October 3, 2018 — Nothing significant has changed for the Gulf of Maine’s imperiled northern shrimp stock in the past five years, as the fishery continues to be haunted by historically low abundance and biomass numbers that just refuse to improve.
The fishery’s recent past may indeed be prologue, as fishery managers from the shrimp section of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission get ready to meet Thursday to review and make recommendations on the most recent benchmark assessment of the stock, as well as a peer-review report on the assessment.
The meeting, set for Portland, Maine, is one of the final steps before the ASMFC decides in November whether to reopen the fishery for the 2019 season.
The early returns point to another closure.
Megan Ware, an ASMFC fishery management plans coordinator, said the 2018 stock assessment offers the same dismal assessment of the northern shrimp stock as every assessment since the 2013 assessment that instigated the past five closures.
“The trends are similar,” Ware told the Gloucester Daily Times last month. “We’re still seeing the low trends that we’ve seen in the past five years.”