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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 7
March 2008
ME, MA lobster dealer reporting plans OK’d
ALEXANDRIA, VA – Lobster dealers in Maine and Massachusetts will not be required to report the “statistical area fished” by lobstermen every time they complete a lobster transaction.
The original requirement was part of Addendum X to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) interstate lobster plan. The addendum called for “mandatory reporting” and went into effect Jan. 1, 2008.
But at a Feb. 4 meeting here, ASMFC’s American Lobster Management Board approved “conservation equivalency” proposals from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) to collect area fished information in alternative ways that didn’t require dealers to be responsible for reporting where lobstermen pulled their traps.
The lobster board approved both plans after receiving confirmation from the American Lobster Technical Committee that the alternatives would “suffice” for gathering area-fished information.
For some states, Addendum X has been a huge undertaking because it requires lobster-producing states to annually collect trip-by-trip-level data from at least 10% of harvesters. The purpose is to generate better information for scientists to use when conducting stock assessments.
This trip-level reporting is particularly controversial in Maine, which issues an average of 6,738 commercial and student lobster licenses, 1,996 noncommercial five-trap licenses, and over 300 dealer licenses annually.
With so many licenses in play, officials say that implementing mandatory reporting even at the 10% level has been challenging. It means hundreds and hundreds of commercial lobstermen in Maine are now disclosing information they’ve never had to report in their entire fishing careers.
MA plan
The Massachusetts DMF, in its own conservation equivalency proposal, emphasized that Addendum X initially proposed 100% trip-level reporting but was changed to accommodate Maine’s strenuous opposition.
“To salvage some level of universal reporting, the board mandated that dealers be required to collect ‘area fished’ information from fishermen and include that data on all trip transaction,” stated DMF Director Paul Diodati and Deputy Director Dan McKiernan in a memo to ASMFC.
But the idea of having dealers “reveal area fished” by lobstermen – instead of having the fishermen do it themselves – “would likely result in inaccurate data,” they said.
Plus, the two DMF officials argued that they were presently collecting area fished information directly from fishermen and had satisfied the Addendum X requirement.
“DMF already has a data collection system that accounts for all permit holders through its annual recall log,” explained Diodati and McKiernan.
“These reports effectively attribute area fished and landings on a monthly basis and are submitted to the agency annually. DMF will be collecting trip-level data from 10% of its active permit holders (as now required by ASMFC) and continue to require the remaining 90% to submit the usual annual recall log with effort and landings attributed to statistical areas,” they concluded.
Maine plan
Maine, with a coastline bordered by only four National Marine Fisheries Service statistical areas – 467, 511, 512, and 513 – proposed to assign landings based on dealer location relative to the adjacent statistical area.
That means lobsters purchased by a dealer in Portland, for example, would be assigned to statistical area 513.
According to the Maine DMR, which analyzed the methodology, the dealer-location alternative is accurate the vast majority of the time because lobstermen fish relatively close to home.
Presently, 21% of Maine’s commercial license holders – 1,440 of them – have federal permit endorsements to fish beyond Maine’s 3-mile limit. And of those, less than 10 still qualify for and elect to fish in Area 3, which is offshore.
Furthermore, the DMR said that 88% of Maine’s lobster landings from 2003 through 2006, which averaged 66.7 million pounds, occurred between July and December – months that posed hardly any statistical area identification problems.
“The majority of conflicts arise in ports that straddle multiple statistical areas in winter and early spring – January through May – a time when 7% of Maine landings are recorded,” reported DMR lobster biologist Carl Wilson.
Like its Massachusetts counterpart, the DMR also argued that requiring dealers to report where lobstermen fished was impractical.
“Dealers do not know where harvesters fish, and the DMR cannot mandate harvesters to disclose this information to a third party not held to DMR’s confidentiality standards,” said the state agency.
Technical committee
ASMFC’s lobster technical committee reviewed the Maine and Massachusetts proposals and found both to be “acceptable,” said Penny Howell of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection’s Marine Fisheries Division, the technical committee’s acting chairman.
However, she said, “That’s in lieu of what we would really like to have, which is 100% reporting on a trip level. 100% trip reporting would still be our goal, but these would suffice our data needs.”
In its formal report to the ASMFC lobster board, the technical committee stated, “In Maine, the majority of the statistical areas fished fall within the Gulf of Maine biological stock assessment unit. In Massachusetts, there are lobster fisheries in all three stock units. However, fishermen must choose one LCMA on their permit and are required to report their landings by statistical area.”
The technical committee concluded, “These two data elements allow the technical committee to account for landings to the appropriate biological stock assessment unit.”
Janice M. Plante
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