September 7, 2018 — Fishery managers will move closer to deciding the fate of the Gulf of Maine’s northern shrimp fishery when they meet in October to review the latest assessment of the imperiled stock.
The review is one of the final steps leading to a decision whether to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing for the 2019 season for the first time in six seasons.
It does not look good.
The popular winter fishery has been shuttered since the beginning of the 2014 season to all but research-related shrimping because of historically low abundance and biomass numbers that reflect a stock in free fall.
The 2017 benchmark assessment — which led regulators to close the fishery for the 2018 season — showed no signs of improvement from previous years and regulators seem to expect the same outcome from the 2018 stock assessment.
“The trends are similar,” Megan Ware, a fishery management plan coordinator with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates the fishery, said Thursday. “We’re still seeing the low trends that we’ve seen in the past five years.”
The 2017 stock status report made for sobering reading.