Management & Regulation

WASHINGTON — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on today announced that it’s using a new way to estimate the amount of fish caught by recreational saltwater anglers on the Atlantic Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, the result of years of work on how to make the numbers more accurate.

The new estimates will have an impact on millions of fishermen and those who make a living from recreational fishing. Eastern and Gulf Coast fish-management groups will use the estimates and other information about fish populations to make decisions about limits on catches of many species of fish, such as striped bass in the mid-Atlantic and red snapper in the Gulf.

"Better, more accurate estimates of anglers’ catch are important to sustainable management of fisheries," said Eric Schwaab, NOAA’s acting assistant secretary of commerce for conservation and management.

It’s not easy to measure the catch from an estimated 11 million U.S. saltwater anglers, Schwaab said. Those estimates are based on sample dockside and phone interviews.

Read the McClatchy Newspapers story in the Boston Herald

 

 

 

 

 

PROVIDENCE — The alarming results of the most recent assessment of cod stocks in the Gulf of Maine has left fishery regulators, scientists and fishermen with a conundrum.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs fishing in federal waters, has set hard targets for rebuilding depleted fish stocks by 2014. But a fall survey, conducted by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, shows cod on the verge of collapse and warned that fish stock rebuilding targets would not be met even if the entire fishery was shut down today.

The news sent shock waves through fishing circles, although New Bedford draggers, which catch their cod offshore on Georges Bank, are less threatened by the findings.

But the survey results were greeted with disbelief by fishermen who operate in waters that extend from Cape Cod to Downeast Maine. Fishermen say they are catching a lot of cod and see plenty of evidence of stock abundance. They also want some answers, since the situation poses a threat to their livelihood and the findings are in stark contrast to an optimistic stock assessment produced by the previous survey in 2008.

Read the complete article from The Standard-Times

 

 

 

 

 

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Local recreational and charter fishermen fear the outcome of an upcoming hearing with the National Marine Fisheries Services, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), could mean the end of groundfishing in the Gulf of Maine.

"We’re seriously concerned," said Capt. Aaron Silberdick, who operates with several charter fishing businesses out of Rye Harbor. "It’s going to put a lot of people out of business, not only in New Hampshire, but Massachusetts as well."

Federal officials, industry leaders and scientists in February are expected to discuss the implications of a 2011 preliminary assessment that shows the cod stock was much smaller in 2008 than initially believed.

NOAA set a deadline in 2004 to rebuild the cod species by 2014. An earlier 2008 survey showed that goal was possible. But researchers are now saying the earlier survey might have sharply overestimated the number of young cod.

Read the complete story from The Boston Herald

 

 

 

 

 

New England's largest fishing industry group, the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, Tuesday cited the case of the disappearing codfish stock as a sign of "a flaw in fishery policy" that makes impossible demands on science in an effort to predict developments in the ocean ecosystem.

And it predicted that, without new flexibility written into it, the Magnuson-Stevens Act's rebuilding policy "is doomed to fail again and again."

On the eve of today's publication in Providence of a peer-reviewed assessment of the inshore cod population by the NOAA Science Center in Woods Hole, the seafood coalition urged the federal fishery management system to halt the normal process of setting what is expected to be an economically devastating catch limit on Gulf of Maine cod based on the pessimistic findings and a rigid legal deadline for restoring the stock to sustainability.

Instead, the coalition recommends that the Science and Statistical Committee of the New England Fishery Management Council, which hosts today's meeting, adopt an "interim catch level that achieves at least in the short term— one year — the overarching intent of Congress in the Magnuson-Stevens Act to strike a balance between … achieving a sustainable resource and a sustainable fishery."

Read the complete article from The Gloucester Times

 

 

 

 

 

New England's fishery management council committee holds an all-day meeting Wednesday in Providence to examine and debate a new, dire and skeptically received assessment of the Gulf of Maine cod stock.

Directly contradicting an assessment in 2008 — which found the most important wild resource of the New England groundfishery was recovering rapidly from chronic overfishing — the 2011 assessment concluded that the cod stock is so weak that nearly all fishing for it should be halted.

But the assessment, a product of the NOAA Science Center in Woods Hole, has been received with doubts about its accuracy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's science itself has come under intense criticism.

In the furor, U.S. Sen. John Kerry, Gov. Deval Patrick and the co-chairmen of the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute have written to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco and top Obama administration fisheries officials, advising them that a "new cod assessment, undertaken with industry and 'local scientific experts'" was essential to gain the "trust and support of fishermen."

