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More info for those that like to write
Talking Points
• River herring landings from directed commercial fisheries have declined 90% in the last two decades, this corresponds with an expansion of offshore fishing for Atlantic herring and Atlantic mackerel.
• While bycatch data in these offshore fisheries is limited due to low levels of observer coverage, the available data reveals disturbingly large catches of river herring by mid-water trawl vessels. For example on four trips alone in 2007, the Atlantic herring fishery incidentally caught over 120,000 pounds of river herring. This is more river herring than any state landed through a directed river herring fishery in 2006, except for Maine.
• Because of high volume catches of single and paired mid-water trawl vessels, we need to look at the amount of river herring that is caught in relation to river herring populations, not in proportion to the total catch or landing. The offshore fishery has the capability of wiping out an entire run.
• It has proven difficult for scientists to fully understand the impacts of at-sea bycatch mortality on river herring populations because the limited amount of observer data makes statistically-significant extrapolation impossible.
• The Board needs to manage by individual runs, not the total population size, individual runs are becoming extinct.
• The last stock assessment was completed in 1990. A new stock assessment was recently initiated, and is scheduled to be completed in 2012. The bycatch data needs to be collected now so this can be incorporated into the stock assessment.
• The last stock assessment, conducted nearly two decades ago, showed five of fifteen stocks were overfished and four more had experienced declines. This assessment also recommended management actions to control fishing mortality, yet to date no measures have been implemented on a coastwide basis.
• To halt the decline and begin rebuilding healthy river herring populations, aggressive and immediate management actions are necessary. A failure to act swiftly to control all sources of river herring mortality could result in another Atlantic species becoming commercially extinct.
• ASMFC has the authority to mandate states create a shoreside program to quantify catch of river herring in the offshore fishery. Massachusetts and Maine have already begun to collect data, the states need to be mandated to operate on the same protocols, share the data in one large database and sample enough and during times when river herring catch is greatest.
• Because trends in river herring bycatch data indicate peak areas and seasons, time/area closures should be proposed and brought forward to the NEFMC and MAFMC to protect river herring.
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