April 6, 2024 — Maine fishermen hope to discover if Gulf of Maine shrimp stocks could support a revived fishery. After a precipitous drop in landings in 2013, Maine’s shrimp fishery officially ended with a moratorium imposed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) in 2014. A few boats continued fishing in a test fishery until 2021 when the Shrimp Section extended the commercial and recreational fishing moratorium through 2024.
“This three-year moratorium was set in response to the low levels of biomass and recruitment and the fact that should recruitment improve, it would take several years for those shrimp to be commercially harvestable,” reads the ASMFC website. After that, monitoring relied primarily on surveys conducted by the R/V Gloria Michelle, which have now been curtailed.
“Federal money to continue the surveys was cut, so the ASMFC shrimp section asked for ideas,” said Glen Libby, who has been involved in the shrimp fishery for decades and whose brother Gary chairs the Advisory Panel. Libby wrote a draft proposal for a plan to sell licenses to previous license holders, allow them to fish at their own expense, and report their findings.
“It would give you a much better picture of stock status than using Gloria Michelle or the Albatross, which is what they were doing,” said Libby, who questioned the validity of the data collected. They had too much spread on the net and were getting mud half the time. It was like towing a butterfly net with a dump truck.”