Management & Regulation

SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton — Sept. 24, 2014 — With the opening of the 2014-2015 Alaska crab season coming on Oct. 15th, there is a lot of interest in the upcoming announcement of crab quotas.

The quotas are set by the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game.  But before they decide, there are several industry meetings, including the crab plan team of the N. Pacific council, which review the survey results and make recommendations about interpretations.  The crab plan team meetings took place Sept. 15-18 in Seattle.  However, ADF&G has final authority and how they interpret the data and their models is generally not known until they make an announcement.
 
This year, the survey results had some anomalies, which make it very difficult to get a read on quota increases or decreases.  Given the results, many industry observers expect there may be little, if any, change in all three species:  Opilo, Red King Crab,and Bairdi or Tanner Crab.
 
The first fact is that the raw data showed significant increases in mature biomass in all three species.  But there was also a spike in water tempertures during the survey of 2 degrees celsius. This causes a significant movement of crab, which prefer lower temperatures, and there is some indication that more crab may have moved into the survey area.  So the population increases may be discounted.
 
The other factors are the multi-year averaging and the number of mature femaies. 
 
For all three species, quotas are set in a precautionary manner using multi-year averaging, so that a spike in population results in one year does not automatically get translated into higher quota, but instead is averaged with other years.  So this will lessen the impact of any population increases in a single year on the quota.
 
Secondly, mature males are harvested, but species also have population thresholds for mature females.  In the case of Baridi, the survey showed a decline in the number of mature females, and an increase in the number of mature males.  This anomaly will have to be factored into the plan.
 
The bottom line is that there is a lot of conflicting information that will go into the ADF&G's crab models.
 
The raw survey results showed an increase in Bristol Bay Red King crab biomass of mature males greater than 120 mm from 33,891 tons to 47,688 tons, which is well above the five year average.  Mature Females also increased.
 
For Bairdi, the legal male biomass increased to 30,366 tons, but the mature female biomass decreased to 4807 tons, reversing a three year trend.
 
For snow crab, mature males increased from 58,381 tons to 105,442 tons, and also the level of recruits, immature males, increased 40% to over 140,000 tons. Mature females increased slightly, from 173,353 tons to 177098 tons.
 
So all the survey data shows a surge in crab populations, but it is unclear how much of this may be due to redistribution of the crab in response to temperature changes, and how much may be indicative of growth in total stocks.

This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

WASHINGTON — September 21, 2014 — How many fish in the sea? No one really knows, but which ones are counted and how often they're examined depends on where you live, a new study by Congress' watchdog concludes.

An analysis by the Government Accountability Office released Friday found wide variations in how frequently fish stock assessments are conducted, chiefly based on geography. Counts in Alaska, for example, far outnumber those in the Gulf of Mexico or in the Atlantic.

Fish counts are critical because they're used by regional councils to set recreational and commercial fishing rules in coastal waters. How they're conducted and what they report are at the center of an ongoing debate between a $100 billion maritime industry that wants to relax catch limits and environmental advocates who want to prevent overfishing.

A bipartisan group of senators, led by Florida Republican Marco Rubio, asked the GAO last year to examine how fish are counted. They want to know how the federal National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, determines which stocks are healthy and which ones need protection.

Alabama Sens. Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, both Republicans, were among the senators that asked for the GAO report.

Critics of the agency say some limits are based on "flawed science" provided by the fisheries service.

The GAO report doesn't settle that argument. The watchdog agency is beginning a second phase to examine "collection of fisheries data" which might more directly address the science behind the counts.

Read the full story from the Montgomery Advertiser

 

September 17, 2014 — Read the full story from the Northeast Regional Planning Body:

In advance of the upcoming Northeast Regional Planning Body (RPB) meeting on November 13-14, the following public events will be held. These meetings will include updates on the regional ocean planning effort and a discussion of two topics the RPB will focus on at its November meeting: options under the Effective Decision Making goal and the Healthy Ocean and Coastal Ecosystems goal. See neoceanplanning.org for the Framework for Ocean Planning in the Northeast, which describes these goals and the options.

