?“The 90,000 TAC would have been a disaster for Maine,” said former council member Dana Rice, who addressed the council on Tuesday. “The 116,000mt TAC will act as a buffer.” Rice had called for a socio-economic study to be done on the impact this would have on the fishermen and communities that rely on herring for lobster bait. ©Photo by Sam Murfitt |
The New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC) voted November 17 to increase the herring Total Allowable Catch (TAC) by 15 percent from the drastic reduction made at the September NEFMC meeting.
The National Marine Fisheries Service’s Science and Statistical Committee was pressed to reconsider their recommended 53 percent cut in the TAC for the next three years. Public outcry from the lobster industry over the impact such a cut would have on the lobster fishery and fishing communities was the driving force. The herring fleet also called for increases to the SSC recommended cut.
Although the SSC is not bound to reconsider its decisions, given that the stock is not overfished, and that there is some latitude in the number the SSC delivers for the TAC, they reconsidered.
The SSC produces a range between the most restrictive number and the least restrictive number for the TAC. Within that range they found it possible to move on the TAC.
An additional 16,000 MT was added to the TAC that will be harvested from Area 3A, on George’s Bank. Area 3A has never been fished down to the TAC as have 1Aand 2A.
Every year NMFS does a trawl survey and an acoustic survey. Every three years the SSC assesses the data collected from these surveys. The TAC is based on that assessment and is good for three yesrs. The recent SSC interpretation of herring data and the results of computer modeling was seen by the SSC as a possible pending herring collapse, so they called for a 53 percent cut from 190,000 MT to 90,000 MT.
Fisheries management decisions, according to the Magnuson Stevens Act must consider social consequences of regulations.
“The 90,000 TAC would have been a disaster for Maine,” said former council member Dana Rice, who addressed the council on Tuesday. The 116,000 MT TAC will act as a buffer.
Maine will still need to find other sources and kinds of bait to make up the shortage. At 116,000 MT the TAC remains 43 percent below what it was in the last herring TAC.
Rice had called for a socio-economic study to be done on the impact this would have on the fishermen and communities that rely on herring for lobster bait. The roughly 7,000 licensed lobstermen operate out of virtually every community on the coast.
The nation’s overarching fishing law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, calls for a socio-economic impact study to be done on all new fisheries management plans. But, said Rice, “they usually don’t do a true socio-economic study. It is more a study of the impact on the resource, what fish will be affected, and who will be left fishing It’s not about how a management plan will affect families and communities.”
There has long been widespread concern for the long-term health of the herring fishery. Some critics believe the database and therefore anything the SSC models generate is potentially flawed since the data does not include the herring that is taken but not recorded because it is dumped at sea.
Opponents of the large midwater trawl vessels applauded the council's decision to increase monitoring on herring trawlers. Details of that decision have not been finalized.
“An inadequate catch-monitoring program for these industrial trawlers has made it difficult to accurately predict population sizes and the rates at which herring are being fished. To alleviate the scientific uncertainty causing the decrease in catch limits, we need to quickly put in place a comprehensive monitoring program that will tell us what is caught and what is thrown back overboard dead or dying,” wrote Peter Baker in a Op/Ed in the Boston Globe on November 16.
