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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 9
May 2007
Symposium examines WGOM closure effects
DURHAM, NH – The Elliott Alumni Center at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) was the setting for the Western Gulf of Maine (WGOM) Closure Area 2007 Symposium held on March 26.
With about 80 in attendance, the audience was comprised of members of the scientific, academic, regulatory, and fishing communities. A notable number of representatives from several environmental groups such as Oceana, The Ocean Conservancy, and The Nature Conservancy also attended and paid especially keen attention to each of the day’s presentations.
The WGOM closure covers a vast area of about 1,400 square miles that extends from southern Maine to Cape Cod and includes productive, shallow-water fishing bottom on parts of Jeffreys Ledge, Wildcat Knoll, and Stellwagen Bank.
Fishermen recently have been asking if the closure is meeting its goals and if the massive size of the closure area is really necessary.
The symposium agenda included 10 presentations on research ranging from seafloor recovery to socio-economic impacts on affected communities to habitat and biology questions. However, because little research has taken place in the WGOM closure area, only a few of the presentations dealt specifically with projects conducted there.
Ray Grizzle, a UNH researcher, presenter, and principal investigator in more WGOM cooperative research projects than just about anyone else, moderated the symposium.
He explained that the primary questions the symposium was organized to answer were:
Is the closure meeting its original goals?
What have the effects of the closure been?
How far have scientists come in understanding the closure?
What research is needed to better understand the closure?
What does the future hold for the closure?
The UNH Marine Program, along with New Hampshire Sea Grant and the Northeast Consortium, sponsored the event.
Evolution
Tom Nies, senior fishery analyst for the New England Fishery Management Council, kicked off the presentations by detailing the origin and evolution of the WGOM closure.
The closure was adopted in May 1998 under Framework 25 to the federal groundfish plan primarily to protect cod. The area was closed to all commercial groundfish fishing, but other activities such as recreational fishing and midwater trawling were allowed.
“This was the start of a whole group of management measures to reduce cod landings,” said Nies. “The closure was never lifted as originally intended.”
In 2004 under Amendment 13, most of the WGOM closure area was designated as essential fish habitat (EFH).
“The additional (habitat area) is to minimize the impacts of fishing on essential fish habitat to the extent practicable. The EFH designation prohibited bottom-tending mobile gear indefinitely,” Nies explained.
Congress has defined EFH as “those waters and substrate necessary to fish for spawning, breeding, feeding, or growth to maturity.”
EFH designation and protection are required by federal law and the New England council met that requirement in Amendment 13 by layering habitat closures on top of large portions of the year-round closures in Closed Area I, Closed Area II, the WGOM, Cashes Ledge, and Nantucket Lightship Closed Areas. It also established a Jeffreys Bank habitat closed area.
Nies added that if stocks rebuild, managers potentially could open a closed area to some harvest but was unsure about the prospects for reopening an EFH closure.
In response to a question from the audience, Nies said it is difficult to measure the success of an area closed to fishing, though surveys had shown improvement in fish populations.
Mike Fogarty of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Fisheries Science Center said, “We have seen some pretty dramatic increases with species that are sedentary such as haddock and yellowtail. (However), cod are a mobile species.”
Socio-economic
Madeleine Hall-Arber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sea Grant College Program addressed how the WGOM closure has affected fishing communities.
She agreed with Nies that the impacts and effects of the closure are difficult to analyze because it is just one of many groundfish management restrictions that fishermen have had to comply with.
“This is a cumulative impact – the WGOM closure, rolling closures, days-at-sea, and trip limits,” Hall-Arber said. “We need a balanced look at the cumulative effect.”
She explained that each measure has had different impacts. Rolling closures create short-term derby fishing. Limited days-at-sea cause crowding of fishing grounds. And trip limits cause discarding.
“The WGOM closure area encompasses what were Gloucester’s primary fishing grounds,” said Hall-Arber. “Fishermen who were surveyed said the WGOM closure has changed the way people fish.”
Hall-Arber’s research on the closure also showed changes in fishing patterns, safety issues, and a reduction in the number of boats in communities due to consolidation.
And her research showed that fishermen are dropping Protection and Indemnity insurance, known as P&I, and fishing alone to save money.
“If the boat mortgage is paid off then (fishermen feel) the P&I insurance can be dropped,” said Hall-Arber.
She also found fishermen in the fleet are aging and fewer young people are entering the industry. On the other hand, the research showed the fishing industry to be resilient and documented a positive increase in the sharing of information.
“When I started doing this, no one shared information,” observed Hall-Arber.
Habitat
Grizzle presented information from a Northeast Consortium-sponsored project to examine recovery of seafloor habitats inside the WGOM and the impacts of the closure on groundfish stocks.
Five New Hampshire fishermen, one Massachusetts fisherman, and other UNH researchers worked with Grizzle to sample a 150-square-mile box inside the WGOM closure area using a variety of methods, including the Hubband camera, Wildco box corer, Shipek grab, and multibeam sonar.
“We sampled a wide range of habitats from highly organic mud to boulders,” said Grizzle. “We are still in the process of analyzing data.”
One of the issues hampering study of the WGOM closed area is that there is no extensive data or research on seafloor conditions or fish populations before the area was closed. In his study, Grizzle used an adjacent area outside of the closure as the “control” area.
The largest increase in fauna – animals that burrow in the substrate – in the closed area compared to the control area was seen in sandy bottom, where the animals were found up to four times higher in density with a richness and diversity in the biomass, explained Grizzle.
