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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 10
June 2006
Editorial
New lobster reference points are good news
On May 8, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s American Lobster Management Board approved Addendum VIII to Amendment 3 of the interstate lobster plan.
The addendum contains two key components. It replaces the F10% egg production overfishing definition with new biological reference points to determine the status of each lobster stock. It also expands coastwide mandatory reporting and data collection.
The shift to new biological reference points – coupled with an easy-to-understand green, yellow, and red “traffic light” system to communicate fishery and stock conditions – is good news because it broadens the range of factors scientists can consider when doing lobster stock assessments. And that is exactly what the industry has been asking for.
Lobstermen have known from the start that there’s a lot more to gauging the health of a lobster stock than just egg production. This new approach gives scientists an avenue for considering things like settlement, fishery performance, and maybe even predation. Together, the new reference points and traffic light indicators give us a more realistic understanding of this extremely valuable resource and allow for more confidence in judging which management measures are necessary.
One big advantage of the new reference points is that, compared to F10%, they’re simple to understand.
In this latest assessment, scientists pretty much gauged “median abundance” and “median fishing mortality” levels for each stock over a 20-to-22-year period. The median is the middle point where half of the years are worse than the median and half are better. Then they compared the “three most recent years,” being 2001-2003 at the time of the assessment, to the median.
The results showed that the Gulf of Maine stock – except for Area 514 – and the Georges Bank stock were doing OK, but Southern New England wasn’t.
This new approach isn’t perfect. Rather, it’s an interim but solid step toward a more comprehensive assessment methodology. Scientists are already planning to use a more refined model for the next assessment a few years down the road known as the Yong Chen model. This model is expected to produce even more reliable estimates of abundance and fishing mortality.
But the Yong Chen model is “data hungry.” For it to work right – for it to give a realistic and accurate account of the true health of the lobster stocks – it will need vastly better data than what’s available now.
Lobstermen from several states have been supplying fairly detailed data to officials for years.
Yet in Maine, where lobstermen have never had to directly supply such detailed reporting – the most private and personal information they have about their fishing activities – there is real suspicion that information handed to the government will be used against them. Managers will have to find ways to convince them otherwise.
Scientists have made it clear that the amount of information they have now is “woefully inadequate” for them to do a good job assessing lobster stocks. They are going to need lobstermen’s help to do it right.
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