NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — August 29, 2012 — The decision by the National Marine Fisheries Service to use new technology to assess the abundance of scallop stocks means the end for the annual survey that SMAST has been conducting in cooperation with the fishing industry for the past 10 years.
The decision has been met with resistance in New Bedford. "It's very disheartening," said SMAST's Kevin Stokesbury, a professor at the school's Department of Fisheries Oceanography who developed the SMAST survey. "Our survey estimates are accurate and precise and have been completely accepted by the fisheries service," he said, The data has been published in 25 scientific papers, according to Stokesbury.
"I don't think the new method has been subjected to the same amount of statistical review," he said.
The new apparatus, developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is known as the Habcam and features a high-definition camera mounted on a sled towed above the sea floor. Its adoption by NMFS means that SMAST will no longer receive any of the moneys set aside by the scallop industry to fund research. Last year 1.25 million pounds of scallops, valued at roughly $10 million, were sold to fund the set aside program. The bulk of that money is now being funneled to HabCam.
"Cutting SMAST out is a problem," Rep. William Straus, D-Mattapoisett said. "SMAST is one of the few outside parties doing review that will keep the feds honest, so to speak," he said.
In an April letter from Straus to the New England Fishery Management Council, he called the decision to consider the use equipment with no performance record "to border on recklessness, if not irresponsibility."
Now NOAA needs top to bottom oversight of the way in which their research is conducted, Straus said on Wednesday.
Scallop boat owner Harriet Didricksen, who also owns New Bedford Ship Supply, said she vehemently opposed the decision.
"We were starving in '97 and without SMAST, Brian Rothschild and Barney Frank we wouldn't have an industry today," she said. "Brian hired Kevin Stokesbury and they found a way to count the scallops."
SMAST's pyramid-shaped camera platform saved the industry by discovering that scallops were not being overfished, contradicting federal regulators assertions, she said.
Read the full story in the New Bedford Standard Times