Page 12. MAINE COASTAL NEWS June 2018 Commercial Fishing News
Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board Revises North- ern Region Recreational Management Measures ARLINGTON, VA – Upon the direction of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Interstate Fisheries Man- agement Program (ISFMP) Policy Board, the Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board (Board) approved revised 2018 recreational measures for the Northern Region states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York (see Table 1). Further, the Board initiated new management action for the 2019 black sea bass recreational fi shery and tasked the Plan Development Team to develop a white paper to consider the impacts of changes in black sea bass abundance and distribution to the management of commercial and rec- reational fi sheries. This action is taken in response to a
Northern Region state appeal of the ap- proved 2018 recreational measures under Addendum XXX. The appeal argued the Board’s action under Addendum XXX in- correctly applied technical data and was in- consistent with the Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan. After reviewing the appeal, Commis- sion Leadership agreed there was adequate justifi cation to bring portions of the appeal forward to the ISFMP Policy Board. During the ISFMP Policy Board’s de-
liberations regarding consideration of the appeal, a potential management program for the 2018 black sea bass recreational fi shery was presented to replace the allocations specifi ed in Addendum XXX. The revised management program was developed to
M C F N
meet the needs of the Northern Region without impacting the remaining states, while still constraining harvest to the 2018 recreational harvest limit of 3.66 million pounds. For more information, please contact
Caitlin Starks, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at
cstarks@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.
River Herring are Running in Local Rivers
River herring gets over a fi sh ladder at Mill Pond in Marstons Mills on Cape Cod.
It’s that time of year. River herring
are returning to local rivers and streams to spawn. For Northeast Fisheries Science Center researcher Ruth Haas-Castro, counts began April 1 at Mill Pond in Marstons Mills on Cape Cod and will continue while the river herring are running in April and May, sometimes into June. Water temperature needs to be about 52 degrees F for the river herring to move, which means the night-time temperatures have to remain above freezing. Haas-Castro, who studies Atlantic
salmon and other river-run fi sh species, volunteers for a ten-minute time slot at Mill Pond when she has a chance, joining a com- munity count run by the Barnstable Clean Water Coalition and the Town of Barnsta- ble. The coalition runs the Mill Pond count and the town manages a count at Middle Pond just up the road. “I’ve been participating in the count
since 2011. It helps me keep a fi nger on the pulse of river herring,” Haas-Castro said of her volunteer eff orts. “Plus it's really close to my house so it is easy for me to do, and
its related to my work.” There are twelve slots each day for the
Mill Pond count, with nine required for a good count. Most are fi lled by retirees and other interested citizens. The weather has been cool and Haas-Castro hadn’t seen any fi sh until Saturday, April 14, when she counted 7 river herring during her 10-minute slot.
Haas-Castro has recruited several other
NEFSC staff to join the eff ort, and noted that similar river herring counts are going on all over the Cape and up and down the Atlantic coast.
World Fish Migration Day is celebrated
on April 21, but events are planned through May.
Reconstruction of Major North Atlantic Circulation System Shows Weakening Impacts Felt on Fisheries and Climate Lobsters are temperature sensitive. Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere have aff ected one of the global ocean's major circulation systems, slowing the redistribution of heat in the North Atlan- tic Ocean. The resulting changes have been felt along the Northeast U.S. Shelf and in the Gulf of Maine, which has warmed 99 percent faster than the global ocean over the past ten years, impacting distributions of fi sh and other species and their prey. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning
Circulation (AMOC) is a large-scale system of ocean currents that circulates warm, salty water from the South Atlantic and tropics via the Gulf Stream to the colder North Atlantic. There, warm salty waters cool, release heat, and eventually sink to the deep ocean and move south. The AMOC plays a key role in
the Earth’s climate and is a major component of the Global Conveyor Belt. In a study published online in Nature,
researchers from Europe and the U.S. used computer model simulations to reconstruct changes in AMOC over time. Comparisons of these simulations with recent direct ocean measurements suggest the AMOC has slowed down or weakened by about 15 percent since the 1950s. Measuring the AMOC Slowdown “Our findings show that in recent
years the AMOC appears to have reached a new record low, consistent with the record low annual sea surface temperature in the subpolar North Atlantic since observations began in 1870 and reported by NOAA for 2015,” the authors report. “The AMOC de- cline since the mid-20th century is a feature projected by climate models in response to rising carbon dioxide levels.” “We found a characteristic sea surface
temperature fi ngerprint for an AMOC slow- down or weakening in both a high-resolution global climate model and in temperature trends observed since 1870,” said Vincent Saba, a research fi shery biologist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and a co-author of the study. Saba works with high-resolution global climate models at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab- oratory at Princeton University. His studies have focused on the impact of changing ocean conditions on fi sheries, sea turtles, and other marine life. “That fi ngerprint consists of a pattern
of cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean’s subpolar gyre and a warming in the Gulf Stream region due to reduced northward heat transport and an associated northward
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