Action | Student News

Explore Maine's Fisheries with MEM Rachel Strader p.2

So after my excursion up north, I returned to the permit database to finish up looking at the changes between 2002 and 2003. The number of permitted vessels and the number of groundfish permits (some boats have more than one) went down in all five New England states, unsurprisingly. In all of the states but Connecticut, the small to mid-sized boats were hardest hit, while vessels over 50 feet retained more of their permits. Soon, I will hopefully start talking to some of the fishermen to try to ascertain how many days at sea they are actually using. We want to be able to take these numbers, the decrease in permits from year to year, and the relationship with vessel size and port, to find out what it all actually means: does the decrease in permits translate into less effort?

Yesterday afternoon, I took another ride with Rosanne back to Camp Ellis and then to Cape Porpoise, where we spoke with a fisherman and then a harbormaster about the Northeast Regional Cod Tagging Program, coordinated by the Portland Aquarium (http://octopus.gma.org /research/ cod_tagging.asp). They are hoping to get some more local involvement in the project, which has been very successful thus far. A member of the Island Institute will be hosting a meeting at the NAMA office this evening, where he hopes to speak to a group of commercial and recreational fishermen and lobstermen about the project, and demonstrate how tagging works on a cod.

Which means it’s now back to the docks to find us a cod!!

Meetings and More Meetings—June 27, 2003
The cod tagging meeting last week was not as well-attended as we had hoped for, due to the last-minute scheduling. However, on our road trip down the coast, Rosanne and I talked to several harbormasters, a lobsterman, and some charter boat captains, who all expressed interest in the program. We also hung up lots of posters and handed out brochures.…

Our quest to find a codfish for the tagging meeting took us down to Hampton, N.H., to a fishermen’s co-op, where the smallest fish was a 14-pounder! While only one lobsterman made it to the informational meeting, run by Shelly Tallack, Gulf of Maine Cod Tagging Program Manager, and Ben Neal of the Island Institute (www.islandinstitute.org), it was a great opportunity for us at NAMA to learn more about the project. We also got a demonstration of proper tagging technique, and I even got to try my hand at it. It was pretty hard on such a large fish—I’m probably lucky it was already dead!

The Nitty-Gritty of Data Analysis — July 10, 2003
The vast majority of my (working) days during the abbreviated 4th of July week were spent back with the permit database. I had already been examining the changes in the numbers of multispecies groundfish permits in New England between 2002 and 2003. Like I mentioned before, we began to see some interesting trends in the number of permits, that small to mid-sized boats saw the biggest decrease, and that the states were not equally affected. The next step I undertook (which I am still working on) was to try to account for the missing permits between 2002 and 2003.

page 1 | 2 | 3