Sunday, December 17, 2017

NEW ENGLAND COUNCIL CONSIDERS HERRING'S ROLE IN ECOSYSTEM


For over the past decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that traditional single-species management, which considers the harvest of each species in a vacuum, and not in the context of entire ecosystems, is not the best way to manage fisheries, particularly fisheries for forage fish—the fish that everything else, including the most valued commercial and recreational species, feed on.

Although there may be exceptions, forage fish generally have very low value, and to be profitable, must be prosecuted on a high-volume basis.  Thus, we see the menhaden fishery land nearly 1.75 billion pounds of product, that’s worth a mere $181 million dollars—just 10 cents per pound.  That’s a lot of fish being sold for very little money, which will end up as food for farmed fish in China, instead of for striped bass, king mackerel and humpback whales in the waters of the U.S.

While menhaden are an important forage fish along the entire East Coast, but it’s easy to argue that up in New England, it’s importance is eclipsed by that of Atlantic herring.  

Herring support a fishery, too.  It’s not as big as the one for menhaden—a little less than 138 million pounds are landed—and the fish are a little more valuable—about 21 cents per pound—but still falls well within the “high volume, low value” category.

But herring aren’t low-value in the New England ecosystem.  They are critical forage for bluefin tuna, as well as for more mundane, but still valuable species such as striped bass and cod.  And when the herring aren’t around, the bigger fish that eat them, and are in turn sought by fishermen, often aren’t around either.


John Pappalardo, executive director of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, says that

“Our guys are not fishing the way they did 12 years ago around the Cape because those fish aren’t there because the bait isn’t there.  We live in a migratory corridor here.  We depend on the bait to be there.”
The region’s fishermen, both commercial and recreational, have asked the New England Fishery Management Council to draft a regulation that would force the big herring trawlers to fish farther offshore, and prevent them from impoverishing the inshore ecosystem.

It’s a controversial request, not only because of the inevitable opposition from the big trawl operators, but because it involves the much-debated topic of “localized depletion,”

“a reduction of population size, independent of the overall status of the stock, over a relatively small spatial area as a result of intensive fishing.”
Thus, intensive forage fish harvest can result in localized depletion of a species occurring in one particular place, at one particular time, even though the overall stock of fish is extremely healthy.  That has led to the concept being challenged when brought up in a management context.  As one former member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, who has had to deal with the question at various meetings, has written

“So, some industry reps have successfully argued that it’s not ‘depletion’ or a conservation issue at all.  It’s simply a ‘gear conflict’ issue—big industrial boats impacting smaller boats.  By framing it in this way, they can argue that they have a right to be there as much as any other resource user.  I’ve heard industry reps say that no one group ‘owns the ocean.’  That may be true.  But if that’s the case, one resource user shouldn’t be able to ruin things for the rest of us…this IS a public resource.”
The good news is that on December 5, the Council responded to the Cape Codder's concerns by releasing a draft Amendment 8 to its fishery management plan for Atlantic herring for public comment.  Of the Amendment’s ten options, nine (the tenth is status quo management) would each

“establish a long-term acceptable biological catch (ABC) control rule that ‘may explicitly account for the herring’s role in the ecosystem and address the biological and ecological requirements of the stock.”
That’s a big deal.

Regulations—which is what would result from a control rule—that would “explicitly account” for a forage fish’s “role in the ecosystem” were exactly what folks hoped would come out of last month’s menhaden meeting.  While there’s still a chance that will happen in the future—menhaden-specific ecosystem reference points are still being developed; the rejected interim reference points were far more generic—seeing the same issue crop up in the case of Atlantic herring makes it clear that managers still see value in the concept, applied to other forage species.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that such a control rule will be adopted; the big trawl operators will be pushing hard for status quo.  They’re the folks best positioned to bring money and lobbyists and political connections to bear on this issue—and if we’ve learned anything from the Gulf recreational red snapper reopening and the New Jersey summer flounder debacle, it’s that money, lobbyists and political connections, rather than good science, is what matters with the folks currently holding the reins in Washington.

But the very fact that the New England Fishery Management Council, a council that has historically lagged all of the others when it comes to conserving fish stocks, is looking at Atlantic herring in an ecosystem  context gives some reason for hope in a year that has seen a number of U.S. fish stocks take serious body blows from a newly erratic management system.


This is an issue worth following, worth commenting on, and worth supporting, and may represent a little good news at an otherwise dismal time.

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