Senate panel hearing set for Magnuson reform

By Richard Gaines | Staff Writer

As he promised the gathering at a national fishermen’s rally in March, U.S. Charles Schumer, D-N,Y., has secured a commitment for the Senate Commerce Committee to hold oversight hearings this fall on problems with the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

The announcement from the New York senator came last week, after he gained the commitment of Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Mark Begich of Alaska.

In a statement, Schumer said he hoped the hearings “will give a national voice” to concerns “about faulty science and excessively strict quotas that are decimating the industry.”

U.S. Sen. John Kerry is the senior Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee. He has proposed his own legislation, to restore a dedicated funding source for fisheries research and development from seafood import quotas, but also has acknowledged the need to make changes to Magnuson.

Also supporting Magnunson reform is Sen. Scott Brown.

In April, the Republican-controlled House Natural Resources Committee, where the reform movement is stronger, began drafting “a comprehensive” change to Magnuson, the overriding fisheries management law, in an attempt to ensure that NOAA makes “informed decisions based on sufficient scientific information,” Chairman Doc Hastings told the Times.

The presidential election and the Democratic control of the Senate all but insures that no substantive action on a rewrite of Magnuson will occur before the expiration of the 112th Congress.

House passage of a Magnuson reform bill is considered the highest goal for this year of industry leaders who organized the rally last March and have been pressing to write flexibility into Magnuson.

Sardine population growing significantly

Opinion

By DIANE PLESCHNER-STEELE 

Guest Commentary

Reading the recent opinion piece on this page by Oceana, one might think that sardines should be placed on the endangered species list. But in reality, this important fishery is doing just fine thanks to existing precautions.

The Oceana commentary, “Sardine population on verge of crash,” bases some of its allegations on a report by two National Marine Fisheries Service scientists. Yet Oceana fails to mention that those scientists deliberately omitted the most recent stock assessment and failed to submit their paper for internal review. That paper and its conclusions were later repudiated by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The fact is, sardine abundance trended significantly upward in 2011 and that led to the increase in sardine harvest quota in 2012.

California’s wetfish industry — named for the fish that were canned wet from the sea — is under attack by extremist groups like Oceana who claim overfishing is occurring. That allegation is false; fishermen have long recognized that a sustainable fishery was good for both people and fish.

Historically, sardines exhibited dynamic swings of a million tons up or down during the first decade of decline. We may be entering another such period, given the 30-year cycle of the stock. But the issue is scale. Sardine management policy is complicated because fishery managers now recognize these dynamics.

The sardines’ visionary harvest policy sets annual quotas far lower than the maximum sustainable catch allowed in most fisheries, and subtracts 150,000 metric tons from the population estimate, allowing for forage and uncertainty. According to the 2011 sardine stock assessment, the coast-wide harvest rate including Canada and Mexico was less than 15 percent of the biomass — decidedly NOT overfishing.

This precaution has been recognized by a host of respected scientists, including the “Little Fish, Big Impact” report referenced by Oceana. Another Oceana omission is found in Appendix E of that report:

Fosmark: Ocean Policy Respite Is Step in Right Direction

By Kathy Fosmark
Special to Roll Call

Recent House passage of an amendment providing for a pause in implementation of the new National Ocean Policy is a welcome development for those seeking to maintain and enhance the productivity of our nation’s marine and inland areas.

This action was supported by groups as varied as the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Forest and Paper Association, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Fisheries Institute and the National Ocean Policy Coalition, among many others.

Because it is being implemented by executive order rather than statute, the policy has not been subject to the scrutiny that accompanies the legislative process. In turn, significant questions about this initiative, and its potential effects on citizens, businesses and existing laws and processes, have still not been adequately addressed.

For example, how will regional fishery management councils effectively carry out their responsibilities under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act when the National Ocean Policy requires federal implementation of potentially inconsistent regional zoning plans developed by regional planning bodies?

In addition, the National Ocean Council has disclosed that federal agencies have been directed to prioritize the National Ocean Policy in their budgets and asked how existing resources can be repurposed. With resources already scarce, how will this affect the continuation and improvement of existing authorized activities such as fishery stock assessments that directly affect recreational anglers and commercial fishermen across the country as well as the communities they support?

