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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 3
November 2010
NE council seeks skate wing emergency action
NEWPORT, RI – Responding to desperate cries for help from industry, the New England Fishery Management Council has asked the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to take emergency action to increase the skate wing possession limit to “ensure that optimum yield is reached in the skate fishery.”
The council also asked its skate plan development team (PDT) to prepare an analysis of first-quarter landings and discards, which it will review in November, “to make sure” that the current discard estimate for skate wings is as “accurate as possible.”
Effective Sept. 3, NMFS reduced the skate wing possession limit from 5,000 pounds to 500 pounds after determining that landings had reached 80% of the available 20.3-million-pound 2010 wing quota. The 80% mark is the trigger point in skate Amendment 3 for the possession limit reduction.
Part of the problem apparently stemmed from the fact that Amendment 3, with its 5,000-pound wing limit, went into effect on July 16, but the fishing year began on May 1 under the old 20,000-pound wing limit.
“So 60% of the total allowable catch (TAC) was taken before we were actually able to implement the 2010 specifications,” said NMFS Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul.
As a result, the 80% landings trigger was reached a month-and-a-half later, resulting in the 500-pound wing limit, which effectively ended the directed fishery and left the remaining 4 million pounds of the quota for bycatch.
Fishermen immediately protested and were united in their call for action by the time the council met Sept. 28-30 in Newport.
Attorney John Whiteside of Mickelson Barnet in New Bedford spoke first, representing Marder Trawling Inc.
Whiteside said the 500-pound possession limit had “resulted in the loss of hundreds of jobs,” and reopening the directed fishery would have an instant “positive economic impact on communities devastated by the downturn in the economy.”
“Although I’m here on behalf of Marder Trawling, their position is not unique,” said Whiteside. “Every single individual I’ve spoken with in the past four weeks who is involved in processing, shipping, or catching skate wings has said essentially the same thing – that this council needs to seek immediate, emergency action to reopen the skate wing fishery.”
Besides arguing that skates in general were far more abundant than the council realized, fishermen and industry representatives all said the 49.6-million-pound discard mortality estimate used in Amendment 3 to set 2010 and 2011 specifications was much too high, and Whiteside said the directed wing fishery could be reopened simply by shifting a portion of the discard estimate into the allowable landings column.
“This council knows there are no discards in the directed fishery for skate wings, and in the indirected fishery, discards are low due to sector management,” he said.
Steve Barndollar of Seatrade International said the 500-pound limit had seriously impacted Seatrade’s business.
“We’ve eliminated 50 jobs just in our own plant in New Bedford because of this,” he said.
Barndollar urged the council to revisit the specifications.
“Think about the job losses here. Look at the new data that’s available,” he said.
Ron Smolowitz of the Fisheries Survival Fund, who was at sea the previous week testing a new scallop dredge with industry members, was struck by the “huge amounts” of skates the crew encountered. He asked the council to consider the impact of skates on other fisheries.
Citing one specific example, he said, “One of the things to be aware of is that winter flounder, besides going into the estuaries to lay their eggs, also lay eggs out on the bottom where skates are. These skates are devouring winter flounder eggs.
“If we’re talking ecosystem management, maybe we need to increase the catch of skate so we can bring back winter flounder,” Smolowitz said.
Skates and monks
Wholesale seafood dealer Andy Baler of Nantucket Fish Co. in Chatham, MA explained the impact of the skate wing reduction on his own community.
“Chatham has been one of the largest landing ports of skates in the day-boat fishery for the last 10 years,” he said. “Skates have been our bread and butter, and we don’t have any butter anymore.”
Baler, too, said abundance was not an issue.
“This summer, the boats would be back at the dock at 9 in the morning because there are so many skates,” he said.
Under the 500-pound possession limit, fishermen wouldn’t even be able to land the four million pounds left in the 2010 quota, let alone any additional poundage if estimated discards were added back into the landings limit, he said.
Furthermore, the 500-pound possession limit would dramatically impact the winter monkfish fishery. Boats from Chatham run 70 miles in bad weather to reach monkfish grounds and count on skate wings to make the trip pay off, Baler said.
“Those skates were worth a dollar a pound last year. We need to have that ability to land more skates. We need to make an adjustment now before it’s too late for the industry and before it’s too late for the small-boat fleet, which is having a hard time surviving,” Baler said.
Skate and monkfish fisherman Ted Platz of Newport also emphasized the intertwined nature of skates and monkfish.
“We have not been able to get our (trip limits) in the monkfish fishery since 2008 with any regularity, and the reason is that skate are so omnipresent on the bottom that they close our nets,” he said. “We in fact are targeting monkfish and catching more skate than monk. Think about that.”
With the 500-pound skate wing limit, Platz said, “We’ve shot the monkfish fishery and the skate wing fishery at the same time.”
Quicker action needed
Platz called attention to the staggering difference between the acceptable biological catch (ABC) of 90.6 million pounds for skates for the 2010 and 2011 fishing years and the total landing limit (TAL) of 20.3 million pounds for the wing fishery. (The bait fishery was allocated 10.2 million pounds.)
“We’re talking about a 75% reduction for scientific and management uncertainty, and we’re talking about a 50% discard mortality rate. We’re shooting in the dark here with these numbers here,” he said.
Platz didn’t think the science was bad, however. To the contrary.
“I agree that we have the best scientists in the world. It’s good science,” he said. “But it’s too old. When you have science that’s this old, it doesn’t matter if it’s good.”
According to Platz, trawl surveys showed a spike in winter skate biomass – the primary component of skate wings – in 2008. The spike continued into 2009 and 2010, but “we’re being held to numbers from 2008,” he said, “so of course we caught 80% of the TAC.”
Platz believed the problem was solvable by getting new science into the hands of the council within three-to-four months and then having the council and NMFS push through an appropriate framework adjustment within six months so that changes could be implemented within nine months total.
“If we had the 2009 trawl survey data here to work with and we could have made adjustments to this fishery, you wouldn’t have all these upset people here and you wouldn’t have the economic disaster you have on your hands now,” he said. “I think the answer is getting the science into the system faster. The science is good. It’s just old. And that’s what’s killing us.”
Council acts
The council listened to this testimony and then went on to discuss other subjects. But before breaking for lunch, Massachusetts council member Rip Cunningham asked to revisit the skate problem.
“We had some lengthy public input, and from what I heard, people are searching for some avenue for us to take to resolve this issue,” he said. “I just don’t think we can shrug our shoulders and walk away from it.”
With that, Cunningham made the motion requesting emergency action and a re-evaluation of data by the PDT. The motion passed 14-to-3.
In an Oct. 9 letter to Kurkul transmitting the request, council Executive Director Paul Howard said the council specifically “requests that NMFS reassess its decision to trigger the 500-pound skate wing possession limit and, if warranted, consider initiating emergency action to temporarily adjust the skate wing possession limit and enable the fishery to harvest 100% of the 20.3-million-pound total allowable landings by the end of the fishing year, April 30, 2011.”
Howard also noted the council had directed its skate PDT to reassess discard estimates and advise the council as to how the new estimates would affect the skate specifications for the 2010 fishing year.
“If discards have declined as industry reports, then it may be possible to continue the directed skate wing fishery further into the fishing year than was anticipated,” wrote Howard. “If the findings are unfavorable, the 2010 TAL would not be adjusted.”
Howard indicated that there was little risk to the resource.
The skate plan includes “accountability measures that would be invoked in 2011 if either the ABC or TAL is exceeded in 2010,” he explained.
Janice M. Plante
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