The Atlantic herring fishery, long a mainstay of coastal Maine’s economy, took center stage in January at the Maine Environmental Resource Institute (MERI) in Blue Hill. As part of MERI’s winter lecture series, Peter Baker, director of the Herring Alliance (herringalliance.org), explained the significance of the fishery and recent changes that have made the herring fishery highly controversial.
“The herring fleet has transformed from the primarily Maine-based weir and seine fishery, to a fleet of midwater trawlers that employ an `industrial’ style of fishing,” Baker said. “The midwater trawl fleet consists of ships 165 feet long that tow nets as long and as wide as a football field.”
Many of the new ships are based in Massachusetts and the financing comes “from away,” including the West coast, Ireland and Norway. “These new ships are not local Maine fishing businesses and the scale of the operations doesn’t fit into what most people think of as traditional New England fishing operations,” Baker said.
The shift in landings from the Maine-based purse seine fleet to midwater trawling has been dramatic. A dozen years ago, the vast majority of herring were caught by purse seines, mainly from the coast of Maine. Now however, more than 80 percent of the landings come from midwater trawls.
“It’s a dramatic shift and many of us are concerned about the impact,” Baker continued. “We saw the shift to midwater trawls in the late 1990s and over the last decade we’ve seen an even more pronounced shift to pair trawling.” Pair trawling is a style of fishing in which two boats tow one gigantic net to increase the amount they can catch per tow. “Some of nets can hold hundreds of thousands of pounds and that some of the herring ships could hold over a million pounds of fish” said Baker.
The size of the nets and the intensive style of fishing these new vessels use has raised many concerns up and down New England’s coast. In 2003, Baker was a cofounder of the CHOIR Coalition (Coalition for Atlantic Herring’s Orderly, Informed and Responsible Long Term Development). CHOIR is made up of commercial and recreational fishing organizations and businesses as well as eco-tourism companies, such as whale watch boats.
“We formed CHOIR because people in New England that rely on the ocean for their livelihood were concerned that these new industrial ships were causing depletion of herring inshore,” Baker said. In addition, the coalition is concerned about bycatch in the herring fishery, “fishermen and whale watchers were reporting slicks of dead fish behind these herring ships, causing concern about how much haddock, tuna, striped bass and other valuable fish was being wasted while these ships trawled for herring.”
CHOIR successfully advocated for a “seasonal purse seine-fixed gear only area” in the inshore Gulf of Maine that prevents midwater trawling from June through September. The measure was implemented in the summer of 2007 and “reports from fishermen were very positive this summer,” Baker claimed.
In 2007, Baker went to work for the Pew Environment Group, where he founded the Herring Alliance, a coalition of 11 conservation organizations that have concerns of their own about herring. “The conservation community listened to the concerns of traditional New England fishermen and we organized to promote changes that will make a difference on the water,” Baker said. “Currently, the industrial midwater trawl fleet is very poorly monitored. The amount of time that federal observers are on the vessels is inadequate and the vessels are allowed to dump fish at sea without the observers ever seeing it.” Baker described onboard camera systems, maximized retention (i.e. no dumping fish at sea) strategies, industry funded observer programs, and other measures that are used on similar industrial fishing operations in other parts of the country. “Were these ships operating with this sort of gear in Alaska, they would have a fisheries observer onboard every time they left the dock.”
The New England Fishery Management Council, which oversees the herring fishery, is in the process of amending the herring fishery management plan. “It’ll take them another year or so, but hopefully we can bring this fishery into the 21st century and get a real monitoring program in place that’ll show us once and for all what they catch and what they throw overboard dead, Baker said. In addition, the Herring Alliance and others will be pushing for extension of the inshore closure to go as far south as Long Island, NY. These are massive ships and they don’t belong in inshore waters.” Baker concluded.
In a related development, the Rockland-based Island Institute has held initial discussions with traditional Maine purse seiners about community based management plans and cooperative research. A handful of Maine herring seiners from the Midcoast area have experience in cooperative research, and there has been one study of the use of camera-based monitoring. As the debate about the future of the herring fishery goes on, innovative strategies that promote traditional, conservation minded fishing practices will continue to emerge, with strong support from Maine’s coastal communities.
Jennifer Litteral is marine programs officer at the Island Institute.