“We saw no difference in soft areas with epifauna (animals living on the surface of the bottom or floor of a water body), but did see an increase in gravel areas,” he added. “We have some ideas why things are this way but don’t want to jump to conclusions.”
Because a large part of the closure area is not being surveyed, Grizzle and Portsmouth fisherman Mike Leary sampled juvenile groundfish in rocky habitats using gillnet gear.
The preliminary data using gillnets showed much higher density for species of groundfish such as cod, haddock, pollock, and hake in closed areas compared to similar areas outside the closure.
“We will be sampling using gillnet gear (over) the next two years,” said Grizzle.
Relative abundance
Jonathan Grabowski of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute spoke about a project to determine relative abundance of key fish species in closed areas compared to open inshore areas. In this case, the closed area was Cashes Ledge.
Grabowski and his team, including industry members Bob Tetrault, Mathew Thomson, and Matthew Weber, worked from a 54' trawler with a 20-meter net and used a protocol similar to the Maine/New Hampshire inshore trawl survey.
“We saw more juvenile cod in gravel habitat than in sand or mud and greater numbers of cod inside (the closed area) along the boundary than outside,” he said, adding that they saw more cod in the spring than in the fall.
Grabowski also noted that juvenile abundance inside the WGOM closure area was very low in 2004 and 2005. This finding was supported by observations made elsewhere in the closed area. Juvenile monkfish were more commonly found outside the closure area although that could be due to the location of food.
Where are the cod?
Grabowski and his team were still “teasing the diet work” but he said they found that adult cod are drawn to the edge inside the closure.
“I’m struck by low juvenile cod (abundance) in the WGOM closed area. Is the gear missing it?” asked Geoff Smith of The Nature Conservancy.
“We are using the same gear as used by the inshore survey – they catch juvenile cod and do not fish hard bottom,” explained Grabowski.
Gear alone does not explain the lack of juvenile cod seen in the WGOM closure area.
“Structured habitats are important to groundfish,” said Grabowski. “I would like to use more static gear and video on hard bottom/structured habitat.”
Trawling effects
Unstable substrates like sand are less vulnerable to any negative effects from trawl gear because the flora/fauna found there are already used to constant disturbances caused by natural processes, according to Joe DeAlteris of the University of Rhode Island.
DeAlteris conducted a study in Narragansett Bay of an area where trawling had regularly occurred for 45 years.
His findings indicated that gravel bottom is the most vulnerable to change from dragging or other bottom disturbances while sand is the least vulnerable and mud is in between.
The frequency of change to sandy bottom substrates depends on water depth, he said, comparing shoal to deep water.
“These critters evolved living in a dynamic environment,” DeAlteris said.
Industry perspective
Portsmouth Fishermen’s Co-op Manager Peter Kendall presented an industry perspective to the symposium audience. Kendall also is one of the fishermen working on Grizzle’s WGOM closure projects.
“Certainly from a habitat perspective, if you don’t have anyone fishing there, then the closure is working. But from a groundfish perspective, over the years there has been an increase in the number of party/charter vessels fishing in closed areas,” said Kendall.
Before the closure, 80% of Portsmouth Fishermen’s Co-op fishermen fished in the area and, because of the closure, boats have changed and adapted, said Kendall.
“Even after the work I participated in, what is happening in the area is still a mystery,” he said. “A lot more research needs to be done.”
Kendall added that the long stretches of time involved in obtaining project approval and funding is a source of frustration for fishermen and scientists.
“By the time we find this out (if the closure is beneficial), we could be out of business,” he said.
Reopening?
Kendall suggested that fishing mortality would be only a fraction of what it once was if managers reopened the area.
“Because of the reduction of the fleet and the number of days we can fish (due to rolling closures and days-at-sea), the mortality wouldn’t be what it was,” he explained. “Most small boats only have about 24 days-at-sea a year.”
In terms of habitat protection concerns, Kendall suggested some commercial gear types, such as shrimp gear, could be allowed in the area.
“As far as habitat goes, you could open the area to different gear types. Presently we can’t gain access to the shrimp population there,” he said.
In response to a question from Smith regarding what changes fishermen have seen since the WGOM closure area went into effect, Kendall observed that landings at the co-op have gone from 7 million pounds a year down to 2 million pounds, but added that other factors may be involved in that drop.
“We landed a lot of pollock from that closed area, but it’s hard to make an assumption that it changed because of the closure. We see it as more of a trip-limit issue than a closure issue,” Kendall said.
Spread out the fleet
Hampton fisherman Carl Bouchard told the audience that it made sense to reopen the WGOM closure area to commercial fishermen.
“The recreational/party/charter fleet has had much more impact (on groundfish),” he said. “Opening this up would spread out the fleet. Because of rolling closures, we are out of business until June off of Gloucester and July further up while haddock are passing through.”
A member of the audience asked the fishermen if they thought management was pushing people to fish more conservatively.
“If you open it up (the WGOM), we are still constricted by days-at-sea,” said Kendall.
Kennebunkport fisherman Joe Nickerson added, “The closure has bottled us up and is causing gear conflicts with lobster gear. We need access to mud bottom in deep water to shrimp fish.”
More info
Ken La Valley, commercial fishing technology specialist for New Hampshire Sea Grant and an organizer of the symposium, said he was pleased to see the number of fishing industry people who attended.
Added Grizzle, “We wanted the meeting to be useful to not any one group but to many stakeholders.”
The organizers will be preparing a technical document to summarize the symposium presentations and discussions. For more information, call La Valley at (603) 862-4343 or e-mail him at <ken.lavalley@unh.edu>.
Rosanne Mizzoni
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