F R O M T H E C R O W E ’ S N E S T
An Interim Shell Game
Atlantic herring is back at the top of the fisheries management news cycle. Again. Herring is a keystone species and especially in the Gulf of Maine. Here, it is a keystone species not only to other marine life, but to the economic life of Maine’s fishing communities dependent on a lobster harvest now built on Atlantic herring bait.
Over the last couple of decades the herring “discussion” has drawn an increasing number of interested parties. On the management side there has all along been the NEFMC, the ASMFC, the NSC. Stakeholders, beginning with the herring fishery-seiners, trawlers and weirs, also include bait dealers, canners and lobstermen. Later came stakeholders in the ground fishery, the whale watch vessels, and environmentalists’ lawyers protecting herring prey fish for whales and a range of other species.
The herring pie has remained about the same size, but the number of people at the table who believe they have the most compelling reason for getting the biggest slice has increased.
In recent years, management has come around to accepting the possibility that effective habitat management might deliver answers around stock size and sustainability – answers that, to date, have been elusive. The NEFMC has for the last three years made a considerable effort to develop a new herring management plan with baselines drawn from science and rounds of public hearings. This, it is hoped, will establish an Allowable Biological Catch (ABC), from which the conventional 3-year stakeholder Total Allowable Catch will then be evaluated.
Meanwhile, there is another pie largely ignored by all of this herring science and law. That pie, could prove to be much bigger than Atlantic herring, and over the decades, it has not been ignored by individual volunteers, community organizations and the Maine DMR. Maine’s vast watershed – the majority of the state – is ideal for alewives, aka river herring. Individuals have been dip-netting alewives over dams, or trucking 5-gallon buckets full of alewives past the dams and other obstructions that have otherwise prevented them from reaching traditional spawning grounds.
The DMR has supported various alewife restoration efforts. If the herring lawyers truly were environmentalists, they would long ago have put their efforts into the immeasurable potential of alewife restoration. Alewives are the original Gulf of Maine keystone species. Without them, Atlantic herring ABCs may be little more than an interim shell game.
