Last month, the National Marine Fisheries Service rolled out a broad new set of rules for groundfish fishermen, taking drastic steps to save New England’s depleted groundfish stocks. These regulations, however, are focused solely on one aspect of our groundfish population problem – overharvest – and blatantly ignore the importance of the smaller species that serve as food for these larger fish in the ecosystem. Abundant populations of these little fish are vital to increasing the abundance of all the fish that prey on them. Without addressing this problem, the fisheries won’t be returning to healthy levels, and the fishermen – along with their families and communities that depend on them – won’t either.
When I started hook fishing off Cape Cod, Mass., in the early 1970s, I depended on Atlantic herring as bait for the codfish I needed to catch. The business put food on my table. The herring were plentiful for the cod, and the cod were plentiful for me. But foreign industrial trawlers realized the great potential herring had as a fishery and started targeting them. Soon after, the Georges Bank herring population collapsed.
In response to the massive impact these foreign vessels were having on our fish stocks, the federal government passed the Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1976. The act created a 200-mile exclusive economic zone off the coast for U.S. vessels, essentially removing the industrialized foreign fleet from U.S. waters. It took almost two decades for the herring population to recover.
Read the complete story from The Herring Alliance.