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[Music] [Applause] [Music] amazing changemakers for the coastal communities hearing me and probably abroad as well so thank you so much for coming and welcome well thank you I'm Ted Ames refugee commercial fisherman and I do historical fisheries ecology as well and Robin and I have split this into two pieces I'm going to talk about how the Gulf of Maine functions and if in weather the sky is falling and Robin is going to share with you the sorts of things that we have been trying to get accomplished through the Resource Center and I think we've made a very good start in things but you'll be a better judge of that perhaps this is about sustainability and coastal fisheries in the Gulf of Maine so first a brief outline of gulf of maine ecosystems then a short talk about climate change effects on various gulf of maine species and then a closer look at whales lobsters and fish first though a look at gulf of maine circulation and if you look at this arrow here and the two green arrows coming from the Newfoundland Shore is the is the Labrador Current and a filament of that goes into the Gulf of Maine makes a u-turn and you see a long arrow going up into the Bay of Fundy and a second arrow making a sharp right-hand turn going in which is Scotian shelf water which is slightly warmer and slightly richer in nutrients than the Labrador Current itself it enters the Gulf of Maine and then as you can see it forms a large gyre actually there are two the innermost one is called Maine coastal current and it basically wheels around Jordan basin the eastern large basin in the Gulf of Maine while the other continues on through and exits the Gulf of Maine via the Great South channel with a little filament going in to the north side of Georges Bank and Georges Bank is absolutely cool because it has a circular current pattern on itself so the tide comes and goes on George's separately from all of the rest it's really confusing if you if you're not prepared for it next a peek at how marine species exist in the Gulf of Maine as you can see I have this very complex food web that certainly gives you the general idea which everyone gets today and 7th and 8th grade and have repeated two or three times along the way but the focal point here is that all of these species are actually functioning within biological communities and those communities varies in size in complexity depending on where they are located and the species that happen to be involved with it in the Gulf of Maine we're borderline between subarctic and and slightly warmer so the species variation we have here is less than it is father so basically you have to keep in mind that marine food webs are loosely coupled which means that if you're a big or aggressive you eat anything that's smaller or less aggressive than you are sometimes if they're bigger but it makes for an interesting set of relationships because there are relatively few species that are restricted to just one or two prey types will see more on that a little later probably key to our whole Gulf of Maine system is the functioning of coastal ecosystem estuaries they're nursery habitats for a wide range of species and are visiting places for feeding for a great many more our whole shellfish industry is based on those interactions in coastal estuaries but what's often not mentioned is the fact that El wise and other anatomist species play an incredibly important role in how the system works they're a forage specie and they they do live in the ocean most of the time but they do come back and visit and believe it or not they can come back in numbers like that and given half a chance and if you doubt it go to Dan Escada or better yet there are some streams right around here that are recently opened and their runs of L wives are increasing interesting stuff well L wives live at sea for virtually their entire life except for a brief period when they come inshore in the spring swim up into the ponds and lakes what they have access to scoot back out and hang around for a couple more months and by fall they're headed back south and offshore the valuable part for us along this section of the coast is that they're juveniles they're young of year stay all year long in the estuary creating credibly large biomass of prey in healthy systems our best estimate from the Dennis gallery of the system is that each female produces about well between 1700 and 2800 fingerling L wives at the end of the season bottom line is if every female L wife died you would still be exporting somewheres around seven times as much phosphorus and nitrogen compounds going back down the road it's a great way to clean up lakes but it also has an incredibly valuable function along the coast here's some work I did earlier which was mapping historical cod population distribution and where they moved in where they went the the red areas are where fishermen caught gravid cod cod that had ripe eggs and as you can see these are all close to shore and the arrows are where young of your L wise migrate from and more recent study I've been doing is that these spawning areas I plotted 15 years of coastal trawl survey distribution floor of the location of young of year L wise and found they correspond it with many of them they arrived in the fall and they Coast they they go aggregate with young of year herring which they with who they stay with for the rest of