white, you tag a great white, you see where it goes up and down the East Coast. But remember, those are individual sharks. And on the East Coast now there's a ban on taking short finned makos, and they looked at it and said we think short fin makos are on the decline. That was a determination made by the international bodies, the International Commission on Tunas, ICCAT. What normally has happened, Tom, is that we've engaged commercial fishermen, normally long liners, to go out and catch sharks in the areas that they live, and from that use that survey data to do a profile. How many sharks did they catch per unit effort? What's their age group? How many are spawners? How many are young sharks? What is the fecundity of those sharks, meaning how many young can they produce? And that gives you the total sense of biomass, how many total pounds of sharks are there per unit area. We don't have any of that information recently on these sharks. In fact, if you look at publications, a National Geographic magazine from several years ago about sharks, their chart shows all sharks are endangered except great hammerheads. The thing is, if you look at their references, all the stock assessments are old. So let's do stock assessments that reflect where we are today. And to do that, you have to engage both commercial and recreational fishermen in a study and say we want you out to catch some sharks, not to kill them, but to gather data on them. Some of them you will take out because you wanna gather data from the cartilage in a shark, which tells you the age. So you will have to kill some of them to gather data, but some you will not. Speaker 1: What would be the steps necessary to start that process? Can individual constituents be part of that process? Speaker 0: Sure. Well, National Marine Fisheries Service is charged under the Magnuson-Stevens Act to do the stock assessments. What we wanna make sure is they are using all aspects of data. In fact, I have language that's actually now in the law that requires National Marine Fisheries Service not only to gather their own data from their structured studies, but to also engage recreational fishermen to get anecdotal data. I would argue if you gather that observational data from recreational fishermen, it is as valuable as the data you gather from these catches of sharks. A great example is Gulf red snapper. When they were doing those stock assessments, they'd pull a trawl net over open bottom and say there are no red snapper around. Well, that's pretty obvious, because Gulf red snapper are reef fish, so if you don't try to gather samples around bottom structure, you're not gonna catch anything. So that's why Garrett Graves, the member from Louisiana, and others and myself included, said let's have an independent group besides National Marine Fisheries Service actually go out and do the stock assessment, because National Marine Fisheries Service wouldn't change the structure of their study. So what we wanna make sure too is these studies are structured the right way. Let's go fish for these sharks where we are seeing them, where we know they live. Speaker 1: How long do you think that process would take if done properly? Speaker 0: Well, Tom, what I'm hoping is that our bill, it got a hearing before the subcommittee a week ago yesterday, and I'm hoping it'll get before the full committee, pass out, go to the floor on the House side, pass, and then we'd like to see it either taken up by the Senate or have a companion Senate bill. I would hope that it would get passed and signed into law by the end of the year. That would be the impetus for National Marine Fisheries Service to put this working group together, and from there start on the track of designing how stock assessments would be done for these different classes of sharks. I think they'd need to start with the large coastal class of sharks. If they did that and did it expeditiously, I think they could track that study to start the middle to the end of next year, which would give us good data. It usually takes about a year after the data comes in to finally have a conclusion about where shark populations are. So I would say best case scenario, maybe a two year period of time to a point where you'd have the data to make some decisions about managing shark populations. Speaker 1: And you mentioned the large coastal sharks. What species would that be? Speaker 0: Large coastals are the hammerheads, so scalloped, smooth, greater hammerheads, dusky sharks, sandbars, black tips, the ones that live in those coastal areas. Pelagics are great whites, porbeagles, salmon sharks, mako. So they put them into different categories. The large coastals, lemons are part of the large coastal shark population too. So the ones that we normally come in contact with inshore and offshore, the ones that are predominantly eating these fish, are the large coastal class of sharks. Speaker 1: Is there any way that interested fishermen can follow along with this process or be involved in it, outside of the state of Virginia, or is there anything we could do? Speaker 0: Absolutely, Tom. I would encourage folks to track the bill. They can go to the Natural Resources Committee website. The US House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee