The Cost of Counting Herring Fishery Bycatch

continued from December Homepage

Doug Grout, NEFMC member. “You don’t have to have it running 24 hours a day on these vessels, just during the haulback operations. That’s one way of cutting costs.” Fishermen’s Voice photo

Establishment of 100 percent observer coverage or onboard electronic monitoring among midwater trawlers in the Atlantic herring fishery is a primary objective, but cost to the industry is a central issue.

A number of speakers told NEFMC that it should at least continue to pursue electronic monitoring (EM).

CHOIR chairman Steve Weiner said EM would be a key tool that would either document net slippage, if it’s occurring, or validate herring industry claims that it’s not occurring.

“These are big boats with a lot of fishing power,” Weiner said. “They’re affecting all of us. When I come to these meetings, I represent the public. I represent the guys on the shore, whether they are fishermen, whale watchers, tackle shops. This council has let them down beyond belief. This is a stall. You’ve got to find a way to get this done. When you’re talking about electronic monitoring, we don’t need to run that camera 100 percent of the time. We need to focus on the haulback, and when you run it on all the trips, you’ll have 100 percent coverage.”

Weiner continued, “The public wants to know what’s going on with these boats. When CHOIR puts in a letter, every single one of those people are people who have grown up in the New England area. They’re seasoned, experienced people. They know what’s going on out there. We hear every time we come here, ‘What’s the big deal? These guys don’t have any bycatch. There’s no slippage.’ Baloney. We want some observer coverage on these boats.”

“It doesn’t need to be this complicated,” said Herring Alliance attorney Erica Fuller. “I think the whole room wants electronic monitoring and port monitoring. Initiate a pilot program, get better cost estimates, and try to get something on the water as soon as possible.”

“This is more delay,” said Patrick Paquette, a recreational fishing advocate from Massachusetts. “The shell game of observers in the herring fleet continues.”

“I agree, virtually everyone wants to see some kind of operational electronic monitoring,” said NEFMC member Michael Sissenwine. “It’s not to collect scientific data to stick in the stock assessment. It’s to ensure compliance. With that limited objective, I think it’s doable. My frustration is, we seem to be wrapping ourselves around the axle on this issue, without figuring out how to get an electronic monitoring pilot program up as soon as possible….We have to move forward with an electronic monitoring solution that’s focused on compliance….I think we’ve spun a lot of wheels on this industry-funded monitoring amendment, which neither the agency nor the industry seem to be able to afford.”

“We can address discards and slippage events with electronic monitoring,” said NEFMC member Doug Grout. You don’t have to have it running 24 hour a day on these vessels, just during the haulback operations. That’s one way of cutting costs. We were looking at costs for dockside monitoring, and that seemed high. If you have to monitor every single landing, I can see how that can be high. But I don’t think you need to monitor every single dockside landing….If you set it up that they don’t know when dockside monitoring will occur, it’s a random check, and if it’s 25 percent or 50 percent or whatever, I don’t think it will be particularly burdensome. The industry has already agreed in Amendment 5 to pay $350. So what we should do is look at what we can get for $350…and either validate or disprove what’s being reported on the water. I think we need to keep plugging away at this.”

The goal of increased monitoring in the herring fishery is to achieve accurate estimates of retained and discarded catch, and accurate catch estimates for incidental species.

Under the proposal, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) would pay for administrative costs, facilities and labor for training and debriefing, gear, certification, vessel selection, data processing, and a compliance and safety liaison.

The fishing industry would pay for program management and provider overhead, salary and per diem for training and debriefing, equipment, deployments and sampling, and all other costs.

With that split, for a Northeast Fisheries Observer Program observer, NMFS would pay $479 per sea-day, and the industry would pay $818 per sea-day.

For an at-sea monitor, NMFS would pay $530 per sea-day and the industry would pay $710 per sea-day.

Both the At-Sea Monitoring Program and the Northeast Fisheries Observer Program are overseen by the NMFS Fisheries Sampling branch at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass. The main difference between the two programs is that at-sea monitors collect a reduced set of data, thereby reducing training time, gear requirements, and internal support resources.

With regard to electronic monitoring—basically a system of cameras and recording gear—NMFS would pay $36,000 in year one for start-up costs, and operational costs of $97 per sea day. The industry would pay $15,000 in year one for start-up, and $325 per sea-day.

For portside sampling, NMFS would pay $479-$530, and the industry $5.12 per metric ton.

NEFMC member and industry representative Mary Beth Nickell-Tooley said the industry had high hopes for EM and shoreside alternatives, but cost estimates seemed high. A three-day fishing trip landing 300 tons would result in $1,500 in sampling fees.

“You get taken aback by those numbers,” she said.

NEFMC chairman Terry Stockwell, who also chairs the observer policy committee, said the committee was concerned about the cost to industry, not just for the herring fleet, but all fleets.

One NEFMC member suggested that, rather than having industry-funded programs within specific fishery management plans, the fishing industry as a whole pay a nominal amount into a fund that could then be administered for specific gear types on an ecosystem basis.