Bluefin Quota Revamp

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Out of sight out of mind. Believed to illegal at sea tuna transfer. Note tarp hung at rail, lower left, blocking sea level view of hold. Photo was not taken in U.S. waters, but addresses the size of the holes in ICCAT oversight.

In order to keep all bluefin catch – landings and dead discards – within the nation’s overall quota for the species, managers propose to subtract the longline fleet’s overages from all bluefin fishery groups. A final hearing, via teleconference, was held in January on Amendment 7 to the Consolidated Atlantic Highly Migratory Fishery Management Plan. The amendment’s new management measures aim to reduce bluefin dead discards and account for dead discards; optimize fishing opportunities; and enhance reporting and monitoring.

Fishermen who target bluefin, and whose gear types have their own quotas, didn’t sound at all pleased to hear about the new accounting system.

The pelagic longline fleet is acknowledged by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) as an environmentally responsible, economically important multispecies fishery. Objections by bluefin fishermen at the hearing on Amendment 7 were not against the longline fleet, but against the new account scheme.

“We’re plenty upset with what’s in the proposed amendment,” said American Bluefin Tuna Association (ABTA) executive director Rich Ruais. Ruais said ABTA “begged fishery managers not to open up” the allocation system “because it’s a nightmare dilemma. We wish you wouldn’t have done that. This plan is so substantial and, from our perspective, radical, that I would venture, if it all goes through the way it is now, if you walk away from this fishery and come back three years from now, you won’t recognize it. That’s how substantial these changes are.”

Ruais said the user group responsible for bycatch must be the one held to account.

“You can’t spread it out across the entire fleet,” Ruais said. “We’re not responsible for it. EXPLAIN WHY This plan does just the opposite, and it does it to the level that is really stinging and in-your-face to the current users. We’re looking at the way you’ve done it – there’s a little bit of sleight-of-hand, where people don’t see the extent of the reallocation.”

Another member of the ABTA, said bluefin fishermen have seen drastic reductions of quota and, as a result, experienced significant sacrifices.

“Now you want to take more quota away from me and give it to another group of fishermen,” he said. “If you reward [longline fishermen] by letting them lease fish, it doesn’t make sense; you’re just going to create a whole other fishery here….You have to come up with another idea to deal with the discards of longline fishermen.”

“You’re not correcting the problem of dead discards the longliners are taking,” agreed New England fisherman Bill Kroeger. “You’re just trying to say internationally that we’re staying within quota.”

The comments capped a series of hearings held by NMFS along the East Coast for the past half-year to get input on the proposed measures. NMFS crafted the new measures in response to a mandate from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), which sets quotas for countries that fish for bluefin. At one time, ICCAT provided a separate quota allowance of 68 metric tons (mt) to account for dead discards. But in 2006, ICCAT discontinued the separate allowance and required discards to be accounted for within each country’s annual quota allocation.

According to the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association, which represents the Atlantic pelagic longline fleet, the fleet currently comprises fewer than 100 boats from Maine to Texas. Most stay within close proximity to their home ports. Many boats are less than 55 feet in length. A few vessels are up to 100 feet long and fish in waters hundreds of miles offshore.

NMFS calls the fleet “one of the most environmentally responsible longline fisheries in the world.” The fleet has an excellent record of returning sea turtles alive to the sea, and follows a protocol for avoiding marine mammals. In the Gulf of Mexico, longline fishermen must use weak hooks to reduce accidental catch of bluefin and may not use live bait, in order to reduce bycatch of billfish. Huge areas of the Gulf of Mexico are closed to longline fishing to reduce bycatch of all species. Longline fishermen must carry vessel monitoring systems on their boats to enforce closures. NMFS monitors the fishery for interactions with protected species through at-sea observers.

“The pelagic longline fishery is comprised of five relatively distinct segments/fisheries with different fishing practices and strategies, including the Gulf of Mexico yellowfin tuna fishery, the south Atlantic-Florida east coast to Cape Hatteras swordfish fishery, the mid-Atlantic and New England swordfish and bigeye tuna fishery, the U.S. distant water swordfish fishery, and the Caribbean Islands tuna and swordfish fishery,” NOAA says.

The fleet also incurs bycatch of numerous other species. One of those bycatch species is western Atlantic bluefin tuna. Three species of bluefin are found around the world – northern (or Atlantic); southern; and Pacific. Atlantic bluefin is divided into two stocks – the western, harvested off the coast of North America; and the eastern, harvested off the coast of Europe and Africa and in the Mediterranean Sea.

