November 13, 2014 — Emergency restrictions aimed at protecting plummeting cod stocks, set to go into effect Thursday in the Gulf of Maine, have some fishermen complaining that one group that routinely kills cod won’t be affected by the new rules – the region’s lobstermen.
In 2008, the year for which the most recent data are available, an estimated 177,000 codfish were captured in lobster traps in state waters off Maine.
Fishing boats with gill nets and trawl gear are banned from coastal waters where cod stocks gather and spawn, but lobster boats face none of those restrictions. Moreover, none of the data about cod mortality in the lobster fishery is included in population projections used to set fishing regulations for cod.
Allyson Jordan, a Portland fisherman who operates two groundfishing boats, said regulators will have a hard time rebuilding cod stocks if they only impose restrictions on New England’s struggling groundfish fleet and ignore the much larger lobster fishery.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “If everybody else is allowed into the closed areas, you will not be effective in protecting the spawning grounds.”
The cod stock in the Gulf of Maine is now at 3 percent to 4 percent of the level deemed sustainable, according to scientists. With the population so low, there is a new focus among federal biologists to understand all the environmental factors that could be affecting cod stocks. That includes the 3 million lobster traps in Maine waters, plus the traps off the coasts of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, said Paul Rago, chief of the population dynamics branch for the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald