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 […]
When it comes to fisheries management, you can’t have too much data. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) requires that “Conservation and management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available,” and that’s a good thing. Yet it also creates a problem, for a penny-pinching Congress has long denied the National […]
It’s nice to think that salt water fish are managed solely by concerned scientists, who look at the data available and always make decisions that will best guarantee that stocks will be sustainably harvested and available to us in the long term. But that’s not the case. Science plays a role. Both the various coastal […]
Folks tend to think of fishing as an innocent pastime, something that takes us back to a cane-pole childhood where cares were few and simple pleasures abundant. Unfortunately, today’s fisheries are as politicized as timber and oil production, with various interests each fighting for a share of the resource. Anglers must play a role in […]
On Monday, December 7, the House Natural Resources Committee held an oversight field hearing in Riverhead, New York. Entitled “Restoring Atlantic Fisheries and Protecting the Regional Seafood Economy,” it illuminated the debate surrounding reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens). The Committee had already approved H.R. 1335, the so-called Strengthening Fishing Communities […]
Fisheries managers are finally paying attention to forage fish, the myriad species of small fish, squid and crustaceans that the predators need to survive. At the federal level, the Pacific Fishery Management Council got the ball rolling with its Comprehensive Ecosystem-Based Amendment 1: Protecting Unfished and Unmanaged Forage Fish Species. That Amendment would prevent the […]
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