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Healthy Oceans Reports
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Executive Summary
America’s oceans are home to whales, dolphins, fish and an enormous variety of other sea life. But today our oceans are in trouble. Destructive overfishing, pollution, and habitat damage are putting important marine animals at risk. Many populations are in serious decline. The result of this poor management is a drastic reduction in fishing opportunities for commercial and
recreational fishermen.
In the South Atlantic, approximately one in three (36% or 4 out of 11) of all federally managed fish stocks for which there is adequate information are depleted (i.e., overfished).1 Roughly one third (31% or 10 out of 32) stocks with adequate information are experiencing overfishing and headed in that direction. Even these numbers do not tell the whole story.
The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council has sole oversight of 86 fish stocks, but it has sufficient data on very few fish stocks to know whether they are overfished or not. For example, it can only determine whether 11 out of the 86 stocks are overfished or not. We do not know which of the other 75 stocks are overfished.
Many of these threatened fish are regionally popular such as the snappers and groupers that have always been a part of Low Country seafood culture. But years of overfishing and the fact that some species are slow growing and late maturing have led to substantial declines. The South Atlantic Council by and large has followed the advice of its independent scientists in setting
target catch levels but refused to impose absolute limits on the amount of fish that could be caught and landed. Instead, the Council relied on managing fishing effort with limits on fish size,
fishing seasons, trip limits and the like. Clearly these tactics have not worked, and fish stocks keep declining.
Recently, the Council has begun to make better decisions on catch levels and fishing controls. It decided to set aside modest Marine Protected Areas (MPA’s) with the hope that some of these
threatened species may begin to recover.
In an effort to improve fisheries management, Congress revised the primary law governing fishing in U.S. oceans, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, at the end of 2006. The Act requires the National Marine Fisheries Service and the regional fishery management councils that devise and propose local plans to maintain healthy fish populations to follow new rules. These rules are now under development; and this report recommends that the new rules follow important conservation principles.
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