Determined to prevent a repeat of last year’s problems in Closed Area II, scallopers are signing up to voluntarily participate in a “yellowtail flounder by-catch avoidance system” for this year’s Nantucket Lightship Access Area fishery.
The system, which was developed at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), relies on two-way communication. Scallopers fishing in the Lightship area will provide real-time yellowtail catch data through daily e-mail reports to SMAST. And, SMAST, in turn, will tabulate the information and e-mail the location of yellowtail hotspots back to the fleet.
“It’s a simple concept,” said Cate O’Keefe, program manager of SMAST’s Marine Fisheries Field Research Group.
Simple, maybe, but potentially crucial to the success of the Nantucket Lightship fishery, where scalloping activity will be shut down once the fleet reaches its 2010 yellowtail flounder allocation for the area of 47 metric tons (mt), which is equivalent to only 103,617 pounds.
Last summer, despite efforts by SMAST to widely broadcast the location of yellowtail concentrations in Closed Area II, scallopers quickly harvested their yellowtail allocation of 158.5 mt, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) shut down the area just 15 days into the fishery.
Read all about this from Commercial Fisheries News.