Concerns about potentially repurposing funds across the federal government in support of an initiative that has not been authorized by Congress are underscored by recent headlines surrounding the disclosure that tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds were reprogrammed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration without Congressional notification.

Ocean Conservancy’s May 24 Roll Call op-ed referred to a “gross overreaction” among those who support a time-out and suggested that concerns about prohibitions on fishing activity are unfounded. Concerns about the potential for the policy to lead to new and unnecessary marine access and use restrictions, however, are real and based in part on past experience.

Read the full article on Roll Call

Oceans Plan Meets Wave of GOP Resistance

  Congressional Quarterly Weekly – IN FOCUS

June 4, 2012 – Page 1137

  By Lauren Gardner | Staff Writer

House Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings, a Washington Republican, fears the blueprint will usher in ocean “zoning.” Texas Republican Bill Flores succeeded in attaching a rider to the fiscal 2013 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill that would bar any expenditures to implement the ocean policy, and Hastings vows to press for similar language in every spending bill that comes to the House floor.

The opposition reflects concerns by many of the industries that make a living in the coastal waters — including oil and natural gas producers, commercial fishermen and seafood processors, boat owners and operators, shippers, and sports fishermen. An industry-backed group called the National Ocean Policy Coalition backs efforts to delay the policy through appropriations riders, saying that “further policy development and implementation should be suspended until Congress, user groups, and the public have been fully engaged and all potential impacts have been assessed and are understood.”

Critics worry that the administration will pay for its initiative by siphoning money from programs that lawmakers intended to fund, and they complain that the White House is moving forward without congressional authorization. Some lawmakers predict the plan, which is expected to be put in final form this summer, will inevitably lead to new regulations that further burden business activities including offshore drilling, wind power, commercial and recreational fishing, deep-sea fish farming, and boating.

Spearheading support for an ocean policy are environmental groups such as Oceana, the Ocean Conservancy and the Pew Environmental Group — a roster that invites the suspicions of industry groups.

Even the co-chairmen of the Senate Oceans Caucus are divided. Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse calls the proposal a “very pro-business and very sensible means for rationally sorting out conflicting uses in a really important resource.” But Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski says flatly: “I don’t like it.”

“They’ve got an idea that sounds nice on paper, establishes all kinds of different programs,” she says. “And again, we’ve had no sense of funding or real direction.”

 Read the rest of the article on CQWeekly.com

Q&A: Eat that fish! When Overfishing is Also Sustainable

Ray Hilborn, Professor of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, and Co-Author of Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know

Written By Christie Nicholson 

Contributing Editor at SmartPlanet

Many of us think that if a fish species is overfished we probably should be wary about choosing it at the supermarket or on the restaurant menu. But the opposite may be true. Our boycotting of some overfished species may be hurting us and the American fish industry, not the fish.

This counterintuitive opinion is laid out by Ray Hilborn, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington, and co-author of Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Hilborn holds that the public, food retailers, NGOs and congress have misunderstood what defines a sustainable fishery. In fact overfishing and sustainable can, oddly enough, go together.

SmartPlanet caught up with Hilborn in Seattle, WA to get a better understanding of this paradox and why he thinks a fish boycott doesn’t make sense.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

SmartPlanet: What are red listed fish?

Ray Hilborn: Red lists are advice that a number of NGOs provide on what species of fish one should avoid eating.

SP: And Whole Foods stopped selling such fish based on these red lists?

RH: Yes Whole Foods made a commitment to not sell any food that’s on the red list of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Blue Oceans Institute.

SP: And other stores and restaurants have done similar things?

RH: Yes red lists are widely used.

SP: What are the criteria for red-listed fish?

RH: The three criteria that most NGOs use. One is status with respect to overfishing. The second is concerns about bycatch. So if you have a fishery that is catching a significant number of turtles, or sharks, or other species they’ll often get red-listed. Finally there are concerns about the environmental impacts of fishing, particularly concerns about trawl nets, or nets that touch the bottom and change bottom habitat.

