A Decade of Change

It is hard to protect fish and fishermen simultaneously.  Fisheries management in the Northeast has long used a mechanistic approach: Count the fish of a certain species and limit the number harvested, and thus the fishery is managed.  the result to day is drastically reduced fish stocks and ineluctably damaged fishing communities.  While the recent federal Sustainable Fisheries Act mandates conservation of fish habitat, the seemingly intractable conflict between managing fish and managing the human beings who harvest fish continues to baffle state and federal agencies alike.  In the 10 years that Nor'easter has been published, significant change has beset the fishing industries of the Northeast.  The six Northeast Sea Grant programs attempted to assist both the fish and fishermen through research and extension activities during this period of transformation.

Despite fluctuations in groundfish stocks, commercial fishing in New England appeared to be modestly healthy through the 1980s. Management decisions by the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) roiled the waters occasionally but overall maintained a status quo that fishermen could live with. Then, in 1993, the tenor of fisheries management in the Northeast changed abruptly. The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) brought suit against NEFMC and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). CLF’s objective: to force those agencies under the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act to ensure conservation of sharply declining groundfish stocks. In response, the NEFMC proposed the first of several amendments to its groundfish management plan, Amendment 5. Amendment 5 sharply reduced fishermen’s days at sea, the amount of fish they could catch, and their bycatch rates.

Despite Amendment 5, the fisheries crisis continued to worsen. Antagonism between resource managers and fishermen, between scientists and fishermen, and among fishermen themselves grew in intensity as more and more species showed signs of overfishing. That traditional fisheries management under the NEFMC was not working became abundantly evident. A new course of action was needed.

Conservation and management regimes have changed fisheries in the Northeast, as elsewhere, with social as well as economic impacts.  Photo courtesy Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant.

Sea Grant Involvement

In the early 1990s, Madeleine Hall-Arber, director of MIT Sea Grant’s Center for Marine Social Sciences, conducted a social impact assessment of the new amendment. "Sea Grant has been looking at the people side of the fishing industry ever since the Magnuson Act was passed [in 1976]," she notes. The work of Hall-Arber and colleagues produced an insightful glimpse of the family and community structure of fishing ports and suggested that comanagement and self-organization might be alternative forms of fisheries management. "Currently, we’re investigating the potential for community involvement in fishery management decisions and ways to mitigate the impacts of change in those communities," she says.

Activities supported by other Northeast Sea Grant programs during the last decade have similarly reflected the fisheries issues dominant in their respective states. Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant concentrated on fisheries research and management techniques. Irv Kornfield, University of Maine zoology professor, conducted genetic research to determine relationships between groundfish populations in the Gulf of Maine. He examined DNA from archived haddock scales to understand the genetic correlation between haddock currently found on Georges Bank and populations harvested there earlier in the century. His work suggested that fishing pressure had reduced the number of reproducing females, limiting genetic variation. Thomas Kocher, a University of New Hampshire (UNH) zoologist, conducted similar genetic studies on winter flounder and Atlantic cod. Jim Wilson, resource economist, and Jim Acheson, anthropologist, both at the University of Maine, explored new methods for management of both marine resources and the fishermen themselves. They reviewed fisheries management processes from around the world to develop alternative economic and management models.

Soon the term comanagement was heard more often in the halls of government. The Maine legislature was the first to bridge the gap between research and policy when it enacted a law in 1995 establishing a system of lobster zone councils along the coast. In the first practical demonstration of comanagement in the Northeast, the councils were empowered to set trap limits and other management techniques on a zone-by-zone basis, subject to the oversight of the state’s Department of Marine Resources. Wilson, whose Sea Grant–supported studies of comanagement principles were drawn upon to draft the innovative law, noted that "what we are building is analogous to terrestrial levels of governance. Like a town meeting, we’re developing local governance of the ocean."

Rhode Island Sea Grant focused much of its research on fisheries technology. Joseph DeAlteris, Sea Grant fisheries specialist and University of Rhode Island (URI) fisheries and aquaculture professor, has been involved in many projects involving gear selectivity and bycatch modification. In the mid-1990s, he and his graduate students worked on development of a modified trawl to separate whiting from flounder, a species under more restrictive management. The trawl varies its sweep height so that whiting go into the net, but flounder pass right under. "Now that trawl is implemented by regulation in Massachusetts," notes DeAlteris.

During the past year, Rhode Island Sea Grant has supported DeAlteris’s work to develop acoustic release mechanisms for deepwater lobster traps. An acoustic signal sent from a lobster boat will release from the bottom a buoy stored with the trap. This guards against entanglement of right whales in the lines that traditionally connect the deepwater traps to surface buoys. "It eliminates any up-and-down lines in the water column," explains DeAlteris. The device is a modified "off-the-shelf, shallow-water oceanographic acoustic release," he continues, which will cost fishermen about $1000. "But it’s worth it if it prevents the closure of the fishery due to another right whale entanglement," DeAlteris says.

Kathy Castro, Rhode Island Sea Grant Marine Extension fisheries coleader, notes that one of that program’s most important current contributions to the fisheries management discussion is its seat on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council (ASMFC) Lobster Technical Committee. "This is one way to bring fishermen into improving the information used in the lobster stock assessment model," explains Castro. Rhode Island Sea Grant recently joined forces with the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association, URI, and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to secure Saltonstall-Kennedy program funds to support lobstermen as data collectors. "We use the money to buy the equipment, and the lobstermen donate their time for sampling and tagging lobsters," says Castro. "We must be at the table where technical and scientific decisions are made, because our researchers are working on these species," she emphasizes. "And then we must translate back to the fishermen why these data are needed and how they will be used."

MIT Sea Grant provided technical assistance to fishermen, particularly through the work of Cliff Goudey, director of the Extension Program’s Center for Fisheries Engineering. Goudey has worked extensively with Massachusetts fishermen, studying the behavior of different types of gear underwater via a submersible equipped with a video camera, testing gear at a wave tank facility, and exploring the conservation benefits of fishing for tuna with paired trawls. Recently, Goudey proposed a collaboration with other New England Extension specialists and with NMFS to better define data needs under the Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA), reflecting fishermen’s concerns about the new law’s provisions.

In 1994, Rollie Barnaby, Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant Extension associate, teamed up with fishermen’s associations, the Conservation Law Foundation, and other individuals deeply concerned about fishermen’s involvement in fisheries management decisions. They convened a workshop, which, with the assistance of a facilitator, allowed participants to find common ground on often contentious fisheries management issues.

From this early discussion, a new group emerged, the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA). Composed of representatives from environmental organizations and fishing industry associations, as well as resource managers, scientists, and others, NAMA has worked for nearly four years to develop a new conceptual model for managing fish and fishermen. Says Barnaby, "It took a few months but we’ve become a true collaboration. It’s been a good way to get inshore and offshore fishermen talking together."

Different Directions

To assist those whose businesses had been harmed by the closure of groundfishing areas in the Northeast, NMFS made funds available through Fishing Industry Grants in 1995 to enable displaced fishermen in the Northeast to find alternative ways to make a living. Sea Grant Marine Extension staff from Connecticut to Maine have lent their skills and expertise to many fishermen baffled by the intricacies of the Fishing Industry Grants program application. Nancy Balcom, Connecticut Sea Grant interim Extension leader, helped one Stonington fishing family to successfully submit a federal Fishing Industry Grant application for reoutfitting their boat to target deepwater royal shrimp. "It’s just a small alternative for some fishermen," notes Balcom. While Connecticut does have a long tradition of commercial fishing, Balcom predicts that the industry will continue to contract. "There’s no doubt it’s shrinking, but I do think that the core of fishermen will survive, because they are tough and innovative."

Connecticut Sea Grant also dealt with the state’s declining offshore fisheries by emphasizing development of aquaculture. Research and technical assistance resulted in new aquaculture curricula for public high schools, exploration of a seaweed aquaculture industry, and investigation of scallop aquaculture.

In New York, Mark Malchoff, New York Sea Grant Extension specialist, works primarily with charter boat and bait and tackle store owners, but he says these marine-dependent businesses face the same issues confronting commercial fishermen. He cites as an example his efforts to improve stock assessment calculations made by NMFS scientists for some valuable recreational fisheries. "NMFS comes up with a stock assessment based on numbers for commercial harvest, bycatch, recreational mortality, and recreational hooking mortality," he explains. Recreational hooking mortality refers to a fish that is caught and released and may or may not survive that encounter. "NMFS numbers for hooking mortality were way off," recounts Malchoff. This resulted in assessments that fishing business owners felt were not accurate. Malchoff’s subsequent research on actual hooking mortality rates was incorporated by NMFS into the 1998 stock assessments for bluefish and weakfish, two important recreational fisheries in New York.

Malchoff also works with marine-related businesses on Long Island, "basically explaining what’s going on with fisheries regulations," he says ruefully. He attends meetings of charter boat and bait and tackle store owners, providing information on how the regional fishery management council works, who their particular representatives are, and what sorts of data these businesses may be required to provide in the future. "I try to help them understand fisheries science and management language," explains Malchoff.

Sustainable Fisheries and Vanishing Fishermen

In 1996, Congress amended the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act with the Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA). In an effort to protect fish throughout their life cycle, the SFA emphasized protecting Essential Fish Habitat (EFH). The Act required the NEFMC to define EFH for all managed species and to note any adverse impacts to the habitat. According to the law, EFH includes all waters or submerged lands in which fish spawn, breed, feed, or grow to maturity. By any measure, that is a lot of ocean. Under a tight deadline, NEFMC and NMFS staff reviewed existing studies and historic sampling data to estimate EFH in the Gulf of Maine and other Northeast marine regions. By late 1998, the NEFMC had designated EFH for sea scallops, Atlantic herring, Atlantic salmon, and 15 species of groundfish. Overlay EFH areas in the Northeast, and the ocean is pretty much covered. Nearly all of the waters plied by Northeast fishermen provide habitat to one commercial species or another during some part of their lives. To identify necessary protected areas more precisely, the NMFS began studying Habitat Areas of Particular Concern, that is, areas used by more than one species that may be particularly vulnerable to degradation.

While NMFS compiled all these data, groundfish stocks continued to sink. In early 1999, the NEFMC made a hard decision: Fishing for cod essentially must stop. The offshore and inshore grounds on which fishermen set in the spring and summer months suddenly were made off limits. According to Commercial Fisheries News reporters covering that meeting in February 1999, upon hearing the decision, several fishermen in the room wept.

Whether the groundfish of the Northeast will rebound as fishing pressure is reduced is still the focus of much debate. What is clear is that with fewer fish there will be fewer fishermen. And the impact of that loss will long echo in the fishing ports of the Northeast.