Today, red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico may be the most bitterly debated issue in fisheries management. By 1990, the stock was badly overfished. Abundance had fallen so low that the population retained only 2.6% of its spawning potential. Since then, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) implemented a successful recovery plan. Spawning […]
Summer Flounder photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation When there are lots of fish, they’re easy to manage. The best example might be scup in the northeast. Abundance is twice the biomass target; in recent years, neither the recreational nor the commercial landings have approached the annual catch limit. Badly depleted stocks can also […]
Photo: Red Snapper I recently attended a media summit in Galveston, Texas, which was hosted by Trout Unlimited, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association and The Ocean Conservancy. Titled “The State of Our Fishing Waters: The Connection Between our Headwaters and the Ocean,” it had an ambitious agenda; presentations began promptly at 7:00 a.m. But […]
This post continues Charles Witek’s two-part personal journey in U.S. fisheries management and conservation. Read Part One here. I had gotten more and more involved with fisheries conservation over the years. By 1996, I sat on the executive board of the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA), an organization that had worked hard to get SFA signed […]
This post is the first in a two-part series about Charles’s personal journey with U.S. fisheries management and the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Read Part Two here. As a boy growing up in the southwest corner of the New England coast, I had no way of knowing that Congress would someday pass the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and […]
Here on Long Island, St. Patrick’s Day—March 17—was always the unofficial start of the winter flounder season. That date wasn’t imposed by law. For many years, there was no closed season, and an angler who knew what to do could catch at least a few flounder at any time that the bays weren’t sheathed in […]
Cownose Rays, photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation For too many years, biologists tried to manage fish in a vacuum. They focused on the impacts that harvest had on each species; they paid little heed to how the same harvest affected the greater marine ecosystem. That is slowly beginning to change. The Pacific Fishery […]
People don’t like to be told what to do. Fishermen are no exception. Ask any fisheries managers who ever imposed an annual catch limit to regulate landings. Fishermen’s aversion to annual catch limits has always been particularly acute in the northeastern United States. The New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) refused to impose hard poundage […]
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