Downeast Fishermen: A Place
at the Groundfish Table
by Laurie Schreiber
Josh Miller of Tenants Harbor. In the last five or six years, lobster fishermen in western Penobscot Bay have been seeing an exceptional amount of groundfish. “It coincided with no more midwater trawling” in herring inshore Closed Area 1. Laurie Schreiber Photo.
ELLSWORTH – A changing ecosystem and downeast groundfish management were topics on the minds of fishermen and others who attended a “listening session” held by the National Marine Fisheries Services’ (NMFS) new regional administrator, John Bullard, in late August.
Fishermen who have been studying downeast groundfish stocks said they are seeing “the building blocks” of recovery. They told Bullard it will be essential to Maine’s coastal communities to ensure that local fishermen retain access to the stocks as they recover. They cautioned against a future that sees all of the groundfish quota consolidated to a few, well-financed fishing operations. And they said that future management of downeast stocks must change, in recognition of localized subpopulations of fish and the role that fishing communities can have as stewards of the resource.
“I feel the groundfish will come back,” said Jason Joyce of Swan’s Island.
Joyce has been a participant in the Stonington-based Penobscot East Resource Center’s (PERC) Sentinal Fishery Project, begun in 2009 and designed to collect data on the status of groundfish stocks in the eastern Gulf of Maine. The goal was to use the data to examine ways to augment the existing groundfish stock assessment framework to reflect fine-scale, localized information. “In the future, this could identify localized depletions of the sort we have experienced in the eastern Gulf of Maine during the past 20 years,” according to PERC information.
Joyce said that, as part of the project, in the last three years, he fished 60,000 hooks through the summer on traditional groundfish grounds. The first two years, he said, he saw fewer than 30 cod each year. This year was much better, he said, and he also saw a handful of white hake.
“I feel the building blocks are there,” Joyce said. But, he said, he is wary of a future that involves a corporate-owned fishing fleet that takes over downeast fishing grounds, when stocks recover, because local fishermen had given up.
Joyce said he sees “the building blocks” of recovery.
“And I do encourage you to allow the access, allow some way to have that quota accessible to the small, coastal communities that are dependent on it,” Joyce said.
Josh Miller of Tenants Harbor said that, in the last five or six years, lobster fishermen in western Penobscot Bay have been seeing an exceptional amount of groundfish.
“It coincided with no more midwater trawling” in herring inshore Closed Area 1, said Miller.
Ted Ames of Stonington said that, rather than managing the Gulf of Maine as a single unit, NMFS must recognize that there are localized differences.
For example, Ames said, the only place that species like haddock and cod reproduce is in inshore waters, from the shore to up to perhaps 30 miles offshore.
“You go beyond that and there’s no nursery ground or spawning area until you get to George Bank,” Ames said. “Somehow you’ve got to change who gets to fish in those locations.”
Ames told Bullard to look to Maine’s lobster zone management system as an example of successful localized fishery management. Ames has previously described a “layered management plan based on the principle of Maine’s lobster zones, but adapted to bracket the area used by the four cod subpopulations in New England. Each management area would be governed by elected fishermen “whose intimate local knowledge would allow them to help managers improve the fishery, just as Maine did so successfully with its lobster zones,” he has written. “The proposed layers were designed to identify and protect local spawning grounds, nursery areas and estuaries that only occur within about 20 miles of the coast and would allow fishermen to have a voice in enhancing the productivity of local stocks.”
To Bullard, Ames said, “The thing we found out in the lobster zone plan is that people took responsibility for the fishery in their zone. They had input into it. The state received their information well and implemented a lot of the things they suggested. That’s a valuable relationship. They’re only advisory groups but it created an atmosphere where fishermen looked at science and management as tools that helped them have a more successful business. It didn’t mean that Joe Blow was going to get all the product. It simply meant they were getting something better for the whole system.”
Ames said that managers must consider the dynamics of recovery not for single fisheries that are depleted, but for the suite as a whole.
“One year we get a lot of this, the next year we get a lot of that,” Ames said. “And it’s like watching the biological succession in a field, where you get a lot of grass and end up with a lot of trees. There’s a whole suite of species that start filling in. That’s some of what we’re seeing.”
Ames said the recovery of the prey base is important for the recovery of cod and other groundfish. Juvenile cod, he said, prey primarily on invertebrates. But when they start to mature, their diet shifts to fish with a high lipid content, such as alewives and herring, for extra energy.
PERC’s Aaron Dority told Bullard that, in the 1990s, there was more fishery diversity in the area. Today, he said, fishermen are almost exclusively dependent on lobster.
“The disappearance of groundfish is a major thing to pay attention to,” Dority said.
Dority said that, while there appears to be some recognition at the NMFS level of local groundfish populations and aggregations on a finer scale, there seems to be some reluctance on the part of managers to address the findings because of the implications for management.
“We need to start adapting to the new information we have now,” Dority told Bullard. “A lot of us are concerned, here in eastern Maine, that local spawning aggregations have all but disappeared.”
The focus now is how to bring those fish back, Dority said.
“But as they come back, they won’t stay if we’re still managing the same way that we are today,” Dority said.
