Photo by John McMurray Anyone who pays attention to salt water fisheries matters knows that a coalition of anglers’ rights groups and fishing tackle and boatbuilding trade associations are trying to weaken the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens). The effort is rooted in their assertion that Magnuson-Stevens, with its prohibitions on overfishing, its […]
I grew up in the southwest corner of New England’s coast, where fog was hardly unknown. I learned how to operate a boat in pea soup conditions when I was still a boy. Running a boat in the fog can be an eerie, disorienting experience. You are surrounded by soggy gray walls that display a […]
Photo: Boats in Gloucester harbor By now, everyone who follows the trials and tribulations of New England’s fisheries has heard of “The Codfather,” Carlos Rafael, who recently pled guilty to falsifying landings records for hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish that was illegally harvested by Rafael’s vessels, fish that included some of the northeast’s […]
Top Photo by John McMurray. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) has been a success. Even its critics admit that. In 2000, 72 fish stocks were subject to overfishing; today, that number is down to 30. During the same period, the number of overfished stocks was reduced from 92 to 38. Since 2000, […]
Illustration: Zeus with Amalthea and nymph The ancient Greeks told a story, which may have originated more than 2,500 years ago, of the infant Zeus, who was destined to be King of the Gods. Hidden from his father, Chronos, who planned to devour him, Zeus survived by drinking the milk of the she-goat Amalthea. Yet […]
Photo: Atlantic Cod, by Joachim S. Mueller It’s the middle of summer. Forty years ago, I would have been fishing for cod southeast of Rhode Island. That might catch some people by surprise, because they think of cod as a cold-water species that only appears off New York and southern New England during the dead […]
Author Charles Witke will testify at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Magnuson-Stevens Act on July 19th. In this post, he explains why the recent Commerce Department decision undermines ASFMC and the future of cooperative interstate fisheries management. Late in the afternoon of July 11, 2017, the United States Department of Commerce (Commerce) […]
Black sea bass photo courtesy of Charles Witek Over the past couple of seasons, no fish has frustrated Mid-Atlantic fishery managers—and Mid-Atlantic recreational fishermen—as much as the black sea bass. There are a lot of them out there. A benchmark stock assessment completed late in 2016 estimated that the spawning stock biomass (SSB) at the […]
Join our email list to receive occasional updates and priority alerts
