IMPORTANT ASMFC ACTION REQUEST
Menhaden Hearing: Attendance and Comments Requested
The ASMFC is considering updates to the Menhaden fishery management plan that will leave more fish in the water for predators like Striped Bass and Bluefish, and update state-by-state quota allocations.
For those of you who have been on the water this fall, you’ve seen huge bunker schools and hopefully got to enjoy some of the EPIC blitz fishing! It’s been an incredible fishing experience and even better for the health of the marine ecosystem. When was the last time anyone saw humpback whales in Perth Amboy or up the Hudson at the GW Bridge?!
To keep the progress rolling, we need to lock in this success by establishing “Ecological Reference Points, (ERP)” accounting for the needs of all predators. Now is not the time to risk taking a step backwards. We also need to make sure that that there is an equitable distribution of the catch. One company, Omega Protein, should not be allowed to get 80% of the fish to grind up for pet food and Asian aquaculture feed. The bait sector deserves a larger slice of the pie.
This document, created by Menhaden Defenders, gives a background summary and covers all major talking points: Menhaden Defenders Background and Talking Points
Please click here to view all coast-wide meeting dates, times and locations: Menhaden Public Information Document (PID) for Draft Amendment 3 Hearings
If you are unable to make the meeting near you, written comments will be accepted via mail, fax and email until January 4, 2017. For this information please see page (2) of this document: Public Information Document (PID) for Draft Amendment 3 Public Comment
Thank you in advance for doing your part!
Menhaden Defenders is a great group of conservation minded anglers and concerned citizens who want to restore Atlantic Menhaden to sustainable levels. For more news updates concerning Menhaden please visit their website and become a member.
Official Numbers: Maryland’s 2016 Striped Bass Young Of The Year
The official numbers are out on Maryland’s 2016 striped bass young of the year, and they aren’t good. This late summer count of striped bass born during the past spring is calculated annually by Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources by hauling a seine through essentially the same areas of Chesapeake Bay, at the same time, year after year. The number of baby bass caught in the net is averaged and a final count for the year is eventually calculated. In 2016 it was 2.2 which compares to a long-term average of 11.86. In fairness striped bass spawning success in the Bay has historically varied considerably on a year to year basis. But it is the trend that is worrisome. Here is the average YOY trend by decade since the recovery began from the collapse of the late 1970s:
· 1987-1996 17.3
· 1997-2006 16.2
· 2007-2016 10.9
This is a decline of 37% since the height of the recovery that gave us the great fishing of the late 90s and early 2000s. But what is more alarming is that two of the poorest years for young stripers in the last 30 – 2016 and 2012 – occurred during the last 5 years. In fact the average for the last 5 years is just 8.81 or about half of what it was during the top of the recovery.
Clearly the direction is not good. We cannot change these numbers and the abundance or scarcity of big bass available to spawn and to fish for 10 or 15 years from now will depend on how we treat these fish as they grow. If we gill net them in Chesapeake Bay, then start cropping them off commercially and recreationally at 28 inches in size, there certainly will be many less large spawners than there are right now, and the quality of fishing will continue to deteriorate.
In truth we are not talking just about numbers here but of the future of wild striped bass and how we choose to manage this shrinking resource going forward. This fishery and the billion dollar plus recreational striped bass fishing economy is threatened by the current, regulatory philosophy that undervalues the quality of the fishery in favor of harvesting. At present these fish are managed primarily for their limited commercial value and as long as these fish have a commercial price tag on their heads their future will always be in doubt. Only by declaring and managing them as a game species will they have a secure future…… and that is the goal of Stripers Forever: insuring a healthy and robust wild striped bass fishery.
U.S. Retreats on Fish Conservation for 1st Time in 40 Years
October 14, 2014 – Brad Sewell
The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act turned 40 this year. And NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency that administers that law, reported coincidentally on Wednesday that forty ocean fish populations or “stocks” have now been rebuilt from depleted levels.
The prudent thing for NOAA fisheries to do at this point, one would think, is to stay the course. You would not expect that the agency would take this opportunity to weaken the guidance it gives to regional fishery management councils on making conservation and management decisions, like setting catch limits, right? But this is what happened yesterday. The agency announced that it had revised its “National Standard One” guidelines in order to give more “flexibility” to the councils.
To translate: flexibility means weakening in this context. It means allowing councils to set higher catch limits, thereby increasing the risk of overfishing and, in instances when a stock is depleted, slowing and possibly jeopardizing recovery. For example, the revised guidance allows catch level reductions to be phased in over several years, even if a stock is already overfished and the science indicates delaying catch reductions will increase the risk of overfishing. The revised guidance also provides more “flexibility” to undercount catch, to reduce conservation of individual species by grouping them with others, or to simply not manage species at all. And the agency confoundingly refused to define “adequate progress” in rebuilding a depleted stock—a finding that would trigger a revisiting of recovery efforts under the law—as including actually rebuilding the population level of the stock. This will allow stocks to linger at depleted levels, rather than requiring steps to be taken to ensure recovery.
