November 20, 2018 — Fishery regulators last week continued the moratorium on shrimping in the beleaguered Gulf of Maine northern shrimp fishery that began after the 2013 season because of unrelenting warning signs of a stock in free fall.
No surprise there. Leading up to the decisive meeting, regulators from the shrimp section of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission had been candid about the bleak prospects of reopening the fishery in 2019.
They conceded that results from the most recent assessment of the imperiled shrimp stock showed no material improvement in abundance, spawning stock biomass, recruitment or any other metric used to gauge the health of a marine stock.
They also spelled out the continuing deleterious impact on the shrimp stock by the continued warming of the Gulf of Maine waters, which researchers have said is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s other ocean waters.
What was surprising, however, was the ASMFC regulators opted this time to close the fishery for three years, through 2021, rather than revisit it on a year-to-year basis as they’ve done since the initial closure prior to the 2014 season. The closure came over the objection of Maine Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times