Workshop to focus on fishing bycatch

PORTLAND – Fishermen, scientists and government regulators will meet Tuesday to discuss bycatch, the animals that are caught inadvertently and have to be thrown overboard dead.

“They’re being harvested but they’re not being eaten,” said Paul Anderson, director of the Maine Sea Grant program at the University of Maine, which is coordinating the workshop. “Only when we land them do we really count them, so the impact on the overall fishery can be profound and we wouldn’t even know it.”

The workshop will provide an update on local and regional efforts to improve fishing practices and gear that aim to reduce the amount of bycatch, according to Sherm Hoyt, fisheries outreach coordinator for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension Service and the sea grant program.

“There’s a lot of success out there, which I think the public needs to know and the industry needs to take some credit for, and the scientists,” Hoyt said. “There’s a lot of bad news, but there is some good news, at least, in basic knowledge about how to reduce bycatch.”

Chris Glass of the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences will be among the panelists. Glass teamed up with fishermen of the Associated Fisheries of Maine for an experiment to determine whether it is possible to catch yellowtail flounder in a closed area of Georges Bank without snagging cod and haddock as bycatch.

Fishermen thought it was possible because by June the cod and haddock have moved out of the area.

“They got an experimental permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service and worked with Chris and some observers to send boats in there, and caught almost no bycatch,” Hoyt said. “They had almost no cod and haddock. It was a very, very, clean fishery just because of the timing of the fishery.”

Other panelists include fishermen and representatives of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the New England Fisheries Management Council, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Conservation Law Foundation.

Tuesday’s workshop is one of a series on fisheries issues that are being scheduled for the coming year in Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire, Anderson said. Future topics include individual fishing quotas and marine sanctuaries.