BOSTON, Mass. — March 3, 2015 — The big windows at the University of Massachusetts Club, 33 floors up into the Boston skyline, filled like bright blue boxes of a cloudless sky that descended into Boston Harbor. It felt like the world had turned a corner and a long winter was finally drawing to a close.
The fishermen, scientists, fishery regulators and environmentalists who slogged through slushy streets and half-cleared sidewalks below could only wish that the summit they were attending Monday had a similar sunny prospect. But this was not a meeting to announce some dramatic turnaround for the beleaguered New England fishing industry. This was a rallying of the troops in advance of a new fishing year in May that promised deeper gloom than the one just past.
For the 2015 fishing year, for instance, the Gulf of Maine cod quota has been reduced from 1,550 metric tons to just 386 metric tons. In 1991, fishermen caught more than 17,000 metric tons.
The summit was hosted by the Marine Fisheries Institute, a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology and the state Division of Marine Fisheries. The fisheries institute was formed with the idea that bringing scientists and fishermen together might lead to some scientifically based innovations. The hope was that cooperation, not infighting, would turn around the nation’s oldest fishery, even as it is beset with increasingly dramatic impacts of global warming and brutal fishing restrictions in the face of the stubborn chronic collapse of iconic species such as cod and flounder.
“If we are going to advance, then we are all in this together,” U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., told the audience. “The myth we have to break down is that this is an industry that doesn’t appreciate the science. They live it, they see it, and they could be more important partners.
“As discouraging as it can be that we’re not making progress as quickly as we can, if we weren’t here working together, it would be so much worse,” Keating added.
A big part of the problem is cod and some flounder species are nowhere near the population levels predicted by scientists and federal fishery managers despite various tactics employed to reduce the impact fishermen were having on stocks, such as slashing daily limits, overall quotas and fishing days to the bone over the past two decades.
Read the full story from the Cape Cod Times