As a result of Trawlgate, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parent agency to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), sought appropriations for increased spending on fisheries science.

“There’s more money going to stock assessment data and Congress has funded four new research vessels,” said Dr. Steven Murawski, newly appointed senior science advisor and director of science programs for NOAA. One vessel was launched in Alaska in May and New England’s HENRY B. BIGELOW was set for launch at the Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard in July, to be ready for use at Woods Hole in early 2006. The next two will go to the West Coast and the southeast.

Murawski was chief of the population and assessment division for NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole until last year when he moved to the NOAA Silver Spring, MD, headquarters to become director of science and technology.

For more than 40 years, two research vessels based at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center have performed annual spring and fall trawl surveys on groundfish, scallops, Gulf of Maine shrimp, and every three years on clams. They tow the same gear in the same places to assess the biomass of the various species.

In the fall of 2002, as New England fishermen were struggling with reduced fishing days and facing even more reductions due to the depleted condition of groundfish stocks, scientists at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center discovered the ALBATROSS IV, one of the NOAA research vessels, had been towing mismatched trawl gear for two-and-a-half years. Murawski revealed the news at a New England Fisheries Management Council meeting.

Russell W. Brown, lead scientist for the ecosystem surveys program at the Northeast Center, wrote the internal memo that alerted his colleagues to the gear problem aboard the 187-foot ALBATROSS IV. “It was a watershed event. It caused us to progress to a better place,” said Brown. “The program had been operating on a shoestring and it [Trawlgate] helped us get resources. My position coming in the door was, if we don’t have the resources to do a good job, we’re not going to do it at all. If we can do without it, fine. But if we can’t do without it, we need to put resources into it.”

Brown is now one of 12 members of a diverse committee that includes fishermen, formed after the incident to oversee gear development for the new research vessel.

“Our primary goal is to assess the abundance of fish biomass in offshore waters,” said Brown. “We use the same gear. It allows us to see trends in abundance and biomass over time, because we’re doing it in a standardized way for such a long time. The design of our gear was antiquated [before Trawlgate], it was late ’50s, early ’60s technology. That was already controversial among commercial fishermen since estimates show they increase their efficiency on average 3 percent a year.”

The committee is trying to balance the size of the gear with the size of the larger new 210-foot stern trawler-style vessel. “But we can’t do it completely, because we want to collect samples of the resource, not necessarily deplete it,” said Brown. Research draggers tow nets with smaller mesh, between one-half and one inch, than fishing vessels because “we’re trying to catch small fish” to ascertain the condition of the whole stock. Fishermen are not allowed to catch small fish, so their groundfish net mesh measures around 6.5 inches. NOAA held a contest and the name for the New England vessel, Henry B. Bigelow, was chosen by schoolchildren. The scientist Bigelow was one of two authors of the classic Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, the first book to document the denizens of the Gulf, still in use today. “High schoolers named it, and they’ll be taken on a cruise,” said Brown.

Advanced monitoring equipment on the new vessels will allow scientists not only to gather fish samples, but water temperatures, salinity, wave heights, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, solar intensity and acoustic Doppler to infer the bottom current at the time of the tow. The net monitor will look at the wingspread of the net doors, the bottom contact, “much more sophisticated than before,” Brown said. “We’ll have tremendous data.”

Cooperative research with fishermen will continue, he added. “These guys spend a tremendous amount of time on the water, they’re highly specialized and know their local area well. They tend to extrapolate beyond that to the entire seaboard, but that doesn’t discount the value of the insights the individuals have.”

For a couple of years, the Albatross and the Bigelow will tow side by side. “We know they will probably have significantly different catch rates. We will be building a bridge. Calibrating one survey to the next is tricky. The better a job we do on this calibration, the less disruptive it will be to fisheries management.”

These vessels will also be acoustically quiet, incorporating declassified Navy technology that isolates the noise a vessel makes, including the hydraulic equipment.

“It’s a radical hull design, a single propeller like subs,” said Murawski. “They will have advanced technology to monitor the trawl performance,” check different trawling methods, and see the effects of gear on the ocean floor. The precision of the entire research operation will be improved, he added. “We don’t get to revise our technology very often.”

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Canada Cuts Science

Early this year, Canada took a different approach to fisheries research,
cutting $44 million (Cnd) from the fisheries science budget of the federal
Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the next five years, with another $13
million a year to be cut annually after that, and one research vessel to be
cut from the DFO fleet.

The largest daily newspaper in Newfoundland, the St. John’s Telegram, in
February editorialized strongly against the cuts announced by Ottawa:
“Reduced science staff, reduced expenses, but better scientific information?
Not likely… The cold hard facts are that you don’t improve fisheries
sciences by cutting $44 million right out of the guts of it… Anyone who
claims, as Geoff Regan (federal fisheries minister) does, that the science
will get better because there are fewer scientists doing less work with less
money is clearly out of their depth.”