October 22, 2018 — The threat of a huge cut in next year’s herring catch quota has Maine bait dealers scrambling to find alternative ways to satisfy the voracious appetite of the state’s $1.4 billion lobster industry.
The New England Fishery Management Council voted last month to set the 2019 herring quota at 3.2 million pounds – about 78 million pounds less than what the East Coast herring fleet is permitted to catch this year – to help the population recover from a record-low number of juvenile herring. To put the cut in context, that is about 2,000 tractor-trailer trucks of the industry’s favorite bait that won’t be showing up in New England lobster ports next year.
“We knew we’d be losing a lot of herring quota since we first heard about the bad stock assessment, so we’ve had some time to prepare,” said Mary Beth Tooley, who oversees government and regulatory affairs for O’Hara Corp. in Rockland, Maine’s largest bait dealer. “We have someone out on the West Coast right now looking for new sources of frozen bait. But I don’t think people understand how bad it’s going to be.”
Some fishermen have told Tooley they aren’t worried about the bait shortage because they don’t use herring. Some have switched to pogy or rockfish because it fishes better for them, while others have weaned themselves off herring, or found ways to conserve bait use, because they saw the collapse coming. But as more fishermen look to other bait species, the prices of those species are likely to rise and their availability shrink, Tooley predicted.