Southern New England Archives - Page 2 of 4

Outlook For Southern New England Lobsters Is Dire

August 2, 2017 — Lobster populations in Southern New England are in dramatic decline and recovery is not likely to happen anytime soon.

That’s according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission — an interstate compact, which manages fisheries in the region.

A 2015 assessment by that group showed record lows.

On Tuesday, the commission considered a number of management options to boost lobster egg production, but agreed nearly uniformly that rebuilding populations of Southern New England Lobster was unlikely.

“We’re seeing warmer waters and lobsters are very sensitive to temperature,” said Megan Ware, the group’s fishery management plan coordinator. “So it could be that we’re hitting that thermal threshold for them, and they’re moving to colder waters.”

Read the full story at WNPR

No new rules for declining southern New England lobstering

August 2, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — An interstate panel that manages fisheries voted on Tuesday against a plan to try to preserve the declining southern New England lobster population with new fishing restrictions.

The New England lobster fishery is based largely in Maine, where the catch has soared to new heights in recent years. But the population has collapsed off Connecticut, Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts and New York’s Long Island as waters have warmed in those areas.

An arm of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission considered a host of new restrictions about lobster fishing in southern New England on Tuesday and chose to shoot the plan down.

Restrictions could have included changes to legal harvesting size, reductions in the number of traps fishermen can use and closures to areas where lobsters are harvested. But members of the commission’s lobster board said they feared the proposed restrictions wouldn’t do enough to stem the loss of lobsters.

Board members agreed to try to figure out a new strategy to try to help the crustaceans, which have risen in value in recent years as Asian markets have opened up.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

New rules to help southern New England lobsters up for vote

July 31, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — A plan to try to slow the decline of southern New England’s lobster population with new fishing restrictions is up for a potential final vote this week.

The population of lobsters off Connecticut, Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts has plummeted in recent years. The regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering a host of new restrictions about lobster fishing at a meeting on Tuesday.

Proposed management tools have included changes to legal harvesting size, reductions to the number of traps and seasonal closures to fishing areas.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Boston.com

ASMFC American Lobster Board Approves 5% Increase in Egg Production for the Southern New England Lobster Stock

May 11, 2017 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s American Lobster Management Board approved moving forward with the goal of increasing egg production for the Southern New England (SNE) stock of American lobster by 5%. This increase in egg production can be achieved through a suite of management tools including gauge size changes, trap reductions, and seasonal closures. The recreational fishery is only subject to changes in the gauge size should any be proposed. In making its decision, the Board took into consideration the extensive public comment, which overwhelmingly supported status quo, and the fact that stock declines are largely a result of climatic changes, including increasing water temperatures over the last 15 years.

The next step in the process will be for the Lobster Conservation Management Teams (LCMTs) in Areas 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 to develop area-specific proposals on how to achieve the 5% increase in egg production. As established through Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for American Lobster, LCMTs are composed of lobster industry members who are charged with recommending area-specific measures for Board consideration and approval. The LCMT proposals will be submitted for Technical Committee review in June and Board consideration in August. Once area-specific measures have been approved, the Board will consider final approval of Addendum XXV.

In its deliberation on the SNE lobster stock, the Board discussed the need to consider changes to the current management goals and reference points, noting changes in the marine environment may limit the ability to rebuild the stock to levels seen in the 1990s. The Board will continue to discuss these issues, particularly as the Commission’s Climate Change Work Group develops recommendations regarding the management of stocks impacted by changing climate conditions.

Warmer waters bring new rules for lobster fishermen

May 11, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — New restrictions are coming to southern New England’s lobster fishery in an attempt to save the area’s population of the crustaceans, which has dwindled as waters have warmed.

An arm of the interstate Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted on Tuesday to pursue new management measures to try to slow the decline of lobsters in the area. Management tools will include changes to legal harvesting size, reductions to the number of traps and seasonal closures to fishing areas.

The board’s move was “a recognition that climate change and warming water temperatures play an increasingly role in lobster stocks, especially in southern New England,” said Tina Berger, a spokeswoman for the commission.

The board’s goal, approved on Tuesday, is to increase egg production in the area by five percent. Decreasing the amount of fishing pressure will give the lobsters a better chance to reproduce, scientists working for the commission have said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Sentinel & Enterprise

Could Trump undo New England national monuments?

November 14, 2016 — Opponents of new national monuments in Maine’s North Woods and off coastal New England are asking whether Donald Trump could reverse those decisions as part of his campaign pledge to overturn President Obama’s executive orders.

Although preliminary, the discussions illustrate how Trump’s election is already affecting debate on conservation and environmental issues.

President-elect Trump vowed repeatedly during his campaign to repeal the Obama policies he viewed as executive overreach. Trump often made those comments in relation to issues such as immigration, foreign policy or environmental regulation.

Fishermen opposed to Obama’s designation of nearly 5,000 square miles of underwater ecosystem off the coast of southern New England – known as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument – also are exploring their options, whether through Trump or the Republican-controlled Congress.

“In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, I would say there is a lot of talk about what can be done,” said Robert Vanasse, executive director of the National Coalition for Fishing Communities, which represents fishing organizations and businesses. Vanasse classified the discussions as “informal conversations,” but added: “Clearly the companies and fishermen that have been economically damaged by the actions of the Obama administration are thinking about what in this new (political) environment – president, House and Senate – might be possible.”

Obama designated Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument on Sept. 15, protecting an underwater mountain range that is home to many rare and endangered species.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

ASMFC lobster board tackles fishery issues

November 8, 2016 — BAR HARBOR, Maine — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s lobster board adopted no new policies affecting Maine lobstermen during its annual meeting in Bar Harbor at the end of October, but the group did discuss future options for trip reporting, crab bycatch and improving the lobster stock in Southern New England.

