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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 1
September 2009
TRAC says herring stock ‘not overfished’ but ...
ALEXANDRIA, VA – A new stock assessment update for Atlantic herring has concluded that overfishing is not occurring on the overall Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank stock complex and the resource is not overfished.
However, this welcome news was greatly tempered by the fact that the US/Canada Transboundary Resources Assessment Committee (TRAC), which conducted the 2009 stock update, also found that a key biomass (B) indicator dealing with maximum sustainable yield (MSY) – referred to as Bmsy – was slightly below target, which could result in quota reductions in the future.
The results stunned and even angered some fishermen and led one group of fishery managers to call for a new assessment next year through the standard stock assessment workshop (SAW) process overseen by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
This latest TRAC stock update, conducted in June in St. Andrews, New Brunswick by both US and Canadian scientists, was not a formal “benchmark” assessment. Rather, it was intended to be an update of the last 2006 benchmark.
Yet the TRAC went far beyond the usual “turn of the crank” exercises normally used for assessment updates.
It revised historical landings data to more properly attribute catches from the old foreign fishing days to their correct areas, which led to more landings being ascribed to Jeffreys Ledge and Southern New England and fewer to offshore grounds.
The TRAC further modified catch-at-age data, added 2006-2008 landings to the time series, re-evaluated a variety of indices used to gauge abundance, and scrutinized survey trends.
And, the US/Canada committee used the NMFS spring and fall bottom trawl surveys but decided against using NMFS’s acoustic survey indices or the NMFS winter bottom trawl survey in the final model runs. The TRAC said that decision was “based on evidence that the entire stock complex was not available in the survey area during the survey period” during either of those surveys.
After all the calculations were conducted repeatedly, the results showed stock biomass to be lower than determined in previous assessments.
Biomass, mortality
By mid-August, news of the assessment results had spread widely, and the New England Fishery Management Council’s herring committee had already heard a formal presentation.
On Aug. 18, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) Atlantic Herring Section received the same presentation, which was made by Matt Cieri of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, who served on the TRAC.
Cieri explained that based on the TRAC’s final selected model runs, stock biomass of age 2 and older fish at the beginning of 2008 was estimated to be 652,000 metric tons (mt).
“So biomass is about 20,000 mt below Bmsy, which is not very much given the current uncertainly within the model,” he said.
Officially, the Bmsy target for herring is 670,600 mt. But the 2008 biomass of 652,000 mt is still well above 1/2 Bmsy, which is the threshold or cutoff for determining whether the resource is overfished, which means the stock is not overfished.
Furthermore, the TRAC estimated that fishing mortality (F) in 2008 was 0.14, which is well below the Fmsy overfishing threshold of 0.27, so overfishing is not occurring either.
According to NMFS, Bmsy is defined as the “long-term average biomass that would be achieved if fishing at a constant fishing mortality rate equal to Fmsy,” and Fmsy is “the fishing mortality rate that produces maximum sustainable yield.”
Cieri said the TRAC was especially concerned about the “very strong and persistent retrospective pattern” in the assessment model, which means the model consistently overestimates stock size and underestimates fishing mortality. He said the TRAC intended to further investigate this problem during the next benchmark assessment for herring, which has not yet been scheduled.
ASMFC reacts
ASMFC herring section Chairman Terry Stockwell of Maine called the assessment report “very sobering,” and numerous section members had detailed questions about how the assessment was carried out.
Section member David Pierce of Massachusetts expressed grave concern about the impact of recent increased Canadian weir landings on stock status and the fact that US managers had no authority over that fishery.
“Are we unable to control our own fate in terms of biomass and mortality?” he asked.
Cieri responded, “In general, the New Brunswick weir fishery catches fish that are available. It’s a fixed-gear fishery. If you have a strong year class, it’s generally going to show up in the New Brunswick weir fishery first because they take smaller fish.”
Section members asked flat-out whether the findings would result in lower quotas for the US fishery.
The question was directed at Lori Steele, chair of the New England council’s herring plan development team, which is currently developing recommendations for 2010-2012 fishery specifications.
“I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, but I think at this point we can all expect to be working with lower numbers,” said Steele.
Industry urges change
Jeff Kaelin, representing Lund’s Fisheries in Cape May, NJ, had seen Cieri’s presentation three times as of the ASMFC meeting and had closely followed the TRAC’s work. He expressed great frustration over the amount of uncertainty in the assessment and the entire TRAC process.
“Every time we have an assessment, we lose half the biomass,” he said. “We don’t have an awful lot of confidence in this approach to say the least.”
Kaelin asked section members to request that the Northeast Fisheries Science Center conduct its own benchmark herring assessment through the center’s standard SAW procedures, which includes a rigorous peer review process by outside scientists.
Greg DiDomenico of New Jersey’s Garden State Seafood Association also supported the idea.
“We’ve all been involved in following this TRAC process, and we were caught by surprise that the outcome would be so drastic in an update and not a full benchmark assessment,” he said.
Following this intense discussion, the section voted to send a letter to the science center asking for a new benchmark assessment in 2010.
Janice M. Plante
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