Contact: Scott Smullen FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(301) 713-2370 11/22/95
The National Marine Fisheries Service will temporarily ban the fishing for Atlantic coast weakfish in federal waters from Maine to Florida to allow stock to recover from overfishing, the agency announced today. The ban begins Dec. 21 and will stay in effect until the stock recovers. However, state waters will remain open for weakfish fishing under the guidelines of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission weakfish management plan.
"Without the immediate conservation measure of a temporary ban on fishing for weakfish to force rebuilding of the stock, all public users of the weakfish resource along the entire coast would experience the severe and long-term impact of a complete stock collapse," said Rollie Schmitten, director of the National Marine Fisheries Service. "The fishery should rebuild quickly because weakfish grow rapidly and spawn as one-year-olds, and the limited number of small fish surviving now need protection to rebuild the stocks."
Officials with the fisheries service, an agency of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said biological indicators show the weakfish stock is severely overfished and weakfish reproduction in recent years has been well below the historical average. As such, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission requested the moratorium and the fisheries service made the decision after holding nine public hearings along the East Coast, collecting nearly 60 days of public comments, and reviewing the latest 1994 stock assessment data.
Fisheries service officials expect the closure will have little effect on recreational anglers; most recreational catch takes place in state waters that will remain open out to three miles. Officials say because weakfish stock numbers have been falling for 15 years, most large commercial fishing has dropped to low levels. North Carolina has the largest commercial weakfish operation, harvesting about 38 percent of their catch in federal waters. However, the federal moratorium is necessary to rebuild the weakfish fishery not only in North Carolina, but along the entire Atlantic Coast.
Until recent years, the harvest of weakfish has been primarily in state waters; however, more than 50 percent of the commercial catch now comes from federal waters three to 200 miles offshore. The total commercial and recreational catch has declined from 80 million pounds in 1980 to eight million in 1994. According to fisheries service officials, the transfer of fishing effort and drastic stock declines alerted fishery managers to the problem and played a major role in the moratorium decision, even after considering other factors such as weather and market demand.
The National Marine Fisheries Service is responsible for the management of Atlantic coast weakfish in federal waters, while the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, consisting of 15 East Coast states plus the District of Columbia and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission, is responsible for management of weakfish in state waters. The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council has the lead in developing a federal weakfish fishery management plan, but because of workload constraints has been unable to do so. In the absence of a federal fishery management plan, the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act allows the Secretary of Commerce to implement regulations in federal waters that complement the ASMFC weakfish plan in state waters.