Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission Archives

Emergency Striper Size Limits Made Permanent

February 8, 2024 — Federal regulators took steps to bring the striped bass population back from the brink last month when the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission voted to approve restrictions on the size of fish recreational fishermen are allowed to keep.

The new regulation makes permanent the emergency actions to protect the striper stock taken by the ASMFC this summer. Recreational fishermen will be restricted to keep one fish a day between 28 and 31 inches during the season.

“We’re putting in rules to control fishing mortality, so we have a shot at keeping this stock healthy,” said Michael Armstrong, the deputy director at the state Department of Marine Fisheries who also serves on the ASMFC.

Now that the commission has approved the regulations, state level departments will be required to put them in place.

The restrictive size limits are meant to protect the class of striped bass spawned in 2015 – the last strong spawning year from the species.

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

A key Maine lobster bait is booming. Soon fishermen may be able to catch more.

August 22, 2022 — While more menhaden are swimming through Maine waters in recent years, the state’s quotas for the important bait fish haven’t kept pace with the growing influx.

But that could soon change as the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate regulatory body that oversees several species along the eastern seaboard, is considering new provisions that could increase catch quotas in Maine.

Menhaden, commonly known as pogies, have become a top lobster bait as herring Right now, Maine has 0.52 percent of the overall quota for the east coast, just slightly above the 0.5 percent minimum quota that is available to every state in the region. But that doesn’t line up with the number of menhaden, often called pogies, that have been in the Gulf of Maine in recent years.

Read the full at Bangor Daily News

Fishery regulators will discuss possible rise in minimum lobster size

July 28, 2022 — Fishing regulators will gather in Virginia next week to talk about the potential of raising the minimum size lobsters need to be in order to be harvested by New England fishermen.

The Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission’s lobster management board is meeting on Tuesday to discuss the implications of a proposal that would install new minimum size limits and other regulations for the crustaceans, either gradually over time or triggered by lobster populations dipping below a certain level.

The proposal was drafted to protect the lobster population as surveys show indications of potential future decline. The idea has rankled many Maine lobstermen, who claim the Pine Tree State often bears the hardest brunt of any new regulations, despite having some of the strictest rules in place already.

Maine lobstermen currently have the lowest maximum size limits in New England. They can only keep a lobster if the distance between its eyes and the start of the tail is at least 3 ¼ inches but no longer than 5 inches. This is done to protect future populations and the most productive breeders.

Other areas of New England have different size limits and could undergo area specific changes under the proposal.

For Maine, one option being considered by regulators is increasing the minimum size by 1/16 of an inch if the abundance of lobster drops by 17 percent, and then again at 32 percent. Another would raise the minimum size gradually between 2023 and 2025.

Analysis done by the commission projected that raising the legal size minimum could increase the number of lobsters that reached maturity, allowing for more resilient populations.

Read the full article at Bangor Daily News

Atlantic Herring Days Out Meeting Scheduled for July 23, 10 AM – Noon

July 7, 2020 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

Atlantic Herring Management Board members from the States of Maine and New Hampshire, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will meet on July 23, 2020 from 10 a.m. to Noon to review landings to date and discuss potential changes to days out measures for the 2020 Area 1A (inshore Gulf of Maine) fishery for Season 1. Days out measures can include specification of the number of consecutive landings days, weekly landings limits, and restrictions on at-sea transfers. This meeting will be held via webinar and conference call. The call and the webinar information are included below:

Atlantic Herring Days Out Meeting

July 23, 2020
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Webinar link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7337839744604085772.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to connect to the webinar.

We strongly recommend connecting to the webinar using the computer audio (VoIP).

For those who will not be joining the webinar but would like to listen in, please refer to your confirmation email for dial-in information.

The 2020 Area 1A allowable catch limit (ACL) is 2,957 metric tons (mt) after adjusting for the research set-aside, the 30 mt fixed gear set-aside, and the fact that Area 1A closes at 92% of the sub-ACL. The Board established the following allocations for the 2020 Area 1A ACL: 72.8% available from June 1 – September 30 and 27.2% available from October 1 – December 31. In April, the Board set effort controls for Season 1 in Area 1A (refer to Memo 20-50 for specifics).

Please contact Max Appelman, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at 703.842.0716 or mappelman@asmfc.org for more information.

A PDF of the meeting notice can be found here.

NEW YORK: Changes on the horizon to reduce striped bass fishing mortality

September 20, 2019 — The Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) has issued proposed changes to Amendment 6 of the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic striped bass.

The proposed changes — formally flagged as Addendum VI — were the subject of comments at a public hearing Sept. 12 in New Paltz, at the Region 3 Headquarters of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

While the abundance of striped bass is declining along the entire Atlantic Coast, according to ASMFC studies, most of the people attending the hearing were honed in on what the changes would mean to the Hudson River’s striped bass fishery.

