This blog was originally published on TalkingFish.org.

It’s been widely reported that at its February meeting, the New England Fishery Management Council voted to ask the National Marine Fisheries Service to take emergency action on Gulf of Maine cod for the 2012 fishing year. The measures proposed, including a mere 3-13% reduction in the catch limit, were notable largely for their failure to address the condition of the depleted cod stock. But there is an aspect of the proposed package that has received little attention, which is troubling, because it would have NMFS open up five of the six existing areas currently closed to groundfishing. The areas at issue serve a myriad of functions for managed commercial species including protection of their habitat and spawning areas and providing a buffer against excessive fishing effort on certain species. Several of these areas have been in place for over fifteen years and have taken on important and positive functions and values that are currently being studied but are not yet entirely understood.

A map of the Gulf of Maine showing the groundfish closed areas (Photo credit: NOAA).

That’s one of the many reasons why the Council’s action is so incomprehensible. It came one day after the Council announced that it was only one year away from completing an eight-year process of collecting data and developing a highly scientific model by which it believes it can identify the best and most vulnerable habitat to protect. So, just when a lengthy scientific process is about to render answers as to what areas should be open and which closed, the Council urged action to open areas and did so without any scientific support. What’s more, many of these closures were imposed in order to comply with a court order to protect habitat from fishing gear, and several of these areas were chosen precisely because they are habitat for Gulf of Maine cod. Giving fishermen access to these areas will increase the likelihood that catch limits on cod will be exceeded and that catch will be discarded, increasing the mortality of this stock and undermining the very purpose of the emergency measure.

There is also the question of the legalities of opening these areas with this action. Many of the areas that the Council has put on the chopping block were originally designated in order to comply with a requirement of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that essential fish habitat must be protected from fishing to the extent practicable. Any elimination of these closed areas risks undoing the Council’s means of complying with this requirement of federal fisheries law. The Service’s action will also be limited by the need to analyze the environmental impacts of reopening closures in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. Just such an analysis is currently ongoing with the Council’s groundfish technical team. This analysis can, and with the Service’s help would, be completed in time for the 2013 fishing year, but is not ready as part of this emergency action.

The Service should take this opportunity to invest resources in the essential fish habitat process and the analysis of the groundfish closed areas already underway in order to ensure that it will be completed in time for what will inevitably be an even more restrictive 2013 fishing year. If the Service instead chooses to randomly reopen closed areas through the Council’s requested emergency action, it risks leaving Gulf of Maine cod and other fish stocks more vulnerable to overfishing than before, a blow to the fishery and exactly the opposite of the emergency action’s intended effect.

Senator Scott Brown (Photo credit: Bibliographical Directory of the U.S. Congress)

In late October, Senator Scott Brown called for the resignation of NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco. CLF’s Peter Shelley wrote the following Letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe in response to Senator Brown’s statement:

Call to oust chief of NOAA is bad for a fishing industry in flux

SENATOR SCOTT Brown’s call for the resignation of the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is misdirected and destructive to a changing fishing industry that needs predictability, not political theater (‘‘Citing ‘indifference,’ Brown says NOAA chief should be fired,’’ Metro, Oct. 23).

Brown seems to think that the catch-share program was forced on Massachusetts fishermen by NOAA and Jane Lubchenco. In fact, the approach of having sectors of boat owners manage their fish quotas was developed and approved by the New England Fishery Management Council with unanimous support from the council’s Massachusetts fishing industry members and Governor Patrick’s representative. NOAA adopted the council’s plan without change. Eighteen months in, with some promising results and no quantitative evidence of an economic emergency, the council continues to support the catch-share program.

Brown’s call for Lubchenco’s head may curry favor with some frustrated Massachusetts groundfishermen, but it won’t solve their problems. What they do need is economic stability and confidence that their concerns will be addressed in full by the New England council. Its efforts to build on the program’s successes and mitigate its negative impacts are already underway with the full support of NOAA and Lubchenco.

If Brown is really concerned about the fate of Massachusetts’ fishing industry, he’d be better off seeking to end the congressional stalemate that is prolonging the national economic crisis than creating a bogus enemy in Lubchenco.

Peter Shelley

Senior counsel Conservation Law Foundation Boston

The Science and Statistical Committee (SSC) of the New England Fisheries Management Council met yesterday and today in Boston to review the report developed by the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute (MFI) in support of Governor Patrick’s request to the U.S. Department of Commerce for emergency relief for Massachusetts fishermen. The MFI report concluded that recent fishery management actions had produced losses on the order of $21 million dollars for Massachusetts fishermen and that catch limits could be raised without compromising the health of the fish populations or the conservation objectives of the management plan.

