BOSTON — The health of the ancient Atlantic sturgeon has emerged as the latest problem for a New England fishing industry already facing serious threats to its future.
On Wednesday, regional fishery managers discussed protecting sturgeon, two months after federal officials listed the fish in the Gulf of Maine as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Four other East Coast populations of the imposing, prehistoric fish were listed as the more serious “endangered” at that time.
Fishermen are forbidden from targeting sturgeon, but the listings could still lead to tough new fishing restrictions, such as closing new areas. That could happen if regulators determine so many sturgeon would be accidentally caught by fishermen chasing other species that it would jeopardize the sturgeon’s existence.
The prospect of more restrictions comes as fishermen in the Gulf of Maine face a 22 percent cut in the catch of the key cod species in May, with potentially catastrophic cod cuts looming in 2013.
They’re also getting shut out of a prime pollock area for two months, starting in October, to protect harbor porpoises.
On Wednesday, David Pierce of the New England Fishery Management Council predicted that new regulations would be needed to protect sturgeon and would cause “untold grief” for fishermen from New England down to the mid-Atlantic states.
He made a proposal, which the council approved, that requires a council committee to assess the federal science behind the listing itself and find out how researchers arrived at the low population estimates for sturgeon.
Council member Laura Ramsden said population estimates for Atlantic sturgeon were unreliable because the last comprehensive assessment was conducted more than a decade ago. She also questioned why onerous restrictions were needed, since only a minority of sturgeon that have contact with fishing gear end up dying from it.
“I’m not sure that’s justified,” she said.
But Kim Damon-Randall of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said regulators have more recent, solid estimates of the sturgeon population, and they show the population can’t afford even a few deaths.
“We’re talking about very low population sizes so even a small percentage being removed each year is a significant number of Atlantic sturgeon,” she said.
The sturdy fish, found from Florida to Maine, can grow as large as 14 feet and 800 pounds and live for 60 years. They spawn in rivers in the spring and early summer, then head for open water. The once-abundant fish was depleted in the late 19th century by demand for their caviar.
Now, federal regulators estimate there are roughly 8,200 sturgeon vulnerable to fishing gear (not counting younger, smaller fish), including 664 in the Gulf of Maine.
Regulators say the sturgeon is most endangered by stationary nets that sink to the bottom, called sink gillnets. The gear is often used by fishermen targeting monkfish, but it’s also used to catch other species such as cod and dogfish. Regulators estimate about 27 percent of the sturgeon that encounter sink gillnets end up dying.
Ron Smolowitz of the Fisheries Survival Fund, a scallop industry group, warned the council that restrictions to protect the fish could affect many fishermen who don’t use sink gillnets. Under the Endangered Species Act, certain areas can be designated as “critical habitat” if those areas are seen as essential to conserving the species.
Such critical habitat designations can come with restrictions that “could wipe out the entire fisheries of the East Coast of the United States,” he said.
Brad Sewell, an attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, which petitioned to have the sturgeon listed under the Endangered Species Act, said in a phone interview said it’s extremely unlikely new sturgeon restrictions will have such a broad effect.
Changes to sink gillnet fishing will be the focus, and there are affordable, sensible measures can make it less of a danger to sturgeon, such as pulling up the nets more often or raising them off the ocean floor to avoid sturgeon, he said.
“We’re confident that there are cost-effective ways of saving this remarkable fish and also keeping fishermen on the water,” Sewell said.
It’s an oxymoron to say that a fishes’ health is a threat to a ‘fishery.’ Without fish there is no fishery. We still have a lobster fishery because there are still live lobsters. Without live lobsters there would be no lobster ‘fishery.’ So the headline could read that live lobsters are a threat to the lobster fishery. This is just silly, unthought headline and story. It makes no rational sense. Of course, we all know that Atlantic sturgeon are precious and important and we all want them to come back to Maine’s rivers and coasts. We want our kids to be able to see 12 foot sturgeon leaping in the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers, just as much as we want them to see whales breaching and eagles flying overhead. To make this story about ‘fish v. fishermen’ is to not understand the equation.
Wisely said but still it is hard and painful when protection, in the short run, causes such drastic impacts on local fisheries…I wonder if we wouldn’t do better by the tsurgeon and the fisheries affected by its protection if we asked the fishery to come up with voluntary programs and sanctioned those.
There has to be a way to merge what science knows about endangered species like the sturgeon with the vast knowledge and know how of our fishery..Wouldn’t we know more about their numbers, their breeding, their progress on rebound if the folk out on the water were supplying the data to the scientists?
The top down way we do regulate is very unwise and counter productive.
The Tragedy of the Commons/bottom-up approach does not work.
