Skate fishing limits draw new fire

The New England commercial fishing fleet has been waiting for more than a month to learn whether the U.S. Secretary of Commerce will honor a gubernatorial request for loosened groundfish limits to help quell a government-induced industry collapse.

Now, a second economic emergency request — challenging limits on the humble skate — is coming from Congressman Barney Frank.

Garth Patterson, Frank's fisheries advisor, told the Times the emergency request for skate will be issued perhaps as soon as this week.

Like the first request — for a broad loosening of catch limits across the 19 stock groundfish complex, sought by Gov. Deval Patrick before the mid-term congressional elections — Frank's will cite authority in the Magnuson-Stevens Act allowing Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to obviate an economic crisis with emergency adjustments in catch limits so long as stock recovery plans are not jeopardized.

Skate, a family of bottom feeders closely related to sharks, has the image of a junk fish in the U.S. But the firm white flesh appeals to French palates, so is prized as an export food fish and an important lobster bait in New England.

As an industry sector, skate supports three major and a number of minor processors and about 300 jobs in New Bedford and Gloucester, according to John Whiteside, attorney for Gloucester's Zeus Packing and both Seatrade International and Marder Trading in New Bedford.

During the decades of emergency conservation regimens the better known and broadly desired groundfish, the plentiful skate — whose numbers dominated government trawl surveys for some time — has helped keep the boats and shoreside businesses of Gloucester and New Bedford running.

But that was before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in two steps, took down the trip limit by a factor of 40 — from a 20,000 pound trip limit in 2009, by last September boats were allowed to land only 500 pounds.

NOAA spokeswoman Maggie Mooney-Seus said the action was mandated under Magnuson and triggered when the year's landings passed 80 percent of the size of the total allowable catch set by the New England Fishery Management Council. The 2006 reauthorization of Magnuson included mechanisms to discourage and compensate for excessive landings.

"The in-season action was to prevent an overage in the fishery, which would require future catch reductions," said Mooney-Seus.

She also said variations in the strength of different species of skates, which are difficult to differentiate even by trained eyes, factored into the decision on limited landings.

"Due to the difficulty in identifying skate species, skate are managed as a complex," Mooney-Seus said in an e-mail to the Times on Friday. "While some preliminary information suggests an improvement in the status of winter skate, not all skate stocks are healthy."

But an academic research paper from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth asserts that NOAA is sitting on unreleased trawl data showing no need for the reduced trip limits that have effectively collapsed the skate fishery, leaving European buyers to skate exporters from South America.

"Normally, between September and October, we're working mostly every day, but this year we've had 10 productive days," said Zeus Packing CEO Kristian Kristensen, who put the losses at about 78 percent or $1.5 million from skate processing in 2009.

Similar hardships at New Bedford's two big skate processors, Seatrade International and Marder Trawling, were reported by Whiteside, who spoke during last week's of New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang's Ocean Fisheries Council. The meeting was called to re-enforce the need for a rapid answer to the filing by Gov. Deval Patrick in October that sited a management created economic crisis in the groundfishery and urged an emergency allocation.

The skate report by Emily F. Keiley at UMass Dartmouth's School of Marine Science and Technology contends that recent management strategies have "fully rebuilt" the targeted skates, and she noted that while the species look alike they are found and caught in predictable and predictable patterns, so need not be managed as an undifferentiated complex.

Locke is awaiting a recommendation from government scientists before acting on the first emergency allocation request for additional groundfish, which was made last month by Gov. Deval Patrick. A emergency allocation requires the finding of an economic crisis and scientific evidence the fishery can sustain the additional taking without overfishing.

"Although the National Marine Fisheries Service has not officially released the information, the most recent three year average indicates that the two target species are rebuilt, Keiley wrote. "This implies that both target species were successfully rebuilt under a 20,000 pound trip limit."

As the Times reported in September, Kristensen points to trawl survey data showing a surge in skates for the past four years, as volume per tow went from 3.71 kilograms in 2007 to 9.50 kg in 2008 to 11.33 in 2009, producing a rolling target of 8.18 kg per tow.

That's nearly double the 5.30 kg rolling average target, according to an e-mail to Kristensen from Russell Brown, NOAA's chief scientist at Woods Hole

Brown wrote to Kristensen that "these indices are higher than we have observed in recent years, and this likely represents good news for fishery stakeholders, managers and the resource."

But on the heels of Brown's e-mail, Nancy Thompson, NOAA's science and research director, sent Kristensen an unsolicited e-mail, effectively negating Brown's optimism and also partially contradicting Brown's claim that results had been "fully audited."

"While we are completing the audit for the bottom trawl survey at this time," she wrote to Kristensen, "we do not know what these results mean relative to the status and condition of the stock. So, quite frankly, we do not know what this means as far as news for the fishery."

Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.

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