Top photo: NOAA monkfish assessment The message from Jon Hare, the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) was as distressing as it was clear: I have raised at both [the New England Fishery Management and Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management] Council meetings the issue that the NEFSC is not going […]
False albacore photo by John McMurray For a very long time, the false albacore was a sort of fishy pariah. There was no significant market for their bloody, strong-tasting meat, which was also a turnoff to anglers, who cursed when the fish crashed lures meant for one of the better-tasting tunas. A few recreational fishermen […]
Read Part I of this two-article series Throughout most of the past twenty years, the Southern New England lobster stock steadily declined, and eventually collapsed, while fishery managers failed to take any meaningful action to address the problem. Yet, even as southern New England lobster abundance fell to new lows, Gulf of Maine lobster were […]
Read Part II of this two-article series Two decades ago, the future of the Southern New England lobster stock, which ranges from Cape Cod south to Virginia or so, began to look bleak. As early as 2006, a stock assessment noted that “stock abundance is relatively low compared to the 20-year time series and fishing […]
Just over 43 years ago, in October 1981, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) released a document designated Fisheries Management Report No. 1 of the ATLANTIC STATES MARINE FISHERIES COMMISSION. It was 329 pages long and extremely well researched. Its title page declared it to be the “Interstate Fisheries Management Plan for the Striped […]
On December 16, 2024, conservation-minded striped bass anglers waited to see whether the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) Striped Bass Management Board (Management Board) would vote to reduce 2025 striped bass landings, and so make it more likely that the currently overfished striped bass stock would be rebuilt by 2029, the deadline set by […]
The black sea bass is the enigma of mid-Atlantic fisheries. Since 2007, when the spawning stock biomass (SSB) was barely above the threshold that denotes overfishing, the stock has staged a remarkable comeback, with SSB reaching a high of 24,680 metric tons (mt), approximately 220 percent of the biomass target, in 2022. The SSB has […]
By any objective measure, the coastal migratory population of Atlantic striped bass has fallen on hard times. In Maryland, the juvenile abundance index (JAI), which has gauged the success of each year’s spawn since 1957, was 2.0 in 2024, far below its long-term average of 11.0. It was the sixth consecutive year of spawning failure […]
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