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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 1
September 2005
Noticed any seals lately?
NMFS wants comment on stocks
WOODS HOLE, MA - Fishermen who have observations or opinions about booming seal populations may want to take advantage of a request for comments recently issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
To comply with provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, NMFS is required to review stock assessment reports (SARs) annually for each stock of marine mammals in US waters that’s considered strategic, meaning at a low population level. For other, healthier marine mammal populations, the review is required once every three years.
The reports contain information on the distribution and abundance of each stock, population growth rates and trends, estimates of human-caused mortality and serious injury, and descriptions of the fisheries with which the stock interacts.
Among the SARs NMFS is seeking comment on are those for harbor seals, gray seals, pilot whales, large whales, bottlenose dolphins, and many more.
According to the SAR for harbor seals – the species fishermen, especially those in Maine, are most likely to see - NMFS has determined the minimum population to be 91,546 individual animals.
For gray seals, the increase in counts of individual animals along their known haunts of Muskeget Island off Nantucket and Monomoy Island off Chatham grew by an estimated 20.5 percent annually between 1994 and 1999.
While NMFS doesn’t have a solid population estimate number, the gray seal observation at least acknowledges there is some explosive growth going on.
The draft 2005 SARs are available online, though it takes a few steps to find them. First go to the NMFS Office of Protected Resources site at <www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr> and click on “publications.” Then scroll all the way down the screen to “Status and Conservation.” Click on “Stock Assessment Reports.”
Next, click on “Draft Reports for 2005.” Finally, scroll down to “Atlantic Region” and click on “Atlantic reports prepared by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, clean version” to download the appropriate pdf file.
Comments on the draft SARs are due by Sept. 26. For more information or assistance, call Tom Eagle at (301) 713-2322, ext. 105 or e-mail him at <Tom.Eagle@noaa.gov>. /cfn/
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