the year that's why the cod were there but they weren't alone because the blue line areas were the location of movement patterns of haddock and as you can see this offshore DC that's commonly connected with Georges Bank today actually was just outside the harbor and could be again if they keep leaving these rivers open and a few rational management ground rules but notice that these particular groupings of cod and haddock are located with specific rivers another clue for how this system used to function the neat pad is when you plot the movement patterns of other species you'll find that cod haddock had company white hake and and and Pollock of the two major gadgets that were caught in the wild fishery back when they were around early in last century but it indicates something else is going on number one what is happening is the prey the forage base in those below those river systems was attracting all kinds of predators that was a dinner bell for them each time each season as these young of you showed up and this part of the system is particularly unique because adults and older juveniles boogie out of there every fall the only lipid-rich prey that's left behind are those young of year so if you look at it collectively you can say all four of those commercial species along with alewife runs and the herring that frequent their function as a single unit has a sub population if you will fascinating idea to think that these aren't really pandemic populations that just swim everywhere and reproduce willy-nilly it doesn't happen that way it's just like here on land it's fascinating change you look at this this is like looking at cows in a pasture they're there for the food and when the food's gone there's no fish nor is there reason for them to come back and maybe that's part of why there's nothing there now but enough of that let's see how some of Maine's valuable marine species is faring with this first another little talk about the Gulf of Maine water temperatures climate change is happening there is no question things are getting warming but the temperature isn't evenly distributed the bloom is called the red is hot you can see that our half of the state Penobscot Bay East is still comparatively cool compared to the West the other part is is what's going on in the Labrador Current with climate change ice is melting a lot of ice is melting and just off the side here where in between Greenland and Iceland south of it there was used to be a huge area where after I said frozen and the salt water had become more concentrated and very cold it sunk it does sink in fact and then runs downhill along the edge of the continental shelf and the the Scotian shelf water does much the same yeah that's true but it's very tricky if you try to make it a one dimensional system surface water and immediate water and then a tongue of deep water so it's more complex but the reason for that this is happening is because this settlement area south of Greenland and Labrador are in Newfoundland because of all of the melting ice it freshens the water it's less saline than it was before which means that it sinks more less rapidly it's less dense and because of that not only does it sink less less not as fast but it flows along the edge of the Shelf more slowly the Gulf Stream hasn't slowed down a bit it keeps chugging right on through and they meet south of George's and much the same thing is happening but there's less cold salt water and the end result is it has to get warmer and it is and it will continue in at some point gulf of maine very possibly will be different some of us look at it another way and say well when you have that much extra meltwater the isthmus between New Brunswick and and Nova Scotia will drown out at the head of the bay and will have an intrusion of the Gulf of st. Lawrence coming into the day into the Bay of Fundy and that would be a whole new deck of cards but that's looking too far into a crystal ball right now what we have is a system that's gradually warming faster than some of us would like cost of that well one thing that's happening is gulf of maine plankton the subarctic varieties are moving father what East End father not the pendulum shrimp that's so tasty that we used to get in the winter we don't see much anymore because it's not cold or not and certain varieties of plankton such as calenus March yes my chances is it's moving north as well well that has serious ramifications because scientific have found that part of the reason that right whales are moving north to Gulf of st. Lawrence where they have not been common in the past is because the area near the mouth of the Bay of Fundy where there used to be huge quantities of this calenus specie gather every summer they are no longer there or I'm sorry they are there in much smaller numbers but there's plenty of them in Gulf of st. Lawrence and that's where they went unfortunately Canadian fishermen haven't developed the strategies and techniques for avoiding them that we have down here so it's brand-new ballgame for them mussels scallops clams all our shellfish are particularly fragile situation partly because as we get more co2 in the atmosphere we get more in the water and as it equilibrate sit turns the surface layers in particular slightly acidic well shellfish larvae cannot develop a shell when the pH lowers so they die it's a problem that's going to be increasing it's a minor one today in this