October 18, 2013 — There is, it seems, more bad news coming out of the ocean than fish.
In yet another blow to local commercial fishermen who work the Gulf of Maine winter shrimp season, it appears the 2013-14 shrimping season may be even more dismal than last year’s abbreviated and paltry campaign.
Marin Hawk of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the multistate body that manages near-shore species such as shrimp, said that the data collected to date indicates the current shrimp stock could be the lowest since the organization started keeping records in 1984.
“The update isn’t quite completed, but the indices this year are the lowest on record and there was another recruitment failure,” Hawk said, referring to the term that attempts to quantify how many of a particular species make their way into a specific fishery.
“It’s not looking good, in short,” she said. “We’re just not seeing as many [shrimp] as we used to and they’re not where they used to be.”
Read the full story at The Salem News