With questions already swirling around the federal government's plan to regulate the New England fishing industry through "catch shares," all eyes have been waiting for the National Marine Fisheries Service's first listing of the total allowable catch limits for some of the fishery's species.

Those figures, after all, will set the ceiling for the overall catch fishermen in their cooperative "sectors" can land under the new system. So it will be those figures that decide how or whether the new format will work.

Now, with NMFS' posting the total allowable catch for pollock, we know the answer: It won't.

With government trawl studies showing a drop in pollock populations, NMFS has projected 2010's total allowable catch of 3,813 metric tons of pollock throughout the New England fishery.

That is just a third of the 11,370 tons of pollock landed in 2008, with the 2009 numbers obviously still in play. So, fishermen already being regulated out of business by their own government are now being told by NMFS that they will have to cut their pollock catch by 67 percent next year compared to their landings in 2008!

That's a figure that Gloucester's Vito Giacalone — who, as policy chief of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, has tried to work with government officials to ease the transition to the catch shares format — says will simply "break the system." Raymond Canastra, co-owner of the Whaling City Seafood Auction in New Bedford, says the NMFS' pollock limits would be "the death knell" for many fishing boats — each of which, of course, is a small business and cog in the wheels of the local economy.

All of this oddly comes as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been touting — on the surface at least — the improvement of many fish stocks, and relatively rosy prospects for the future under new NOAA director Jane Lubchenco's prized "catch shares" regulatory scheme.

Granted, pollock was not among the stocks cited as gems of recovery. And there would be a context to NMFS' pollock numbers if there was credible, independent science to show that the species has clearly reached an emergency level.

Yes, government pollock surveys suggest that populations have dropped by more than half since 2004, with less than 1 kilogram of the fish coming up in each tow, compared with more than 2 kilograms five years ago and 7 kilograms in the 1970s. But even one of NOAA's own scientists — research biologist Paul Rago of the NOAA fisheries science center in Woods Hole — acknowledges pollock "are a notoriously difficult stock to assess," with pollock moving within different depths of the ocean waters.

Does that kind of survey sound definitive enough to order a 67 percent cut in the amount of pollock to be landed?

Hardly.

Lest we forget, a May review of existing research data and the findings of boat captains done by UMass-Dartmouth's School of Marine Science and Technology found the science on which NMFS' current regulatory Interim Rule is based to be "costly and misleading." And that report, produced in conjunction with Gov. Deval Patrick's office and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, found NMFS' assessment of winter flounder hopelessly flawed because the research apparently didn't account for that fish's swimming habits.

When the New England Fishery Management Council convenes in Plymouth next month, its members should demand that NMFS' allowable pollock catch — and perhaps other catch totals, if they're available by then — be put on hold pending more independent research. And, with those numbers in play, they should also reconsider or put a hold on their June approval of the entire catch share program as well.

We've noted in the past our faith that a catch share system could work — as long as the allowable catch at least matched or exceeded fishermen's current landings. But if the pollock catch is any indication, NMFS, and, by extension its parent agency of NOAA, are committed to putting even tighter regulatory clamps — no doubt accompanied by excessive, heavy-handed enforcement — on an industry already choking at the hands of our own government.

It's time that the fishery council — baked by lawmakers and the reforms this process desperately needs — stood up and said, "enough." No independent science? No reasonable catch allotments? Then no dice, no new mandates — and no catch shares.