>>Fishermen's Voice Monthly Newspaper, Gouldsboro Maine

Ted Boyce, Stonington lobsterman and fourth generation stop seiner at the NEFMC, scooping session public comment period on Herring Amendment 4, Portland, ME, June 2. Boyce addressed the council regarding the negative impact on stop seiners, of the regulation that started June 1, which attaches stop seiners to the same rules as the mobile gear –trawlers and purse seiners. They have been restricted to the same three days a week. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights. His family has stop seined since the 1940’s providing lobster bait, and enabling young fishermen to supply herring. It has been part of his family’s tradition and a way of life.

Stop seining is done from dories, at night in coves. The seine net is drawn across the coves after herring come in, then closed in around the fish. But the herring only come in on the dark of the moon and on a flood tide during the monthly cycle. The chance of this all happening on the three designated nights is unlikely. The mobile gear of mid-water trawlers can go where ever the herring are. “We were left out of the decision making process.”
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This rule puts us out of business”, Boyce told the council. At the same time stop seiners east of Cutler have been made exempt from this rule. Boyce asked, “How can you have one set of rules east of Cutler and another west of Cutler?” He asked the council, “To allow fishermen in Hancock and Knox counties to fish during all of the brief season without the restrictions that will eliminate them from the stop seine business.

A new ecosystem approach for the assessment of the Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank Atlantic herring complex shows that their wild predators need herring just as much as people.

Dr. William Overholtz, a research fish biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, recently presented to the New England Fishery Management Council an overview of a study he and colleagues conducted to estimate total consumption of herring by all groups, and to quantify the effect of predation over time, using data from 1977-2002.

This was the first stab at bringing an ecosystem approach to herring management, he said. The central question, he said, was whether herring management can support both predators and a fishery simultaneously.

Herring predators come in four major groups, he said: medium demersal fish, marine mammals, sea birds, and large pelagic fish. The study identifies the important predators within each group, which all together account for most herring predation.

Among the demersal fish, 12 species, including cod and dogfish, are major herring predators. Whales, seals, porpoises and dolphins represent the marine mammals. Pelagics include tuna and sharks. Among the four groups, sea birds consume the least herring.

It was found that, when the herring fishery collapsed in the 1970s and early 1980s, predators still focused on herring; the rate of predation was highest when the stock was at its lowest, because predators still went after herring. Before the collapse, the total removal of herring was very large, due both to fishing and predation.

More recently, predation re- moval is three times greater than fishery removal. All together, predators are consuming more than 300,000 tons of herring now. The fishery is removing about 100,000 tons.

“We want to capture all these dynamics and bring them forward in a stock assessment,” Overholtz said.

The goal, he said, is to put together measures that deal with the tradeoff between predation and the fishery, for a sustainable, long-term yield. If predation increases, he said, then fishery production must decrease. Predation could increase, for example, if cod stocks recover, or the number of marine mammals increases.

“There’s a tradeoff, but there appears to be a fair amount of fishery yield available,” he said.

But managers must be cautious, he said. Growing predation and a large fishery could lead to another stock decline.

A better understanding of predators could mean a better understanding of the overall ecosystem, he said.