SP: But you have made the point recently that if a species is overfished it doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be sustainable. And this seems counterintuitive. People might say well red lists sound more like the right thing to do.

RH: There’s an enormous lack of understanding about what sustainability really is. Essentially sustainability has nothing to do with the abundance of the fish and much more about the management system. So if you’re managing it in a way where if it gets to low abundance you’ll reduce catches and let it rebuild. That’s clearly sustainable.

You can have fish that are overfished for decades but still be sustainable. As long as their numbers are not going down they are sustainable. Some of it is “overfished” with reference to the production of long-term maximum yield. It doesn’t imply declining and it doesn’t imply threat of extinction.

SP: And even if it falls into this latter category that you just described it should be safe for consumers to eat?

RH: So long as it’s in a management system like the U.S. where when stocks get to low abundance we dramatically reduce catches, and the evidence is they then rebuild. Then yes, those stocks are perfectly sustainable.

SP: What about this issue of bycatch?

RH: OK, so the NGOs will say, “Oh this stock is not sustainable because there is bycatch of sharks.” Well the stock is sustainable. Every form of food production has negative impacts on other species. And that’s where there’s an enormous double standard applied to fish.

For instance, I guarantee you there’s a big environmental impact of buying soybeans that come from cutting down rainforest. There’s a much higher standard applied to fisheries than almost anything else we eat.

SP: What goes into creating a sustainable fishery?

RH: The first thing is you have to monitor the trend in the stock. You have to have a  system based in good science, that says this stock is going down. Then your management actions have to respond to the trend.

SP: What about foreign fish? Which ones can we eat?

RH: Much of the fish of the world do not qualify as sustainable because we just don’t know what’s happening in other countries like Africa or Asia. Now, very few fish from those markets makes their way to the U.S. market. But some of the Atlantic cod populations in Europe are still fished much too hard. But the big propulsions in Europe are actually quite sustainable. Much of the cod that make it to the U.S. are coming from Iceland or Norway where the stocks are in good shape.

SP: But how do you tell the difference if it’s cod coming from an overfished area?

RH: Well, that is a major problem. But if it’s Marine Stewardship Council certified you can be pretty sure that it’s what it claims to be. Personally, I tend to buy a pretty narrow range of fish that come from my region, like salmon, halibut, and black cod. And pretty much all of those are MSC certified.

SP: You mention that the boycott on sustainably caught fish does nothing for conservation.

RH: You can boycott this all you want, it’s not going to affect what’s caught. Because for these overfished stocks enormous effort is being taken to catch as little as possible and it’s not the consumer market that drives the amount of catch. Those fish are going to be caught and they’re going to be sold because there are a lot of markets in the world that don’t care about classification and red lists, essentially all of Asia, which is the world’s biggest seafood consuming market.

The places that consumer boycotts might have an effect is for fish like bluefin tuna or swordfish.

SP: Well if boycotting makes no difference, is there a negative side to boycotting?

RH: My real target is to tell retailers and the NGOs, “Look, let’s get more reasonable about what we mean by sustainability.”

SP: And we need to get more reasonable about the definition of “sustainability” because there are real economic dangers to the fishing industry? Or is it because of something else?

RH: Yes, that’s certainly one of the issues. Let’s not punish these fishermen who have paid a very high price to rebuild these stocks. Let’s let them sell what they’re currently catching.

SP: So it seems the word “overfished” is also more nuanced?

RH: Well I think Congress had this very naïve view that somehow you could manage every stock separately and if cod is depleted, at low abundance well we stop fishing it, but they don’t appreciate the cost of all the other species that we could not catch because we can’t catch those species without also catching some cod as bycatch.

Now, there’s a lot of work going on to try to solve that problem. But I it’s important to convince people that we will always have some overfished stocks. And if we continue with our current U.S. statement that ‘no stock shall be overfished’ we’re going to have to give up a lot of food production. We’re certainly doing that now.

SP: You’ve also argued that fish is a food we need?

RH: If we don’t catch certain fish with trawl nets, and let’s say it’s twenty million tons, then that food is going to be made up some other way. And what’s the environmental cost of the other ways of producing the food? My initial calculations suggest that it is quite a bit higher. We should always be saying, “Well if we don’t eat this, where else is the food going to come from, and what’s the environmental cost of that?”