Read the full story at the Poughkeepsie Journal

Analysis: Shrimp may have ‘no ability to recover’

November 20, 2018 — Fishery regulators last week continued the moratorium on shrimping in the beleaguered Gulf of Maine northern shrimp fishery that began after the 2013 season because of unrelenting warning signs of a stock in free fall.

No surprise there. Leading up to the decisive meeting, regulators from the shrimp section of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission had been candid about the bleak prospects of reopening the fishery in 2019.

They conceded that results from the most recent assessment of the imperiled shrimp stock showed no material improvement in abundance, spawning stock biomass, recruitment or any other metric used to gauge the health of a marine stock.

They also spelled out the continuing deleterious impact on the shrimp stock by the continued warming of the Gulf of Maine waters, which researchers have said is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s other ocean waters.

What was surprising, however, was the ASMFC regulators opted this time to close the fishery for three years, through 2021, rather than revisit it on a year-to-year basis as they’ve done since the initial closure prior to the 2014 season. The closure came over the objection of Maine Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Maine: It’s shrimp season, but without the shrimp

December 27, 2017 — PORT CLYDE, Maine — Sitting between Glen Libby’s desk at Port Clyde Fresh Catch and the armchair where his brother’s old dog, Red, likes to nap are two boxes full of “The Original Maine Shrimp Cookbook.” This slim spiral-bound volume includes contributions from various members of the brothers’ immediate family, whose shrimping history dates back nearly four decades in this coastal town about two hours northeast of Portland.

Libby loves the small, delicate Northern shrimp, known fondly here as Maine shrimp, and so do customers at his processing and distribution plant. He bought $700 worth of the books to sell.

“I have sold two,” Libby said.

He is unlikely to sell many more. Not long after the cookbook was published in 2009, its central ingredient began vanishing from Maine’s waters. In 2014, regulators closed the shrimp fishery (the term that encompasses both the fishing grounds and those who work there). The hope was that the struggling species would replenish itself if left undisturbed.

So far, according to scientists who survey the Gulf of Maine annually, it has not. Their most recent data show Northern shrimp numbers at a historic low for the 34 years in which they have been counting the crustacean, Pandalus borealis. Egg production is down. Survival rates for larvae are poor.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Martha’s Vineyard herring stocks show alarming decline

November 30, 2017 — Herring Creek is a small stream that plays a mighty role in the Martha’s Vineyard ecosystem. It’s the one waterway that connects Menemsha Pond and Squibnocket Pond, and the one place on the Island where blueback herring and alewives — also known as river herring — come home to reproduce.

River herring are anadromous fish and live most of their lives, three to five years, in the ocean. When it’s time to breed, they return to the exact river or pond where they were born.

Twenty years ago, the herring run at Herring Creek was described as “one of the largest on the East Coast, with up to 1.5 million fish making their way through the creek,” according to David H. Killoy, then chief of permits and enforcement for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Read the full story at the Martha’s Vineyard Times

Odds are tiny for a winter shrimp fishing season

November 28, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — With fisheries regulators slated to gather in Portland on Wednesday, a shrimp fishing season in the Gulf of Maine this winter seemed as likely as bipartisan tax legislation in Congress.

The schedule called for members of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section to meet in the afternoon to establish dates and landings limits for the 2018 season. All evidence suggested that, except for a tiny “research” fishery, the limit, or total allowable catch, will be zero and there will be no season at all.

According to the commission’s recently released “2017 Stock Status Report for Gulf of Maine, Northern Shrimp,” the resource is in terrible shape. For the past five years (2012 through 2017) the shrimp stock has been at its lowest, both in terms of number and total biomass, over the 34 years that the shrimp population has been surveyed.

Prospects for the shrimp resource to rebound in the Gulf of Maine are grim.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Atlantic Menhaden Board Votes Against Ecological Management Plan For Fishery

November 17, 2017 — The Atlantic Menhaden Board voted earlier this week to stick to the status quo when managing the menhaden fishery and made slight changes to the annual catch limit. However, Saving Seafood, a group that represents the commercial fishing industry, has mixed feelings about those changes.

Menhaden are a forage fish found across the Atlantic Coast. The Board was considering implementing a new ecological-based management plan that was designed for forage fish.

The plan would have required fishermen to leave enough fish in the water for it to replenish itself and enough for predators to eat. However, the board voted no for the plan because it’s not specifically designed for menhaden.

Bob Vanasse, executive director at Saving Seafood, said the group agrees with the board’s decision.

“I think this was a strong statement that moving forward science needs to prevail, data needs to prevail and we need to look at this complex system in its complexity and not try apply a rule of thumb in every circumstance,” Vanasse said.

The menhaden board also voted to increase the annual catch quota by eight percent.

Read the full story at WNPR