February 21, 2018 — Maine’s lobster industry is pushing back against new rules that they say are costly and put onerous requirements on them to record data.
Maine does not have the funds to pay for the new reporting requirements mandated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, according to Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. McCarron said the new rule, which requires 100 percent of Maine lobstermen to report certain catch data over the next five years, is cost-prohibitive.
“We have more than 4,000 lobstermen, so we have no way to collect trip-level data from all of them,” she told SeafoodSource.
Currently, data is collected from only 10 percent of the state’s lobstermen. The MLA opposed the ASMFC’s proposal on the reporting requirement, explaining that the state does not have the funds for data collection and that its current data system has a 95 to 98 percent confidence interval level.
“The question for Maine is how do we pay for it. We need electronic reporting technology that would make it simple and fast,” McCarron said.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association lobster analyst Peter Burns said the more thorough reporting requirements are necessary to give scientists a fuller picture of how the fishery is performing.
“We have a big black hole of reporting somewhere in the Gulf of Maine and into Georges Bank,” Burns told the commission, according to the Portland Press Herald.
As a compromise, ASMFC is phasing in the more stringent reporting requirements over five years, which it said would give Maine time to implement an electronic reporting requirement that may reduce the burden placed on fishermen to comply with the rules.
Read the full story at Seafood Source