June 16, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — At their June meeting last week, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council moved forward on a regulatory amendment to allow Western Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) groups to lease halibut IFQ during times of low abundance.
The issue has been before the council since December 2015; last week the 11-member panel selected a preferred alternative for further analysis.
Low relative abundance has been an issue throughout the range of Pacific halibut since 2010 or so when the phenomenon of lower size at age became widely discussed. That years-long event, marked by successive generations of halibut not reaching sizes they have in the past at advanced ages, appears to have leveled out in recent years.
Both Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) and CDQ are issued in units which are converted to pounds, so the problem of lower pounds to fish, in a region defined by few processing plants and vast distances between fishing ports where product is processed and the markets that buy it, continues to affect residents of the Pribilofs and the Aleutian Islands.
In 2015, the issue reached a critical point when the International Pacific Halibut Commission’s (IPHC) stock assessment and harvest policy justified some half a million pounds of halibut in an area where over a million was required to run the plants and allow the fleet to go fishing.
The IPHC’s method for setting annual catch limits uses an equation that removes from the total biomass mortalities that are estimated by each country the year before, for example subsistence removals and bycatch removals.
In the Bering Sea, removals of halibut bycatch in the pursuit of flatfish and P-cod, amounted to 4.6 million pounds, nearly 14 percent of all halibut caught by the directed fishery in both countries that year. Catch limits went down from there in 2016. Additionally, most of the bycatch was smaller than 32-inches, which is the legal limit for the directed fishery.
In June 2015 the Council recognized the need to reduce bycatch in the Bering Sea and set goals for each fishing sector. The Amendment 80 fleet, targeting flatfish that inhabit the same sea floor as halibut, exceeded their reduction targets in the following years.
Any savings in the over 26-inch portion of the groundfish fleets’ halibut bycatch translates the following year as increased catch limits to the directed halibut fleet in the Bering Sea. Any savings of under 26-inch fish is taken into account by the IPHC’s annual stock assessments and improves the overall abundance of the species in that area and other areas affected by out-migration and recruitment to the biomass.
The action taken by the Council to allow CDQ groups to lease IFQ is seen as a stop-gap measure only in times of severely low abundance and until the Council completes their work on shifting the managment of halibut bycatch from a set Prohibited Species Catch (PSC) to an Abundance Based Management (ABM) scheme.
That effort continues at the Council with a step-wise process to establish first, indices that answer the question “Abundance of what?”, for instance just in the Bering Sea, or also the Aleutians or Gulf of Alaska, and a starting point that answers the question “Where do we begin measuring the ratio of what we’re catching with what is out there?”
Analyses will be done this summer for the Council’s consideration and further action at the October meeting.
This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.