SP: So you ultimately feel that the marketing of these red lists has gotten to the point where it’s lost rational sense?

RH: Yes. I’m pretty convinced that seafood production is more sustainable than growing corn in Iowa or wheat in Kansas. Because growing corn in Iowa forces us to lose topsoil every year. In another 200 years the topsoil will be be largely gone. Is that sustainable?

SP: So your feeling is that disappearing fish from the store shelves is going to force us to lose food and presumably money?

RH: Yes, and to eat more livestock or chicken now.

Check out the article on the SmartPlanet blog.

Whole Foods Is Wrong Says Industry, Environmentalists, Scientists, Congress and Government Data

Point/Counterpoint: Monterey Harbormaster: No need to massively limit forage fishing

Note: A shorter version is scheduled to appear in the Monterey Herald.

By Steve Scheiblauer, Harbormaster for the city of Monterey

More than 150 years ago, immigrant Chinese fishermen launched sampans into the chilly waters of Monterey Bay to capture squid. The Bay also lured fishermen from Sicily and other Mediterranean countries, who brought round-haul nets to fish for sardines.

This was the beginning of the largest fishery in the western hemisphere — California’s famed “wetfish” industry, imprinted on our collective conscience by writers like John Steinbeck.

Who doesn’t remember Cannery Row?

It was the plentiful schools of fish — especially sardines that stretch from the Gulf of California to Alaska during cycles of abundance — that provided the opportunity for generations of enterprising fishing families to prosper. These families helped build not only Monterey, but the ports of many other California cities, like San Diego, San Francisco and San Pedro — the fishing hub of Los Angeles.

But now, this historic industry ì named for the fish that were canned wet from the sea — is under attack by extremist groups who claim overfishing is occurring. That allegation is false; fishermen have long recognized that a sustainable fishery was good for both people and fish.

When the sardine resource began its storied decline in the late 1940s, wetfish fishermen levied an assessment on their catch and contributed to the beginning of the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI).

A cooperative effort between the National Marine Fisheries Service, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Fish and Game, CalCOFI now is one of the preeminent research efforts worldwide.

Research has since documented the dynamic fluctuations in coastal pelagic “wetfish” stocks, including sardine and anchovy, which alternate their cycles of abundance — sardines favoring warm water epochs and anchovy preferring cold.

Core samples from an anaerobic trench in the Southern California Bight found alternating layers of sardine and anchovy scales over a period of 1,400 years. Turns out, sardine stocks would have declined naturally even without fishing pressure.

Today the wetfish industry maintains its commitment to research with cooperative efforts ongoing for both sardine and squid.

Even though the canneries are gone due to their inability to compete on a now-global marketing stage, our wetfish industry is still the backbone of California’s fishing economy — responsible for more than 80 percent of the volume and more than 40 percent of dockside value in 2010.

Fast forward to earlier this month, when an in-depth study by a panel of 13 hand-picked scientists provided recommendations on policies to protect forage fish — like anchovy, sardines and market squid — that larger species feed on. The study by the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force concluded that overfishing of forage species is unfortunately occurring on a global scale.

But interestingly, these scientists also identified the West Coast as different, noting that California is “ahead of other parts of the world in how it manages some forage fish.” The region has “stricter monitoring and more conservative limits that could serve as a buffer against future crashes.”

The Lenfest Report provides a strong case that forage fish are managed better in California and the Northern California Current than anywhere else in the world. Overall, forage fisheries here account for less than two percent of total forage production (including both fished and unfished stocks), leaving 98 percent for other marine life.

Knowledgeable people understand that this is no accident. Fishing families have worked and are working with regulators to conserve California’s fisheries and coastal waters.

In fact, after a 20-year moratorium on sardine fishing, California adopted strict fishing regulations when the sardine resource rebounded. The federal government assumed management of coastal pelagic species in 1999 and approved a visionary management strategy for the west coast “forage” fish harvest, maintaining at least 75 percent of the fish in the ocean to ensure a resilient core biomass. The sardine protection rate is even higher at about 90 percent.

