May 30, 2015 — GEORGES BANK — It was May 14, a Thursday. The big yellow Caterpillar roared to life beneath us, throbbing through the steel deck plates; a signal that it was time to cast off the surly bonds of earth. Capt. Ron Borjeson backed the Justice down. The spring line came taut and groaned. From its Fish Island berth, the black 82-foot hull began to swing slowly into the shipping channel until the prow pointed directly toward the hurricane dyke. We bore away for Georges Bank, in the wake of generations of New Bedford fishermen who sailed from here before us, all bound for what Melville termed “the watery part of the world.”
The Justice is a scallop boat, but as the net reel above the stern ramp proclaimed, we were rigged for groundfish. But this was to be no ordinary fishing trip. Kevin Stokesbury was heading a scientific expedition, targeting groundfish but trying to count rather than catch them. The flatfish net on the Justice was designed to enable fish to pass through the mouth and escape through the open end unharmed. Their passing would, however, be filmed by cameras mounted inside the net, with their number and species recorded on video and stored for later analysis.
Professor Stokesbury, the chair of the Department of Fisheries Oceanography in UMass Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology, is well-known for his pioneering work with scallops. His introduction of video surveys in the 1990s, using a drop camera to film scallops on the sea floor, transformed the conventional scallop survey. It was a quantum leap forward, delivering an accurate and cost-effective method that helped in correcting a stock assessment that had been significantly underestimating scallop biomass and constraining fishermen. The boon to the industry stemming from the expanded estimates contributed enormously to New Bedford attaining its status as the nation’s top fishing port, a record that now extends to 14 consecutive years.
The picture is not so rosy for the groundfish industry, however. With drastic cuts in the allowable catch, the groundfish fleet in New Bedford and other New England ports has been decimated, while the survey data employed for calculating stock size in this multispecies fishery have generated much controversy and rancor. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel conducts its trawl surveys in the spring and fall, relying for its data on a series of 20-minute tows. Annual catch limits are calculated largely on their findings. Fishermen have publicly expressed a vote of no confidence in the survey results while NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole acknowledges that the demand for stock assessment advice exceeds its capacity to provide it. Many boats remain tied to the dock, landings have reached four-year lows and a fishery disaster has been declared. Everyone agrees that more and better science is needed to improve the data but counting fish in the ocean is no simple matter.
Kevin and his students at SMAST have focused their attention on the root cause of the fishery disaster — scientific uncertainty about the relative abundance of fish — and are trying to do something about it. With assistance from state Rep. Antonio F.D. Cabral of New Bedford, some funding was obtained from the state and, augmented by ingenuity and improvisation, a pilot program began in 2013. The improvisation is best demonstrated by the cylinder inside the net, upon which the underwater camera and lights are mounted. It is an old fish tank from the SMAST lab with the bottom sawn off.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times