Lobstermen fear 2019 bait crisis due to herring quota cuts
Courtesy / Gulf of Maine Research Institute
Chart shows where the Atlantic herring stocks are located.
Herring and lobster fishermen alike expressed concern that quota cuts and vessel restrictions in the herring fishery approved this week by the New England Fishery Management Council will hurt Maine’s lobster fishery next season.
Maine Public reported the regulatory agency approved a quota of around 15,000 tons for next year, down from 55,000 this year. It also established a 12-mile buffer zone for large fishing boats called mid-water trawlers that will prevent them from fishing close to shore.
Ryan Raber, co-owner of Portland bait business New England Fish Co., told Maine Public he’d likely have to lay off some crew and staff. Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, predicted acute bait shortages in the lobster fishery.
Earlier this summer, the prospect of a shortage of herring bait for Maine's lobster fishing fleet drove price increases for bait fish and fueled concern about the long-term availability of bait in future years.
The herring fishery is overseen by the New England Fishery Management Council. The quota is driven by a 2018 benchmark stock assessment, conducted by the Atlantic Herring Stock Assessment Working Group. The assessment indicated that recruitment — incoming year classes of newly born fish — has been poor for several years. The working group said that four of the six lowest estimates of herring recruitment occurred in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
In its July newsletter Landings, the Maine Lobstermen’s Community Alliance, anticipating the quota cut, wrote, “Nothing chills the hearts of lobstermen more than the prospect of a bait shortage. Herring comprise the majority of bait purchased by Maine’s approximately 4,500 licensed lobstermen and even the whisper of a possible shortage causes lobstermen to mutter grimly over the marine radio.”
But in its September newsletter, the alliance wrote that bait dealers have adapted in the face of past herring shortages, quota cuts and under-harvesting by sourcing herring from Canada and supplying other types of bait like redfish, tuna heads and menhaden.
Still, the alliance said, the “problem is the magnitude of the poundage to be made up. Regardless of a lobsterman’s preferred bait, the shortfall in herring supply will spike demand for all available baits creating shortages and price increases.
“There’s nothing out there to replace a 40-million-to-50-million-pound shortage,” Wyatt Anderson, bait manager for O’Hara Corporation in Rockland told Landings. “We’ve never seen a situation like this before.”
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I have developed and tested a real boat for bad weather, fuel economy and faster travel to fishgrounds, but, all I would achieve would be even greater depletion of our GOD-given resource. Good tools in destructive hands is a curse to our bountiful fish resource. No one cares that it is being destroyed?!^* Do you?
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