April 25, 2015 — It could have been worse.
That was the consensus among Cape Cod participants in the New England Fishery Management Council’s hotly debated meeting this week in Mystic, Connecticut, where the discussion centered on what areas to protect as fish habitat, one of the most fundamental elements in bringing stocks like cod and flounder back from historically low levels.
Using a new computer model and lots of new data that identified and mapped critical habitat in the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, and the Great South Channel, the council was supposed to evaluate and update the validity of closures that have lasted as much as 20 years and enact new closures to protect newly identified critical habitat and spawning grounds.
From the outset the process threatened to morph into a turf war over opening access to thousands of square miles of ocean that have seen little or no fishing in decades. The scallop fleet, for instance, campaigned to be allowed into the northern portion of Georges Bank because new data showed that some of the closed area was not critical to fish stocks but contained large amounts of scallops.
Read the full story from the Cape Cod Times