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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 5
January 2006
Standoff unresolved; dogfish quota could drop to 2 million pounds
HYANNIS, MA – To the absolute frustration of everyone involved, the spiny dogfish standoff remains as unresolved as ever.
Exasperated fishermen continue to be plagued by dogfish. Scientists and environmentalists continue to worry about the low percentage of large females in the population. And the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils continue to be at odds over how to deal with landings and discards under a stock rebuilding strategy that doesn’t allow a directed fishery.
In the latest development, the Mid-Atlantic council and the Spiny Dogfish Monitoring Committee, which tracks the status of the stock and provides scientific input to the councils, have recommended that the 2006 commercial quota for spiny dogfish be cut in half from the current 4 million pounds to 2 million pounds.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) will make the final decision. In the meantime, the potential quota cut was being viewed by the deeply fractured sides in one of two way: unfortunate but necessary, or utterly insane.
New England council member John Pappalardo was in the latter camp.
“I don’t understand how going to 2 million pounds is going to increase the likelihood that we rebuild (the female population) any quicker,” Pappalardo said during the council’s mid-November meeting.
“It seems that people are thinking, ‘If you don’t allow the landings, it’s going to speed up the recovery.’ That’s wrong. Except for the harpoon fishery for tuna or swordfish, every other fishery interacts with this species. To throw them back, to say you can’t bring those fish in and have that $100 to offset fuel costs, just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Chatham, MA fisherman Ted Ligenza echoed that sentiment, arguing that the money was particularly important for fishermen who regularly landed the 600-pound limit when the dogfish were thick.
“At 24 cents per pound, that’s almost $1,000 per week for bycatch. That’s a lot of money for fishermen given the ways things are these days,” he said. “I don’t know why you guys would want to give that up. There are lots of dogfish. It’s a predator and it influences all the other stocks.”
What happened
Here is the sequence of events over the past few months that led to the 2-million-pound vs. 4-million-pound dichotomy:
The Spiny Dogfish Monitoring Committee met on Sept. 22 and recommended that a 2-million-pound incidental catch quota with a 600-pound and 300-pound trip limit for quota periods 1 and 2 respectively be set for the 2006-2008 fishing years.
The fishing year runs May 1-April 30, and quota periods 1 and 2 run May 1-Oct. 31 and Nov. 1-April 30 respectively.
The New England and Mid-Atlantic councils’ joint dogfish management committee met on Oct. 4 to review the monitoring committee recommendations. The management committee recommended a 4-million-pound quota with a 600-pound trip limit for both quota periods for the 2006 fishing year only.
The two councils at the moment have joint management responsibility for dogfish in federal waters.
The full Mid-Atlantic council met immediately afterward on Oct. 4 and 5. Following numerous failed attempts to adopt a variety of alternatives, the council voted 11-7 to recommend that NMFS implement a 2-million-pound quota. Through different votes, the council also supported 600-pound trip limits for both quota periods and to retain the specifications for the next three fishing years.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which manages the dogfish fishery in state waters, voted on Nov. 1 to adopt a 4-million-pound quota for one year only, with 600-pound trip limits for both quota periods. And
The New England council in mid-November also voted to recommend a 4-million-pound quota with 600-pound trip limits for both quota periods for one year only.
NMFS must consider the advice from all three management bodies in setting the federal specifications.
Scientists worried
Dogfish biomass estimates are determined based on a “three-year moving average” in part because the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s spring survey catches of dogfish have “high inter-year variability,” meaning that they change significantly from year to year.
According to the center, the 2003-2005 three-year moving average of total stock biomass was 835 million pounds, down slightly from the 2002-2004 average of 857 million pounds.
What’s most troubling to scientists is that the moving average of mature females declined from 132 million pounds – a low number in and of itself – to 118 million pounds. And the survey-based estimate of pup biomass, which showed a 12-fold increase last year over the previous seven years, dropped once again to a little less than half of last year’s estimate.
Jim Weinburg, the science center’s liaison to the New England council, said, “The males are very abundant. It is the female biomass that needs to be rebuilt.”
Weinburg explained, “A fishing mortality rate (F) of .03 is what would be needed to rebuild the female biomass. If we fished at .03, it would take 20 years for the female biomass to recover, which is quite a long time. The current estimate of F is double that.
