Management & Regulation

January 17, 2015 — Two years ago, a small fish created big trouble between Chesapeake Bay environmentalists and commercial fishermen.

Environmentalists backed by scientific data said Atlantic menhaden were being over-fished. Commercial fishermen disagreed. New data collected by scientists show the fishermen were probably right.

A draft of the latest bench assessment using new data says, “Based on the current adopted benchmarks, the Atlantic menhaden stock status is not over-fished and over-fishing is not occurring.”

“It’s really what Omega Protein and others in the fishing community have said for a long time,” said Ben Landry, a spokesman for the Houston-based company. “Previous stock assessments did not accurately reflect what the population looked like in the water.”

Menhaden is eaten by fish and birds, used as bait by watermen and anglers, and rendered by Omega Protein to make fish-oil supplements. Traveling in large schools, the fish move up and down the coast and in and out of bays, making them difficult for biologists to ensure they're not being over-fished.

January 17, 2015 — Two years ago, a small fish created big trouble between Chesapeake Bay environmentalists and commercial fishermen.

Environmentalists backed by scientific data said Atlantic menhaden were being over-fished. Commercial fishermen disagreed. New data collected by scientists show the fishermen were probably right.

A draft of the latest bench assessment using new data says, “Based on the current adopted benchmarks, the Atlantic menhaden stock status is not over-fished and over-fishing is not occurring.”

“It’s really what Omega Protein and others in the fishing community have said for a long time,” said Ben Landry, a spokesman for the Houston-based company. “Previous stock assessments did not accurately reflect what the population looked like in the water.”

Menhaden is eaten by fish and birds, used as bait by watermen and anglers, and rendered by Omega Protein to make fish-oil supplements. Traveling in large schools, the fish move up and down the coast and in and out of bays, making them difficult for biologists to ensure they're not being over-fished.

Read the full story from the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

January 18, 2015 — The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is proposing to allow more flexibility in regulating Atlantic shark fishing. NMFS is proposing new rules for Large Coastal & Small Coastal Atlantic Shark Management Measures. NMFS is proposing the changes to Draft Amendment 6 of the 2006 Consolidated Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan in the Federal Register of Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015.

NMFS is taking public comments on the proposals until April 3 and plans four public hearings and a teleconference on them. Refer to NOAA-NMFS-2010-0188 and file your comments electronically. Or mail them to to Margo Schulze-Haugen, NMFS/SF1, 1315 East West Hwy., NMFS, SSMC3, Silver Spring, MD 20910. If you have questions, contact LeAnn Hogan, Guyacute DuBeck, Alexis Jackson or Karyl Brewster-Geisz at (301) 427-8503, fax (301) 713-1917.

The hearings take place Tuesday, Feb. 17 in St. Petersburg, Florida; Wednesday, Feb. 18 in Melbourne, Florida; Monday, Feb. 23 in Belle Chasse, Louisiana; and Thursday, Feb. 26 in Monteo, North Carolina. All take place from 5 to 8 p.m. The hearings are accessible to people with disabilities. If you need special help such as a sign language interpreter, call the above number at least a week in advance. NMFS intends to give all attendees a chance to speak.

Read the full story at The Examiner

January 15, 2015 — It's shaping up to be another interesting season on the summer flounder management front.

At a public comment hearing held last Monday night in Toms Rivers, attendees received a presentation from the ASMFC on Draft Addendum XXVI to the summer flounder managment plan for 2015 and the available options for fluke management.

Attendees then provided feedback on those they felt best served the state's recreational fishing community.

Unfortunately, not a lot of the community was there. The meeting was rather poorly attended with maybe just a dozen or so recreational fishermen and captains from party boats and for-hire vessels showing up.

Capt. Adam Nowalsky, the chairman of the New Jersey Chapter of the Recreational Fishing Alliance and one of New Jersey's three representatives to the Commission, thought the poor turnout was indicative of several factors.

