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ONE ROCKFISH PER DAY: VIRGINIA LOWERS STRIPED BASS LIMITS

September 3, 2019 โ€” The Virginia Marine Resources Commission approved a set of emergency measures August 27 to help protect the struggling striped bass population in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic coast. That includes lowering the number of โ€œkeepersโ€ for recreational anglers from two to one fish per day.

The action will reduce the amount of striped bass lost to recreational fishing in Virginia by 24%, said Alex Aspinwall, a data analyst with the state commission.

Charter boat industry leaders said the change will devastate their business for striped bass, also known as rockfish. But the moveโ€™s backers said it and the other new measures are needed to keep fishery managers from having to enact the stateโ€™s first fishing moratorium on the species since 1990.

โ€œNo one wants their ox gored,โ€ said Steven Bowman, head of the commission. But โ€œthis ox is not just gored. This ox is lying on its side in need of treatment.โ€

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Magazine

MARK EUSTIS: Maryland overfishing imperils rockfish population

April 25, 2019 โ€” On Tuesday, Virginia did what Maryland should: close its 2019 spring recreational striped bass trophy season.

โ€œThe recent stock assessment shows that early action is needed to slow the decline and restore this fishery to sustainable levels,โ€ Virginia Marine Resources Commissioner Steven G. Bowman said in a statement.

Yet Maryland, one of the worst offenders when it comes to overfishing Atlantic striped bass โ€” what we like to call โ€œrockfishโ€ โ€” has chosen to go forward with a trophy season this year despite mounting evidence of the dangers.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just released a peer-reviewed report that finds striped bass are overfished and that manmade overfishing โ€” taking too many fish too fast โ€” is accelerating the decline. (When a fish population is overfished, there are fewer fish in the water than that population needs to replace itself.)

Read the full opinion piece at The Baltimore Sun

VIRGINIA: Menhaden landings pacing below disputed cap

August 8, 2018 โ€” Chesapeake Bay landings of menhaden are coming in at a pace well below a controversial cap imposed by an interstate fisheries commission, Virginia Marine Resources Commissioner Steven Bowman said.

As of the end of June, landings for the so-called reduction fishery came in at 24,000 metric tons, Bowman told the management board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) this week.

He said that meant landings this year would almost certainly come in below the 51,000-ton cap the interstate commission imposed last year โ€” a cut of more than 40 percent that the General Assembly balked at adopting.

Bowman, joined by Marylandโ€™s director of fisheries, asked the board to hold off declaring that Virginia was not in compliance with the cap because the General Assembly had not written the 51,000-ton limit into state law.

That finding, if adopted by the commission and accepted by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, could shut down the menhaden fishery, which employs about 300 people working on Omega Proteinโ€™s fishing boats and its processing plant in Reedville, on the Northern Neck. While the cap applies only to menhaden caught by the big โ€œpurse seineโ€ vessels Omega operates to catch fish to be processed for oil and fish meal, board members said a finding of noncompliance could shut down the bait fishery, in which smaller operators use a different technique to catch fish used by crabbers and in commercial fin-fisheries

Instead, Bowman and Blazer proposed that the commission find Virginia out of compliance if landings this year actually exceeded 51,000 tons.

That effort failed, but the board decided to delay until February acting on an alternative declaring Virginia out of compliance.

Omega spokesman Ben Landry said he believed the menhaden boardโ€™s decision to delay acting reflected commissionersโ€™ new-found concern, underlined by NOAAโ€™s Lynch, about the scientific basis for the cap.

โ€œWe have no intention of blowing past the 51,000,โ€ he said. โ€œBut itโ€™s an artificial number โ€ฆ our concern is flexibility; if there are storms out in the ocean, weโ€™d like to be able to come into the bay.โ€

Read the full story at the Daily Press

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