Cod Emergency Whacks Fishermen
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Gloucester’s working waterfront at dusk 11/14/14. A town whose name has been equated with fishing since the first fishing settlement was established here in 1631. A port of a traditional small boat fleet, homes and community. The American dream opportunity fishing has always offered is feared lost in the wake of a cod closure in the Gulf of Maine. Many, including fisheries council scientists, question a controversial experimental stock assessment and how it has suddenly become the final word on the cod stock. The cod closure will prohibit fishing on several other stocks in the same cod areas. Fishermen’s Voice photo
The emergency regulations are:
1. Time and area closures applicable to federally permitted vessels using commercial and recreational fishing gear capable of catching GOM cod;
2. A 200-pound GOM cod trip limit for both the common pool and sector vessels;
3. Changes to commercial fishing declarations prohibiting sector vessels declaring into the GOM Broad Stock Area from fishing in another broad stock area on the same trip;
4. Prohibition on the possession of recreationally caught GOM cod (applies to the entire Gulf of Maine); and
5. Revocation of a previously authorized GOM exemption that allowed sector vessels declared into the gillnet fishery to use more gillnets.
The rule implements these measures for an initial 180 days.
NMFS said the wholesale closure of the Gulf of Maine was considered; however, “we thought that the negative socio-economic impacts were not justified for the conservation return that could be realized for such an action,” NMFS said.
Bruce Tarr predicted socio-economic impacts to the industry in general and to specific ports would be “fairly extreme. What is the agency planning to do by way of seeking assistance to the industry?”
In a written statement, Bullard said, “We know these changes are not going to be easy for communities like Gloucester that have continually relied on cod. But, time and time again, fishermen and communities have shown that they are adaptive. While cod has been the mainstay for Gloucester and other New England ports, there was a time when halibut was also abundant and even caught frequently in Gloucester harbor – but conditions changed – so Gloucester shifted its focus to other species. Already in the past few years, cod has become less of an economic driver for Gloucester than it was. It has been replaced by lobster, herring and pollock. Our job as fishery managers will be to help fishing communities through these changing times.”
“How does trapping vessels in the Gulf of Maine help vessels avoid Gulf of Maine cod at all costs?” said Jim Odlin. “If we’re in the Gulf of Maine fishing, we are catching cod and we can’t leave so we have to continue to fish where we are encountering Gulf of Maine cod. I think it’s going to backfire.”
Hank Soule, sector manager for Sustainable Harvest Sectors 1 and 3, said he expected discard rates will skyrocket because fishermen will now be required to discard cod. Soule wanted to know if NMFS had analyzed that impact.
Some in the industry wanted to know if the impact of cod caught in lobster traps in closed areas had been taken into account.“There’s still an open request to the science center to evaluate lobster gear impacts on cod,” Bullard responded.
Patrick Paquette said NMFS should also look into the impact of midwater trawlers on spawning activities.“If we’re trying to stop the disruption of spawning activities, running midwater pair trawling gear across spawning aggregation is probably as bad a thing as we can do,” Paquette said. “You should expect a lot of protest if that activity is going to continue.”
According to NMFS, three objectives were used in evaluating areas for interim closures: Reducing fishing mortality by reducing GOM cod commercial and recreational catch; protecting core areas where the remaining GOM cod stock is believed to be located; and protecting areas of likely cod spawning activities.
“These objectives were analyzed in the context of not closing down the entire GOM so as to allow some harvesting of other groundfish stocks but still reducing mortality and fishing on cod” while the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) develops more permanent measures.
To achieve zero fishing mortality on cod “would require closing all fisheries in the Gulf of Maine, including those that do not target groundfish,” NMFS said.
“In selecting these areas, we analyzed where the majority of 2010 to mid-calendar year 2014 GOM cod catches have occurred,” NMFS said. “The basis for our analysis is that fishermen have fished where the stock is located and by selectively closing some of these areas, catch can be reduced and the standing stock protected.”
NMFS said it is aware of the potential of effort shifting to other groundfish stocks. “We kept open areas where the amount of non-cod species catch might be strong but the potential cod catch relatively low,” NMFS said. “In cases where co-occurrence of cod and other likely target stocks were high, the areas were closed to reduce cod fishing mortality and to discourage intentional targeting of cod or incidental take of cod while fishing for other stocks.”
NMFS said that, in order for GOM cod “to have a meaningful chance to recover, not only must fishing mortality be controlled, but the complex courtship and spawning process must be protected. To this end, we are also closing areas important to spawning and spawning potential. Because of difficulty in pinpointing spawning spatially and temporally, we used broad, larger areas for the spawning-related closures. The use of larger areas is expected to provide more protection for spawning activities than would smaller or disaggregated areas. This is because there is strong evidence that pre-spawning courtship and foraging, spawning activities, and post-spawning egress from areas can be substantially impacted by fishing activities and result in high fishery removals.”