One being the continued destruction of the for-hire and recreational fishing fleets as a result of fisheries management policies; and second, the public's growing disenchantment with management over its inability to provide reasonable access to resources that are claimed to be rebuilt and healthy.

"There is a sense," said Nowalsky, "of why bother."

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press

January 13, 2015 — The New England Fishery Management Council held the last of 12 public hearings on Draft Omnibus Habitat Amendment 2, including the draft environmental impact statement, in Portland, Maine, on Jan. 7. Ten years in the making, the amendment, designed to address habitat requirements for all of the council's fishery management plans, isn't light reading at 400 pages.

"It's big and it's complicated," council member David Preble told the audience of about 60 people who attended the  public hearing on the amendment.

"Ten years is too long to create a document," said Jim Odlin, owner of Portland-based Atlantic Trawlers Fishing.

Much attention has been paid to one proposed alternative to open a portion of the Cashes Ledge closed area in the central Gulf of Maine. The proposal could help the region's struggling groundfish harvesters, but the Conservation Law Foundation is fighting to keep the closed area as it is.

Odlin said he supports the idea of modifying closed areas. "The conclusion that larger closed areas are more beneficial is more speculation than anything proven in fact," he said.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

January 8, 2015 — Federal regulators are deciding the scope of a management plan for thousands of square miles of fishing grounds off New England that has deeply divided fishermen and conservationists.

The New England Fishery Management Council is working on the long-awaited plan for federal waters from Maine to Rhode Island. It includes a host of options including opening areas closed to fishing and adding new restrictions to open areas.

Some of the options would change and, in some cases, decrease protections to habitats such as Cashes Ledge, an underwater mountain and offshore ecosystem mostly closed off to fishing that conservationists want to preserve. Regulators have held a series of public hearings about the proposed changes, with conservationists pushing for preserved or increased protections. Fishermen have cited the need to access fishing areas in a time when critical species such as cod are heavily restricted and low in number.

Read the full story from ABC News

NEWBURYPORT, Mass. – January 7, 2015 — Maine lobstermen and scallop and quahog harvesters are among those weighing in at public hearings this week on a proposed federal fishery management action. The New England Fishery Management Council (NEMFC) staff held a webinar hearing and in-person meetings in Brewer and Portland on the council’s proposed Amendment 2 to its Omnibus Essential Fish Habitat document.

Among the alternatives before the council when it meets next in April is closure of a large area that runs from Vinalhaven past Mount Desert Rock to all fishing gear “capable of catching groundfish.” The area would be designated a “habitat area of particular concern” and flagged for future council attention and study.

Under current definitions, “gear capable of catching groundfish” does not include lobster traps, but some are nervous that could change. Five options have been considered for these habitat areas with specific kinds of gear prohibited. “Option 5” for the Eastern Gulf of Maine area in question is for a “complete restriction on use of gear capable of catching groundfish.”

Read the full story from the Mount Desert Islander

January 6, 2015 — The following was released by the Caribbean Fisheries Institute and NOAA:

The Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute and NOAA have partnered to launch a new web portal to provide managers, researchers, and the public with the latest information on the lionfish invasion in the Atlantic.

Introduced into the southeast Atlantic through the U.S. aquarium trade in the 1980s, lionfish have been spotted as far north as southern New England and are firmly established in a range from North Carolina to South America, including the Gulf of Mexico. Lionfish, which are considered an aggressive threat to native fish populations throughout their range, have recently expanded throughout most of the Caribbean in a time span of less than five years.

“Lionfish may prove to be one of the greatest threats of this century to tropical Atlantic reefs,” said NOAA ecologist James Morris, Ph.D. “As the first reef fish invasive species to this region, lionfish have clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of Atlantic reefs to marine invasions. With the lionfish web portal, coastal managers, scientists, and the public can work together to manage and better understand the lionfish and its economic and ecological impacts.”

