Conservationists say strict fishing rules work

As thousands of fishermen planned to converge Wednesday on Washington, D.C., to protest a federal law they say is strangling an industry and taking the fun out of recreation, some marine experts contend the rules have been effective in rebuilding stocks - to fishermen's ultimate benefit.

The fishermen seek to ease provisions in the Magnuson Stevens Act, which enacted timetables for rebuilding fish species. Under the changes fishermen seek, stocks that are clearly rebuilding would not be subject to the same restrictions, and would have longer timetables to fully rebuild.

Opponents, including Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is sponsoring some of the legislative changes the fishermen support, say the rules are based on faulty science and don't take into account the difficult economics of commercial and recreational fishing.

"There's more fish around now than I've ever seen in my life," said Mark Phillips of Greenport, a fisherman for nearly 40 years, who landed his commercial boat in Virginia to attend the rally. "There's no question we were under-regulated" years ago, he said, but "the pendulum has swung too far" the other way.

Several busloads of Long Islanders - representing commercial and recreational interests - are set to attend the rally.

Scientists and regulators say that recent successes in rebuilding stocks are due in part to provisions in the 2006 reauthorization of Magnuson Stevens, compared with previous rules that left rebuilding time frames open-ended.

David Conover, dean of the marine sciences research center at Stony Brook University, said easing the timetables now is a mistake.

"We would go right back to where we were before," he said. Leaving the rules in place could raise some fish stocks to previously unrecorded highs - levels predating decades of fishing.

Jim Gilmore, who heads the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's marine resources bureau, said while it's uncertain easing the rules is advisable, regulators need to take a more realistic view of quotas for rebounding stocks such as scup (porgies).

"The sea is paved with scup," he said, and yet a federal panel recently denied a request to increase the catch allotment by 30 percent, limiting the increase to 10 percent. "They're saying it's rebuilt but also saying there's uncertainty in the stock estimates," to explain restricting the allotment.

Conservationists remain unconvinced. Easing the rules "would be very destructive," said Carl Safina, founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group in East Norwich. "The reason there is a rebuilding mandate with a timetable is that when there wasn't, we had just about every fishery in the country on the downturn and being depleted."