NMFS said that by closing areas identified as producing a high proportion of cod catch and/or are involved with cod spawning activities, “it may be possible to
reduce GOM cod catch by a sizable amount—ranging from 68 to 82 percent for commercial and 73 to 81 percent for recreational catch, depending on which of the years from 2010 to 2014 are included in the analysis.”
The 200-pound GOM cod trip limit is meant to push fishermen to avoid catching GOM cod, NMFS said. “Overall, even if discards of GOM cod on individual trips increase somewhat as a result of this trip limit, the overall reduction of fishing mortality of this stock should be greater than if no trip limit was in place,” NMFS said. “However, we are hopeful that fishermen will take measures to avoid catching GOM cod by either avoiding areas of known cod concentration, using selective gear, leaving areas where cod are unexpectedly captured, and, when necessary, reporting cod discards. There are several uncertainties about how effort may shift in response to the closed areas and what GOM cod catch rates may be in the remaining open areas.”
The emergency rule also prohibits commercial fishing vessels in both the sector program and common pool that declare trips in the GOM from fishing in other broad stock areas, such as Georges Bank or Southern New England, on the same trip; and it extends the current prohibition on possession or landing GOM cod in or from federal waters by recreational anglers and federally permitted party and charter vessels to the end of the fishing year, April 30, 2015.
In a statement, Bullard said, “The Gulf of Maine cod stock, a historic icon of the New England fishery, is in the worst shape we have seen in the 40 years that we have been monitoring it. Abundance is only 3-4 percent of levels deemed sustainable for the stock.”
An assessment of GOM cod status was presented to the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) at its meeting a month earlier. The assessment, conducted this past summer by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in Woods Hole, Mass., said the stock continues to be overfished and overfishing is occurring.
Spawning stock biomass (SSB) in 2013 is estimated to be below 2,500 metric tons (mt), the lowest ever estimated. The estimate is just 3-4 percent of the SSB’s maximum sustainable level, which is calculated to be 47,184 mt or 69,621 mt, depending on which model scientists are using. Fishing mortality is estimated to be more than 6 times greater than maximum sustainable fishing levels.
“Fishing mortality is near all-time highs despite the fact that fishery catches are at the lowest levels in the time series,” the assessment says. “The Gulf of Maine cod stock is in poor condition.” For the current, 2014 fishing year, the allowable catch level of 1,550 mt, which was set by fishery managers through a three-year specification process, exceeds the updated overfishing threshold.
“Fishing year 2015 catches would have to be substantially decreased to avoid exceeding” overfishing levels, the assessment says. To rebuild spawning stock by 2024, the 2015 catch would need to be reduced considerably lower than 1,550 mt, the assessment says.
The assessment also saw a truncated age structure in the GOM cod stock. That is, there is a lack of older-aged fish, as well as lower overall abundance and decreased weight-at-age for the older ages in the population.
The assessment underwent a peer review by NEFMC’s scientific and statistical committee (SSC), which determined that significant reductions in fishing effort were needed to protect the cod stock. SSC’s preliminary acceptable biological catch recommendation for the fishing industry was 386 metric tons (mt) in 2015, down from 1550 mt this year.
As a result, NEFMC asked NMFS to take immediate steps to address overfishing of the cod stock.
NEFMC’s Groundfish Oversight Committee was scheduled in mid-November to begin working on the long-term measures to protect and rebuild cod.
Because the fishing year is half over, overfishing on GOM cod cannot immediately end, said Bullard. But, he said, “we can take firm steps, now, to try to prevent further stock decline.
“We know that these closures will have profound effects on small vessels that fish these inshore waters, particularly fishermen from New Hampshire and Massachusetts ports like Gloucester.
“At the same time that we are implementing these measures for cod, we are implementing a quota increase for a healthy groundfish stock, Gulf of Maine haddock. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the necessary protection measures for cod largely offset the benefits of the haddock quota increase.”
NMFS estimated gross revenues from groundfish are predicted to be $64.3 million for fishing year 2014; the emergency measures will reduce revenues by up to $1.6 million, taking into account potential revenue increases from the concurrent increase in the haddock catch limit. For Gulf of Maine haddock, which is not overfished and the stock condition has improved, NMFS increased the commercial fishery quota from approximately 676,812 pounds to around 1.3 million pounds.
“For the industry as a whole, the increase in revenue due to the haddock increase will help to slightly reduce the overall economic impacts of the needed cod protection measures,” NMFS said.
Some fishermen who saved their cod quota to optimize their profits, or are unable to get offshore to fish for cod, may be disproportionally affected by the action. However, said NMFS, since many of the measures being implemented were already discussed publicly during several council meetings, “we expect that many fishermen who had Gulf of Maine cod quota may likely have already fished it. However, if any fishermen still have available cod quota, they will be able to fish for cod in some inshore areas, with restrictions.”