September 12, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — Federal fishing regulators are planning to cut back the fishing quota for golden tilefish for the next three years.
Trump administration nears decision that sets stage for offshore drilling in the Atlantic
September 11, 2017 — Environmental groups are bracing for the Trump administration to approve controversial testing along the Eastern seaboard that would mark a significant step toward offshore drilling in waters off the coast of Florida all the way north to the Delaware Bay.
Five geophysical survey companies are seeking federal permission to shoot pressurized air blasts into the ocean every 10 to 12 seconds around the clock for weeks and months at a time, seeking fossil fuel deposits beneath the Atlantic Ocean floor.
The testing, which would cover 330,000 square miles of ocean, faces fierce opposition from environmental groups and local officials due to the possible economic and environmental effects.
Because the underwater blasts are louder than a Saturn V rocket launch and can be heard by monitoring devices more than 2,500 miles away, scientists fear long-term exposure to the noise could cause hearing loss and impair breeding, feeding, foraging and communication activity among dolphins, endangered whales, other marine mammals and sea turtles.
Some worry the blasts could cause mother whales and their calves to become separated. Commercial and recreational fisheries could also be affected if fish change their breeding and spawning habits to avoid the noise. Others fear disoriented marine life could collide with the vessels that tug the air guns or become entangled in their lines. Oceana, an international conservation group, estimates that 138,000 marine mammals could be injured in the testing process.
Seventy-five marine scientists asked the Obama administration in 2015 to reject seismic air gun testing in the Atlantic because of these threats. Twenty-eight marine biologists did the same in 2016 over concerns that testing would harm the estimated 500 endangered North Atlantic right whales.
“That’s the species we are most concerned about,” said Doug Nowacek, associate professor of conservation technology at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina. “They are in decline. They live coastally along the U.S. They were hunted (by whalers) and they were slowly recovering. And now they’re starting to decline again.”
Read the full story from the McClatchy Company at the Miami Herald
Shrimp plan changes advance
September 11, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Meeting in Portland at the end of August, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section selected several final measures for inclusion in the latest revision to the Fishery Management Plan for northern shrimp.
Known as “Amendment 3,” the latest version of the plan will bring about a number of significant changes to the way the fishery is managed — if indeed the northern shrimp fishery is ever resuscitated. Because fisheries scientists believed that the northern shrimp population had collapsed, commercial shrimp fishing on the Gulf of Maine has been banned since 2014 with only an extremely limited harvest for scientific data collection purposes permitted.
Before the amendment becomes effective, it will have to be approved by the ASMFC. In its recent action, the shrimp section also recommended that the commission approve the amendment at its next meeting, tentatively scheduled to be held in Norfolk, Va., next month.
The newly recommended provisions would make several changes in both the philosophy and the practical measures affecting the management of the shrimp fishery.
The plan’s stated objectives will now call for managing the resource to support a viable fishery and will give individual states more control over the way the fishery is managed.
Something fishy in the quotas?
September 8, 2017 — There hasn’t been a large enough quota for fishermen to intentionally catch cod for four years, said Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, which contends the federal limits on groundfish such as cod and flounder contradict what commercial fishermen are finding. The coalition has launched an effort to have input into the research done by the federal government as it sets the regulations.
“We’ve been seeing it for the past two decades, but more so in the past seven or eight years, especially on the [flounder and cod],” Giacalone said. “What we’ve seen in the last seven or eight years is that you can catch any fish you want at any time. That’s how available it is. So, we’re certain that the government estimates are wrong.”
Giacalone noted that scientists have a huge area to cover, and variables such as fish behavior — sometimes swimming near the top, sometimes the bottom, or abandoning certain geographic areas that are still included in the surveys — can influence the results.
The management plans are written by the New England Fishery Management Council in Newburyport, with input from several sources, including stock assessments from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole. The assessments include surveys and catch and discard numbers from the commercial fishing industry, said Teri Frady, spokeswoman for the center.
The Northeast Seafood Coalition wants to play a bigger role by providing more information from the field. To do so, it is fund-raising to hire independent scientists to develop a method of collecting information that could be shared with government officials to develop more accurate assessments of species numbers.
“What [the regulators] should be doing is using the industry’s data to come up with a relative abundance index,” Giacalone said. “We realize it’s difficult because it has to be standardized, [and] it has to be unbiased. But until they admit that they could be getting it wrong, by a lot, they’re never going to put that work in. What the coalition is trying to do is shine a light on that.”
Frady said the NOAA center in Woods Hole is interested in any input.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe
New Rules for New England Shrimp Fishery — if It Reopens
September 7, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — With the prospect of New England’s shuttered shrimp fishery reopening this winter, new rules are being designed to perpetuate the crustacean’s numbers and prevent another shutdown.