Even so, some environmental groups are calling for deep and unnecessary cutbacks in sardine fishing in California, as well as substantial harvest reductions in other forage fish fisheries, including herring, anchovies and squid.

Touting studies with faulty calculations, activists are lobbying federal regulators to massively limit fishing, if not ban these fisheries outright.

Apparently the facts don’t matter to groups with an anti-fishing agenda. Their rhetoric leaves those not familiar with the fishing industry with the impression that overfishing is a huge problem in California.

We hope decision-makers will see through the rhetoric when developing harvest policy for California’s historic, and still important, wetfish fisheries.

Note: The opinion piece above was written to counterpoint an editorial that was also published  in The Salinas Californian. You can access the debate online via  TheCalifornian.

Eat Your Hake and Have It, Too

Eat Your Hake and Have It, Too

 By Ray Hilborn and Ulrike Hilborn

WHOLE FOODS recently stopped selling fish that are on the “red lists” of seafood to avoid, issued by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Blue Ocean Institute. Other major food retailers are considering similar measures, under the assumption that because a species is overfished, it is not sustainable.

Those decisions are based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes a sustainable fishery. The fact is that we can harvest a certain fraction of a fish population that has been overfished, if we allow for the natural processes of birth and growth to replace what we take from the ocean and to rebuild the stock. Instead of calling on consumers to abstain from all overfished species, we should direct our attention at fisheries that consistently take more fish than can be naturally replaced.

Bluefin tuna is a classic example of a species that has been consistently harvested too hard and should be avoided by consumers. But at the same time, the United States has made remarkable progress in rebuilding overfished stocks. Wild populations of 27 species have been rebuilt to “healthy” levels in the last 11 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earlier this month, the agency announced that six formerly overfished stocks had been rebuilt, including Bering Sea snow crab, Atlantic Coast summer flounder and Gulf of Maine haddock.

But even as those stocks were being rebuilt, there were no apparent conservation benefits from the refusal of consumers to buy those overfished species. The catch was limited by rules set by regional fisheries councils based on quotas determined by fisheries scientists and enforced by the oceanic agency and by the Coast Guard. Any boycott punished American fishermen, who got a lower price when the catch was sold abroad.

Elsewhere in the world, many fisheries have become unsustainable because of fishing pressures. Most of Asia and Africa do not have management systems that regulate those pressures. And while Europe does have a management system, the quotas are often based on politics rather than science. Many European stocks are fished too hard — some cod stock, for example — and should be avoided by consumers.

If we are to fully harvest the potential sustainable yield of fish from the ocean, we cannot follow the utopian dictum that no stocks may be overfished. After all, even in sustainably managed fisheries, some stocks will almost always be classified as overfished because of natural fluctuations in their populations.

At the same time, we should recognize that seafood-labeling systems hold seafood to much higher standards than other forms of agriculture. The same stores that won’t sell an overfished species are selling other foods whose production affects the environment far more.

During a recent visit to a Whole Foods store in Seattle, we saw no evaluation of the environmental impact of the meat being sold. Free-range chickens were labeled, but there were no labels telling us if pesticide and fertilizer runoff from growing the corn used to feed the beef caused dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, or if the soybeans came from land clear-cut out of the Brazilian rain forest.

Truly informative seafood labels must distinguish between the abundance of a fish stock and its sustainability. Some fish will be disappearing from supermarket shelves over the next few years even though they are being sustainably managed. Consumers should tell retailers and environmental groups not to “red list” fish stocks that may be overfished but are being replenished.

California is Global Leader in Managing Forage Fish

Note: This article also appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, North County Times, Salinas Californian, and online, on Saving Seafood and Science 2.0.

Written By Steve Scheiblauer

More than 150 years ago, immigrant Chinese fishermen launched sampans into the chilly waters of Monterey Bay to capture squid. The Bay also lured fishermen from Sicily and other Mediterranean countries, who brought round-haul nets to fish for sardines.

This was the beginning of the largest fishery in the western hemisphere – California’s famed ‘wetfish’ industry, imprinted on our collective conscience by writers like John Steinbeck.

Who doesn’t remember Cannery Row?