Coast it's becoming more serious on the west coast they have problems with the upwelling situations in Oregon but we already see a lot fewer mussels settling out that isn't all incidents of red tide are increasing because the water is warmer and the water is less saline perfect conditions for growing a couple of varieties of dinoflagellates that like those conditions lobsters by contrast are doing just fine thank you they're pretty tough critics at when they eat almost anything sometimes more than you would even think they can tolerate temperatures from anywhere from 64 68 degrees and even for short periods even as high as 70 degrees larval Office's 68 degrees is like a shut off you go see that temperature and you know eyetality rates skyrocket but hey that's pretty warm that gives these critters a lot of space I have an example of what's happening with lava suits though and I'm going to try to play it no guarantee if it does it yes now notice this concentration down here in southern New England working progressively farther north and then kind of stopping at 2010-2014 those those are my guess is this landings but what's happening is we can see an expanding range in a concentration in the Gulf of Maine conditions are really ideal for lobsters today there are a number of reasons for it is the absence of many predators and and also there's as temperatures increase the habitat that's available for surface water and increases temperature it basically expands the habitat that's available for settling for stage lobsters and they swim down and if the temperature is right and the substrate is right he'll stay it's not they just bounce back up and keep swimming so an expansion of range is happening for them but let's go on the plot thickens because lobster fishermen are still concerned the center of the population as you could see before is constantly moving farther to the east and no and quite frankly fishermen are afraid they're gonna keep right on moving out I am less that concerned but eventually things will change more and I'll be eating words if I'm still kicking one thing you can be sure of is that things will change and this is no different so it depends on how rapidly this rate of change happens to slow down the Labrador Current which is our saving grace for the Gulf the Gulf you see is really like a wash basin tipped on one side with a big crack the cold water comes in the crack the other stuff just spills over the lip but it's all in all but changes a fragile system whoops that went the wrong way let's try this there God my old buddy they're not as lucky as the as the lobsters yet if you examine the conditions that they do well that they're very similar to lobsters they should and could be one might say as abundant as the others but they collapsed back in 1995 and they have not recovered period that's incredible conditions and they're not alone there hasn't been a had it caught up here in the years that I'm aware of white hake are virtually gone and so so are the Pala though they're not none of those are extinct they are simply at such low numbers it couldn't possibly support a fishery here's what it looked like in 2007 after a extensive Comerica and Canadian study that tagged a hundred and ten thousand cod fish and retrieved tags four to three years no Cod from basically the Kennebec River in the West all the way to Bay of Fundy Bay of Fundy and the st. Croix River hmm what's going on well let's look at it a little closer in light of what we were talking about just a few minutes ago cod haddock pollock the flounders all of that stuff even down to sculpins disappeared in the two eastern subpopulations Wow and have never returned at the same time atlantic herring were being overfished and we're targeting adult herring mid-water trawl was underway well and by then and allies were and still are in a depleted States you don't suppose the absence of forage in those near those rivers could have possibly been a contribute to this some of this thing yes partly because we didn't look at it as a series of these subunits incidentally there are four of them between no problem there are four between Cape Ann or Gloucester and the Bay of Fundy and we've we're looking at two of them completely wiped out and a third that's well on its last legs interesting well what's the story here in the past federal policy assume that fish were lived in pandemic populations they went anywhere and spawned anywhere it's like a bathtub if you put cake coloring in and stir it pull the plug in the bottom and drain some out the color of the water is just the same they assumed that cod and haddock and Pollock and all of these other guys they would just go and spawn somewhere else they would find other nursery grounds and life would go on wonderfully that's not how the system exists we found that they existed relatively small independent reproductive population units whose population varies independently of each other so you could wipe one system out and you'd lose all of those Cod and Pollock and haddock etc but everything else would keep on going they weren't aware that the system was more complex than that they weren't aware that coastal sub populations of cod and many other species were linked to these coastal estuaries and rivers they weren't aware that a sub population was part of an echo waltrip was an ecological sub unit that had several sub populations of different species that