Maine fishermen once caught millions of pounds of the shrimp every year, with fishermen also bringing some ashore in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But as the Gulf of Maine waters warmed, the catch plummeted from more than 13 million pounds in 2010 to less than 700,000 in 2013. The fishery shut down that year.
A decision on whether to allow the fishery to reopen could come in November.
With that in mind, an arm of the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is developing new rules for the fishery to put it in a better position to sustain itself if it does reopen, said Max Appelman, a fishery management plan coordinator for the Atlantic States.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News and World Report
Federal officials take first steps to protect chub mackerel, other forage species in the Mid-Atlantic
September 6, 2017 — For the first time, the National Marine Fisheries Service has taken action to protect forage species in the Atlantic Ocean.
The new regulation, initially approved last year by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, covers such species as anchovies, herrings, mackerel, and sardines up to 200 miles off the coastline from New England to central North Carolina. The Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, chose to protect the fish because of the important role they play in the ecosystem.
The fish, along with some crustaceans and mollusks, are considered prey for larger fish sought by commercial and recreational fishermen as well as marine mammals and birds.
2017 Northeast Groundfish Operational Assessment Meeting Materials Available
September 1, 2017 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center is carrying out routine, regularly scheduled stock assessments for New England groundfish. The peer review will be September 11-15, and the NEFSC is sending the draft assessment reports and supporting information to the peer reviewers and making the information available to the public this Friday, September 1. At this stage the results are preliminary until they are vetted by the peer review panel.
You may now access the 2017 draft groundfish operational assessments and a range of additional materials through our data portal link here:
https://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/groundfish/operational-assessments-2017.
For each species stock, we will also include models, model inputs, maps, figures, tables, and other background materials that will be used by peer reviewers. We hope this will help you prepare for the assessment meeting if you plan to attend and to better understand the draft assessment results, recognizing that the results are not final until confirmed by the peer review panel. Please let us know your thoughts on how we can continue to improve access to information for future assessment meetings.
The 2017 peer review of 19 Northeast groundfish operational stock assessments will occur September 11-15 in Woods Hole, MA. The meeting will also be available by webinar and teleconference.
Questions? Contact Teri Frady at 508-495-2239 or teri.frady@noaa.gov.
NOAA Fisheries Removes the Northern and Southern Windowpane Flounder AMs for all Trawl Vessels
August 31, 2017 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Effective tomorrow, September 1, 2017, until February 28, 2018, non-groundfish trawl vessels fishing with a codend mesh size of 5 inches or greater are no longer required to use approved selective trawl gear (haddock separator trawl, rope separator trawl, or Ruhle trawl) in the large southern windowpane flounder Accountability Measure (AM) areas. For more information, read the permit holder bulletin and the emergency rule as filed in the Federal Register.
Through a previous action, groundfish vessels may also fish in the AM areas without selective gear, effective September 1 2017 through April 30, 2018. While we were able to remove the accountability measures for the groundfish vessels through existing regulatory processes, an emergency rule was required to remove the accountability measures for non-groundfish trawl vessels. This emergency rule is intended to minimize economic harm to the fluke and scup fisheries.
Fishermen Express Concerns About Upcoming Stock Assessments And Fishing Limits
August 30, 2017 — Fishermen who attended a meeting Monday in Point Judith about upcoming groundfish stock assessments are unhappy with the data collection process for those assessments.
Federal regulators use data collected by fishermen and scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries to assess the health of fish species and set limits on how many fish can be taken from the sea. Those limits are intended to protect against overfishing.
The Northeast Fisheries Science Center, the research arm of NOAA Fisheries in the region, talked with commercial and recreational fishermen as a part of a series of port outreach meetings to hear fishermen’s concerns and to figure out how the science center could work to address them.
Patrick Duckworth, a commercial fisherman who attended the meeting, said regulators are using bad scientific methods to collect data and set fishing limits.
Read and listen to the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio
Overhaul being weighed in Atlantic coast menhaden management
Commission seeks comments on catch limits and distribution of catch among fisheries
August 29, 2017 — A major overhaul could be coming in how menhaden are managed along the East Coast — one that might, for the first time, try to account for the ecological role of the small and oily fish.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which oversees migratory fish along the coast, is preparing to update its menhaden management plan this fall. It’s looking to revisit how the catch is distributed among states and fisheries and may adjust the catch limit for the Chesapeake.
Public hearings on potential changes are scheduled for September, with written comments accepted through Oct. 20.
People generally don’t eat menhaden, yet the fish has been the focus of heated debates in recent years over how many should be caught. By weight, menhaden are the largest catch in the Bay, primarily because Reedville, VA — home port of Omega Protein’s “reduction” fishing fleet — is where the fish are reduced or processed into vitamin supplements, fish meal and other products.
The Omega fleet’s menhaden harvest accounts for about 75 percent of the coastwide catch, with the rest taken by small, but growing, operations that sell the fish as bait for recreational and commercial use.
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