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of controls, which can range from limiting the number of days commercial anglers are permitted at sea, capping the
amount of fish that can be caught, or
closing certain areas to fishing altogether, depending on what experts believe
any particular fish stock can handle.
In 2010, the New England Fisheries
Management Council — one of eight such
bodies that oversee commercial fishing
in the U.S. under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — refined the controls by implementing a “catch share” system for the
region’s highly prized groundfish. Modeled after similar systems used by various
other U.S. and international fisheries, the
idea is simple: Government scientists,
using a combination of historical catch
data and trawl surveys, determine the
size of a fish population and how much of
it can be sustainably caught. That total
catch limit is then divvied up as “shares”
among the region’s commercial fishermen, who can then pursue their allocations on the high seas, or sell them to
other anglers on an open market.
Catch-share systems are by no means
universally popular, and the jury is still
out on their overall impacts. Some recent studies suggest, for example, that
while they may help to stabilize fish
populations, they are less effective in restoring health to the marine ecosystem,
which would ideally include boosting the
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06.23.13
overall biomass of the target fish that
remain in our oceans.
This year’s drastic cuts in cod allocations, which met with angry protests
ahead of the season that opened early in
May, suggested to many critics that the
catch-share system in New England was
an utter failure. But some environmental groups and fishery regulators insist
that the system is both sound and necessary, explaining that an earlier sampling anomaly led them to overestimate
certain stocks in the preceding years and
forced them to make b