October 26, 2021 — The following was released by the office of Congressman Seth Moulton:

It is an age-old question: how many fish are in the sea? In New England, the livelihoods of 34,000 people depend on the answer. A new federal grant that will fund the work of Rep. Seth Moulton’s Groundfish Trawl Task Force aims to get a more accurate count.

The results of the work have major implications for New England’s commercial fishermen. Government regulations that dictate how many groundfish commercial fishermen can catch are based on estimates of the groundfish population. Those estimates are currently calculated by combining decades of data from two research vessels that sporadically trawl the ocean and judge a species’ health based on what they catch. For decades, commercial fishermen have criticized the method as an archaic, inaccurate approach that leaves their financial security up to chance.

Groundfish are fish that live on or near the ocean floor. They include species like the iconic Atlantic cod, haddock, and flounder which fetch the highest-values for commercial fishermen.

Today, Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA) announced a $500,000 federal grant from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that will fund research designed by Moulton’s Groundfish Task Force. The work will lead to new data NOAA, scientists and fishermen hope will be more accurate measurements of the fish population.

Moulton formed the Groundfish Task Force in 2015 in order to build consensus between the scientific community that conducts research which informs commercial fishing regulations and the commercial fishermen who are most affected by those regulations.

“When I took office I was told I had to make a choice: stand with the fishermen or the environmentalists. I thought that was crazy because both want—and fishermen need—a sustainable fishery. So instead, we rallied both groups around getting better science, and that is exactly what this historic partnership has produced,” Moulton said. “This work will protect the livelihoods of thousands of people, it will protect our ocean, and it will preserve New England’s identity as a place where people can make a living fishing.”

Jackie Odell, Executive Director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, said: “Working constructively and collaboratively through the Task Force has been invaluable. The upcoming research will make a positive scientific contribution. This research will fill-in gaps and reduce uncertainty with the existing science.”

The new data will influence the commercial fishing industry. Gloucester, in the 6th Congressional district, is the second busiest port in the state.

According to a 2021 report by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, 436 permitted commercial fish harvesters have a Gloucester address and 446 commercial fishing vessels are homeported in the city.

They keep busy. Commercial fishermen landed 63,098,659 pounds of catch in 2018, with an ex-vessel value of $53,210,608. The top-ranked species, by dollar value, landed in Gloucester between 2014-2018 included American Lobster, Atlantic sea herring, and haddock. Herring and haddock are two of the species affected by the grants announced today.

Gloucester Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken said: “As America’s Oldest Seaport, Gloucester has been proud to partner with Congressman Seth Moulton and our fishermen so that we can find common sense solutions to benefit the entire fishing industry. Our partnerships agree that we must continue to collaborate together, especially around sustainable solutions that will benefit us all.”

In December of 2020, with Moulton’s support, the task force sent NOAA several recommendations for ways that the government could improve its research.

In a letter in response to Rep. Moulton and the Task Force, NOAA’s Director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Dr. Jon Hare said: “Thank you for forming the Cod Task Force. The Task Force has broad expertise and has made a number of helpful recommendations to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.” 

It also outlined three recommendations that NOAA will fund.

NOAA selected three of the recommendations for funding. The first will explore whether NOAA can get a better count of how many fish are present in waters fished by commercial fishermen. It will do this by separating the data of the two research vessels NOAA used to conduct the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s trawl survey. The Albatross IV was used between 1963 and 2008, and the Bigelow was commissioned in 2007 and has been used since. NOAA currently combines the data gathered over the last six decades into one dataset in order to assess where and when fishermen can work.

The second will determine how many groundfish are present in the areas of the ocean where they are known to live but can be challenging to sample with traditional approaches such as trawl surveys. This study will use a variety of data sources including NOAA’s longline surveys. Longlining involves long strings of hooks dropped and left on or near the bottom of the ocean at depths beyond the reach of trawling vessels.

Finally, the grants will collect data on how many fish are caught by fishermen and compare that information to the trawl surveys that NOAA conducts. The goal is to determine the degree to which the trawl surveys overlap with where key groundfish stocks are caught in the Gulf of Maine.

The $500,000 grant that will fund these three projects was appropriated by Congress and sent to NOAA’s Cooperative Institute of the North Atlantic Region, which is housed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The institute divided the work into two parts. One part will fund the first two studies and will be conducted by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute with a subaward to Northeastern University. The third project will be funded through a grant to UMass Dartmouth.

Moulton and his team worked with Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)  to secure funding for the research with an amendment to a Senate appropriations bill late last year. The money is now on the way.

According to NOAA, Cooperative Institutes are NOAA-supported, non-federal organizations that have established outstanding research and education programs in one or more areas that are relevant to the NOAA mission. Cooperative Institutes’ expertise and facilities add significantly to NOAA’s capabilities, and their structure and legal framework facilitate rapid and efficient mobilization of those resources to meet NOAA’s programmatic needs.