were connected to that estuary and river system they w ren't aware that these smaller ecological subunits were actually the building blocks for fish populations in the Gulf of Maine or that they all were part of a larger complex adaptive system which means that when you have changed one thing in it everything else has to accommodate and change somehow and we're seeing part of the tail end of that as they'd say in the old country that's one hell of a mess and by golly they're right and to bring you on to what we're trying to do collectively as an industry and and managers as well here's my dear wife Robbie good evening it's so nice to see all of you and it's amazing to be here on this property I I am the summer of 72 I lived at the Colemans long before Elliott had interns or anything I was camping on his property and we used to come and eat at the old nearing farm often with with Helen and Scott so it's very nice to be here and and thinking about the things that they believed in I'm wondering if we could move this closer so that it wasn't office' is that asking for trouble you never know so I'm gonna add humans to the to this conversation which is not going to make it any simpler and Ted has talked about the limitations of traditional fisheries management it as it has been taught in universities for 40 or 50 years as it has been put into law in the federal management law that 200-mile limit law that's now that called the sustainable Fisheries Act and probably if any of you have been part of ocean nonprofits as they have supported that's that approach but there is definitely change in the air and I don't just mean climate change there are major advances in science Ted mentioned the local stock structure what we've found is people in the last 40 years have discovered that most marine organisms home to the place where they were hatched that's true of little tiny reef fish in the middle of the Pacific going to the specific part of the reef where they hatched very much very much closer to birds than we ever dreamt of in the ocean system there are so there are also really complex behaviors mating mating rituals and all kinds of things that were never known before people started diving and before we had GPS and before we could do the type of marine research that's been done recently and there's also genetics work being done so for those of you who know where Dillsboro Bay is just east of Ellsworth it's a tiny 14 square mile area Bay and the scallops in there are genetically distinct from the scallops outside the mouth of that Harbor so there is complexity and and as Ted said prey matters a lot and so add to that complexity climate change and the fact and what you realize is in fact we don't just have a complicated system we have a complex adaptive system and that whole theory that has been the route of developing computers and and it's it's a approach to complexity that that is being used in both social science and Natural Sciences this all makes a real moment in time right now on top of this we have a local opportunity both a history of very different non-traditional management in Maine and also a pilot project so I'm gonna give you a quick primer on traditional fisheries management just so that you can so that I'm not talking Greek and then I'm gonna tell you about the eastern Maine coastal current collaborative if you can think about the eastern Maine coastal current that Ted showed you that inner gyre and the Gulf of Maine and then I'm going to tell you the about four types of management in Maine that are are really why I have hope that we might be able to develop a new paradigm for how to exist with fishery so in traditional fisheries management as Ted said on average there was assumed to be fish it was surveyed in large areas such as the whole Gulf of Maine all the way from Gloucester to to the Canadian line they were counting adults of single species and there was an assumption that future stock size was tied to the current stock size so in other words the the common sense more moms make more babies there was assumed to be a straight line connection and there was assumed to be an optimal level at which we can continue to take fish adult fish out of the population and will be able to fish forever well it turns out to be a slightly more complicated and so what we've had is major conservation failures and Cod and the Gulf of Maine is the poster child for that but in many cases that the baselines been moved and people are comparing it you know when they say there's success it's really only the last over the last ten years never look looking at the type of historic abundance we should be able to try to restore fishermen have been granted fishing rights for large areas let's say the whole Gulf of Maine from Gloucester to Canada and they are able to pulse fish moving around on abundance and when you think about the local stock structure that Ted was talking about you can see why you might end up with a cereal depletion that you didn't never even noticed if you were counting fish on a Gulf of Maine wide basis the other thing that's happened is that rights to to those adult stocks have been given out like money in a in a economy so people who caught the most have been given a share of those quotas and the idea was if they owned the shares they would take care of them in fact what it's done is consolidated fishing into major ports like the white dots you see Boston