Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Trump says he’ll reopen Northern Edge to scalloping; New Bedford may benefit more than Cape Cod

July 8, 2026 — South Coast scallopers are rejoicing at President Trump’s pledge, on Thursday, to reopen a prime scallop fishing area off Massachusetts.

But the process could take more than 18 months, and Cape Cod scallopers may not benefit as much as those in New Bedford.

“From an industry perspective, access to the Northern Edge would be a blessing,” said Eric Hansen, owner of two New Bedford scallop vessels. “The loss of resource and revenue for the scallop industry for the last 30 years has been huge.”

The Northern Edge, a section of Georges Bank, has been closed to scalloping since 1994.

Aubrey Church, policy director at the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, said some of the smaller commercial vessels on Cape Cod Cape are unlikely to be able to make the 15-hour trip to the Northern Edge.

Many of Cape Cod’s commercial fishing vessels are dayboats, meaning they go out and return on the same day.

Church said the alliance wants to hear more from its members before taking a position on access to the Northern Edge.

“Understanding how different sectors of the fleet may be affected will be an important part of our discussions with members,” she said.

Read the full article at NHPR

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford fishermen eye return to Northern Edge of Georges Bank as Trump plans reopening

July 7, 2026 — A prominent scallop fishing ground could soon reopen after more than three decades.

Pres. Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he plans to reopen the Northern Edge of Georges Bank, an area that has been closed to commercial fishing since 1994. In the announcement, Trump also gave a shoutout to New Bedford, highlighting the city as one that could benefit from the move.

For many fishermen, the news is generating excitement about returning to waters that previous generations once worked.

Read the full article at WJAR

Kevin Stokesbury awarded $1.4 million from NOAA Fisheries

May 23, 2023 — Commonwealth Professor of Fisheries Oceanography Kevin Stokesbury was recently awarded four grants totaling $1,462,427 for sea scallop research through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Scallop Research Set-Aside (RSA) Program. Co-principal investigators from the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) include post-doctoral research fellow Adam Delargy and research associate Amber Lisi.

In RSA programs, researchers apply for funding through a competitive federal grant process managed by NOAA Fisheries. No federal funds are provided to support the research; instead, funds are generated from the sale of sea scallops “set-aside” annually for this purpose. Selected researchers partner with the fishing industry to conduct research and to harvest their set-aside award.

Read the full article at UMASS Dartmouth

New research suggests cod, New England’s founding fish, may be returning to local waters

May 5, 2022 — “For the first time in about 20 years we’ve seen and are tracking a successful year class of cod, and they seem to be growing at a very good rate,” said Kevin Stokesbury, a fisheries science professor at UMass Dartmouth leading a multi-year survey of codfish in the Gulf of Maine.

Stokesbury has a history of using scientific innovation to produce new findings that upend fishing regulations. In the 1990s, he devised a new way of counting scallops that helped open up a tightly regulated fishery.

A typical government-led survey determines scallop numbers by dredging the ocean floor, counting the scallops it pulls up, and estimating what percentage that is of the total scallops in the sample area. Stokesbury’s surveys rely on pictures of the ocean floor instead. A team of his undergraduates count all the scallops in their sample areas one-by-one, eliminating much of the guesswork.

Stokesbury’s method for counting scallops was peer reviewed and eventually incorporated into the government’s periodic stock assessments, which form the basis of fishing regulations in America. In the early 2000s, regulators had already suspected scallops were rebounding to some extent, but Stokesbury’s findings upended what they had been saying for years.

“They thought there were two to three times as many scallops in there,” Stokesbury said, “and there were actually about 14 times as many.”

But the UMass Dartmouth scientist has his own critics when it comes to codfish. One of them has an office down the hall from him.

Professor Steve Cadrin, a fisheries scientist leading a periodic review of how the government assesses cod stocks, said the cod fishery has opened up prematurely once before.

“We’ve seen other year classes that have not survived,” Cadrin said.

Some years, Cadrin said NOAA’s projections have been overly optimistic.

“They led to continued overfishing and the stock hasn’t rebuilt,” Cadrin said. “It’s a lot more than just a heartbreak. There’s been a lot of fishery restrictions because of that.”

Read the full story at The Public’s Radio

MASSACHUSETTS: Meet the women of New Bedford’s Waterfront: Scientists analyze data to support fisheries

July 7, 2021 — Scientist Kevin Stokesbury pulled up a digital presentation in his New Bedford office at the School for Marine Science and Technology. Across from him sat fisheries consultant Cate O’Keefe with a notepad and pen in hand.

For about an hour, O’Keefe asked Stokesbury (her former doctoral advisor) a series of questions about scallop surveys, the potential impacts of offshore wind development on data collection, and the ways in which survey collaboration could improve.

She will meet with other researchers in the region in the coming weeks for a project with the New England Fishery Management Council — the organization that regulates fisheries in federal waters from Maine to Connecticut. The working group O’Keefe is involved with expects to issue a set of recommendations to improve scallop surveys by next summer, which will ultimately inform the future management of New Bedford’s most lucrative fishery

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Five Questions With: Kevin Stokesbury

March 27, 2019 — Kevin Stokesbury, professor of fisheries oceanography at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science & Technology, was chosen for a service award from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea last month. The council, in Denmark, recognized the Stokesbury for his work in restoring scallop stocks in the region. He served as chair of the ICES Scallop Assessment Working Group for five years.

PBN: Where are we in terms of scallop stocks in New England now as opposed to say, 10 and 20 years ago?

