Brown and Ayotte, both Republicans in the U.S. Senate, have introduced a bill that could do away with the catch shares program, which went into effect on May 1, 2010. The catch shares program was put into place as a means of granting fishermen more control over when they can fish without doing away with limits aimed at protecting fish populations.

Before catch shares were adopted, Libby said, fishermen were limited to 14 days at sea and often raced against each other to catch as much of a certain species that they could before the fishing fleet reached the overall catch limit on that species. Fishermen also had limits on how much they could bring ashore from each trip, he said, and so often threw excess fish overboard at sea, though most of it was dead, in order not to exceed their catch limit.

With catch shares, however, individual fishermen are allocated a certain amount before they leave the harbor, Libby said. If they also are part of a larger sector, in which fishermen pool their shares together, they can trade shares back and forth among each other as long as they stay with the overall catch limits allocated to that sector.

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