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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 7
March 2010
‘Traffic light’ may illuminate lobster status
ALEXANDRIA, VA – Every lobsterman wants to know the true status of the lobster stock and whether or not the resource is on the upswing or downswing.
But let’s be honest. Who really understands what it means to have an “effective exploitation threshold” of .49 for the Gulf of Maine stock or a “reference abundance threshold” of 25.4 million lobsters for Southern New England?
Undoubtedly, the answer is: not many.
Fishery managers are well aware of this problem, and now they’re taking steps to make lobster stock assessment results more tangible for everyone – including themselves – by going back to the traffic light approach.
The traffic light was first introduced during the 2005 assessment to give people a simplified sense of stock status and fishery performance indicators such as abundance, settlement, landings, and overall effort.
The approach was easy, and everyone understood the basics: green (go) was good; yellow (slow down) was cautionary; and red (stop) was bad. At the time, the words “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative” were attached to the colors.
The traffic light actually never went away, but recently it has been more in the background.
During its Feb. 1 meeting here, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) American Lobster Management Board discussed bringing these red, yellow, and green signals back into the forefront as a primary tool for explaining stock abundance and “effective exploitation,” which is fishing pressure.
So, by looking at the traffic light chart for stock abundance on Georges Bank, for example, lobstermen at a glance would get the sense that abundance was safely in the “green” zone.
The ultimate goal is this: By using clear, recognizable markers to reflect stock status, managers, biologists, and industry members should be able to have much more effective two-way conversations about the health of the resource.
In the end, the lobster board charged its technical committee (TC) with further refining the traffic light approach for use with the latest 2009 stock assessment. The board also asked the TC for guidance about what to do in the yellow and red zones.
Addendum XVI impetus
This shift toward simplification was prompted by two events.
First, in January, ASMFC went out to public hearing with draft Addendum XVI to the interstate lobster plan. The addendum proposed new biological reference points for all three lobster stocks – Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, and Southern New England – based on results from the 2009 assessment.
Besides the possibility of sticking with status quo, which no one wanted since the out-of-date reference points in the lobster plan indicated that overfishing was occurring on all three stocks, the addendum proposed adopting new reference points.
Two options were proposed:
One by ASMFC’s own lobster technical committee, which would result in the Southern New England stock being classified as “depleted” or overfished; or
Another by the panel that peer-reviewed the assessment. Under this set, none of the stocks would be classified as depleted (see CFN December 2009 for details).
While roughly three-dozen people attended public hearings in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, and several industry organizations submitted comments, the options were, at best, hard to grasp.
Some people felt the TC option might be safer for the resource overall, but others supported the peer review panel option because it would result in less severe future management measures in Southern New England.
GOM conference
Simultaneously, in what turned out to be fortuitous timing, the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation (GOMLF) was in the final stages of planning its third summit in a series called: Gulf of Maine Lobster Fishery Conference: The Future of the Lobster Industry.”
According to foundation Executive Director Erin Pelletier, the first conference was held in November 2008 and the second in January 2009.
The third conference was held Jan. 21-22 in York, ME – roughly a week prior to ASMFC’s lobster board meeting.
There, attendees discussed the progress made during the first two conferences on biological, socio-economic, and resource management issues and then considered how all of that fit in with concerns raised in the latest stock assessment.
The invitation-only event was meant to pull together fishery managers and biologists from the key lobster producing states, hole them up for two days, and let them hash out difficult topics face-to-face in a relaxed environment.
By all accounts, the series was extremely productive and, by the end of this third conference, participants reached a consensus. They wanted to go back and really pursue traffic light signals as a way to reflect on and talk about the health of the lobster resource.
Percentiles
The group agreed to use “percentiles” on the traffic light chart to measure stock status.
The two key percentiles for stock abundance, for example, were proposed to be the 25th percentile for the threshold abundance – the minimum amount for a healthy stock – and the 75th percentile as a target, which is a far more desirable level of abundance.
If current abundance for a particular stock fell below the 25th percentile line on the chart, then abundance would be in the red zone, which is bad.
And if abundance were above the 75th percentile target line on the chart, it would be in the green zone, which is good. Numbers still would be involved, but they’d have instant meaning by being presented in terms of colored traffic lights.