Please mark your calendars for the following meetings:

October 6, 2014 – Portsmouth, New Hampshire; 5:00PM – 7:30PM
NH Department of Environmental Services
222 International Dr., Suite 175, Room A
Portsmouth, NH

October 8, 2014 – Belfast, Maine; 1:00PM – 4:00PM
Hutchinson Center
80 Belmont Avenue
Belfast, ME

October 15, 2014 – Narragansett, Rhode Island; 5:00PM – 7:30PM
Coastal Institute
215 South Ferry Road, Hazards Room A and B
Narragansett, RI

October 20, 2014 – New Haven, Connecticut; 6:00PM – 9:00PM
Regional Water Authority
90 Sargent Drive, Welch Room M
New Haven, CT

October 27, 2014 – Boston, Massachusetts; 3:00PM – 5:00PM
100 Cambridge Street
100 Cambridge Street, Second Floor Conference Room C + D
Boston, MA

Additionally, a day-long regional forum will be held on October 21, 2014 at the University of New Hampshire, Holloway Commons, 75 Main Street, Durham, NH, in the Squamscott Room. The forum will focus on the topics leading into the November RPB meeting.

Materials for these meetings will be posted online here in advance.

September 18, 2014 — A number of regional fishing associations are joining forces to strengthen the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

The Sitka-based Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association announced last week (9-9-14) that it’s reached an agreement with the Alaska Marine Conservation Council and several east-coast industry groups to form the Fishing Community Coalition.

The new organization wants to ensure that Congress makes protecting fish stocks a priority as it prepares to reauthorize the nation’s most important law governing the harvest of seafood in federal waters.

Draft language containing proposed changes to Magnuson-Stevens has been working its way through the US House of Representatives, but the political lines became clearer when Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced his version of the bill on September 16.

Read the full text of Sen. Rubio’s Florida Fisheries Improvement Act.

The top priority for Rubio is giving the regional management councils more flexibility in setting timelines for rebuilding depleted fish stocks.

This is exactly what Linda Behnken, the director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, was hoping not to hear.

“There’s quite a pushback right now against the rebuilding timelines and the catch limits. You start rebuilding stocks, it means you have to catch less fish, generally, and that’s a painful process for fishermen.”

Read the full story from KTOO

 

September 15, 2014 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Earlier this year we made available a number of Geographic Information System (GIS) data sets and charts for various federally managed fish species.  We've added three new groups of files that contain management area information for the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan, the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Plan and Atlantic Coastal Fisheries.

Click here to read some background on this project.

Click here to go directly to the GIS website.

September 12, 2014 — The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council recently met in Biloxi, MS to discuss a number of fishery issues, including recreational red snapper sector separation and accountability measures.

During the meeting, the Council reviewed recommendations made by its Red Snapper Advisory Panel. Council staff also presented public hearing and public comment summaries, along with a revised Reef Fish Amendment 40 – Sector Separation document for Council discussion.

The Reef Fish Amendment 40 divides the recreational red snapper sector into two distinct components – a private angling component and a for-hire component.

The Council, made up of state appointees and federal officials, had a lengthy discussion about sector separation, specifically Action 2 – Allocation of the Recreational Red Snapper Quota between the Components of the Recreational Sector.

The Council’s preferred alternative was originally Alternative 4, which would allocate the recreational red snapper quota based on average landings between 1996 and 2012. Federal for-hire and private angling allocations would be 47.1% and 52.9% respectively.

Read the full story at Gulf Seafood News

September 11, 2014 — Seafood industry organizations across California and even the US are crying foul over NGO Oceana’s attempt to fight seafood fraud in the state.

Senate Bill 1138, authored by California Senator Alex Padilla and sponsored by Oceana, has passed through the California legislature to the desk of Governor Jerry Brown.

If signed by Sept. 30, it would require all seafood sold in California — either via retail or restaurants — to be labelled by the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Seafood List’s common name list, which separates commonly known market names for fish into 1,827 terms.

So far, the California Fisheries & Seafood Institute, California Grocers Association, National Retail Federation are among a list of groups writing governor Brown to plead for a veto.

“Simply stated, SB1138 is unnecessary, unworkable, and will make seafood labeling more confusing, not less,” California Fisheries and Seafood Institute president Kevin Joyce writes in a letter to the governor dated Sept. 8. “The bill proposes to fix fraudulent thus unlawful labeling of seafood with a complicated scheme of labeling protocols that will require the entire seafood industry to label historic market names with names that will be more confusing for both the industry and the consumer.”

Yet the intent, argues senator Padilla, is to address “the growing problem of seafood mislabeling by making sure that seafood is labeled accurately.”

Yet multiple industry groups, including the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), argue that making seafood labelled “accurately” — in the bill’s definition, by its common name — will actually only make it more difficult to fight seafood mislabeling.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

SEAFOODNEWS.COM — September 10, 2014 — The Fishing Community coalition has weighed in on Magnuson reauthorization, pushing to strengthen conservation mandates and avoid disruptive reallocations.

