Scallop Closures Successful in
Some Areas

by Laurie Schreiber

Trisha De Graaf, DMR. “The pie is sliced into that many more pieces: 150 newly activated licenses came into the fishery last year. So these landings are not being fully appreciated by the guys who have traditionally been fishing this fishery over the last couple of years. ©Photo by Sam Murfitt

ROCKPORT – The Maine scallop fishery once supported a large number of vessels and was a significant component of many fishing businesses’ yearly income, prior to the mid-1990s. Since that time, declines in the resource prompted the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) to initiate strategies to rebuild stocks. Over the past five years, the fishery has utilized spatial closures as a rebuilding strategy with relative success.

Recent strategies include a 10-year plan of rotational closures.

Zone 2, the eastern half of the coast except for Cobscook Bay, was divided into 21 areas on three rotations. Certain areas were closed for last season and this season. Next year, when the full plan phases in, those areas will open and the rest of the downeast coast will close to fishing.

The DMR plans to survey the current closures and evaluate what’s in them, DMR resources coordinator Trisha DeGraaf told folks during a session on current management strategies, during the recent Maine Fishermen’s Forum.

Recent data show landings are increasing, she said.

“I don’t want to say the closures are directly related to this,” she said. “This is a cyclical resource, highly dependent on environmental factors. But it seems we’ve been able to have a good set of seed.”

For 2013, landings were the highest they’ve been in 13 years.

“We landed 424,000 pounds last season. That product was worth $5.2 million,” she said. “So we increased the value of this fishery quite a bit. We do believe we are going in the right direction. The value of the product is extremely high. And the benefits are being received by a lot of people. Overall, the fishery has responded to the measures you guys have put in.”

One man said Whiting/Dennys Bay rebounded nicely. “Last year, I was in there and there were lot more smaller scallops. I had to spend time picking through to get legal size. This year, it was beautiful legal stuff and much less small stuff. I really feel you could have allowed another day or so to get more of that.”

One fisherman said the statement regarding benefits was misleading. The prospect of increased resource caused a lot of previously inactive fishermen to go fishing, beginning in January 2013.

DeGraaf agreed: “Yes, the pie is sliced into that many more pieces: 150 newly activated licenses came into the fishery last year. So these landings are not being fully appreciated by the guys who have traditionally been fishing this fishery over the last couple of years.”Scallop fishermen previously inactive were attracted to the rebuilt areas, and many may have been displaced from other fisheries, she noted.

“A lot of people reactivated their licenses the last year,” said DeGraaf. “At a time when we’re trying to rebuild, it’s put that much more pressure.”As a result, the DMR implemented four emergency actions last year and eight this year to close certain areas to fishing. Emergency rule-making authority was used to prevent overfishing to the resource from occurring in the limited access areas, in order to protect the resource from complete depletion. Emergency rule-making is triggered when 30-40 percent of the biomass in limited access areas is harvested. That began occurring, during the current season, just weeks after the season opened.

It was hard to tell precisely how many more boats set out to fish for 2013-2014, she said. But it’s estimated there were about 400 boats, compared with the 200-250 boats in 2012-2013.

DeGraaf noted that emergency closures imposed on Cobscook Bay earlier this year, after about 135 boats swept in, will be discussed at the upcoming meeting of the Scallop Advisory Council, April 10, Brewer.“I encourage everyone to come to that meeting to talk about whether people want changes for next year,” she said. “We had a lot of calls, and I think people want to see things differently.”

The 2013-14 scallop season runs from early December through March. The fishery operates under a zone management system that includes daily limits, limited access areas, targeted closures, and the start of a 10-year rotational management plan.

Zone 1, from New Hampshire to Penobscot Bay, had a 15-gallon daily limit, 70-day season, and limited access areas.

Zone 2, from Penobscot Bay to Lubec, had a rotational management system, limited access areas, a 15-gallon daily limit, and a 70-day season. The DMR described the 10-year rotational management plan as similar to crop rotation on land. Areas of the coast are divided into three rotations. Seven areas were closed. Those areas will be opened for the 2014-2015 season, and the other two-thirds of the coast will be closed.

Zone 3, comprising Cobscook Bay and the St. Croix River, was a limited access area with a 10-gallon daily limit and a 50-day season.

In Zone 1, some areas that were closed for three years in 2009 for rebuilding were retained as limited access areas with one day per week of fishing, starting in January 2014.

DMR biologist Kevin Russell said that, prior to the 2009 season, there were three areas closed to scalloping, for a three-year period. These were reopened in 2012 as limited access areas. The three areas were Whiting/Dennys Bay, Machias Bay, and Gouldsboro Bay.

Russell said the DMR’s sampling surveys showed the closures were effective.

The sampling gear comprises a 7-foot-wide, New Bedford-style chainsweep drag, with 2-inch rings to retain smaller scallops. Stations are 500 meters apart and tows are 2 ½ minutes long. All scallops are weighed and measures. For a certain portion of the catch, Russell extracts and weighs meats individually, and measures shell dimensions.

The survey started in 2002. Between 2009 and 2010 – the fishing season before the closures, and after a year of closures, “There’s distinct change in size distribution just after one year” in Whiting/Dennys Bay, Russell said. There was a high abundance of seed.

