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 […]
On Georges Bank and in the Gulf of Maine, cod stocks have collapsed. A stock assessment update released in October 2015 found that the Gulf of Maine stock was experiencing a fishing mortality rate five times the sustainable level, while abundance had fallen to just 5% of the biomass target. The Georges Bank stock is […]
The National Environmental Policy Act, informally referred to as “NEPA,” has been called “the Magna Carta of environmental law.” It assures that the public interest in maintaining a healthy environment is protected, by requiring all federal agencies “to incorporate environmental considerations in their planning and decision making,” and compels such agencies to prepare “environmental assessments” […]
If you’re not an angler who fishes the coast somewhere between Virginia and Massachusetts, you may never have heard of a tautog. Where I live on Long Island, we usually call them “blackfish,” which pretty well describes their appearance, although it doesn’t say anything about their white chin and dirty-white belly, or the thick, sturdy […]
I recently read an editorial in a local angling newspaper that criticized the way summer flounder are managed. It was written by Nick Cicero, a founding member of the Save the Summer Flounder Fishery Fund (SSFFF). Back in the late 1980s, summer flounder abundance bottomed out, and overfishing was so bad that it was hard […]
Summer flounder management gets a lot of publicity, and has for the last fifteen years, even though the management of that species has been very successful. But there is another closely related fish, the southern flounder, which gets far less publicity, although its management hasn’t been very successful at all. Summer flounder are managed by […]
In April 2010, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) American Lobster Technical Committee issued a report entitled “Recruitment Failure in The Southern New England Lobster Stock”, which shocked lobster fishermen in the southern New England and mid-Atlantic regions when it stated that “Since the release of the 2009 Assessment, additional monitoring information has been […]
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