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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 7
March 2010
Council herring Amd. 4 sets stage for future specs
PORTSMOUTH, NH – It happened with groundfish. It happened with scallops. It happened with monkfish and red crab. And now it has happened with herring. The fishery has a whole new vocabulary.
During its Jan. 26-28 meeting here, the New England Fishery Management Council approved Amendment 4 to the federal herring plan, which it developed to meet the latest requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA).
With all the new acronyms and accountability measures (AM), the amendment is confusing even for the people closely tracking it, let alone those dealing with the day-to-day details of running a boat, selling catch, keeping logs, and operating a fish business.
As complicated as it is, Amendment 4 by itself is expected to have few direct “biological” or “human” impacts. Instead, it mostly lays a foundation for how the council will set catch limits in the future.
Council staffer Talia Bigelow, who provided the council and audience with an overview of the document, put it this way.
“This amendment is mostly procedural and administrative,” she said. “We’re not going to be setting any actual numbers through this amendment. That will be done through the specification process.”
What it does
So, here are a few of those new terms.
The amendment outlines the role of the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) in determining acceptable biological catch (ABC) for the fishery. Significantly, it also does things like specify that “scientific uncertainty” will be subtracted from the overfishing limit (OFL) to achieve ABC, which is set by the SSC.
The amendment further lays out exactly what will happen during the spec setting process. It states that “management uncertainty” will be subtracted from the ABC to produce a “stockwide” annual catch limit (ACL),” which will equal optimum yield (OY).
Then the ACL will be further divided into “sub-ACLs” to produce the finally familiar total allowable catch (TAC) levels for Areas 1A, 1B, 2, and 3.
The end result will be the same – area-by-area quotas. But the new formulas that will be used to get there will take some getting used to.
Spec changes, AMs
The council made a couple of relatively easy decisions to set the course for Amendment 4. First, it adopted specific definitions for all of the new terms.
Second, the council eliminated four obsolete terms that no longer will show up in the table of herring quota distributions – “total joint venture processing,” “internal waters processing,” “total allowable level of foreign fishing,” and “reserve.”
The council further agreed to adopt two AMs – those accountability measures.
The AMs are intended to back up the fishery’s primary fail-safe, which is the requirement that fishing cease in an area when 95% of the TAC is projected to be reached – or 92% if a research set-aside is involved.
“Overage payback”
The first new AM calls for an “overage payback,” which will be deducted after final statistics from the fishing year have been fully tallied.
Bigelow explained how the payback would work with this example: Should an overage occur in 2011, then landings information would be fully compiled in 2012 and the overage would be deducted in 2013.
However, she emphasized that this new AM should have very little impact on the fleet.
“Any overages are likely to be small,” Bigelow said.
That’s because the fleet rarely exceeds its quota in any significant way under the 95% closure trigger, which will remain in the plan and continue to function as the primary AM for the fishery.
The second new AM is the existing haddock catch cap for herring midwater trawl vessels, which closes the fishery for those vessels when the allocated haddock cap is reached.
The amendment contains additional language to allow herring vessels with Northeast multispecies permits to retain haddock when on a groundfish trip.
Monitoring up next
The council held public hearings on Amendment 4 in Gloucester and Fairhaven, MA and in Portland, ME early in January. While the amendment was challenging to understand, several organizations with a stake in the fishery testified at the hearings or submitted written comments.
Some opposed the council’s decision to split the amendment into two actions: Amendment 4 to deal with ACLs and AMs; and Amendment 5 to deal with herring fishery monitoring and other issues, including river herring.
Establishing catch-monitoring provisions was one of the original focuses of Amendment 4. However, the council agreed earlier in 2009 to limit Amendment 4 to ACL and AM issues in order to ensure it met the 2011 MSA deadlines for these requirements.
The Herring Alliance, a project of the Pew Environment Group, said it “vigorously opposed” the split into two amendments, arguing that the council previously had “recognized the vital importance of establishing a rigorous monitoring system and other measures to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Atlantic herring resource as a fundamental first step to meeting the MSA’s requirements to implement ACLs and AMs.”
During the council meeting, attorney Roger Fleming of Earthjustice said the Herring Alliance disagreed that Amendment 4 was largely a procedural and administrative action.
He said “fundamentally big decisions” were involved in setting ABCs and ACLs “that could affect the environment in a bigger way than just how much fish are removed from the fishery.” He also said the council should have developed a full environmental impact statement for Amendment 4 and not the smaller scale environmental assessment.
Forage
The Sustainable Fisheries Coalition, which represents a significant number of midwater trawl vessels in the region, had concerns about the way herring was described in the amendment as a forage species.
“We agree that this is an important consideration in setting an ABC in the fishery, consistent with stock assessment advice that may be available to the SSC,” said the coalition in its written comments.
However, the coalition continued, “We strongly oppose … the contention that (forage) should also guide setting OY, ACLs, or sub-ACLs in the herring fishery. There is no scientific evidence that current catches in the herring fishery are threatening the maintenance of the important role of Atlantic herring in the ecosystem.”
The forage issue drew numerous comments, and the herring committee said it recognized that forage would be accounted for through the SSC’s ABC recommendation.
Council herring plan coordinator Lori Steele added that, should the council decide to go further than the SSC’s accounting of forage, it could subtract additional tonnage to account for forage through the specification setting process when it developed its ACL for the fishery.
After discussing these and other issues, and then making minor language changes to the document, the council voted to submit Amendment 4 to the National Marine Fisheries Service and move forward with work on Amendment 5.
Janice M. Plante
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