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New England’s struggling groundfish industry would benefit if regulators pay more attention to how their decisions affect fishermen and their communities, a Northeastern University researcher says.
In a presentation at UMass Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology last week, Jonathan Grabowski said management decisions for the fishery have been based on trawl surveys to estimate fish populations, plus economic and environmental factors.
Yet federal and regional fisheries management officials have not as readily included the social impacts of their decisions on fishermen and their communities.
Fishermen have experienced high levels of stress and social disruption as the groundfish industry has declined due to overfishing and ineffective conservation measures. Meanwhile, their distrust in regulators has increased, he said.
Using more social and experiential data from these fishermen could allow regulators to make better management decisions, Grabowski said. That could help the fishery function better, improve outcomes for the industry, conserve environmental resources, and rebuild trust.
“You can get the biology really well, but if the economics or the social dynamics of the system are off, it’s still a poorly functioning system,” Grabowski said.
Surveying New England fishermen
Grabowski pointed to work he did after the federal government declared New England’s groundfish industry a disaster in 2012.
Decades of overfishing had depleted populations of the 13 bottom-dwelling species that comprise the fishery. Regulators had implemented several conservation efforts, including limits on days at sea for fishing vessels, strict quotas, and the closing of certain fishing grounds. They were aimed at allowing fish populations to recover.
Despite these efforts, independent surveys continued to suggest the region’s groundfish were overfished and experiencing overfishing.
After the 2012 disaster declaration, fishery regulators implemented major cutbacks to annual catch limits, Grabowski said. That put significant pressure on the fleet to survive and adapt.
To measure the social impacts of this disaster declaration and the cuts leading up to it, Grabowski and his team of researchers conducted phone surveys of industry members in 2013, 2015, and 2018. They talked to 100-plus fishermen in five states.
They asked about social disruption and stress. They asked about who the fishing community trusts. They asked about subjective stress levels, and fishermen’s willingness to adapt.
Grabowski said that during the survey’s five years, the number of participants actively fishing for groundfish declined sharply, from around 40% to just over 20%. About 60% of the fishermen reported chronic or severe stress across all three sampling periods.
The researchers also found distrust among fishermen in the information coming from the government, and fisheries managers. They had even less trust in environmental groups.
Meanwhile, these fishermen had pretty high levels of trust in the information they were getting from members of the fishing industry itself.
Grabowski said the study suggests these fishermen have lost trust in “outsiders” that try to inform and manage New England’s groundfish industry. However, since the fishermen trust the industry, it presents an opportunity for regulators to collaborate with them on better fishery management.
Grabowski said that a focus group of fishermen in the 2019 study supported fisheries management practices like implementing basket quotas — or stacking similar species in a quota — rather than treating every species as its own fishery. They also expressed some support for the use of marine protected areas.
Mapping cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine
Grabowski said his research to map the Atlantic cod “footprint” in the Gulf of Maine also shows how the region’s fishermen could contribute their experiences to improved management of the fishery.
He said that he and his co-authors with the Northeast Seafood Coalition started this research after expressing concerns over the annual groundfish trawl survey to fishery regulators. They felt these regulators relied on the survey too much in assessing the stock of cod.
They suspected the results of the trawl survey could be impacted by groups of fish near tow stations during the trawl, and whether the boat hits those groups or not as it moves through the water. That could influence the degree to which fisheries managers think there is a lot of cod in the Gulf of Maine or not.
Grabowski said the authors wanted to create a stock assessment tool for fisheries managers that used detailed historical data on cod’s prevalence in New England waters.
Grabowski and his team interviewed 27 experienced fishermen. They asked the fishermen to draw where they fished on NOAA charts. They also asked these fishermen when they saw cod in the area, at what times of day, and about the abundance of it in these areas.
The authors had the fishermen repeat this process for three time periods: 2004 to 2009, 2010 to 2012, and 2013 to 2022. They had the fishermen map the areas virtually in Google Earth. Then, the authors conducted a focus group with some of the interviewees to test the maps.
He said the researchers and industry are hoping to test their footprint map with actual fishing data. It could be a tool to help regulators’ efforts to survey cod more directly, if they want to do that instead of the trawl survey, Grabowski said.
Regional fisheries managers issued a four-stock management plan for New England cod stocks in December 2024. Grabowski said he and his co-researchers are interested in using their cod footprint map to support stock assessments in the new system.
Email reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@newbedfordlight.org.
Sentiments that I am sure Captain Jerry Leeman and NEFSC would agree with
I didn’t know they netted cod..I thought hook and line..tuna going to hook and line
Do live under a rock?
80+ percent of cod are caught by trawling.
How much money does an average fishing deckhand make?
An average Wind Turbined Crew Transfer Vessel deckhand make.
Which is more dangerous?