Maine or “Northern” Shrimp (Pandalus borealis) have been targeted by fishermen in the Gulf of Maine for generations and are the small, delicious shrimp that normally make their way to our appetizer or dinner plates for the holiday season. This year though, Maine shrimp will be much harder to come by as the fishing season has been shortened due to a decline in the population according to the most recent population assessment.
Instead of heading out in the middle of December and fishing until sometime in March or even April, fishermen will be leaving the docks in the beginning of January with the hope that the season will last until the end of the month. The fishing community has had a range of reactions to the assessment, from people agreeing (at least to the point that we are working with the “best available science”), to others stressing that the numbers are simply incorrect. Much of the discussion around this issue thus far has focused on “How do we get better numbers out of the science,” and while that needs to be considered, we are shortsighted in only focusing on that aspect of the problem. Instead, we need to be asking ourselves how we got into this situation, and how can we ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Don’t get me wrong–science is one side of the two-headed coin of fisheries management–but the other side is the policies that govern the fishery, which have not been able to control overfishing and have put the shrimp industry in jeopardy this year. Included is a graph of the size of the Northern shrimp population over the past 25+ years. It is pretty clear that this is a boom-to-bust fishery meaning that there have been a series of robust periods, followed by a sharp crash in the stock. Landings (the black line in the graph which represents fish brought to market) tend to follow the population trends because when the stock is good, more people get into the industry and effort is too high, and then the stock collapses. We see this trend often in many natural population structures, but the goal of the fishery is to maintain a population to support an industry.
The most recent collapse was in the late 1990s, and for several years after, very few people were willing to go shrimp fishing. This was, in part, because it was more difficult to find shrimp, but more importantly, the price of shrimp was so low that people didn’t think it was worth the effort to switch their boats over to a different gear. While classic supply-and-demand logic suggests that when there are less shrimp, they should be worth more, that doesn’t always work in fisheries because of the way the distribution chain functions. Historically, when the shrimp stock collapses, so does market demand because processing companies don’t want to bother switching their facilities to deal with the small amount of shrimp that would be landed. This lack of demand from processors further reduces fishermen’s incentive to catch shrimp. The reduction in fishing effort that occurred after the late ‘90s collapse allowed the Northern shrimp population to return to robust levels. The market returned, and prices increased.
Read the complete editorial from Talking Fish