This is the first time in forty years, since Magnuson was enacted in 1976, that the U.S. has weakened its fisheries conservation policy. Congress strengthened the conservation requirements in the law in 1996, adding requirements to rebuild depleted fisheries, because in too many instances, fishery managers used flexibility in the law to accede to pressure to allow unsustainable fishing. In 2006, Congress again strengthened the law to require catch limits to prevent overfishing. Most recently, in 2009, the Bush Administration strengthened the National Standard One guidelines to help implement the 2006 statutory amendments.
The stronger conservation requirements have paid off.
As NRDC’s 2013 “Bringing Back the Fish” report showed, nearly two-thirds of fish stocks placed in rebuilding plans had been rebuilt to healthy population levels or had made significant progress. Not only have 40 previously depleted fisheries been rebuilt to healthy levels, but the percentage of federal stocks known to be subject to overfishing has also dropped by more than half since 2006, from 20% to less than 10%.
The ecological recovery means economic recovery. In 2011, NOAA Fisheries estimated that rebuilding all U.S. fish stocks that year would have generated $31 billion more in sales, supported 500,000 more jobs, and increased the fishermen’s revenue at the dock by $2.2 billion.
Don’t get me wrong: there remains much work to be done. More than three dozen fish stocks (out of 233 tracked by NOAA Fisheries) remain overfished. Certain regions, like New England, the South Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, have more than their fair share of these still-beleaguered fisheries. Hundreds of fish species that are less economically-important but still ecologically-important remain poorly or not managed. Habitat damage that impairs recovery of fish populations and harms ecosystems, discarding or bycatch of unwanted fish and other marine life, and ensuring sufficient forage fish for larger fish and marine wildlife like whales, sea birds, and sea turtles are just several of the other fishing-related problems still awaiting adequate solutions. And climate change is already making its impacts felt in the nation’s oceans, with waters off New England warming faster than virtually any other monitored marine water body in the world.
The revision of the National Standard One guidelines is a missed opportunity to help address these challenges and to maintain continued progress in the evolution of the nation’s fisheries management policy. At a bare minimum, the agency should have done no harm, given the existing policy’s overall success in recovering many of our nation’s most economically important fish populations and the sacrifice that this has entailed for many fishing communities.
Instead, NOAA Fisheries has retrenched. This is a distressing signal for the future of U.S. fisheries, for the communities that depend on them, and for ocean health.
article source: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/brad-sewell/us-retreats-fish-conservation-1st-time-40-years
Mid-Atlantic Council Approves Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM)
AUGUST 10, 2016
VIRGINIA BEACH, VA – Today the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council unanimously approved a guidance document to facilitate the transition to an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAFM) in the Mid-Atlantic. The EAFM Guidance Document is designed to serve as an umbrella document that will enable the Council to coordinate ecosystem considerations across fishery management plans (FMPs).
The Council has been considering mechanisms to introduce ecosystem considerations into the fishery management process since the late-1990s. After a review of the various approaches used around the U.S., and extensive input from fisheries stakeholders through its visioning project, the Council decided in 2011 to pursue a transitional approach which would introduce ecosystem considerations into fishery management actions in a step-wise, evolutionary fashion. This approach is intended to allow the Council to meet its current requirements for the management of individual stocks while moving towards an approach that takes into account interactions at multiple dimensions of the environment and ecosystem.
“The EAFM Guidance Document responds to broad public interest in incorporating ecosystem considerations in the management of marine fisheries and will be a critical tool for the Council as it transitions from single-species management to a more comprehensive, ecosystem-based approach,” said Council Chairman Rick Robins. “One of the most important aspects of this approach is that it will allow for the evolution of our EAFM policy at a rate commensurate with the availability of the science to support it.”
The Council’s EAFM approach is organized around four major ecosystem-related issues: forage species, habitat, climate change and variability, and interactions. Development of the document was informed by a series of four workshops which brought together scientists, managers and stakeholders to discuss each issue and associated best management practices.
The EAFM Guidance Document and supporting documents are available at: www.mafmc.org/eafm
Article source link: http://www.mafmc.org/newsfeed/2016/mid-atlantic-council-approves-ecosystem-approach-to-fisheries-management-eafm-guidance-document
This has a real, even likely possibility, to become the norm in all NOAA regulated fisheries. The key point here is, “The EAFM Guidance Document is designed to serve as an umbrella document that will enable the Council to coordinate ecosystem considerations across fishery management plans (FMPs).
Many folks including most within the Stripers Forever conservation community have been advocating for EAFM to become the standard operating model for the management of our coastal resources. It is the details within the Document that will define the goals and the implementation of management protocol. Until the details can be scrutinized we can’t be certain to what degree the “value” of a species will include or be defined by its recreationally generated economy. We shall wait and see but this policy shift has terrific potential to finally place a real value on wild striped bass and have them managed accordingly……. as a game fish!
-Dean Clark, MA Co-Chair/ National Board Member