STOKESBURY: The scallop stocks of New England are a fisheries success story. For 2018, the stock is estimated at 482 million pounds … with a projected harvest of about 63 million pounds. For the last 10 years the average landings were 50 million pounds valued at $460 million; for the last 20 years the average landings were 46 million pounds valued at $345 million; and from 1970 to 1996 the average landings were 20 million pounds valued at $81 million, based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

This success is the result of nature providing the right conditions for the scallops to produce large numbers of offspring; scientists and the fishing industry working together to develop new ways to document the number of scallops – their distribution, size and biomass – and agencies being open to new ideas on rotational management and flexible enough to act on the new scientific data.

The results have been a sustainable fishery with reduced environmental impact and economic prosperity.

PBN: One of the things you have been credited with is partnering with fishermen, getting their buy-in to gather information to manage scallop stocks. How would you describe that process?

STOKESBURY: The fishing industry originally approached [UMass Dartmouth professor Brian] Rothschild for help determining the abundance of scallops within the closed areas of Georges Bank. Rothschild had the ability to bring all the different agencies, academics and fishing groups together. The first cooperative dredge survey had already been completed when I came onboard in 1998.

Read the full story at Providence Business News

MASSACHUSETTS: SouthCoast Man of the Year: Kevin Stokesbury continues to seek solutions to fishing industry challenges

December 31, 2018 —  It’s pretty well known around these parts that homegrown research proved the ocean held more Atlantic sea scallops than federal regulators thought.

And a lot of folks know that the value of those succulent bivalves has made New Bedford the highest-grossing fishing port in America for 18 years running.

Starting in the late 1990s, Professor Kevin Stokesbury of the School for Marine Science and Technology at UMass Dartmouth, working with SMAST founding dean Brian Rothschild, developed a video technique to count scallops on the seafloor without harvesting or killing them.

Along the way, he pioneered a partnership with local fishermen.

Some fishermen say the research saved the New Bedford scallop industry. (Other observers point out that federal regulations protected the species at critical times.)

Read the full story at New Bedford Standard-Times

JACK SPILLANE: A rogue agency gets set to shut down another New Bedford fishery

December 10, 2018 — Scott Lang has been around fisheries issues for a long time.

Both when he was mayor and afterwards.

In 2013, Lang helped organize the Center for Sustainable Fisheries as a grassroots lobbying group to try to make sure New Bedford fishermen were not totally forgotten by NOAA. He’s worked for the industry for a long time and seen a lot of arguments from both sides back-and-forth over the years.

But until last week, he said he had never seen NOAA make a decision to close a fishery with no science behind it. Not even questionable science, as for years NOAA has used for New England groundfishing limits in the opinion of many.

NOAA’s decision to close the Rose and Crown Zone and Zone D to surf clammers is based on anecdotal evidence related to UMass Dartmouth scientist Kevin Stokesbury’s research for the scallop industry, first done almost two decades ago.

The camera net device Stokesbury invented was for measuring scallop habitats but NOAA has used his science to measure clam beds. It’s not the same, Stokesbury told The Standard-Times. The images his survey produces are of the ocean floor about a kilometer apart and clammers often dredge in much shorter distances.

The clammers have offered to do surveys that will be more applicable to clam beds in the areas of Nantucket Shoals in question. They would need about three years to do that but they would have to keep fishing in the closed areas in order to pay for it.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fishermen ask for more time to study wind impact

November 12, 2018 — Fishermen, fish processors and others warned on Thursday that fishing grounds will be lost with the construction of Vineyard Wind, and some expressed doubt that planned UMass Dartmouth research can happen fast enough to document the loss.

“We have this huge area we’re going to develop, and obviously we’ve got a pretty close timeline,” said Ed Barrett, a commercial fisherman from the South Shore. “How are you ever going to even come close to figuring out an impact? … I have zero faith in that.”

UMD’s School for Marine Science and Technology held the meeting to collect fishing industry comments as researchers begin to design monitoring studies that would occur before, during and after construction. Vineyard Wind has hired SMAST to help write a monitoring plan to submit to federal regulators, Professor Steve Cadrin said in an interview prior to the meeting.

Three similar meetings are planned for Rhode Island, Chatham and Martha’s Vineyard.

Katie Almeida, fishery policy analyst for The Town Dock, a squid dealer and processor in Rhode Island, said that for two years, her company has been asking for at least five years of pre-construction fishery monitoring, and the conversation has not gone any further.

“And now we’re down to what, a year?” she said. “How can we get any meaningful science and study done that’s going to actually hold up to any kind of scrutiny for baseline studies?”

People have been asking for a delay, she said.

Cadrin and Professor Kevin Stokesbury hosted the meeting. One of the problems they will face in designing a study, Stokesbury said, is that whatever survey methods they use before construction, they have to be able to use during and after construction, to eliminate variables.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: 50 people who met at SMAST believe they can change the fishing industry

May 25, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — About 50 people assembled inside a classroom at UMass Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology on Wednesday night.

They formed the first Ocean Cluster meetup, merging the worlds of fishing and Internet of Things.

Those in the room believed the collaboration, small at its inception, has the potential to revolutionize the industry.

“This night, while there are only 50 of us here, is exactly how this happens,” said Chris Rezendes of CONTEXT LABS, ImpactLABS and Spherical Analytics.

Those who spoke at the event included: Ed Anthes-Washburn and Eli Powell of the New Bedford Port Authority, Cassie Canastra of BASE New England and the Whaling City Display Auction, Mike Carroll of LegitFish, Jeff Young of Advanced Marine Technologies, Liz Wiley of Spherical Analytics and Kevin Stokesbury of SMAST.

Each discussed the importance data plays in their respective organization.

Canastra and Carroll are working together to allow the fish auction to include blockchain technology for fishermen and purchasers.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times