“There’s a major fishery access problem right now,” said PERC’s Pat Shepard. “Getting a groundfish permit now, if you don’t have deep pockets, you’re out of luck. These permits are prohibitively expensive for young people. The young people trying to get these permits, can’t. Most of them don’t want to right now because there aren’t any fish in eastern Maine, but as those stocks begin to rebuild, we need to have mechanisms in place so young fishermen have the opportunity to fish.”
Only 20 permits, of the approximately 1,200 groundfish permits in the Northeast, belong to people in eastern Maine, said Shepard.
“[When] the fish come back in any large amount, we don’t even have a seat at the table, as far as groundfish,” said Shepard.
But Ian Bricknell, a professor of marine science at the University of Maine, said he’s more pessimistic about a groundfish recovery to its state before the resource’s collapse.
“I think we’ve changed the ecosystem forever,” Bricknell said. “I think we’ve lost those big, late-spawning, highly reproductively successful cod, and replaced them with much earlier-maturing fish that are less successful per pound of fish. We may be seeing a fundamental change.”
A couple of decades ago, said Bricknell, codfish averaged 10 pounds, a size that produced millions of eggs.
“Those genes may have gone,” Bricknell said. “We fished for the big fish for 150 years. We’ve actually selected for smaller and younger, so we may have to think very differently about how to manage that population to select for larger fish….I don’t think we can be sure it will bounce back on its own without some help.”
In whatever manner the fish rebound, Dana Rice of Gouldsboro said that NMFS and the states must tend to the still-young permit-banking system to ensure that fishermen in small harbors get a chance to go after groundfish as they rebound. He proposed a mechanism to refine the system in way that might ensure that all of the quotas don’t end up in the hands of a few: “Every time the bigger guy buys out the little guy, put a conservation tax of so many pounds of fish that goes with that permit and transfer it back to local area bank,” Rice said.
“Do we want the fishery owned by five people? Do we want there to be a future? And who decides that anyway? And do we get a vote in that? I take that very seriously. Is this Adam Smith’s invisible hand, that whatever happens, happens? Or should this be a public debate, a fair, civic discussion that people talk about?”
At that meeting and others along the coast, Bullard said he wanted to hear from stakeholders about the major issues facing the fishing industry and thoughts on how a successful industry could be structured.
At the time of the Ellsworth meeting, Bullard had been on the job for less than three weeks. “All you guys know a lot more about this than I do,” he said. “I’m trying to learn. The best way to learn is from people who know more than I do, which is not a small sample.”
John Bullard, new NFMS regional administrator. “Do we want the fishery owned by five people? Do we want there to be a future? And who decides that anyway? And do we get a vote in that? I take that very seriously.” Laurie Schreiber Photo.
A native of New Bedford, Mass., Bullard joined NMFS after retiring as president of the Woods Hole, Mass.-based Sea Education Association. From 1993 to 1998, he was a member of the Clinton administration, leading NOAA’s first Office of Sustainable Development and Intergovernmental Affairs. There, he created programs to assist fishing families in New England, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. At the state and regional level, he helped create a marine spatial plan as a governor-appointed member of Massachusetts’ Ocean Advisory Commission.
From 1986 to 1992, Bullard was mayor of New Bedford.
At the listening session, Bullard recalled the groundfish crisis of the 1990s. “I think this crisis is even worse than what we were looking at in the ‘90s,” he said. “Because I think stocks are not only in worse shape, but I think the causes are more difficult to overcome. Back then, I think it might have been a one-dimensional problem – overfishing. You stop overfishing, it’s pretty simple, the fish stocks rebound. Georges Bank is this wonderful fish factory. You combine the Labrador Current with the Gulf Stream on Georges Bank and you get biomass like crazy. It’s this unbelievable gift of God. And now we’re messing with it. Something’ going on out there that I don’t think we fully understand and we’ve got to pay more attention. I think it’s a higher degree of difficulty.”
Fishermen and environmentalists told Bullard that, in general, NMFS must pay attention to changes in the marine environment. They said they’ve seen many changes in marine life and habitat in recent years. James “Howdy” Houghton of Bar Harbor said the summer temperature at the bottom of Frenchman’s Bay measured 45 degrees five years ago, but recently measured 60 degrees.
“Things are changing fast,” said Houghton.
“We have to be vigilant,” said Steve Perrin of Bar Harbor. Perrin said his particular area of study is Maine estuaries. “Estuaries are the vegetable gardens that support a lot of fisheries,” he said. I think we’ve got to be apprised of what’s happening as soon as possible, not 10 years from now when a report comes out.”
“I think anybody in this room who has spent any time on the water will tell you there have been huge changes,” said Rice.
Rice said NMFS’ mechanisms in place now for data collection will be inadequate for the dynamic changes going on in the marine environment. And he said that NMFS must do a better job of listening to the people on the water.
“I see people in this room coming to meeting for a lifetime and telling their personal experiences on the water. The answer we get back from NMFS is, ‘That’s empirical evidence,’” Rice said. “That has got to chang. Whatever you can do to change that mechanism, please do it.”