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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 32 Number 9
May 2005
Council asks NMFS to take emergency action to address herring/haddock bycatch issues
NEWPORT, RI – In an effort to give the herring midwater trawl fleet a chance to operate during the 2005 fishing year without fear of being fined for small and unavoidable amounts of haddock bycatch, the New England Fishery Management Council voted at its late-March meeting to ask the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to take emergency action to address the situation.
The council requested that NMFS, on behalf of the secretary of commerce:
• Implement a 1,000-pound trip limit on haddock for all Category 1 herring vessels;
• Suspend the minimum size on haddock for Category 1 boats;
• Impose a “no sale” provision on haddock for human consumption for Category 1 boats; and
• Make these rules effective through Dec. 31, which is the end of the 2005 fishing year for herring.
The minimum size suspension and “no sale” for human consumption provisions are primarily intended to protect lobstermen so they won’t be in violation of groundfish rules if they find small haddock in their bait this summer and fall.
The council weighed the pros and cons of a number of possible regulatory vehicles and determined that emergency action was the only tool available to address the “time sensitive” nature of the problem.
“If we don’t ask for emergency action, that basically leaves the herring industry in the same ballpark as last year where they can’t have one pound of haddock,” said Rhode Island council member Phil Ruhle.
Maine council member Jim Odlin agreed that without some flexibility in the zero-haddock-possession rule, many herring boats wouldn’t be able to fish at all.
“I don’t think those guys can take the chance of having one or two fish cause them substantial fines,” he said.
Mary Beth Tooley, executive director of the East Coast Pelagic Association, said her group, which represents 17 vessels that are active in the midwater herring and mackerel fisheries, supported going in the direction of emergency action.
“It’s the only way we’re going to be able to have a fishery in 2005,” she said. “We appreciate the council’s effort to provide us with an opportunity to fish this season.”
NMFS decides
Now that the council has made this emergency action request, the ball is completely in NMFS’s hands. The agency will consider the council’s recommendations, but legally, it can take any action it deems appropriate to deal with the emergency. This is significantly different from the way it handles plan amendments and frameworks, where it can only approve, disapprove, or partially disapprove council measures.
The council emphasized that it wanted the emergency rule to expire at the end of this calendar year. Few council members seemed satisfied with the final trip limit recommendation but thought it was necessary to get the fleet through the current fishing year and buy time to develop a better solution.
Many, many haddock
The recent phenomenon of haddock showing up in herring midwater trawl catches is considered to be primarily caused by the extremely large 2003 haddock year class.
“The estimates of the size of this year class are still evolving,” said council staffer Phil Haring. “But right now, the best estimates are that it’s between 400-to-600 million fish.”
Furthermore, many fishermen are reporting that the 2004 haddock year class is sizable as well.
Bycatch committee Chairman Rodney Avila of Massachusetts reminded the council that haddock interactions were going to become a factor in numerous fisheries, not just herring.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “This is the same dog that’s going to bite everyone from behind.”
TAC issues
The council didn’t start off considering a haddock trip limit for the herring fishery. In fact, it opened its debate with an eight-part recommendation from the bycatch committee, which proposed using a total allowable catch (TAC) approach.
The committee recommended that the herring fishery be allowed to operate under a bycatch cap – not an allocation – equal to 1 percent of the 2005 Georges Bank haddock TAC and 1 percent of the 2005 target TAC for Gulf of Maine haddock. If a cap was reached, the directed herring fishery in the affected area would have been shut down for the rest of the fishing year.
But several council members had trouble with the TAC approach, and NMFS Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul didn’t think it could work.
“I agree that there’s a problem here that needs to be solved and there’s no easy solution,” she said. “But you’ve proposed a hard TAC with no effective way to monitor it. Until we have a system to monitor a TAC, it doesn’t make sense to have one.”
New Hampshire council member David Goethel said he thought the 1 percent bycatch cap was unenforceable.
“I can’t see how anybody’s going to count these fish,” he said.
Change in direction
Goethel turned the discussion by proposing to substitute the TAC cap with a 500-pound multispecies trip limit for Category 1 herring boats.
The shift in direction stunned many people, especially those who had been working closely with the bycatch committee and thinking in terms of a TAC cap.
Peter Moore of the American Pelagic Association strongly opposed the switch to trip limits.
“I think this is the wrong approach,” he said. “There may be some flaws in what we’re talking about for a dockside monitoring system, but you don’t want to get into trip limits. It’s totally undoable on the boats given the volume.”
Moore said the surge in small haddock should be viewed as “an incredible windfall” and that 1 percent of the TAC was “a miniscule part” of the enormous haddock biomass.
“What we’re trying to do as an industry is work within this bycatch cap cooperatively,” he said.
Jim Kendall, representing NORPEL, agreed.
“Culling out the fish is impossible,” he said. “The problem is these small haddock are acting in a pelagic fashion. That’s causing them to school in with the herring.”
Making it work
Tooley, however, was less troubled.
“It’s certainly not the ideal program for the fishery,” she said of the trip limit approach. “But we’re talking about what we can do to allow a fishery for 2005 where the vessels don’t always feel like they’re in jeopardy.
“If the limit were 1,000 pounds, I think we could make it work,” she said, “and it would give the council a chance to find out what’s going on.”
Maine council member Lew Flagg moved to change the 500-pound proposal to 1,000 pounds.
“I know 1,000 pounds seems like a lot, but our largest vessel can carry 1 million pounds of herring. One thousand pounds is a pretty stiff test for a vessel that can carry that much herring.”
Massachusetts council member David Pierce, who strongly supported the trip limit approach over a TAC cap, said, “My central concern is we need to solve the problem. Right now the limit is zero and it imperils the fleet. The better way to go is to give the vessel a trip limit. It will give industry a chance to avoid the haddock.”
Pierce also said, “I’m relying on industry’s cooperation, which has been excellent so far. I’m confident they’ll take every step possible to communicate with each other and not get themselves in a situation where they have high bycatch.”
Haddock only
The council voted that the 1,000-pound trip limit should be for haddock only, and the possession of all other regulated groundfish species would remain prohibited.
Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine expressed concern about the size of the trip limit, especially since it covered both Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine haddock.
“I think this is the totally wrong way to go,” she said. “I don’t think we want people having 1,000 pounds of Gulf of Maine haddock, and this would allow that to happen. I think it’s a real issue that we need to talk about more.”
Gear modifications
After wrapping up its decisions on the emergency action request, the council then voted to add “gear modifications” to the list of frameworkable measures in draft Amendment 1 to the herring plan. It also remanded the topic of gear modifications, including those made by the Fishing Technology Expert Working Group, to the herring committee “for further review and evaluation.”
“I think we need to look heavily in this direction for a lot of the answers,” said Phil Ruhle of gear modifications in general.
As for the trip limits, TACs, and other controls, he said, “We’re just trying to find a band-aid for this, and that’s not a good way to go. Band-aids always come off underwater.”
Tooley said the East Coast Pelagic Association was already moving forward on the gear modification front. Based on recommendations resulting from last December’s industry-sponsored gear workshop, the association initiated a gear modification research project that’s now in the design phase.
Not only will members be traveling to Canada in early June to view firsthand how gear modifications affect net functionality in a flume tank, the association hopes to have some modified nets “on the water in 2005,” Tooley said.
Moore urged the council to seek guidance from around the world as it investigates gear modifications.
“If we’re going to try to improve this fishery, which we support, we ought to be expansive about it and look beyond our own borders,” he said.
Janice M. Plante
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