August 3, 2015 — WASHINGTON — New federal bycatch rules are not enough to keep Northeast Fisheries from circling the drain, environmental protection group Oceana claims in Federal Court.
Oceana filed a lawsuit against the government last week for its “continued failure to create a method for monitoring the amount of wasted catch in New England and Mid-Atlantic fisheries, a region spanning from North Carolina to the Canadian border,” according to an Oceana statement.
The group sued United States Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“Bycatch” is the term for the collection of ocean species other than the ones for which commercial fishery crews are fishing. Often, these fish and animals are discarded, either dead or dying, into the ocean, or when the boat reaches shore.
In its statement announcing the lawsuit, Oceana writes, “New England, in particular, has been plagued for decades by lax monitoring and overfishing. The failure to monitor catch and enforce catch limits is in part responsible for the collapse of the New England groundfish fishery, including historically important Atlantic cod populations in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, which are currently at 3 and 7 percent of their former population levels.