December 16, 2024 — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section is maintaining the current moratorium on northern shrimp fishing through the 2025 fishing year. That makes 11 years of no commercial shrimp fishing in Maine.
That action followed the 2024 Stock Assessment Update, “which indicates the northern shrimp stock has been at low levels of biomass for over the past decade despite the fishery being under a moratorium since 2014,” said the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in a Dec. 13 news relesae.
The Update found no improvement in stock status and 2023 summer survey indices of abundance, biomass, and recruitment were the lowest in the 1984-2023 time-series.
There will be a pilot industry-funded winter sampling program for 2025 with a research set-aside quota of 26.5 metric tons (or approximately 58,400 pounds).