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times

 

 

 

 

 

MEXICO BEACH — Chip Blackburn’s boat hasn’t gone out since September.

Blackburn is part of a coalition of gulf fishermen fighting against further funding for catch share programs, a controversial form of fishery management that dictates the amount of fish that can be caught through the distribution of individual fishing quotas (IFQs) to fishery participants.

Although the recreational sector that the charter boats fall into is not bound by the catch share programs in place for commercial fishermen in the gulf, many charter fishermen fear implementation of further catch share programs on the horizon, and see it as a way for NOAA to privatize their right to a public resource.

Blackburn fears that younger generations of fishermen will not have a chance in the business, which he said is becoming more difficult to stay afloat in each year, and harder to acquire the necessary permits to fish in federal waters, required for charter and commercial boats that fish more than nine miles off the Florida coastline.

Read the complete story from The Panama City News Herald

 

 

 

 

 

The New England Fishery Management Council is conducting public hearings to solicit scoping comments for Draft Amendment 18 to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan (FMP). The scoping document is available on the Council’s website, or may be obtained by contacting the Council office.

For anyone who may be attending the January 31 – February 2 Council meeting, a hearing is scheduled in the Council meeting room on Tuesday, January 31st from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel, 250 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801.

 

 

 

 

 

Statement by Acting NOAA Assistant Administrator for Fisheries, Samuel Rauch and New England Fishery Management Council Chairman, C.W. “Rip” Cunningham:

We want to alert fishermen and other stakeholders of the upcoming opportunities for providing
additional public input on Gulf of Maine (GOM) cod management options including:

-The Council’s Groundfish Oversight Committee will meet tomorrow, January 18, in Portland, ME. The Committee will receive an overview of the assessment and may also  develop a recommendation to the Council on how to incorporate the results into management.    

-The Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) will meet next Wednesday, January 25, in Providence, RI. The SSC will review the cod assessment and identify information that may influence the interpretation of the assessment results. The SSC will also review a range of catch levels for GOM cod.  

-The Council will meet next on January 31-February 2, in Portsmouth, NH. On Wednesday Feb 1st it will discuss a course of action for GOM cod and possibly request that NOAA Fisheries take emergency action for the 2012 fishing year.  

-NOAA Fisheries and the Council also plan to hold another public meeting in February. This meeting will be an opportunity for the public to learn and comment on any action the Council has taken before agency action. Further details about the meeting date and agenda will be available shortly.  

A joint agency working group met with fishing industry and environmental representatives, scientists, and other stakeholders on December 9, 2011, to discuss the GOM cod assessment, which indicated that the stock was overfished and overfishing was occurring. The purpose of the meeting was to solicit ideas for potential management responses. Since this meeting, the working group has continued to explore the feasibility of these options under the authority of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in the hope of identifying ways to help alleviate impacts on the fishing industry while also protecting the long-term health of the GOM cod stock.

For additional information on these upcoming meetings, please visit the Council’s website at: http://www.nefmc.org/index.html

Updated information about our progress and all of these upcoming meetings can be found at: http://www.nero.noaa.gov/nero/hotnews/gomcod

 

 

 

 

 

After two lean years of Alaska Bering Sea pollock harvests, 2011 was supposed to be a return to normalcy with a quota set near the historic average at 1.25 million metric tons.

The season ended with a thud, though, as some 54,000 metric tons were left in the water following the “B” season that starts June 10 and ends Nov. 1. The shore-based catcher fleet reported difficulties finding the fish, poor catch rates and soaring encounters with both chinook and chum salmon bycatch as effort extended deeper into the fall.

The 2011 season was the first under new chinook salmon bycatch reduction measures, and while the pollock fleets finished well under the cap of 47,591, nearly 18,000 of about 25,000 chinooks were taken during the “B” season.

After taking between 13,000 and 46,000 chum salmon from 2008 to 2010, pollock boats caught about 180,000 chums in 2011.

Read the complete article from The Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

 

 

 

 

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine—Fishery regulators have increased the amount of Gulf of Maine shrimp that can be caught this season, but Maine fishermen and processors say the higher limit won't make much difference in their season.

More than 150 fishermen and processors packed a meeting room Thursday in South Portland, where an Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission committee voted to increase the season's catch limit from 4.4 million pounds to nearly 4.9 million pounds.

Read the complete story by The AP at the Boston Globe.