will have information on this bill, what's happening with it through the committee. There's also a conduit there for folks to comment. They can go to our website, which is wittman.house.gov. But I would urge folks across the country to go to their member of Congress, because their member of Congress will have a role in this when the bill comes to the floor. Go to your member of Congress and say, take a look at the SHARK Act, ask them to sign on as a co-sponsor, ask them to track it, ask them to support it when it gets to the floor in the House to be voted on, ask their US senator to support it over on the Senate side. And if they have ideas about the bill, we don't claim this is the perfect mechanism, so send them our way or send them to your member of Congress. We wanna make this bill as good as it can be. When it gets to the full committee to be marked up, we probably will make a few changes to it to make sure we get it into a form where it can gain the most support. And the best ideas don't come from inside Washington, they come from folks that live this each and every day. Speaker 1: What kind of resistance do you see with a bill like this? Speaker 0: Well, listen, we've tried to reach out to all the environmental groups, and folks like the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Trust are really a very forward looking conservation group. Listen, we know we'll get some pushback from conservation groups that'll say this is a bill about killing sharks and shark populations are not recovered, therefore we shouldn't even be talking about this. I wanna make sure that we're using science to make these decisions. Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think that most people that fish anywhere between Maine and Key West on one side, and Key West to Texas on the other side, have seen that there are way too many sharks and don't really know what to do about it. So really, I think it's refreshing that someone in your position is interested in this, does feel as though it's out of balance, and is offering some solutions. So congratulations for that. I really think that you have, or seem to have, the fisherman's best interest. And that is because you are a fisherman, right? You sent me some pictures of your office, it looked pretty awesome, this guy has mounts all over his office, pictures of all these fish he's caught. Speaker 0: Well, actually I'm back in the congressional district now. This is my office over just outside of Richmond in Henrico County. So I don't have as many of those critters here, but I am blessed to have had some great experiences fishing. And listen, I grew up working as a mate on a charter boat both in the Carolinas and the Chesapeake Bay. Worked on the commercial fishing side too, so I've seen that element of life. Worked on a scalloper, worked on a long liner. So I really had great experiences on the water. And that is what fuels my passion for making sure we're properly managing our fish populations, because I look at it from both standpoints. We have a very robust recreational fishery in Virginia, with the Chesapeake Bay, with coastal Virginia, with the Outer Banks. And I am very connected with those folks as well as folks in the commercial fishing industry who rely on a healthy marine resource to make a living. So I always tell folks, I get somewhat disappointed when recreational fishermen are after commercial fishermen and vice versa. I really think our purpose needs to be how do we increase fish populations in general, and when we do, then we can debate who gets to catch which portion of them. But when we see fish populations declining, that ought to join everybody together that's interested in fish to begin with. So that's always been my focus. And I'm blessed, the district I represent, Tom, has one of the largest shoreline areas of any district in the United States, from the Chesapeake Bay and up in our rivers. So it's really about the interest of folks in the district, and they are constantly in my ear about the things we need to do to properly manage these resources. Speaker 1: That's great. I couldn't agree more on banding together and avoiding pointing the finger at each other, seeing this group of fishermen, both commercial and recreational, in all the different nuances. My feeling has always been that we have to come together. We're strong together, we're weak apart, and there are lots of different reasons and issues that try to divide us. I don't see that as productive at all to preserving fishing and fisheries as a whole. Speaker 0: Well, Tom, we need to grow the pie, and you've got some great groups out there. Captains for Clean Water down in the Everglades doing an incredible job. They're really pointing out that water quality means something, and it means something for everybody. So if we can come together and say let's grow the pie, then we can debate who gets to catch what portion of the pie. But if all we're doing is fighting over a shrinking pie, then shame on us. Speaker 1: Right. And I also think the one group you mentioned, I have a strong connection with them, and the reason I like Captains for Clean Water is they come with solutions. All we really need is to raise awareness, the solutions already exist.