August 29 – Fisheries Scientists across the Yellow Line? – In discussions about how to set catch limits for yellowtail flounder, some scientists may have crossed the line separating pure science from policy making.

August 31 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, August 31 – In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, a draft disaster relief package for the Northeast groundfishery; the mayor of New Bedford asks NEFMC not to reduce the catch limit for yellowtail flounder; dogfish receives MSC certification; NMFS adopts a new scallop stock assessment technique; warmer waters may be changing the distribution of New England fish stocks; the Ocean Health Index gives US oceans a low score for food production; and Coast Guard safety inspections for fishing vessels become mandatory this fall.

August 31 – A Proposal for NOAA – Why does this current crisis seem so familiar? As the populations of New England’s cod, haddock and flounder have continued to decline, it’s not surprising that the number of fishing boats chasing them have declined.

August 24 – Court Order Sets Clock Ticking for Action on River Herring – In a few weeks the New England Fishery Management Council will get a letter, probably a long one, explaining why the coming year will bring big changes to the way the council handles severely depleted river herring and shad.

August 24 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, August 24 – In this week’s Fish Talk in the News: NOAA asks Congress to keep NERO in Gloucester; the Boston Globe supports John Bullard; New England fishing is the deadliest profession in the country; the South Shore Seafood Exchange grows; rising seal numbers cause concern; a gold rush for New England conch; river herring return to Upper Mystic Lake; and a cooking competition raises awareness of local, sustainable seafood.

June 20 – Conservationists and fishermen agree to agree – By Peter Baker. (Peter Baker directs the Northeast Fisheries Program for the Pew Environment Group.) News stories in New England about fishing often pit conservationists and fishermen against each other over how many fish should be caught, or play up every instance in which a private citizen bemoans government intervention. But today there is a much more compelling story, on which fishermen and conservationists agree.

June 22 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 22 – This week’s stories include: new regulations for the industrial Atlantic herring fleet to protect river herring and shad, Native American tribal support for the opening of the St. Croix River to alewives, a bill to fight illegal fishing, a study to map the seafloor of Long Island Sound, an objective look at New England fisheries and fishing communities, and an article about how London is working to achieve their commitment to serve only sustainable seafood at the 2012 Olympic Games.

This piece was originally published on TalkingFish.org.

Federal fishery managers rolled the dice on the New England cod fishery on Monday, once again. It is hard to escape the premonition that they fell well short of their responsibility. We think catch levels were set too high, too little was done to reduce the growing cod catches of recreational fishermen, and nothing was done to balance fishermen’s economic and social pain by directing the small allocation of Gulf of Maine cod toward coastal fishing boats.

The decision of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to accept the New England Fishery Management Council’s quota recommendation had little to do with precautionary principles and much to do with politics.

Atlantic cod (photo credit: NOAA).

The 2011 Gulf of Maine cod assessment, which has a broad consensus in the science community, concluded that the fishing levels for the last three years had been set perhaps five times as high as they should have been. A large percentage, sometimes bordering on almost 90% of the spawning cod, has been caught each year in recent times. With few adults older than ten years old in a population that should include significant numbers of highly-reproductive twenty-something-year old fish, the spawning populations are buoyed by little more than the individual year-classes of new maturing fish, year-by-year. The risks of a Gulf of Maine cod train wreck may well be much higher than this decision assumes.

The one thing that is known with certainty about past cod assessments is that they have consistently overestimated the spawning biomass and underestimated the amount of human and natural mortality that is happening in the real world. The scientists are not counting all the fish that are actually being killed each year. In the fisheries modeling world, this sort of systematic model error is called a retrospective pattern. The new assessment, just like prior assessments, is still based on a model exhibiting a retrospective pattern.

What this means in simple language is that while the managers think their new catch levels pose a 30% risk of bringing spawning fish populations down to new historic lows, the real risk is almost guaranteed to be higher – and only time will tell how much higher.  The scientists’ best estimate is that Gulf of Maine cod spawning stock biomass (the amount of the stock that is capable of reproducing) is roughly 11,868 metric tons (mt). By setting new 2012 catch limits at 6,700mt, NMFS and the Council expect that 56% of this spawning population will be caught in the fishing year. But this 11,868mt estimate is just one in a range of estimates; the actual spawning stock biomass could be lower or higher. In fact, the approved 6,700mt catch level could remove anywhere from 41% and 71% of the entire spawning population with equal confidence. Killing two-thirds of the spawners in a population that is already decimated is not rational.

And it is critical to remember that these are just best scientific estimates. The unforeseen cod collapse in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s that has lasted many decades now produced one irrefutable fact: even the smartest people in the room can’t fully understand or predict, let alone control, the biology of a situation. We should be mindful of that if we are to avoid our own cod collapse.

On the brighter side of the NMFS interim cod action, the managers didn’t open up any of the areas that are currently closed to fishing in order to protect important fish habitat and help species rebuild. That would have done little to help Gulf of Maine cod fishermen and much to undermine other rebuilding stocks that likely benefit from these closed areas. Significantly more analysis is needed before that action should be considered.

We are also encouraged to see that additional cod assessments and analysis will be done later this year. There may also be new assessment tools—specifically, the new low frequency sonar technologies developed by MIT and Northeastern—that might finally allow scientists to “see” the fish under the water and get a better real-time estimate of what the total populations of cod might be. All this work is of the highest priority. It would be a great relief if the latest assessment turned out to be overly pessimistic.

The power of denial and the risk of significant bias in these efforts, however, cannot be overstated.  The new analysis must be done right. With so much political pressure, so many fishermen in serious economic straits already, and so many scientists heading into the effort hopeful that a new look at the cod populations might produce a better result, the tendency to skew the inquiry will be practically unavoidable. With the long-term health of Atlantic cod in New England in the balance, however, the integrity of the scientific process must be protected.

There is no way to completely reduce the risks in a fishery, no perfect fishery. Nonetheless, we had started to hope that the New England managers were getting more risk-averse and more focused on realizing the important goal of managing this pivotal fishery out of its persistent crisis state. We hoped that they were becoming more mindful of the bad distributional effects of some of their management rules on the smaller coastal day boats. This latest cod decision negates optimism. It treated that long-term better and fairer future like some game of chance with such long odds that it wasn’t even worth playing.

The Gulf of Maine (Northern) shrimp season ends today (Photo credit: Aldric D'Eon, courtsey of the NEFSC).

• February 13: “A behind the scenes peek at the Gulf of Maine cod stock assessments” - What really happened to Gulf of Maine cod? Heather Goldstone of Climatide investigated last week by talking to Liz Brooks and Mike Palmer, two of the scientists at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center who were involved in producing the 2011 Gulf of Maine cod stock assessment.

• February 14: “To help GOM cod, NMFS should not touch closed areas” - 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.

• February 17: “Fish Talk in the News” - A weekly roundup of stories we think will interest readers. This week: news and opinion on Gulf of Maine cod regulations and fisheries science, the end of this year’s Gulf of Maine shrimp season.

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