Test said to show fish undercount Officials meeting on research results By David Arnold, Globe Staff, 9/29/2002 The National Marine Fisheries Service conducted four days of
experiments with net trawls in southern New England waters in response to
complaints that they were hauling the nets unevenly while surveying the
health of fish populations.
''There's plenty wrong. The net set was totally different from what it
should have been. It was a disaster,'' said Stephen Lee, a fisherman from
Berwick, Maine, who accompanied more than a dozen other observers and
scientists on a four-day voyage that returned to port at 7 a.m. Friday.
Because the results of the tests are not scheduled to be publicized
until a workshop next week, officials at the National Marine Fisheries
Service were more guarded in their remarks.
''There are obvious issues that we are going to have to take up at the
workshop,'' said Steve Murawski, chief of population dynamics for the
Northeast Fisheries Science Center, which is the regional science arm for
the fisheries service.
Fishermen have faced ever-tightening restrictions that, at least since
2000, may have been based on unduly pessimistic population estimates.
The federal government will hold a public workshop next Wednesday and
Thursday at Whitman Auditorium at the Marine Biological Laboratory in
Woods Hole to show the video and discuss the data generated by submarine
sensors that monitored the net's performance. A broad range of specialists
in the industry have been invited to the workshop, where fishery officials
hope to generate a report to summarize results of the sea test and propose
an appropriate next step. This could be side-by-side trawl tests, or it
could be simply to wait until the fall fish survey, now underway with
corrected gear, is completed in late November.
''It is way too early to speculate what's next. That's the purpose of
bringing everyone together,'' said Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the New
England Fisheries Science Center.
Acting on the suspicions of Matt Stommel, a Cape Cod fisherman who had
been complaining for many months the government was monitoring fish
populations with faulty equipment, officials inspected the net-hauling
equipment on the research vessel Albatross IV on Sept. 3. The net's mouth,
some 80-100 feet across, is held open in part by the trawl cables that
connect the net to the boat. The problem was that while crewmembers
thought they were releasing equal lengths of cable, in fact the lengths
might vary by as much as six feet because of incorrect markings made in
February 2000.
The mission earlier this week was to determine if unequal lengths of
cable were distorting not only the shape of the net's mouth, but how it
rode on rollers over the bottom where cod, flounder, and haddock reside.
The Albatross' surveys over many years have contributed to the bleak
picture of overfishing that has led a federal judge to order the catch in
the region cut by as much as two-thirds by August 2003.
Observers say the mission showed that there is a problem.
''The net was lifting off the bottom, away from where the fish are.
There was a significant distortion of the trawl,'' said Matt Stommel.
''But that's just the beginning. There were also some other issues, but it
would be inappropriate for me to talk about it now. This will all come out
in the workshop.''
An official at the Conservation Law Foundation, which has aggressively
pushed fishing restrictions through lawsuits, said she would ''wait and
see'' what results from the workshop, but cautioned that the statistical
decline of groundfish was thoroughly documented long before early 2000
when the Albatross acquired the poorly marked cables.
''Frankly, it would be great if it turns out there are more fish out
there than we think,'' said Priscilla Brooks, the director of CLF's marine
resources project.
This story ran on page B3 of the Boston Globe on
9/29/2002. |