The SSC is a distinguished, international panel of scientists, some of whom have been assessing fish populations in New England for decades. Specifically, the SSC was asked to review several positions taken by the MFI report:

1.      Whether the methodologies used to calculate the biological reference points and the catch limits represented the best available science;

2.      Whether the methodology chosen to set catch limits resulted in an overly conservative approach because of “double counting” of scientific uncertainty;

3.      Whether there were other aspects of the fish modeling, such as the presence of so-called “retrospective patterns” in the models,  that resulted in overly cautious adjustments of the catch recommendations;

4.      Whether there were any recommendations for additional information that could be used in the future to improve the assessment process.

The SSC did not agree with any of the science-related assertions in the MFI report. In their discussion, they noted a number of places where the conclusions were based on faulty premises or ignored widely recognized issues that the scientists who had developed the original catch limit recommendations had addressed when they set the limits.

They concluded that the stock assessment and catch specification process was fully consistent with best scientific practices, that there was no “double counting” of uncertainty or risk, and that the annual catch limits could not be increased without increasing, in some cases significantly, the risk of meeting the conservation objectives of the New England Council and the federal statute that controls harvest, the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

In their brief economic review, the SSC rejected the analysis and conclusions from the MFI report. Aside from noting that it was questionable to draw economic or social conclusions from a new management plan that had only been in effect for six months, the SSC noted that the report misrepresented $21 million of theoretical losses as actual losses and did not account for the revenues from the numerous other species that groundfishermen pursue in addition to the groundfish species. A number of SSC members also indicated that comparisons to the 2009 fishing year were not proper since the scientists had all concluded that the 2009 catch limits were set significantly too high for many species. The SSC agreed by and large that the economics of the new fishery plan looked positive for the first year, and provided no evidence of an economic crisis.

The SSC did acknowledge that there was always room for improvement in fish stock assessments and that additional research on both the assessment methodologies and a range of social and economic effects should be considered in the future.

The MFI report has now been rejected as a basis for emergency action or even immediate reconsideration of existing harvest levels by the Department of Commerce, a national scientific meeting of fisheries experts, and by the New England SSC.  It is time to move on and focus on continuing to improve the management system in New England so that we can restore healthy fish populations that support thriving and diverse regional fishing communities as quickly as practicable.

The following op-ed was written by CLF Maine Director Sean Mahoney and published on Saturday, December 18 in the Portsmouth Herald.

On Monday, Dec. 20, a committee of the New England Fishery Management Council will meet in Portsmouth to continue the effort to develop a new management plan for Atlantic herring.

Atlantic herring are not only valuable as bait for lobstermen, but are a key forage fish for bigger fish and marine mammals such as striped bass, cod, tuna, dolphins and whales. The work of the council’s Herring Committee is critically important not just for the sustainability of Atlantic herring but for the continued viability of these other fisheries and tourism-related industries such as whale watching.

The Atlantic herring fishery is currently dominated by midwater trawling vessels. These vessels are large (up to 150 feet) and often fish in pairs, where their small-mesh nets the size of a football field, can be stretched between two boats. These small-mesh nets are efficient killing machines. The problem is they are also indiscriminate killing machines — any fish or marine mammal that is ensnared by the small-mesh nets is unlikely to survive, even if they are thrown back into the water after the nets are hauled on deck. These dead fish — referred to as bycatch or discards — include not just the fish that prey on Atlantic herring, such as stripers or haddock, but also the Atlantic herring’s cousins — alewives and blueback herring.

Alewives and blueback herring (collectively referred to as river herring) are anadramous fish — they are born in freshwater, spend most of their lives in the ocean, and then return to freshwater to spawn. The rivers of New England were teeming with river herring up to the 1980s. But in the last 20 years, their numbers have dropped precipitously. For example, until 1986 the number of river herring returning to spawn in the Taylor River averaged between 100,000 to 400,000 a year. But by 2000, that number had declined to 10,000 to 40,000 a year, and in 2006, only 147 river herring returned to the Taylor River. This is a tragedy for New Hampshire’s wildlife conservation.

The causes of the dramatic decline in the numbers of river herring include the fishing practices of the midwater trawl vessels. While at sea, river herring can often be found in the same waters as Atlantic herring and fall victim to the indiscriminate fishing practices of the midwater trawlers. In 2007, bycatch documentation showed that three times the amount of river herring was taken in one tow of one of these industrial vessels as returned that year to the Lamprey River, which boasts New Hampshire’s largest remaining population of river herring.

The meeting of the council’s Herring Committee will focus on management steps to curb this wasteful practice. Central to the success of any management effort must be a robust monitoring program, catch caps on river herring to serve as a strong incentive to avoid areas where river herring are known to aggregate and strong accountability measures to be applied when those catch caps are exceeded.

If river herring are to avoid the fate of Atlantic salmon — another anadramous species all but extirpated from New England’s rivers where they once teemed — a critical step is putting an end to the indiscriminate fishing practices of the midwater trawl boats pursuing Atlantic herring. All other efforts to improve the access to and water quality of the waters river herring spawn in are of little value if they are killed before they get there.

> Read more about CLF’s regional ocean conservation work