It's widely agreed that good fisheries regulation demands good science. We need to know how many fish are out there and what is happening to them.
But gaps in the science have spawned disputes between fishermen and regulators in the Northeast and, in response, fisheries scientists are offering a radically different approach to the way groundfish stocks are evaluated and managed.
Regulation is obsolete as it is now practiced, according to Steve Cadrin, associate professor at UMass Dartmouth's School for Marine Science and Technology.
"Fisheries management based on single species population dynamics goes back to the 1950s," said Cadrin, who also serves on the New England Fishery Management Council's science and statistical committee.
But this fishery is multi-species, and single-species methods miss plenty and can be oversimplified and misleading, he said.
"If you sample the removals from a population and the age structure, you can get a good sense of a fish stock and how hard you can fish it," he said. "But that simply ignores other species who are eating and being eaten by a single stock. And it also ignores the many environmental variables, such as hot years and cold years and times of high or low salinity."
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