It was the plentiful schools of fish – especially sardines that stretch from the Gulf of California to Alaska during cycles of abundance – that provided opportunity for generations of enterprising fishing families to prosper. These families helped build not only Monterey, but the ports of many other California cities, like San Diego, San Francisco and San Pedro – the fishing hub of Los Angeles.

But now, this historic industry – named for the fish that were canned wet from the sea – is under attack by extremist groups who claim overfishing is occurring.   That allegation is false;  fishermen have long recognized that a sustainable fishery was good for both people and fish.

When the sardine resource began its storied decline in the late 1940s, wetfish fishermen levied an assessment on their catch and contributed to the beginning of the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI).  A cooperative effort between the National Marine Fisheries Service, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Fish and Game, CalCOFI now is one of the preeminent research efforts worldwide.

Research has since documented the dynamic fluctuations in coastal pelagic ‘wetfish’ stocks, including sardine and anchovy, which alternate their cycles of abundance – sardines favoring warm water epochs and anchovy preferring cold.

Core samples from an anaerobic trench in the Southern California Bight found alternating layers of sardine and anchovy scales over a period of 1,400 years.  Turns out, sardine stocks would have declined naturally even without fishing pressure.

Today the wetfish industry maintains its commitment to research with cooperative efforts ongoing for both sardine and squid.

Even though the canneries are gone due to their inability to compete on a now global marketing stage, our wetfish industry is still the backbone of California’s fishing economy – responsible for more than 80 percent of the volume and more than 40 percent of dockside value in 2010.

Fast forward to earlier this month, when an in-depth study by a panel of 13 hand-picked scientists provided recommendations on policies to protect forage fish – like anchovy, sardines and market squid – that larger species feed on.

The study by the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force concluded that overfishing of forage species is unfortunately occurring on a global scale.

But interestingly, these scientists also identified the west coast, as different, noting that California is, “ahead of other parts of the world in how it manages some forage fish.” The region has “stricter monitoring and more conservative limits that could serve as a buffer against future crashes.”

The Lenfest Report provides a strong case that forage fish are managed better in California and the Northern California Current than anywhere else in the world.  Overall, forage fisheries here account for less than two percent of total forage production (including both fished and unfished stocks), leaving 98 percent for other marine life.

Knowledgeable people understand that this is no accident. Fishing families have worked and are working with regulators to conserve California’s fisheries and coastal waters.

In fact, after a 20-year moratorium on sardine fishing, California adopted strict fishing regulations when the sardine resource rebounded. The federal government assumed management of coastal pelagic species in 1999 and approved a visionary management strategy for the west coast ‘forage’ fish harvest, maintaining at least 75 percent of the fish in the ocean to ensure a resilient core biomass. The sardine protection rate is even higher at about 90 percent.

Even so, some environmental groups are calling for deep and unnecessary cutbacks in sardine fishing in California, as well as substantial harvest reductions in other forage fish fisheries, including herring, anchovies and squid.

Touting studies with faulty calculations, activists are lobbying federal regulators to massively limit fishing, if not ban these fisheries outright.

Apparently the facts don’t matter to groups with an anti-fishing agenda. Their rhetoric leaves those not familiar with the fishing industry with the impression that overfishing is a huge problem in California.

We hope decision makers will see through the rhetoric when developing harvest policy for California’s historic, and still important, wetfish fisheries.

Ed’s Note: Steve Scheiblauer is the harbmaster for the city of Monterey.

Read the full opinion piece online on Capital Weekly.

The 15th Annual Report to Congress on the Status of Stocks for 2011: A record number of rebuilt fisheries

Annual Report to Congress on the Status of U.S. Fisheries

NOAA’s Fisheries Service has released the 15th annual report to Congress on the nation’s Status of Stocks.  More than any a previous year, the Status of Stocks report for 2011 underscores the strength of the science-based management process and demonstrates we are actively turning the corner on ending overfishing and rebuilding our nation’s fisheries.  A record number of stocks were declared rebuilt in 2011, with a decrease in both categories of overfishing and overfished determinations.

To read the full report, visit the NOAA’s website and download the report titled, “Status of Stocks 2011“.