Herring trawlers just offshore anger Cape fishermen 11-16-16

Herring trawlers just offshore anger Cape fishermen

Cape Cod Times
by Doug Fraser

ORLEANS — They were visible from shore for most of Tuesday, seven vessels of between 140 to 170 feet in length, four miles off Nauset Beach.

Some worked in tandem, towing a huge net between them, scooping up mackerel or herring right on the Cape's doorstep and making local fishermen like Bruce Peters angry.

"They suck up all the herring and mackerel, the forage fish we need for the cod, tuna, stripers, the whales, what we need for the food chain," said Peters, a longtime commercial cod and groundfish fisherman, who now runs a charter boat business and fishes commercially for tuna. "We need a 50-mile buffer zone to keep these guys offshore."

Buffer zones that prohibit the herring fleet from fishing within anywhere from 6 to 50 miles from shore are part of a new amendment to the herring fishery management plan that will be outlined at the New England Fishery Management Council meeting Thursday in Newport, Rhode Island, and voted on at the January meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The council — a representative body of fishermen, industry representatives, environmental organizations and state and federal fishery officials — draws up plans to sustainably manage fish and shellfish stocks in federal waters. They received 238 pages of comment, much of it in support of requiring the herring fleet to fish farther from shore.

Like some Cape fishermen, Peters is glad that a buffer zone will finally be on the table but angry it took this long.

"We went to Washington over 20 years ago for this issue and they did nothing," Peters said.

After plummeting to historic lows in the 1970s, Atlantic herring stocks reached historic high population levels by 2013 with just a fraction being harvested, compared with landings during the 1960s. But Cape fishermen are concerned about localized depletion, which occurs when efficient fishing techniques harvest high numbers of a species in a particular area.

"The biological and ecological impacts (of localized depletion) can be major," Boston University fisheries biologist Les Kaufman wrote in an article on TalkingFish.org this September.

Herring, and mackerel, are keystone species in the food chain, grazing on massive plankton blooms and converting that energy into protein for predators like cod, striped bass, tuna, whales and other species.

Kaufman pointed to scientific studies that showed that concentrated fishing pressure on fish congregating at predictable times and locations, as when herring gather to spawn, could remove older fish that are more effective spawners. It could also wipe out discrete sub-groups that might not mix much with other groups but contribute to the resilience of the species against environmental change or disease.

The rapid removal of large amounts of prey can also affect predators, Kaufman wrote, noting that the loss of herring could have detrimental effects on inshore groundfish (cod, haddock, flounders) populations, Atlantic puffins, and whales and dolphins.

But Washington, D.C., attorney Shaun Gehan, who represents the Sustainable Fisheries Coalition, which includes many of the corporations that own the large herring vessels, pointed out in a September 2015 letter to the council that it is hard to measure or even define localized depletion. Near shore areas mentioned in connection with herring depletion have no clear boundary, and Gehan contends there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of localized depletion, citing studies in New England and on the West Coast that he said show little effect on predators or prey since both are highly mobile.

Gehan contends the real issue is conflict between groups of fishermen over who should be allowed to catch fish in a particular area.

Preliminary findings by fisheries council analysts of catch data from the herring and tuna fleets showed that Area 1b, particularly the portion of the ocean within 50 miles of the Outer Cape, had a high percentage of tuna landings in the fall, and was one of the two top areas for landings of herring in the fall and spring.

Local fisherman say the evidence of the importance of herring to their near-shore ecosystem is there, but no one is looking. They want the council to require that every trip and every tow by the herring fleet be overseen by federal observers.

There is some evidence, Kaiser contends, that the waters off the Cape should be protected as spawning grounds, as is done with inshore areas to the north. Kaiser noted that the inshore waters teemed with life after the herring fleet couldn't fish off the Cape last fall because they had already caught their quota of haddock, a groundfish stock that is sometimes found swimming with herring.

"Because of that, this was the first time in seven years, we've seen any bait coming down the beach," Kaiser said. Other fishermen noted there were whales, striped bass, and even tuna coming within 10 miles of shore to prey on herring. Bluefin tuna have been staying far out to sea for years, Kaiser said, but for the first time in recent years, the tuna fleet caught its quota.

"I saw gannets (seabirds that eat schooling fish) by the hundreds and I didn't know I'd ever see them again in my lifetime," Kaiser said.

— Follow Doug Fraser on Twitter:@dougfrasercct

Editor's note: The original version of this story included the wrong date for the New England Fishery Management Council meeting this week in Rhode Island. The story has been corrected.