International Pacific Halibut

Commission talks to local fleet

Klas Stolpe

October 23, 2008.

For commercial halibut fishers there is a correct way to bait to avoid snarls, a correct way to set to avoid entanglements, and a correct way to haul to avoid parting the gear; it’s the determining of their sustainable harvest catching quotas that has fishers scratching their heads.

“It is nothing that you have done wrong,” said IPHC executive director Bruce Leaman. “It’s been a change in our understanding of the stock based on new tagging information. The trick of fishery science is not to take more out of a biomass than is sustainable. The perception that this has all been done right is not correct, and I’ve even heard it from some of you, catch rates in Area 2 have been going down and that’s not an indication of sustainable management. The commission has over-estimated biomass in Area 2 for years.”

Leaman was addressing a Petersburg City Council Chamber crowded with local commercial halibut fishers concerned over the IPHC’s latest methodology to determine the coast wide estimates of exploitable halibut biomass which resulted in different computations than previous closed-area stock assessments had allowed.

Commented Leaman, “What we are trying to explain is what our view of the stock is and to give them some understanding as to where we think this is going…and we recognize there have been some really severe economic impacts with the changes in the quotas over the last few years, some of it was a result of the change of methodology but the stock was coming down even with the old closed area assessments… there are both biological and methodological changes and we are trying to make the industry aware of both of them. I did want to stress to people that there is some brightness on the horizon if we can manage to take advantage of it by decreasing the exploitation in these areas.”

One issue was truncation of age distribution on growing decline in Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE). Halibut growth rates are lower than ever before. 70 percent of halibut males in some areas are not reaching legal size even by age 16, while females reach that size by age 12. Concerns over depleted food sources and water temperatures can be one reason but that wouldn’t account for the increased abundance of arrow tooth flounders in one harvest area. Trying to determine whether the IPHC survey catches fish in the same way among all areas is another problem. Previous closed area assessments didn’t take into effect halibut migration, which really doesn’t have a lot to do with the annual calculation of catch limits but it does affect biomass distribution over the long term and accounting for it correctly is just one of many unanswered questions the commission faced from fishers.

“As businessmen we wonder what’s next,” stated fisherman Gary Slaven. “I think Clyde Curry said it best, ‘This thing has been going up and down for years and it’s getting fairly old…’”

The IPHC wants to try and bring down the harvest rate among all age classes equally throughout the stock. In a reproductive biology perspective, the important point is to maintain healthy spawning biomass with contributions from all ages and having a mortality rate set up so that adequate numbers of fish could reach 40 years is the goal.

Fishermen have been concerned that the proportion of catches taken before survey vessels fished has significant bearing on data but the commission usually conducts surveys where commercial fishing has not been within five days or five nautical miles of survey operations. While fishermen want to do what is right for the stocks they also want to know about fish that used to be counted for one region that they no longer are allowed to catch, but the science of the data shows that exploitation rates (the proportion of the bio mass that is being caught) have gotten so high that fishermen have driven stocks down. Data also shows most of the fish moving from 2C to 2B and local fishers are concerned over 2B’s aggressive fishers.

“Let me tell you what I do know,” local fisherman Bob Dolan commented to the speaker. “I do know that halibut don’t know there is a boundary line between areas 3A and 2C.”