The board relies on data from dealer and harvester reporting to make management decisions.

“The technical committee (which provides scientific advice to the management board) highlighted data deficiencies in federal waters,” Fishery Management Plan coordinator Megan Ware said.

Most state fishery departments conduct their own lobster surveys, such as the Department of Marine Resources settlement survey, ventless trap survey and sea sampling program. But each state is different.

“States are collecting a variety of this information, but it’s not uniform,” Ware said.

Offshore waters — beyond the three-mile limit — have become an increasingly important part of the fishery and they are outside the scope of the state programs.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

NILS STOLPE: Why is the summer flounder quota being reduced 50 percent in two years (with another major reduction for the following year)?

October 20, 2016 — Summer flounder, also known as fluke, support recreational and commercial fisheries that are among the most important in the mid-Atlantic and southern New England. They have been a mainstay of recreational fishermen either from their own boats or on for-hire vessels, support a large directed commercial fishery, their incidental harvest is important in other fisheries and they are near the top of the list of must-have meals for summer visits to the shore. Hundreds of party and charter boats depend on them for all or for part of their annual incomes, thousands of private boats seek them out every summer, and much of the business bait and tackle shops do every year depends on the fishery. Hundreds of commercial fishing boats target them or take them incidentally in other fisheries.

To say that the summer flounder fishery is important to tens of thousands of people from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras would be an understatement. The fishery is more important to both recreational and commercial fishermen than any other in the Mid-Atlantic and southern New England.

“By 2010 the fishing mortality on summer flounder had declined to its lowest level in at least 30 years, and summer flounder stock biomass was the highest since the stock assessments began in the 1960s” (from The summer flounder chronicles II: new science, new controversy, 2001–2010, M. Terciero, Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, Dec 2011).

But in a memo dated 25 July 2016, the Chair of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC), wrote “the revised understanding of the stock status produced by the assessment update indicates reductions in the estimates of SSB, and increases in the estimates of annual Fs.” So 5 years after declaring that the summer flounder stock was at its highest level in half a century the managers decided fishing mortality was greater that it had been thought to be and that there were fewer summer flounder than was previously estimated.

Following a quota cut for both recreational and commercial fishermen of 27% for the 2016 fishing year it was decided that a 31% cut was necessary in 2017. That’s a 50% reduction in landings in two years.

The NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, MA conducts annual bottom trawl surveys in the spring and the fall that have been continuous since 1963. They are designed to give a relative measure of the abundance of the various species caught. The chart on the right shows that there has been nothing particularly dramatic going on with the summer flounder in either the spring or autumn survey, seemingly nothing that would warrant such draconian quota cuts (note that beginning in 2009 a new survey vessel was employed, resulting in higher absolute catches).

With the quota reduction in 2017, commercial summer flounder landings are going to be at their lowest point since 1974. From 1950 to 2014 annual commercial landings averaged 7,200 metric tons. The 2017 quota will be one third of that. In the words of the head of NMFS in 2011 ”in 1976, federal management of marine fisheries was virtually non-existent. With the exception of state managed waters, federal activities were limited to supporting a patchwork of fishery specific treaties governing international waters, which at that time existed only 12 miles off our nation’s coasts.” In twenty-three of the twenty-six years between 1950 and 1976, pre-Magnuson years with no significant management of summer flounder, commercial landings were higher than they will be in 2017, which will be the fortieth year of intensive management of the fishery. This management has involved annual surveys, at least 100 meetings (usually involving at least a dozen people and usually held at coastal resorts or conference centers) and over 8,000 pages (either dealing with summer flounder alone or in combination with sea bass and scup, which are all included in the same management plan) of reports, calculations, charts and tables, memos, meeting notices and on and on.

Kind of makes you wonder what’s going on with summer flounder management, doesn’t it?

Interstate lobster conservation plan up for key vote soon

October 20, 2016 — BAR HARBOR, Maine — Interstate fishing managers will vote next week on whether to send a proposal to try to rebuild the southern New England lobster population out for public comment.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has been working on new management measures to try to preserve lobsters in the waters of southern New England.

The commission is meeting on Oct. 27 in Bar Harbor, Maine, to decide whether to send the management proposal to the public for consideration.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

CFRF Black Sea Bass Research Fleet

August 24, 2016 — The following was released by the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation:

On September 1^st., the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF), in partnership with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RI DEM), will launch a one-year pilot project to develop a cost-effective method to collect critically needed fishery dependent data on black sea bass (Centropristis striata) in the Southern New England and Mid-Atlantic Bight region. The project will be approached collaboratively by a team of commercial and recreational fishermen and fisheries scientists and managers, and will involve eight months of black sea bass catch and discard characterization from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras. The Black Sea Bass Research Fleet will involve eight fishing vessels from a variety of gear types, including trawl, lobster/crab trap, gillnet, and hook and line, in collecting biological black sea bass data as part of routine fishing practices. Participant fishermen will use a specialized tablet app to efficiently and accurately record biological information about black sea bass catch and bycatch throughout the year. The results from the proposed project will help to fill existing data gaps for the northern Atlantic black sea bass, which is an essential first step in developing a management plan that reflects the current state of the black sea bass resource.

The CFRF will be soliciting applications from fishing vessels based in Rhode Island to participate in the Black Sea Bass Research Fleet in September 2016. More information about the project, including application materials, will be available on the CFRF website here.

The CFRF looks forward to getting the Black Sea Bass Research Fleet up and running!