“This is the highest density of seed we ever saw in Cobscook or anywhere else in the state,” Russell said.

The next survey in the Cobscook Bay region was conducted in 2012.

“Harvestable biomass continued to build,” although recruitment was down, Russell said. “All that 2010 sublegal abundance is pushed up into 2012: They’re four or five years old. So this is a very high harvestable density. That’s the highest we’ve ever seen on the survey.”

In 2013, one year after fishing in the region started up again, “You can see some effect of the fishing of harvestable abundance is getting lopped off. Some of the bigger scallops were removed; we’re not seeing as much recruitment. That’s got me concerned about Whiting Bay in the future.”

Machias Bay is a “much more diverse, scattered area than Whiting Bay,” he said. “We’ve been seeing quite a bit of recruitment coming in recently. Whether that was directly corresponding with the closure, I don’t know.”

Machias Bay is currently judged to be a good growing area, with some recruitment. Harvestable biomass went from 80,000 pounds in 2011 to more than 110,000 pounds mid-2012. And then, even after a year of fishing, the harvestable biomass was a little higher in 2013.

Gouldsboro Bay has been a historically productive area. But, “When we surveyed in the mid-2000s, we didn’t see a lot of scallops.” In 2008, the survey measured only 110 scallops. In 2011, it measured about 700 scallops.

“The total abundance has dropped, but there’s not a lot of recruitment coming behind,” Russell said. “It’s a very good growing area, but for some reason we didn’t get the recruitment in there.”Still, he said, harvestable biomass increased significantly, from 9,000 pounds in 2008, when it was an open area; to 80,000 pounds after two years of closure; to more than 120,000 pounds by time it reopened in 2012.

“So we optimized our biomass by just closing that for two years,” Russell said. But there was pretty high removal in there and biomass dropped to about 50,000 pounds after one year of fishing. “The take-home message,” he said, “was that closures helped at least two areas to rebound in two to three years.”

But one man wanted to know why it takes three-plus years for areas to rebound.

“We used to go in there year after year and see bigger catches than what we saw the last two years,” he said of Gouldsboro Bay. It would take only one year. Why is it taking so long to build up now?”

“The conditions were different,” said Russell. “Is there something killing these off as fast as they grow?” the man asked. “Have you done research on that?”

“I don’t think we squeeze blood out of a stone with these closures,” replied Russell. “We weren’t creating where there wasn’t anything before. I think the history is fraught with these episodic things.”

Another man wanted to know why Zone 1, the western half of the coast, has not seen the same level of success as Zones 2 and 3.

“Why did our limited access areas in Zone 1 fail?” he asked. “There’s no recruitment. We look it over and there’s nothing there. There was a lot of young stuff, but now it’s not there.”

Dr. Erin Owen, an assistant professor of biology at Husson University, described results of the world’s longest-term scallop closure, off the Isle of Man, in the middle of the Irish Sea. This is a permanent closure now about 30 years old.

“So a lot of the information we know about the impact of permanent closures is from this area,” Owen said. The permanent closure has increased the size and age of scallops, the biomass, larval production, growth rate, and settlement.

“But what we don’t know is, what are the benefits to the fishery, the benefit of larval export or spillover effects into adjacent fishery?” she said. Most fishermen there tend to drag the line because they see higher biomass right on the line.

The questions for Maine, she said, include whether the size, location, or time scale of closures matter.

“Local closures don’t necessarily mean local benefit,” she said. “Also, we might not see local closures having benefit over time. The potential difference in growth rates in different areas can vary. Also, connectivity among management areas – do seed come into this area from somewhere else? We don’t know.”

This year’s closed areas will open up for the 2014-2015 season, and every area not in a closure this year, will be closed next year, DeGraaf said.

“There’s only one-third open,” fisherman James West said of 2014-2015. “Our scallop season is going to be really short.” For example, he said, Frenchman’s Bay will probably be closed down within a week after fishing starts. The result, he said, will be that fishermen will be traveling out of their home waters to other open areas.

“I know you think you’re helping us out,” West said. “But you keep pushing boats here, then here, then over here. It’s like you’re hurting us. We don’t have the biomass, we don’t have whatever it is that’s bringing back the scallops. We have small areas that don’t produce. I guess our season will keep getting shorter and shorter until either the scallops come back or we don’t fish anymore.”

DeGraaf agreed that next year will be a problem.

“There’s going be a lot less bottom next year, and that’s also happening at the same time that effort is ramping up,” she said. “That’s going to be a big issue next year. So we’re going have figure out this spring how to reconcile that.”

“It’s always been a mobile fleet and it always should be a mobile fleet,” West said. Still, he said, the state should not be saying “you can fish here and you can’t fish there. That, to me, is not the way to run this fishery.”

Said DeGraaf, “We’re trying to build biomass in everybody’s backyard, so people will stay and fish in their backyard, to disincentive the mobility. But it always has been mobile. When you rebuild biomass, you’re going to go to the place where you get the best bang for your buck. And a lot of people ended up in Cobscook this year; there was really good fishing there. But goal of this plan is to rebuild biomass all along the coast. But it’s going to take a while to get there. It’s a ten-year plan and it’s being slowly phased in.”