Fishermen to help with fish surveys

PHOTO / &Copy; Hans Hillewaert (Wikimedia Commons) The Atlantic cod is on a critical decline in the Gulf of Maine, but fishermen won't know whether they'll have to obey quotas until a federal agency makes recommendations by next month.

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The Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass., plans to begin outfitting commercial fishing boats with surveying equipment to gather data on the type and number of groundfish in the Gulf of Maine.

The Bangor Daily News reported that the new survey approach is slated to begin next year.

The data will supplement the regular trawl surveys conducted by government scientists, and will be fed into the computational process used to set catch quotas, Russell Brown, who heads the center’s population dynamics branch, told the BDN.

Groundfishermen have been navigating for years complicated regulations around fishing times, areas and species quantities, as fishery managers attempt to rebuild overfished species in the Gulf of Maine.

Many species have responded to regulatory efforts, but the status of the iconic Atlantic cod has been in dispute.

According to NEFSC’s most recent assessment report in 2014, the Gulf of Maine Atlantic cod stock is overfished; spawning stock biomass levels were the lowest ever estimated; and fishing mortality was near all-time highs despite the fact that fishery catches were at the lowest levels in the time series.

But fishermen said the stock is rebuilding.

“It’s really perplexing that you’ve got a set of federal scientists who are sampling the ocean methodically and coming up with a very different picture than the fishermen about what’s going on out in the Gulf of Maine,” Jonathan Labaree of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute told the BDN.