BIDDEFORD, ME – A coalition of scientists, spotter pilots, fishermen, bait suppliers, and members of the fish reduction industry have teamed up this summer to conduct an extensive aerial survey of Atlantic menhaden from Maine to New Jersey.
The northern-waters aerial survey, the first of its kind for menhaden, which are also called pogies or bunkers, got underway on Aug. 1 with a strong survey team that Sulikowski is confident will help ensure the project’s success.
The last stock assessment for menhaden came out in May 2010. Yet, the information that goes into menhaden assessments is limited at best. In fact, there is no coastwide menhaden survey at all – aerial or otherwise – so assessment data comes mainly from fishery-related information collected in the Mid-Atlantic/Chesapeake Bay area, supplemented by pound net data collected by the Potomac River Fisheries Commission.
Assessment scientists use this information to develop a “fishery- dependent” index of relative abundance for adult menhaden. They also use fishery-independent seine survey data from several states from Rhode Island to North Carolina to develop an index for juvenile abundance. However, menhaden is a bycatch species in the seine surveys, not a target species.
Since there’s no independent region- wide survey for menhaden and there’s very little fishing going on in the north to supply fishery- dependent data, the concern is that menhaden surveys might not accurately reflect the stock’s status.
What troubles industry members most is that the model used to crank out the assessment assumes that all age 3+ menhaden – the mature ones – are considered to be “fully recruited” into the fishery and incorporated into the assessment.
The problem is that many age 3+ menhaden spend their summers in colder, northern waters in New England – that area where there’s very little fishing and few samples are available to scientists.
Sulikowski explained that if schools of older menhaden are present in New England and aren’t being incorporated into the calculations, the assessment could be overestimating fishing mortality and underestimating spawning potential.
The scientists who conducted the 2010 menhaden assessment and those who peer reviewed it highlighted this problem and said the assessment would be “substantially improved” by a coastwide fishery-independent survey and sampling data for the full range of the resource, including the north.
Read the complete article from Commercial Fisheries News