November 14, 2013 — The following was released by the The Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission (GSMFC):
The Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission (GSMFC) has completed an assessment of the Gulf menhaden population in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The assessment was accomplished through the SouthEast Data, Assessment, and Review Program (SEDAR) as SEDAR32A. The final stock assessment report is available on the SEDAR website.
The SEDAR report is the culmination of a three-year effort to gather and analyze available data for Gulf menhaden from the commercial purse-seine fishery and the fishery-independent sampling programs of the Gulf States. The Gulf’s five marine resource agencies provided experts through the GSMFC’s Menhaden Advisory Committee (MAC), which served as the technical committee throughout the assessment process.
A Review Workshop was held in August 2013 to present the assessment to six independent reviewers: three from the Center for Independent Experts (CIE), two from the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and one representing the GSMFC. The reviewers approved the SEDAR report, but were unable to comment on the biological reference points and the stock status because the GSMFC’s MAC had not defined management goals or objectives and had not adopted formal reference points for management. However, given a suite of reference point options provided in the SEDAR report, the reviewers agreed that, given commonly applied benchmarks in the region, it was unlikely that the Gulf menhaden stock is experiencing overfishing or that overfishing is occurring.
Since the completion and approval of the SEDAR32A Gulf Menhaden Stock Assessment, the MAC and the GSMFC have approved the adoption of reference points for inclusion as recommendations in the draft Fishery Management Plan, which should be available for public comment in 2014. The approved overfishing rates are expressed as F%SPR values. The overfishing threshold and target and the harvest rates associated with the equilibrium yield at those rates are a threshold of F30% [= 680,765 metric tons (mt)] and target of F35% (= 663,583 mt). Included was the approval of benchmark assessments every five years. Additionally, a request for an immediate update assessment would be triggered by two fishing years exceeding the target or by one year exceeding the threshold. The overfished status is defined in terms of equilibrium spawning stock biomass (SSB) based on fecundity. The SSB values associated with the accepted target and threshold are SSB30% and SSB35% and were adopted for inclusion in the draft management plan. Based upon these recommended benchmarks, the Gulf menhaden fishery is not overfished and not undergoing overfishing and has not experienced overfishing since the early 1990s.
View a PDF version of the press release here