The Invasive Lionfish Web Portal provides scientifically  accurate information for coastal managers, educators and the public on the lionfish invasion and its impacts by providing training videos, fact sheets, examples of management plans, and guidelines for monitoring. The authors of the web portal include NOAA scientists and policy experts, non-profit environmental groups, academic scientists, and coastal managers from the Southeast U.S., Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico who together bring decades of experience fighting the lionfish invasion.

One of the new site’s special features is an interactive front page that includes live Twitter (#lionfish), Flickr, YouTube, and Google news feeds, image and video contests, a lionfish distribution map, and a lionfish discussion forum designed to promote discussion and inquiry.

“The lionfish web portal was built to bring together scientists and coastal managers to share information and gather resources,” said GCFI’s executive director Bob Glazer. “We are confident that we can control lionfish in many places such as marine protected areas, sanctuaries, and other conservation areas if the many strategies and tools provided on the lionfish web portal are used.”

Invasive lionfish continue to cause ecological damage along temperate and tropical reefs from North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean islands to the Atlantic coast of South America. Coastal managers are working to catch and control lionfish in some conservation areas using methods such as adopt-a-reef programs, paid or volunteer removal efforts, fishing derbies, and commercial harvesting of lionfish as a food fish or for other end uses including the aquarium or jewelry trades.

This project was funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Conservation and Water. Collaborating partners include NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS), GCFI, REEF, the International Coral Reef Initiative, and Oregon State University.

The Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute promotes the exchange of current information on the use and management of marine resources in the Gulf and Caribbean region. GCFI endeavors to involve scientific, governmental, and commercial sectors to provide a broad perspective on relevant issues, and to encourage dialogue among groups that often operate in relative isolation from one another.

The U.S. Department of State’s Office of Conservation and Water coordinates the development of U.S. foreign policy approaches to conserving and sustainably managing the world's ecologically and economically important ecosystems, including forests, wetlands, drylands, and coral reefs, and the species that depend on them. To learn more, join the State Department Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs on Facebook and Twitter.

NOAA's mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and our other social media channels. Visit our news release archive.

January 6, 2015 — Fishermen say access to Cashes Ledge will help them survive tight groundfishing regulations, but conservationists say the rare ecosystem should be left alone.

Roughly 100 miles off the coast of southern Maine, a hidden, mountainside forest that scientists describe as an ecological time machine offers glimpses of an abundance long lost on the New England coastline.

Schools of oversized cod and pollock congregate in Cashes Ledge, drawn to the food and shelter found in one of the largest, densest kelp forests in the world. Endangered North Atlantic right whales, humpback whales and various species of shark swim above, while sponges, sea stars and sea anemones form a brightly colored blanket on the bottom – all in an area largely off-limits to commercial fishermen.

Now a proposal to reopen part of the 500-square-mile area to groundfishing is reviving debate about how to balance conservation with attempts to keep New England’s historic groundfishing industry from becoming extinct. That debate will continue Tuesday and Wednesday as the New England Fishery Management Council holds public hearings in Brewer and Portland on the Cashes Ledge proposal and other potential changes to regional fishing regulations.

“It makes no sense whatsoever to allow the (gains) we have established over the past few years to be destroyed for a few boats,” said Greg Cunningham of the Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit that pressured regulators to create the refuge for cod and other struggling groundfish species in 2002. “The fish they are targeting there are readily available in other areas.”

Fishermen and members of the management council – the regional federal commission that regulates the industry – insist that the proposed changes still will protect the rare Cashes Ledge habitat while giving fishermen access to surrounding waters. The council is accepting public comment on the suite of proposed changes through Thursday.

“We are not opening up Cashes Ledge or Ammen Rock if this goes through,” Harpswell fisherman and council member Terry Alexander said in referring to the tallest peak of the cluster of submerged mountains. “All we are opening up is the deep water to the west of Cashes Ledge.”

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald