Who Should Manage the Fisheries?
An Alternative Approach in Northern New England

by Nick Houtman, Univ. of Maine Department of Public Affairs
Kathleen Lignell, Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant

For 200 years New Englanders have governed their communities through the grassroots tradition of annual town meetings. Now lobster fishermen Down East, who are concerned about the future of the region's most valuable fishery, have undertaken comanagement practices to govern their own industry as well.

With the blessing of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, lobster harvesters have embarked on "bottom-up" resource management and stock assessment that are being jointly developed and implemented by industry and regulators. And the Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant Program is in the thick of all this activity. Comanagement would not be possible, however, if the Maine State Legislature had not been persuaded that comanagement was a good idea and passed a law in 1996 allowing the lobster industry to select zone councils to manage three things: number of traps on a line, a trap limit, and the times fishing will be allowed.

Where Have All the Fish Gone?

In the Northeast, the once-plentiful supply of haddock, cod, and yellowtail flounder - bottom-feeding "groundfish" that were once the staple of the region's fishing industry - has declined to the point where fishing for those species has been severely curtailed. In the Gulf of Mexico, overfishing and the use of shrimp nets may have nearly depleted the red snapper fishery. In the Chesapeake Bay, the oyster population for which the bay is famous is at an all-time low. And in the Pacific Northwest, salmon are on the verge of extinction.

Meanwhile, Down East lobstermen have seen their catch rates reach record highs in recent years. To preserve their 200-year-old industry, lobstermen in Maine practice a number of conservation measures: minimum and maximum carapace size, V-notching and throwing back of all egg-bearing females, prohibition against taking V-notched lobsters, trap limits, and no hauling on Sunday or after sunset during June, July, and August. But lobstermen with an interest in their valuable resource are continuing to make hard decisions that will affect ways the lobster fishery can be sustainable in the years ahead.

What Is "Bottom-Up" Management?

Increasingly, fisheries managers are drawing criticism for failing to conserve the resources with which they have been entrusted. One of the basic problems is that fishermen tend to see the rules promulgated by scientists and regulators as ineffective and unrealistic, and consequently they have fought them effectively all too often. As a result of this long-term impasse, there is increased interest in industrialized countries worldwide in finding new ways to manage fisheries that involve more input from the fishing industry and ceding some management power to user groups and coastal communities.

Social scientists at the University of Maine (UM), with support from the Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant program, have been at the forefront of this so-called "bottom-up" management movement. They have argued that fisheries are complex and chaotic systems that can only be managed by protecting environmental parameters on a local level. This necessitates more decentralized, community-based governance.

The lobster fishery is unusual in that it has been practicing comanagement for many decades. In Maine, the regulations developed for the lobster industry have been the result of heavy lobbying by the lobster industry itself. This has resulted in rules that are not only effective in conserving the lobster, but also strongly supported by the industry itself. Any fisherman who takes illegal-sized lobsters, V-notched lobsters, or egged lobsters will not only have trouble with the wardens, but also with his neighbors.

The lobster comanagement program is an outgrowth of this tradition of involvement of the industry in management. Since the 1950s, lobster fishermen have been interested in a trap limit, and many different trap limit bills have been introduced into the legislature. None of these bills had enough support to pass, since there was no agreement on how many traps should be fished. In response, the legislature passed a comanagement law in the spring of 1995 that would be governed by a council elected from among the lobster license holders in each zone. Temporary zone councils began operations in July 1996; and permanent zone councils will be in full operation by January 1997. By a two-thirds' vote, the fishermen in each of these zones will be able to promulgate regulations on the number of traps on a line, and the times fishing will be allowed.

One of those most in favor of comanagement for the lobster industry is Robin Alden, the current Maine Commissioner of Marine Resources. Last March, at a standing-room-only session on lobster zone management during the annual Maine Fishermen's Forum, over 400 people listened to her stress the "need for regulation to come from within the industry." Alden has been an advocate of comanagement since her days with Sea Grant when she organized the first Maine Fishermen's Forum in 1976 and during her two decades of leadership as editor of Commercial Fisheries News.

Alden has spent untold hours convincing fishermen that local, "bottom-up" management of the fisheries is a viable alternative to traditional, "top-down" government regulation of the state's centuries-old fishing industry. The leadership of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, the Down East Lobstermen's Association, and the Marine Resources Committee of the state legislature have strongly supported this management plan.

At present, the so-called "Lobster Zone Management Bill" has not gone into effect, and there is a good deal of speculation about its impact on the industry. Now that restrictive trap limits are a distinct possibility, many fishermen - primarily those with large gangs of gear - are raising opposition to the bill and arguing that the "part-timers" will pass a trap limit for the various zones that will put them out of business. Some part-timers for their part are afraid the full-time fishermen will insist on time rules that will make it impossible for them to fish at all.

In an effort to discover and document the effect of this law, Jim Acheson, UM anthropologist, and Jim Wilson and Ralph Townsend, UM economists, will be undertaking a Sea Grant research project on comanagement in the Northeast. They will document how the Lobster Zone Management Project is implemented in each of the seven proposed zones over the next four years. The group will also study the effects of comanagement rules that have been put into effect in three fisheries in Atlantic Canada.

Reversing the Trend

Acheson has termed the state's proposed plan for lobster zones "a radical piece of legislation in one sense. This is the first time any state has handed over control to the people, which reverses the trend of migration of power to the top." According to Acheson and Wilson, the concept of "bottom-up" resource management and stock assessment calls for an approach that is jointly developed and implemented by both industry and regulators.

Acheson and Wilson ought to know what they're talking about, since they were both involved in implementing the state's Lobster Zone Management Law, which many think will prove to be a watershed piece of legislation. The implementation committee was charged by Marine Resources Commissioner Alden with dividing the coast into zones, writing the rules concerning the operation of the zone councils, specifying voting procedures, and ensuring the law went into effect by July 1, 1996.

Wilson, who played an important role in organizing the display-style fish auction in Portland, Maine, in the 1980s and developed the U.S. brief for the World Court case on the international boundary on Georges Bank, was the chair of the implementation committee for the newly enacted Lobster Zone Management Law.

Acheson, Townsend, and Wilson have also been involved in other practical aspects of lobster management at the federal level. Wilson led a project charged with writing Amendment Five to the Federal Lobster Plan, which was submitted to the New England Regional Fisheries Management Council in 1993, while Acheson and Townsend have documented the effects of the long tradition of resource conservation in Maine's lobster industry since the 1930s.

Sea Grant Supports Bottom-Up Lobster Research

Comanagement councils are not going to appear overnight. Nevertheless, as they develop, they will have the same thirst for information exhibited by their predecessors. For their part, researchers may have to adapt by focusing on practical questions on a local or regional scale. In less mobile fisheries, such as lobsters and urchins, researchers will have to answer questions such as:

Just as harvesters are assuming responsibility for management, they are also becoming partners in research being done to answer these questions. UM marine ecologist Robert Steneck is heading a regional Sea Grant project that demonstrates how researchers and harvesters may work together in the future.

"Lobster is the single most valuable species in the fisheries of New England," Steneck says. "We need to know what is happening to those stocks, whether they have a couple of good years or a couple of bad years, or if the stocks are on the verge of collapse. More importantly, we need to know early enough, so there's something we can do about it."

Steneck has worked on lobster ecology for most of the past decade and says that harvesters need this information to reduce their risk in an uncertain future. "They may know that this year is good, but they need to know that the next two years are good. If stocks are low, they may need to tighten their belt for a couple of years."

Steneck and his colleagues Rick Wahle of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, Hunt Howell and Win Watson of the University of New Hampshire, Stanley Cobb of the University of Rhode Island, and Michael Fogarty of the National Marine Fisheries Service, are working with Pat White, formerly of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, and harvesters in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. They hope that the information they collect will allow scientists to predict the lobster harvest seven to 10 years down the road.

For now, the project is focusing on the settlement of planktonic lobsters, the inch-long pre-schoolers that swim in coastal waters and eventually settle to the sea floor. "Early events that happen in the life of many organisms, whether they be codfish or lobsters, seem to be the most important thing in controlling the organism's abundance," Steneck says. "This is where ecology and fishing come together."

Indeed, Steneck's research challenges some traditional thinking in ecology and fisheries management. "I think the old fisheries approach is on the way out," he adds. "It's the idea that all you need to do is look at a single species, at how many individuals and how many egg-bearing individuals there are. Now we have to seriously think about predator-prey relationships, larval survival, nursery grounds, migration, and so on.

"Back in the mid-1980s, I wanted to look at the role of traps on the ecology of lobsters. It turned out that 80 percent of the lobster's diet is trap bait. In doing this, it became obvious that the babies just weren't evident. This is New England's most important fishery, and we didn't know where the babies were," Steneck says.

As a graduate student of Steneck's in the mid-1980s, Wahle developed new techniques to count the number of larval lobsters settling to the sea floor. "When I started studying lobsters in 1985," says Wahle, "there wasn't anything about settlement, about what might influence a whole year-class of lobsters as they settle to the bottom and grow."

Since then, work by Wahle, Steneck, and others has demonstrated that selected rocky areas in near-coastal waters are critical for the settlement process. The number of young lobsters in any one area does not appear to change much from year to year, but differences among areas can be large.

Breaking Down Barriers
Between Scientists and Fishermen

Eventually, better knowledge of future lobster stocks may help scientists, regulators, and the industry to reach agreement on how to manage today's resources. "It's very hard to implement any rules that don't have the support of the fishermen," says White. "It's been an adversarial situation for years and years. We [harvesters] didn't believe their science, and they didn't believe things that we were saying. A lot of that is broken down now. The scientists are doing some dives up and down the coast, and we have no problem getting harvesters to take them out."

"This gives us an opportunity to learn from lobstermen," Steneck says. "They are out there working with the resource day in and day out, while most of us in science spend far too much of our time in offices staring at computer screens."

Steneck believes the current Sea Grant study may serve as a useful model for other fisheries. Attention would have to be paid to cultural and economic differences from one fishery to the next, but the same basic concepts of property rights, governance, resource ecology, and sustainability would seem to apply.

Nick Houtman is Science Writer for the University of Maine Department of Public Affairs.
Kathleen Lignell is Communications Coordinator for Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant.


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