July 23, 2012 — The nation’s largest scallop industry organization has found NOAA’s approach to assessing the status of yellowtail flounder to be virtually worthless and urged the agency to scrap its commitment to “computer models” in favor of “field research.”
The four-page, single-spaced letter to Bill Karp, the newly appointed director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, by attorneys for the Fisheries Survival Fund includes a harsh, detailed analysis of government’s effort to determine the status of the stock.
A staple of the groundfishing fleet and bycatch in the scallop trawls, the yellowtail founder is essential for different reasons to the region’s leading commercial ports, Gloucester and New Bedford.
The July 13 letter to director Karp by attorneys Drew E. Minkiewicz and David E. Frulla, with the Washington, D.C., office of the firm Kelley Drye & Warren, repeatedly emphasized the intent was not to pressure the government for a larger allocation of yellowtail.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recently approved a novel arrangement, allowing scallopers to give some of their bycatch allocation to the groundfishing fleet to help the boats avoid an early shutdown for exceeding their yellowtail catch limit. In exchange, NOAA has agreed to indemnify the scallopers should they exceed their yellowtail allocation.
The agreement was improvised last month after NOAA announced dire yellowtail findings in the midst of a generally pessimistic set of assessments of the Georges Bank fishery, and in the immediate aftermath of a deeply discouraging benchmark assessment of Gulf of Maine cod, which has pushed the inshore fishery toward a possible shutdown next May. Twelve New England senators and representatives — including Congressman John Tierney — wrote to NOAA on July 11 asking for extraordinary permission to allow the inshore fleet to reduce its landings of cod this year, and shift the uncaught allocation into 2013 to keep most of the boats out of Gloucester and elsewhere working.
The Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute, headed by Paul Diodati, the state director of marine fisheries, and Brian Rothschild, a marine scientist at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, also have been highly critical of NOAA stock assessments, and in the wake of the cod and yellowtail crises offered in writing to work with NOAA on an “end-to-end” review of what’s gone wrong.
“At the root of most of the problems is a lack of confidence that the industry has in stock assessments and research vessel survey indices,” Diodati and Rothschild wrote to NOAA’s deputy administrator in late June.
Karp wrote back on Thursday that NOAA has “a high degree of confidence in the integrity of the our assessments” and proposed a workshop in 2013.
Read the full story in the Gloucester Times