Anymore that allowing polluting industries to “self police” themselves.
yessah
Well, munebaght, Ted Ames, Recipient of a McCarthur genius fellowship and head of Penobscot East Resources here in Stonington doesn’t agree with you on that.
As a nationally recognized expert in environmental risk management, throughly familiar with the history of enviropnmental laws affecting property owners and businesses, I don’t agree. I think law makers did it wrong and created laws in many instances that incorrcetly assumed industry would and could just adapt. One example the lead in constructon rule which affected the means and methods of painting and paint removal on all steel structures..bridges, tanks etc. A wonderful private entity, the Steel Structures Painting Council emerged to help meet the training requirements Of the Lead In Construction rule but many years after passage of the rule very few painting contractors in NYC were qualified to deal with structural steel painting. It created nightmares for large owner operators of bridges and tanks who couldn’t find any qualified contractors to undertake heir work. Perhaps law makers would have done better to get more input up front from the owner operators of these facilities and from painting contractors to understand what was involved in complying instead of just assuming you can make a law, give people time and they will find a way on their own to compliance.
As an evironmental risk manager mostly overseeing the insurance and operations of huge mutli million $ construction contracts, time and time again I foud myself and our projects up against exactly that kind of gap between what the law assumed and what contractors actally did or were able to do.
Lead in paint is a good thing. It creates jobs and makes for damn good paint. All this lead stuff has been dreamed up by the left and their hippie beliefs. More government and more taxes. I say lets make lead paint again and keep the GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY PAINT CAN!!
Yeah..lead paint was like asbetso..seemed to be so suited for its uses..can’t argue that lead paint was a great coating for structural steel..right up to the part where it started to peel or needed to be scraped and released all that lead into peoples bodies.
Not sure if they have ever found a coating as durable as lead paint. They used a beautiful classic lead pait green coating on our bridge refurbishing here..not sure what it was and often wanted to stop and ask.
Are you/were you a steel strucrures paiter?
I’m not sure that you have ever seen a child who suffers from lead paint poisoning. Perhaps if you did, you might try to fix stupid. I don’t care what stupid things you do, but when it harms other people I think maybe your stupid needs to regulated.
Boy, with the number of the sturgeon I see it’s hard to believe it is endangered. The place is lousy with them in the summer.
Clamcove1..where are you seeing all these sturgeon?
I had one in my cove which empties/fills from exactly the mouth of the penobscot about 5 years back. I was fishing stripers with a young friend..The fish which was over 4 feet long let us take a good close. Very impressive. That one turned out to have been tagged and its signal in my cove was confirmed suggesting that the official count was accurate.
Your discovery /knowledge may be valuable..the knowledgeo of all fishermen is valuable and often more acurate than official science.
Come to either side of the Sheepscot River in Maine – Back River in Boothbay (my backyard), Robinhood Cove, the Sasanoa, Kennebec- filled with them. 664 fish in the Gulf of Maine it says in the article. I’d say there are close to that many on the east side of the Sheepscot alone in July and August
Kim Damon-Randall of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said regulators have more recent, solid estimates of the sturgeon population. I’m highly skeptical.
Who cares about sturgeon. The fishermen own the ocean and all that goes with it. If they go extinct that won’t change a thing for me and everybody else. Pollock is good and so is haddock and thats what matters to me. Kill ’em all. LePage will stop these regulations and let the fishermen do their job and do it good. We dont need all these stupid regulation and regulators either. thats tax money that could go back in our pocket. Eliminate NOAA,,NMFS Marine Resources, and IF&W and watch the money come back to us and the fish will come too! Don’t TREAD ON ME or THE FISHERMEN!!!
I think we all want more haddock and pollock, but in order for that to occur, you need a healthy ecosystem. If the sturgeon are eliminated, that means bad things for a whole bunch of other critters. They are all tied together in one way or another. In protecting the sturgeon, you are also protecting a whole mess of other fish. It sucks now, because it means closures to sensitive fishing areas, but in the long run it will mean good things for our rivers, ocean, and commercial fishing as a whole.
We won’t try to fix you……………
That fish should have died from UGLY years ago.
If we want to have a fishing industry – you need fish.
We have seriously depleted nearly every commercial marine and diadromous fish species, urchins, scallops and perhaps shrimp in the Gulf of Maine.
The ongoing free-for-all on elvers is absolutely irresponsible.
To preserve what is left of the industry we need severe restrictions on harvest, the establishment of no-take sanctuaries and fishways on the Androscoggin River to maintain alewife, shad, salmon populations in the Gulf of Maine.
Once populations are reestablished, we need conservative harvest quotas to sustain these fisheries.
Yessah
who needs sturgeon? I need shrimp and scallops dammit.
I was surprised to read they are in trouble as well. One never saw them in the New Meadows but in the past few years they have become increasingly common. We see various sizes too, so it isn’t just one fish showing.