As the third conference drew to a close, ASMFC lobster plan coordinator Toni Kerns, who attended the event, was asked to prepare talking points and a summary of the consensus for ASMFC’s Feb. 1 lobster board meeting.
Weighing options
During the lobster board meeting, Kerns provided an overview of both Addendum XVI and the conference hosted by the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation.
Board members weren’t quite sure what to do. On the one hand, many felt they couldn’t move forward to begin addressing stock status problems without first adopting new biological reference points as proposed in Addendum XVI. On the other hand, many were intrigued at the possibility of moving toward the simpler traffic signal concept.
“I thought what the Maine group came up with was great,” said Connecticut board member David Simpson. “I do believe a stoplight-type of approach makes good sense given the uncertainty we have in the assessment. We do have shades of grey.”
Yet Simpson said he felt a bit uncomfortable because no one had any clear indication of what would happen if a stock was in the red zone or yellow zone.
“What’s the management action we need to take in response to the colors?” he asked.
New Hampshire board member Doug Grout said he thought having a middle ground – a cautionary yellow zone – was attractive because that way managers could think about taking corrective action before reaching the more serious red zone.
“The thing I like about this approach is we’d be looking at doing something before we get to that threshold (and into the red),” he said.
Color meanings?
Still, several board members expressed concern that ASMFC’s own technical committee had not reviewed the traffic light percentile, even though some TC members were present at the conference.
When asked what the technical committee might think of the new approach, TC Chairman Carl Wilson of Maine said, “So far, the TC has only discussed the recommendations coming out of the assessment.”
Wilson did add that the 25th/75th percentile traffic light approach was “less conservative” than what the TC had recommended for biological reference points as a result of the 2009 stock assessment.
“But we could go back and discuss it,” he said. “It depends on what you would do in the yellow area. That might bring up the comfort level of the TC. To me, personally, it is a compromise.”
Others asked Wilson about how the signals would work.
“A target is where you want to be,” said Wilson. “When you get into the lower threshold, to me that signals impaired recruitment and that bad things are happening. You need to take action.
“In the yellow area, you’re not where you want to be but it’s not bad,” he continued. “If we’re in the yellow, we would go back to the (stock status and fishery performance) indicators to tell us where we’re going. If some stock indicators are giving you a foreshadowing of what could happen in the future, then you should pay attention to those.”
New definitions
Board member Pat White of Maine, who is also president of the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation, tried to find a middle ground.
“I think this stoplight approach is excellent,” he said. “Maybe we could get some refinement from the TC.”
White further said, “One of the things we talked about was further defining actions that could be taken when you’re in the yellow zone. People said, ‘Let’s not wait until we’re in the serious zone before taking action.’”
So the board took two steps.
First, it voted to adopt new “reference abundance” and “effective exploitation” definitions – no numbers, just definitions – as proposed in Addendum XVI by the TC.
The addendum states:
“Reference abundance and effective exploitation would be the primary descriptors of annual abundance and annual fishing pressure;”
“Reference annual abundance is the number of lobsters 78+ millimeters (mm) in carapace length (CL) on Jan. 1 plus the number that will molt and recruit to the 78+ CL group (roughly 3.12") during the year;” and
“Effective exploitation is the annual catch in number divided by the reference abundance.”
Traffic light review
Next, in order to put those new definitions to use to measure current stock status against historical reference periods, Simpson moved to have the board adopt the 25th percentile for the threshold abundance level and the 75th percentile for the threshold exploitation level based on the lobster reference periods of 1982-2003 for the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank stocks and 1984-2003 for the Southern New England stock.
Prior to the meeting, Simpson had circulated additional options for bringing together the peer review panel’s reference points with the traffic light approach recommended during the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation conference. He also floated more specific language about what would happen in certain colored zones, such as calling for “immediate and significant corrective action” when a reference point was far down in the red zone.
Although momentum seemed to be building for adopting the traffic light approach, New York board member Pat Augustine said, “This may be a very valid approach and the right thing to do, but without a TC review, it’s not appropriate.”
The board then tabled the motion to its May meeting and charged the TC with reviewing the new approach and suggesting options for potential action under the red, yellow, and green traffic signal colors.
Janice M. Plante
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