On Monday, Dec. 7, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section and Advisory Panel will meet in Portsmouth, N.H., to decide whether boats from Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts will be allowed to this winter. Last year, the regulators imposed a moratorium on fishing because scientists said the shrimp stock was on the verge of collapse.

Next month, the scientific advisory panel will meet to review the 2015 Stock Status Report and develop recommendations for the 2016 fishing season. The section will meet later in the day to set specifications for the 2016 fishing season, if there is to be one, after reviewing the 2015 Stock Status Report and the advisory panel recommendations.

Information from the ASMFC suggests that another moratorium is likely. According to surveys in the Gulf of Maine, between 2012 and 2014 the abundance of shrimp and the size of the shrimp biomass were at their lowest levels in the 31-year history of the survey. The 2014 fishable biomass was the lowest on record.”

The presence of juvenile shrimp in the survey was discouraging as well. Shrimp hatched during 2013 were not expected to reach fishable size until 2017 and the level of recruitment in 2014 was the ninth lowest since the surveys began.

In a document prepared to introduce the public to proposed changes to the Northern Shrimp Fishery Plan (which have been postponed), the ASMFC said that scientists believed that “the northern shrimp stock has collapsed with little prospect of recovery in the near future.