Commercial Fishermen Get Reprieve
By Russell Drumm

(March 24, 2011)

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted on Monday to delay until July of 2012 regulations that threatened an end to the Long Island and southern New England lobster fishery. Local squid fishermen have also gotten a reprieve from rules that would have greatly curtailed their catch if implemented.

A year ago, fishery managers said that a dramatic drop-off in the lobster population from southern New England to the Carolinas called for either an outright moratorium on lobster fishing or a catch reduction of up to 75 percent.

Montauk lobstermen said at the time that either scenario would spell the death of their industry. And, they strongly disagreed with stock assessments that seemed blind to what was going on offshore, especially in regard to the relatively robust lobster population in the eastern part of Long Island Sound and beyond.

Eric Braun, East Hampton’s recently-appointed fisheries consultant, traveled to Alexandria, Va., this week to tell managers they were getting ahead of themselves, that their stock assessments were incomplete.

Bonnie Brady of Montauk, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, presaged her comments at Monday’s meeting with a letter earlier this month to Robert Beal, director of Atlantic States commission, in which she carefully spelled out possible shortcomings in the commission’s data collection.

“Relating to the National Marine Fisheries Service’s trawl [survey] data, since the most recent assessment made by the commission employed 2007 data, can you tell me whether any other federal trawl data since 2007 has been included in the southern New England lobster assessment process?” Ms. Brady asked in her letter.

Back home on Tuesday, Ms. Brady said that since Monday’s meeting she had learned that the findings in a trawl survey of Long Island Sound waters conducted by the New York and Connecticut conservation agencies were based on 200 trawls made west of the Connecticut River and only five east of it. The imbalance skewed a true picture of the lobster population, Ms. Brady said.

Industry representatives reportedly told the commission that recent increases in the minimum legal size of lobsters, and a decrease in the allowable number of pots, had not been given a chance to have an effect.

Managers agree that overfishing is not the cause of decreases in the lobster population, and that environmental influences have played a major role. Stocks have yet to rebound in the Sound from a die-off in the mid-1990s possibly linked to the spraying of insecticide in coastal communities. Nonetheless, controlling fishing mortality is the only tool they have to reverse the downward trend, members of the commission contend.

The loligo, or long-finned squid, fishery is extremely important to the Montauk and Shinnecock dragger fleets. As a result of the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, a federal ruling, species important to commercial fishermen were put on an aggressive schedule of rebuilding, one that many fishermen agree seeks an unnatural and unattainable balance of competing populations.

In January of this year, an amendment to regulations designed to protect butterfish threatened to close the squid fishery because of the possibility that its bycatch of butterfish would exceed recovery targets set for butterfish.

To reduce the possibility of a closure, fishermen from New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and North Carolina worked with the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s science and statistical committee to see if an increase in the 2011 butterfish quota could be justified. In February, after studying historical landings data, the committee increased the allowable catch by 17 percent.

The National Marine Fisheries Service approved the finding as an emergency measure last Thursday.