Saving Seafood

OCEANA AGAIN SUES NOAA OVER BYCATCH MONITORING

July 29, 2015– WASHINGTON — Oceana, the maritime environmental group that successfully sued NOAA Fisheries in 2011 over its bycatch rules, is challenging the federal regulator of the nation’s fisheries over its newest bycatch rule for the Northeast region.

Oceana again sued NOAA Fisheries on Wednesday, claiming the current bycatch reporting rule finalized last month for the region — in part, as a response to Oceana’s earlier legal victory — is underfunded, uniformly inadequate for providing accurate information and in violation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The 43-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., claims the new bycatch rule “leaves loopholes that would guarantee that observer coverage will never meet its performance standards, ultimately failing to fix current insufficiently low levels of monitoring in the region,” Oceana said.

The group’s lawsuit said NOAA’s new Statistical Bycatch Reporting Method (SBRM) “fails to address the fundamental legal flaws” identified in its previous lawsuit and “effectively doubles down on the Fisheries Service’s decade-long practice of under-funding and marginalizing its bycatch monitoring systems.”

That under-funding, Oceana said, impedes NOAA Fisheries’ ability to generate statistically reliable data needed to assess the impact of bycatch on individual fisheries.

The lawsuit draws a direct connection between faulty bycatch monitoring and overfishing. It specifically targets NOAA Fisheries’ bycatch monitoring performance in New England and among the Northeast multispecies groundfish fleet.

“New England in particular has been plagued for decades by lax monitoring and overfishing,” said Oceana Assistant General Counsel Eric Bilsky. “The failure to monitor catch and enforce catch limits is in part responsible for the collapse of the New England groundfish fishery, including the historically important Atlantic cod populations of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

NEW JERSEY: Massive reduction in allowable flounder catch a possibility

July 18, 2015 — There is one topic and one topic only dominating the discussions going on at bait shops, on docks and aboard boats this past week. That is the genuine possibility of a massive reduction in next year’s allowable summer flounder catch in New Jersey. The proposal for an upwards of 43 percent slashing of the catch was disclosed by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), citing overfishing and a huge decrease in the flounder stock. The decision can be challenged by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, but the final say still belong to NOAA.

This year’s quota is 18.45 million pounds, with 60 percent of that going to the commercial fleet, the rest to recreational anglers. The proposal for next year has the allowable catch down to 10.5 million pounds.

Now, if you talk to just about anyone who has fished for summer flounder this season, the last thing they will they will tell you is there is a shortage of fish. They may be undersized and have to be thrown back but finding fish is not a problem this season.

South Jersey already has what I think are overly strict flattie regulations, especially when compared with neighboring Delaware. Such a huge reduction in the number of fish you can bring back home, coupled with strict sea bass catch restrictions, quite possibly will wreck much of the state’s charter and party boat fleet. A large percentage of anglers who pay to fish in New Jersey come from Pennsylvania and if the rules make it nearly impossible to catch enough fish for dinner, the ride to Delaware ports is not much of a hardship.

Read the full story at The Mercury

 

DON CUDDY: Spreading misinformation about our fisheries

July 15, 2015 — Anyone knowledgeable about the commercial fisheries of the United States will find nothing original in the op-ed piece recently submitted to the New York Times by the environmental organization Oceana.

Even its title ‘A Knockout Blow for American Fish Stocks’ is misleading. American fish stocks are healthy. NOAA’S annual report to Congress, submitted at the end of 2014 showed that only twenty-six of the three hundred and eight fish stocks assessed were subject to overfishing.

‘Overfishing’ occurs when too many fish are removed from a population to produce maximum sustainable yield. As a scientific term it is quite misleading, carrying, as it does, the clear implication that low stock assessments result solely from fishing pressure; whereas ‘overfishing’ can result from a number of other factors, such as changes in water temperature or salinity, degraded habitat and increased predation.

NOAA also maintains an ‘overfished’ list; comprising any stock whose biomass is such that its capacity to produce its maximum sustainable yield is in jeopardy. Only thirty-seven of two hundred and twenty eight stocks found themselves on that list. Hardly a knockout. No new stocks were added to the list in 2014. In fact, three were removed from the previous year, according to the NOAA report.

The Oceana piece also asserts that recent estimates determined that New England cod stocks were at three to seven percent of target levels. As fishermen in the Gulf of Maine can attest, most of that bottom is now taken over by lobster gear and neither the fishermen nor the NOAA survey vessel can tow through that. So nobody can determine with any certainty how much cod might be out there; not to mention the fact that if a fisherman sees cod in the water he goes someplace else. Why? Because the introduction of fishing sectors and catch shares in New England have made cod a commodity, like pork bellies. The result is best illustrated by New Hampshire fisherman Dave Goethel’s plight. He has a photo showing 2000 pounds of cod that his 40-foot boat caught, after a one-hour tow on a research trip last December. If sold, the cash value at the dock would have brought him $3,000. But to lease those 2,000 pounds of cod would have cost him $4500. That’s what you call a knockout. In a multispecies fishery you need some cod quota, even if you are targeting haddock or other groundfish species and so the lease price keeps going up. That is one reason why the percentage of fishing quota actually caught in the New England groundfishery in 2013-2014 was only 33 percent of the allowable catch limit. Because of regulatory constraints fishermen are now avoiding fish that allegedly are not there.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times