Surf Clam Fishery Within Proposed Groundfish Closures

PORTLAND, ME—Proposed groundfish closures under consideration by the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) could, if implemented, be bad news for the surf clam fishery. Surf clams are mechanically harvested in deeper water.

NEFMC received an email, Nov. 25, from David Wallace of Cambridge, Md.-based Wallace & Associates, which represents the clam industry operating in southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Wallace wrote that if proposed habitat management closure areas on Nantucket Shoals and Georges Bank are implemented without an action to protect the clam fishery, then one year after implementation, “the clam fishery will be closed and hundreds of clam-shucking factory workers will be out of work, along with some boat crews and the folks who support those boats and plants.”

The letter adds, “Soon the clock will begin running and we need to have a resolution in place before the time runs out.”

At NEFMC’s December meeting, Wallace explained, “We find ourselves in a precarious position. We will be in a position where the small-boat operators in that work on Nantucket Shoals will be frozen out of almost all of the areas where there are significant quantities of surf clams. On Georges Bank, there’s a large portion of the area proposed to be closed that has a significant amount of surf clams and is right in the middle of the only known large portion of surf clams on Georges Bank.”

“We need to move forward with a framework for the surf clam and ocean quahog industries, and identify the technique and the data that this council is going to be able to utilize in order for those fisheries to move forward,” agreed Cape May, N.J.-based Atlantic Capes Fisheries’s corporate director of sustainability, Peter Hughes. “They are hugely important fisheries in the New England region, and I think it’s imperative that we move forward at the greatest speed possible.”

In the end, NEFMC voted on list of priorities to work on for 2016 that put this issue toward the bottom.