R.I. pushing rules to guard fish schools

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – State environmental officials are enacting emergency regulations to protect schools of menhaden that have been migrating into Narragansett Bay for the first time in years.

The schools are luring out-of-state fishermen who use airplanes to find the schools of small bait fish, then call in boats with large nets to scoop them up.

The surge caught the attention of state regulators. The state Department of Environmental Management is now pushing regulations that would limit each boat to 75,000 pounds of the fish daily.

At the Statehouse, a bill would have banned commercial fishermen from netting menhaden in Narragansett Bay.

The bill sparked a long-simmering feud between environmentalists and commercial fishermen even though the bill never got out of committee.

Those pushing the bill, including Save the Bay, the state’s largest environmental group, said they were upset about the methods used by the fishermen, who use small boats to circle schools with large nets.

They draw the nets closed and vacuum up the trapped fish, appearing to wipe out entire schools.

“There’s a school of fish, and then the school is gone. To me that’s a problem. They take too many fish at once,” the bill’s sponsor Rep. Raymond E. Gallison Jr., D-Bristol, told The Providence Journal.

The bill was fiercely opposed by 200 lobstermen who depend on menhaden as an inexpensive bait for their traps. The lobstermen argued the menhaden were not threatened but their livelihoods would be if they couldn’t get the bait.

The state Department of Environmental Management also opposed the bill saying that while menhaden were down, they were not being overfished.

“It’s been quite a year for fisheries management,” said Mark Gibson, deputy chief of marine fisheries at the Department of Environmental Management.