Motherships Get More Rockfish Bycatch to Continue Whiting Fishery
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by Susan Chambers - September 2, 2016
The National Marine Fisheries Service has approved a Pacific Ocean perch rockfish transfer of 3 metric tons to the at-sea sectors to allow the Pacific whiting mothership sector to continue fishing this year.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council and NMFS in June agreed that unused fish, particularly POP, a species listed as overfished, that were set aside for research could be transferred if that fish were available after summer research activities. The remaining amount for research, 0.7 mt, is anticipated to go unharvested but not transferred to account of uncertainty in estimates of POP harvest in research.
The mothership sector is allocated 7.2 mt of POP as bycatch; the catcher-processor sector is allocated 10.2 mt.
Without the transfer, the mothership sector could have closed early, leaving several thousand metric tons of whiting unharvested. ...
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