November 4, 2016 — Starting in October, the federal government began a pilot project to test electronic monitoring on midwater herring trawlers fishing in “groundfish closed” areas off the coast of New England, two of which are in the rich spawning grounds on the continental shelf known as Georges Bank. The yearlong project will help regulators decide whether cameras can replace people as observers to regulate herring trawlers’ catch of haddock.
But before the study is finished, the New England Fishery Management Council will be working to loosen the rules on how much haddock herring trawlers can catch.
Since 2011, government observers have been required on any trips trawlers make to those areas, as part of a program to limit incidental catch, often called “bycatch,” of untargeted fish species. In the case of herring fishing, the biggest bycatch concern on Georges Bank has been haddock, a species on the rebound after the groundfish collapses of the mid-1990s.
But the monitoring program has been expensive. A recent amendment to all Northeast fisheries plans required the industry to assist in funding its overseers, increasing pressure to bring down costs.
Federal regulators believe electronic monitoring could be the answer.
“This year we’ll get really good (human) observer coverage — 440 sea days — so we’re going to compare what the observer sees and what the camera sees,” said Daniel Luers, a monitoring expert at the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries office of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “The contractors will watch all the videos, and then NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) will watch to confirm that what the contractors have seen correlates with the observers.”
What they’re looking for are “discard” events, where fishermen dump unwanted fish back into the sea — rather than reporting the bycatch and facing fishing closures.