Fishermen, conservation groups, and policymakers count on GMRI's science team to provide timely, objective scientific and economic advice that they can use to make informed decisions to guide Gulf of Maine fisheries toward sustainability and profitability. In 2008, our team managed 40 active research projects aligned to some of the most significant challenges facing our fishing communities and management agencies.
GMRI provided economic analysis to maximize the chance that restructuring New England’s groundfishing fleet into harvesting sectors will achieve desired socioeconomic and conservation goals. We tested the feasibly of using electronic reporting devices as an alternative to at-sea observer coverage to help sectors meet increased requirements for real-time catch reporting.
We launched an acoustic sonar study to try to resolve the highly contentious debate over how herring behave when a midwater trawler fishes a large school and its potential to adversely impact predators like bluefin tuna. Our scientists developed a model to enable the New England Fishery Management Council to better assess the vulnerability of different habitats to fishing gear impact. We used a variety of tagging techniques to track and interpret the movement of cod, haddock, and monkfish and worked with fishermen to refine fishing gear and practices.
Culminating six years of work by Northeast Regional Cod Tagging Program, GMRI shared valuable insights on cod migration with NOAA Fisheries to inform the 2008 stock assessment. A monkfish tagging study established movement between northern and southern management zones. This finding challenges current fishery regulations that treat New England’s most valuable groundfish stocks as two separate populations. Haddock implanted with acoustic tags were detected by our acoustic array in the western part of Georges Bank over a period of several months, suggesting that they remain resident in one area for extended time periods. Managers and fishermen can use this information to decide when and how closing certain areas to fishing may be an effective tool to protect stocks. We were also excited to discover that haddock surf subsurface ocean currents in the Gulf of Maine to travel up to three times faster than they are able to swim!
In 2008, GMRI forged a partnership with the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association (MFA) to improve the selectivity of their fishing gear. With funding from the Island Institute, we determined that modifying the trawl net with 7.0" square mesh at the cod end dramatically increases the escape of non-commercial species as well as under-sized fish. MFA’s adoption of the new gear demonstrates the concept of using an Environmental Management System (a framework for documenting voluntary incremental improvements in all aspects of business operations from harvesting practices to fuel consumption to safety at sea) to distinguish seafood products in the marketplace. GMRI also worked with the southern New England scallop fleet to test whether changes to traditional dredging gear enable fishermen to avoid flounder and other species while catching more scallops.
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GMRI's lab may have opened just five short years ago, but we have already earned the respect of major scientific entities as a leader in fishery research...