“If we continue to fish at that level, you simply cannot get to a rebuilding of the female biomass,” he concluded.
Discards
Further troubling to scientists is the considerable level of discards in the fishery. Commercial discards for calendar year 2004 were estimated to be between 14.1 and 29.3 million pounds, and “recreational removal estimates,” as they’re called, ranged from 1.8 million pounds to 7.3 million pounds.
Dennis Spitsburgen of North Carolina, who represented the Mid-Atlantic council during the New England council meeting, said the discard situation made it difficult for the Mid-Atlantic council to agree on a quota recommendation.
“There were two schools of thought,” he explained.
“One, we had the recommendation from the monitoring committee for 2 million pounds and the concern that fishing mortality on females was too high,” Spitsburgen said.
“The other thought was that with commercial discards being 14-29 million pounds, the difference between 2 million and 4 million didn’t look like much, especially since the recreational spread was large too. So maybe it didn’t matter if you went with 2 million or 4 million,” he recounted.
Although the 2 million pounds eventually won out at the Mid-Atlantic council, Spitsburgen relayed the concerns of the state of North Carolina that a 2-million-pound quota and a 600-pound trip limit “would be taken up north before the fish ever got to the south.”
Like the Mid-Atlantic council, the New England council wasn’t united in its position either.
Connecticut council member Sally McGee supported a 2-million-pound quota based on the monitoring committee’s scientific advice.
“We’re going to deal with bycatch in this fishery by raising the incidental catch limit (from the scientific advice of 2 million to 4 million)? This is an entirely inappropriate way to address bycatch,” she said. “I don’t want to see this stuff dumped over dead, but raising the incidental catch rate doesn’t address the problem.”
New Hampshire council member Dave Goethel, a fisherman himself, expressed his own long-standing frustration about what was happening.
“The ocean in my area is littered with the carcasses of dead dogfish,” he said. “That’s wasted economic benefit to the nation. The boats are all catching them – draggers, gillnetters, everyone. And they’re all throwing them back. We’re not solving the problem. We’re stepping around it.”
Walter Barrett, manager of Seatrade International, one of only two major dogfish processors left in business, urged the council to consider the repercussions of dogfish on other fisheries.
“Start considering the side effects of allowing dogfish to run rampant on other fisheries,” he said. “We’re hearing about more and more dogfish being inshore. I do believe monitoring needs to be done in the area where the dogfish are abundant.”
Landings down
Another new development in the fishery was that, for the first time, landings during the 2004 fishing year, which ended April 30, 2005, were constrained in both state and federal waters by the very restrictive trip limits, which were 600 pounds and 300 pounds respectively for quota periods 1 and 2.
In past years, Massachusetts in particular but other states as well allowed significantly higher trip limits in state waters for fishermen who didn’t possess federal permits. But ASMFC adopted low trip limits for 2004 and required its member states to abide by them.
As a result, documented landings in 2004 only reached about 1.5 million pounds – a far cry from the 4-million-pound incidental catch quota authorized for that year.
But many disputed the landings information.
“The data base does not appear to reflect what has been processed at best in Massachusetts alone,” said Massachusetts council member David Pierce.
Seatrade’s Barrett concurred.
“That information you have is totally inaccurate. AML (International) and Seatrade are the only two major processors left. Together we did well over 3 million pounds. This year, too, we’re between 3 and 4 million pounds,” he said.
Now up to NMFS
Kurkul, however, thought the data closely reflected landings, and she said it proved the low trip limits – and not the quota – have been the restraining factor in the fishery.
“So the question is: Should the fishery be allowed to expand to 4 million pounds? The monitoring committee says no, that fishing mortality shouldn’t be increased. If landings were allowed to increase, we would have an F well beyond the F target,” she said.
Kurkul’s comments indicated to many that NMFS would take the monitoring committee recommendation for a 2-million-pound quota to heart.
NMFS is expected to publish final specifications later this winter for at least the 2006 fishery and possibly for the 2006-2008 fishing years.
The agency published proposed Framework Adjustment 1 to the federal dogfish plan in the Federal Register on Dec. 1. The framework, if ultimately approved, would allow NMFS to set dogfish specifications for up to five years at a time.
Janice M. Plante
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