The group represents small commerical harvesters, many with IFQ rights, who have often found themselves allied with some supportive Environmental organizations that support fishing rights and survival measures for smaller ports.

In a letter to the chairs of both the House and Senate subcommittees dealing with Magnuson Reauthorization, they criticze current drafts of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) as being too lose with science standards, and for allowing a patchwork of excptions and regional mandates to take hold.  The group said it wants to see more focus on national standards and science-based fishery management.

The Coalition’s membership includes the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, Alaska Marine Conservation Council, Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance, Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.

They said “We cannot realize the full potential—biologically, socially or economically—of our nation's marine fisheries without robust and well-managed fish stocks as well as strong protections for fisheries access in traditional fishing ports. A reauthorization that simply reaffirms the status quo, or, worse, moves backwards, is something our Nation’s fisheries and fishermen cannot accept.  We can and must do more."

The group lists several changes it would like to see during the reauthorization process which include:

-Maintaining strong, science-based management, including stringent rebuilding timelines and an ACL process based on timely science.

-Requiring more comprehensive, real-time and cost-effective catch information and biomass estimates to feed into improved annual stock assessments.

-Strengthening requirements to reduce bycatch, particularly of species which are fully allocated to other directed fisheries; providing stability to fishing communities by ensuring opportunities for access for current fishermen and the next generation of fishermen.

-Moving towards ecosystem-based management by providing specific direction and requirements for Councils to incorporate ecosystem-based management.

-Including protections for forage fish; including more innovative approaches to monitoring and accountability including more widespread use of electronic monitoring and reporting

-Maintaining a strong and comprehensive National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process to evaluate true impacts of fisheries management through extensive public input.

-Managing our nation under a single fisheries law by applying consistent policies that prevent conflicting management standards between different regions

-Avoid disruptive federal mandates for reviews of regional allocation decisions.

"We appreciate the efforts in both the House and Senate to begin the important process of reauthorizing the MSA," the group said. "However, we are disappointed that neither of the current bills/drafts include the measures that are critical to moving our Nation’s fisheries forward."

This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

 

September 5, 2014 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC):

he Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Council) and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (Commission) have scheduled a series of scoping hearings to gather public input on the range of issues and information to be considered in the Comprehensive Summer Flounder Amendment. Hearings will be held September 29 – October 22 in coastal states from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

The amendment will involve a comprehensive review of all aspects of the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan (FMP) related to summer flounder. Specifically, the Council and Commission will consider whether modifications to the FMP’s goals, objectives, and management strategies for summer flounder are needed.

Scoping is the first and best opportunity for members of the public to raise concerns related to the scope of issues that will be considered. The public is encouraged to submit comments regarding the range of potential issues to be addressed in the amendment. The Council and Commission are particularly interested in comments on the following topics:

• Fishery management plan goals and objectives
• Quota allocation between the commercial and recreational fisheries
• Commercial management measures and strategies
• Recreational management measures and strategies
• Discards in the commercial and recreational fisheries
• Ecosystem, habitat, bycatch, and protected species issues
• Data collection requirements and protocols

Learn More

The Scoping Document contains background information on summer flounder management and on issues that may be addressed in the amendment, as well as a description of the amendment process and timeline. Additional information and updates will be posted at www.mafmc.org/actions/summer-flounder-amendment.

Contacts

Kirby Rootes-Murdy, FMP Coordinator                              Kiley Dancy, FMP Coordinator
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission                     Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council
Krootes-murdy@asmfc.org                                          kdancy@mafmc.org
703.842.0740                                                                302.526.5257

Written Comments

In addition to providing comments at any of the fourteen scheduled scoping hearings, you may submit written comments by 5 PM, Eastern Standard Time, on October 31, 2014. Written comments may be sent by any of the following methods:
ONLINE: www.mafmc.org/comments/summer-flounder-amendment
EMAIL: nmfs.gar.FlukeAmendment@noaa.gov
MAIL:

Chris Moore, Ph.D., Executive Director                  Bob Beal, Executive Director
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council              Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission
North State Street, Suite 201                               1050 North Highland Street, Suite 200A-N
Dover, DE 19901                                                 Arlington, VA 22201

Please include “Summer Flounder Amendment Scoping Comments” in the subject line if using email or on the outside of the envelope if submitting written comments by mail.

All comments, regardless of submission method, will be compiled into a single document for review and consideration by both the Council and Commission. Please do not send separate comments to the Council and Commission.