ICCAT sets a total harvest quota for each species and stock, and allocates shares of the quota to countries that harvest the fish. For western Atlantic bluefin, the total western Atlantic quota was 1,750 mt in 2013, shared between the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. holds the biggest share, 57 percent. For 2013, that was 923.7 mt, plus 25 mt to account for bycatch related to longline fisheries in what is called the Northeast Distant gear restricted area, on the Grand Banks, for a total U.S. share of 948.7 mt.

In the U.S., the fishery is managed through NMFS under the dual authority of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and the Atlantic Tunas Convention Act.

The types of gear that U.S. fishermen use to harvest bluefin as a directed fishery are purse seines and handgear (rod-and-reel, handline, and harpoon). In 2013, the traditional rod-and-reel commercial sector was given the largest portion of the U.S. quota, with 435 mt; followed by the recreational (angling) sector with 182 mt. Allocations to the other direct-fishing sectors were: purse seine 172 mt, harpoon 36 mt, traps 1 mt. A reserve amount of 23 mt was set aside to account for in-season adjustments and scientific research.

In order to account for bluefin caught incidentally by the longline fleet, NMFS allocated 46 mt of the quota (plus the 25 mt in the Northeast Distant area). However, that amount is considered inadequate. For 2013, NMFS estimated the longline fleet threw back 145.2 mt of dead discards. NMFS estimated bycatch by handgear and purse seine gear to be relatively low.

Amendment 7 would allow the longline fleet to retain and land previously discarded bluefin. The anticipated landings, expected to exceed the fleet’s quota, would be deducted from the quotas all bluefin user groups. According to NMFS, the extensive regulatory framework already in place for managing the fishery, and the nation’s existing overall quota, adequately accounts for uncertainties regarding the status of the bluefin stock. The proposed measures do not change the overall harvest level. Instead, they affect the time, place and manner in which U.S. fisheries may harvest the U.S. quota.

The changes are needed, says NMFS, because the quota system has become more difficult, due to new methods of calculation which increased the estimate of bluefin dead discards; a larger percentage of the adjusted quota being landed within the directed fisheries; and changes in ICCAT requirements regarding accounting for dead discards and allowable carry-forward of unused quota.

“The combined effect of the domestic quota system and the need to account for dead discards results in an annual allocation/accounting challenge: How to both account for anticipated dead discards as well as optimize fishing opportunity for all categories in a fair manner while ensuring that the United States remains within its overall allocated quota,” the proposed amendment says.

Fisheries for bluefin date back thousands of years in the Mediterranean but didn’t emerge in the western Atlantic until the 1950s, according to a federal fishery website called fishwatch.gov. A giant bluefin can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars at fish markets today.

“As sushi and sashimi markets developed in the 1970s and 1980s, the demand and prices for bluefin tuna soared,” fishwatch.gov says. “Fisheries expanded, fishing pressure increased dramatically, and, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the western Atlantic blufin tuna population plummeted.”

“There was rampant overfishing in the eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean during the 1990s and early 2000s,” fishwatch.gov says. “However, in recent years, catches in the eastern Atlantic have been reduced to levels consistent with scientific advice, and new monitoring and control measures have been adopted to address illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing on that stock.”

At the final hearing on Amendment 7, Brad McHale, chief of NMFS’ Highly Migratory Species Division, said that, in 2012, landings for the categories were pretty much on par with the quota each was allocated – except for purse seiners, which didn’t have any landings.

“Currently, it’s difficult to account for all sources of mortality,” McHale said. The overall fishery has limited information regarding dead discards, he said. However, he said, the longline fleet’s comprehensive reporting requirements make it possible to determine that the fleet has “significant tuna interactions that are resulting in dead discards.”

NMFS is faced with dual objectives, McHale said. One is to prevent overfishing, rebuild bluefin, and minimize bluefin bycatch. The other is to maintain flexibility and fairness in a variable fishery, he said.

To address these objectives, he said, the proposed management measures will:

• Reallocate quota among categories, adjusting quotas based on historical dead discard allowance;

• Reduce longline bluefin interactions with gear-restricted areas;

• Increase accountability and create incentives to avoid bluefin with individual bluefin quotas for longline fishermen;

• Improve quality and timeliness of catch data with enhanced reporting requirements for commercial quota categories;

• Optimize fishing opportunity with adjustments to general and harpoon category quota rules.

