<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/atlantic-mackerel-overfishing-recovery/>
"In the summer of 2018, while commercial tuna fishing off Maine’s Monhegan
Island, Tim LaRochelle kept encountering a species different from the one he
had set out to hook. “We were catching tons of mackerel,” he recalls. “Just
vast, vast amounts.”
Seeing profit potential in a fish that hadn’t previously been his priority,
LaRochelle took a cue from the ocean and rigged up his 42-foot boat, the
Mary
Jane 2, with an automatic jigging machine — the type commonly used to catch
zippy, pelagic fish — with the hope that those giant, shimmering schools of
mackerel would still be waiting for him in Maine’s chilly surf. Though it took
a few fishing seasons to work out the kinks of the rigging system he had taught
himself how to use, LaRochelle’s bet paid off. By 2020, with his gear in good
working order, the
Mary Jane 2 was catching close to 21,000 pounds of
mackerel in the span of just three days.
But this bounty wouldn’t last. In the fall of 2021, just as LaRochelle had
started landing large quantities of mackerel, the U.S. government shut down the
commercial fishery — the result of mechanism built into a 2010 federal law to
help stem overfishing — and by 2022, a biomass assessment conducted by NOAA
found that the species population was at an all-time low.
The fishery’s sudden shuttering was a subtle but significant loss for the
broader New England fishing community. For generations, mackerel played an
integral role in the region’s economy as a canning species as well as in the
fabric of its cultural ebbs and flows. Chris Uraneck, a marine resource
specialist for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, who specializes in the
saltwater recreational sector where mackerel are often fished for bait or
sport, says his grandmother-in-law holds fond memories of the fish. “She can
remember people going door-to-door selling mackerel. They would ride around on
a bicycle and sell it to people to eat,” he says. “Things have changed,
obviously.”
But hopefully, things are about to change again. The 2024 removal of the
Atlantic mackerel from NOAA’s overfishing list indicates that the shutdown that
so abruptly ended the season in 2021, harming the income of commercial
fishermen like LaRochelle, potentially worked, and that more abundant days are
ahead for the fishery."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
