April 24, 2014 — The following was released by the Center For Sustainable Fisheries:
The status of groundfish stocks in New England is shrouded in considerable uncertainty. This uncertainty often raises the question as to whether stocks that are claimed to be overfished are actually overfished or vice versa. Uncertainty in this determination reflects in turn whether management regulations intended to correct these characterizations are effective. Furthermore, whether the declines in stock relate to fishing and are therefore reversible, or whether they owe to the environment and would not be responsive to changes in fishing intensity is not known. There is no doubt that a resolution of these uncertainties could yield benefits worth of the order of 100 million dollars.
It is our view that this costly uncertainty owes to an insufficiency in basic data on the abundance of stock and their life history.
It is our belief that, experimental, cooperative, adaptive fishing programs will materially contribute to the data and information pool thereby considerably reducing the uncertainties associated with current management advice.
This assertion is supported by past work on scallops and more recent studies of the gbytf. For the gbytf stock, biomass estimates obtained through mathematical virtual population analysis amounted to only 800 MT. Yet direct estimates of abundance, actually counting fish, using area swept measurements yielded estimates that had a lower bound of 4000MT. In other words, the direct measurements provided estimates of that were at least five times greater than the mathematical estimates.
Recognizing GBYTF as a opportunity for the Secretary of Commerce to demonstrate the usefulness of experimental fishing programs, and that 1) the yellowtail VPA assessment did not represent the dynamics of the stock, and 2) increased harvesting of the underfished gbytf could not only provide information, but income to an economically challenged industry, we proposed to the Secretary on January 13, an experimental fishery to achieve these goals.
We received a reply to our January 13 letter on March 26 from Assistant Administrator Sobeck denying our request.
We felt that additional information would have helped the Administrator.