In addition to quota reallocations, McHale said NMFS also looked at ways to reduce longline interaction with bluefin, by using logbook information to map out where interactions occurred, both geographically and temporally. The result was the creation of two gear-restricted areas, in the Gulf of Mexico and off Cape Hatteras along the Outer Banks, both for certain times of the year. The Outer Banks restricted area would exempt some longline vessels that meet certain criteria.

“We strive to reach a balance between minimizing interactions but also acknowledging that the longline fishery is a multi-species fishery, and the impacts of an extended closure can be significant,” McHale said. Another proposed measure would provide conditional access to current closed areas – off the Northeast, North Carolina, and the east and west coasts of Florida – for longline vessels.

Also proposed is the institution of a bluefin quota for individual vessels in the longline fleet, McHale said. “This would limit landings and dead discards with a hard catch cap,” McHale said. “It would provide incentives to avoid bluefin interactions, and would provide flexibility to enable longline vessels to lease some bluefin quota from other vessels” in the purse seine fleet. A vessel’s annual quota allocation would not carry over from one year to the next.

“It isn’t all about the longline fishery,” McHale said. “We have other fishermen interacting with bluefin and other species, that we don’t have strong data streams from. For example, the purse seine category: Do we start to have additional reporting requirements such as VMS [vessel monitoring system] or video monitoring from them?...Putting a VMS on every general category or harpoon vessel may not be possible, so are there different reporting systems – logbooks or website reporting?...How do we get a better sense of overall catch and dead discards?”

Given the purse seine fleet’s “underperformance” in recent years, NMFS drew up a plan to help the fleet retain its potential to harvest its full share of quota. The plan looks at the fleet’s catch in a given year, and increases the subsequent year’s quota by 5 percent. “So there’s a significant amount of flexibility built into this program,” McHale said. It doesn’t preclude the purse seine category from fishing, but nor does it have a substantial portion of U.S. quota tied up if the purse seine category wasn’t going to be landing in a given year….It opens options to how the fishery as a whole is managed.”

“I have a couple of concerns with regard to the amendment,” said Chester Brewer, chairman of Coastal Conservation Association’s national government relations committee. “The amendment looks like were trying to maximize fishing opportunities with a system of very complex rules and rule-changes. Maximizing fishing opportunities is a good idea when you’re talking about a recovered fishery like swordfish. But bluefin tuna has been essentially in a collapsed state for decades. We’ve had some recent upticks. But to say it’s a recovered fishery – no way. It’s not. My concern is, you’re setting up a catch-share system for the longline boats, and you’re allowing the purse seine operators to lease quota to the longline operators. The purse seine boats have not caught any bluefin for a number of years now. I’ve got a real concern that you’re going to take that purse seine quota, that currently is really almost a reserve, and you’re going to incentivize the longline boats to go after bluefin using leased quota.”

Brewer said he was also concerned about the prospect of allowing longline boats into closed areas: “You’re going to have incredibly negative blowback,” he said.

Ralph Pratt, a member of the ABTA’s board of directors, wanted to know if there is anything to prevent a longliner from leasing substantial quota from a purse seiner and establishing a targeted set.

“I’m concerned about the leasing capability in the amendment,” Pratt said.

McHale said the amendment does not propose an individual ceiling on the amount of quota a vessel can acquire, outside of what would be available within the categories themselves. He added that the current proposal would allow for one-time annual leases. If a proposal is later developed for a permanent leasing rule, at that point NMFS would consider limits on leasing.

“I think it would work against your intention of leasing if someone tried to accumulate enough for targeted set,” Pratt continued.

“We agree,” responded McHale.

Kristin McLaren, assistant executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Board, said the proposed Gulf of Mexico gear-restricted area will have consequences for Louisiana swordfish longliners. She pointed out that NMFS already requires longliners to use “weak hooks” to allow bluefin to break away, which has reduced bluefin bycatch by 56 percent.

“We need a better way to solve this than fighting each other for quota,” said one man. “We request that NMFS provide enough time, flexibility and quota. We know that our fishermen, particularly our pelagic longline fishermen, offer very significant economic, scientific and conservation benefits. We are working to try to make all of this work.”

The comment period on Amendment 7 closed Jan. 10. NMFS expects to publish a final rule within the next six months. The effective date of most measures will be 30 days after the final rule is published. Other measures will become effective in January 2015, so that on-the-water fishing activities are not disrupted mid-year.