Portland Worcester New Bedford and a lot of lung loss of local fishing communities so I just have to give you a quickly explain how fisheries management is done it's done inside three miles and outside three miles outside three miles it's managed by the federal government inside its managed by the state and sometimes by the state in partnership with the other states of the Atlantic coast so it's kind of like a landing States Marine Fisheries Commission is kind of like a UN of states they get together they decide how to manage and then they go back home and they enforce the rules through their own state rules so that blue line along the shore is the three-mile line and you can see that the federal influence is huge in terms of territory so change is tough and it usually doesn't happen easily and sometimes it's easiest to do change by trying something and what one of the things that's happened since the 200-mile limit and the federal management went in in the mid-70s is the law is the law and you can't experiment this the federal government has to say we know how many fish there are out there we'll tell you how much to catch and if you catch only that many everything will be fine well they can't say well we really aren't sure how many there are maybe we should try this and then get some feedback and try something else well we have a local pilot project that is has been catalyzed by the fact that it's time to try something new like and because of the complexity that climate change its throwing at us and so the nonprofit that Ted and I started Maine Center for coastal fisheries in Stonington the state of Maine the Maine Department of Marine Resources and NOAA Fisheries have signed a five-year agreement to take a look at the area swept by the eastern Maine coastal current because it is ecologically distinct and in the five years the objective is to to develop a research agenda that's going to support an ecological approach to fishing there it's in the eastern Maine coastal current area but it includes the watersheds that feed that coastline so this is really radical to include land and water together dr. John hare is the head of the federal lab in Woods Hole and he's delivering a closing statement at the recent science conference we had in Machias made these points and I thought it was worth while mentioning them said this isn't top-down it's owned by all three partners and led by me and Center for coastal fisheries that unlike the federal government the way the federal government normally does it it's not just the ocean they are actually working collaboratively with other people who are working in estuaries and in the watersheds there won't be one answer in fact he said two big traps one is thinking there's an answer and and the second is thinking it's too complicated and saying I'm not going to do it and so this is this is the federal government saying this isn't going to be in our control we're going to do this with the communities and we're going to learn as we go the answers and the right things to do are going to emerge and they'll probably change because climate will change and this is just a major major development so I thought I'd give you four reasons why we're in a good shape in Maine particularly in eastern Maine to to take this a different approach if you'll remember that three-mile limit the state is not bound by the sustainable Fisheries Act and it actually has done a lot of very ad hoc and and learn as you go kind of management over the years l wives some of you may be aware of the exciting work that's being done on the bag adduce watershed in Brooksville and Sedgwick and and and Weiser are complex because they involve watershed management estuary management and marine management and so in Brooksville there's a huge collaborative project that's been sparked by in particular bailey Bowden who is the guy with the shades and the in the boat there who's who from Penobscot and has been dogged on wanting to restore ilwis and by another couple of years probably all the ponds on the watershed will be will have full access for their lives so l wives take a life management takes place it's land by States as a group because l wives exist all along the east coast and so Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission gets together and figures out what the rule should be and then the states have to come back and and enforce them well how does that apply to the bag adduce well the way it applies to the bag adduce is that there are all there are no rivers open on the east except for a little over a dozen in Maine who have which have traditional passage and harvest in order to gain the right to harvest you have to take scale samples for many years day in day out and during the runs and and then you have to go through a process to get permission to harvest this is really difficult to do and in fact none of the other states really have have a concept that it would be possible to restore fish the way Maine is doing all along the coast so volunteer stewardship is absolutely critical and this kid who's looking at the fish in the in the river is this is what it's about if any of you have it I hope you all have seen an Illinois friend because it is a primal experience and it makes you realize what the abundance of the earth you know what is possible so the the team around Maine Center for coastal fisheries and the bag induce watershed people are are