January 5, 2018 — The following is excerpted from an article by Doug Fraser of the Cape Cod Times:

After 14 years of research, negotiations, hearings and two additional years of review, New England has a plan that uses science and the latest technology to decide which areas are important for the critical life stages of fish and shellfish species and how to protect them.

John Bullard, the regional director of NOAA’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, informed New England Fishery Management Council Chairman John Quinn in a letter Wednesday that his agency had approved most of their fish habitat protection plan.

“It was a massive undertaking and your staff, especially Michelle Bachman, should be proud of their groundbreaking work that went into supporting this amendment,” Bullard wrote in the letter. The council staff, along with researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service, state fisheries agencies, and universities, especially the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology, put together models that incorporated photographic and other surveys of the ocean bottom with known areas of fish concentration and other research on spawning and other life stages, that helped the council evaluate what should be protected and how.

“The fact that it dragged on so long, people miss how groundbreaking this really is,” said Tom Nies, the New England council’s executive director. Two decades ago, habitat closures were decided based on drawing a line around areas where fish were congregating, Nies said. Now, with a model that compares the sea bed with the impact of fishing, they can make decisions he feels will have greater significance to restoring and protecting fish stocks. Plus, the habitat plan also set aside research areas to investigate the link between habitat and fish productivity, a piece of the puzzle that has seen relatively little conclusive research.

“If you compare where we are with this amendment in terms of how they were developed and analyzed versus the original habitat areas in 2002 and 2003, we are light years ahead of where we were then,” Nies said.

Scallopers from both the big boat and small boat fleets, which are often at odds, traveled to Washington in October to lobby [U.S. Rep. William] Keating and other congressmen on getting NMFS to finish its review of the habitat plan and open the area up to scalloping before that population died off. Their message was that allowing them into scallop-rich, nonessential fish habitat meant they spent far less time towing their heavy dredges through areas fish do use.

“From our perspective, it’s really heartening that they heard our concerns,” said Seth Rolbein, director of the Cape Cod Fisheries Trust, speaking for the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance.

David Frulla, an attorney and lobbyist representing limited access scallop vessels, and Fisheries Survival Fund attorney Andrew Minkiewicz agreed the council and NOAA made the right decision in closing the Great South Channel and opening the scallop grounds in what is known as Closed Area I. But they felt that there was just as much evidence to open up a portion of a second closed area on Georges Bank over 100 miles east of the Cape that had historically produced as much as 50 million pounds of harvested scallops. Bullard said more information would be needed for his agency to do that right now.

“There are only so many highly productive scallop beds, and this is one of them,” Minkiewicz said. Frulla admitted that the bottom there is more complex and may be harder to determine its value to fish, but Minkiewicz said adding another prime scallop area keeps scallopers away from the bottom where fish do congregate.

Assistant Regional Administrator Michael Pentony told Quinn in an email that his agency expected to publish the final rule containing the regulations to implement the plan this spring.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times