making the case to Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission that in fact stewardship I mean harvest makes good stewardship if the towns think that eventually they can harvest some of these air lives within the very strict limits that are set by the state and the interstate system there will be more collective interest and so that's where this is headed and in fact they have really have written the proposal that they're just submitting to the interstate group as we speak this is a very pivotal time it's all happening the bag of dues River watershed is really sparking change on an Atlantic coast soft-shelled clams is another case where one thing I didn't say about ly is this that the state doesn't manage it directly they subcontract it basically to the towns and to the operators of whatever person is is harvesting at a at a constriction in a stream so optional clams is the same way if you picture a clam flat with acres of flats like northern Bay and the bag adduce and try to picture the state agency with 50 marine patrol officers being able to control those and a clam digger being able to run across a flat and get to another truck that's on the other point and the wardens on the other point you know the original point you can see that local enforcement is absolutely essential so this is a long-standing process that the state of Maine has done and these local town clam committees actually provide stewardship they they close and open flats they do conservation closures and they do local enforcement so this is a case of quite a quite a local quite an adaptive quite a human and resource linked management approach scallops about starting in 2010 and effort a multi-year effort was started to try to rebuild the state waters scallop fishery this was done by lots of meetings with lots of fishermen and what was developed with something that the state never expected they had always managed scallops from Kittery to East port the same way and what came out of that those meetings was that there were three areas of the coast that were really different ecologically and the scallops the scallop abundance was different and the habitat was different and for this middle part of the coast that we're talking about the eastern Maine coastal current area fishermen there wanted rotational Court closures fishermen drew those lines those three colors of those areas those are rotational areas for scalloping and and fishermen wanted to to be able to fish from home and not have to be mobile back to the concept of not getting so big that you just pulse fish abundance but they wanted to Justice Teddy winters winter's work within reach of home they they're the state agreed and developed a process where there's some real-time connection with enforcement and that management system has resulted in a major increase in value and and landings and this this the success of this effort was part of what attracted national marine fisheries service to sign the ecosystem the the coast Maine coastal current ecosystem pilot project because they realized that interacting with people who knew the condition of the resource in their local bays and closing on a relatively real-time basis so that there was stuff left for the next year could in fact work so lobsters the granddaddy of ecological approach to management there are no quotas although there's a survey done for lobsters nobody ever limits the catch and that's the fundamental thing for traditional fisheries management instead protection reproduction by v-notch not you know throwing over egg bearing lobsters protecting juveniles by throwing over the little ones protect habitat by fishing with traps only dragging for lobsters and and limiting limiting traps limiting technology and fisherman stewardship fishermen when we bring you said when I ran Maine Center for coastal fisheries we would have let's say crab fishermen from Chesapeake Bay or fishermen from bailey's come up and they'd be shocked at how many fish if you've ever been out lobstering you fishermen are throwing over more than half of what they're catching often different times of year so this is the other piece of lobster management that is so unique there there are seven zones there the zones limit the mobility of fishermen so that you are not entitled as a fisherman to catch lobsters wherever they are you have to catch them near nearby where you live these were state proxies for the traditional territories basically it's what they were if you will notice that three-mile limit is this line here the zones go out to this line here which looks a lot like that line over there and so what this is is an agreement between the states and the federal government that state rules should lead with lobster and and in this area the main type fishing rules no dragging all of that stuff goes out to about 25 miles to that one to this line here and what you'll see is even the Atlantic states Marine Fisheries Commission has quite a complex number of areas south of us and that's because the state agencies have said well we need to make this change off the Cape we mean to make this change in the south of the Cape and and so it has adapted this management is adapted by fishermen and managers working together and the federal government has agreed to this and has not put the traditional fisheries management on lobster instead has let the states take the lead the other piece for Maine is that we have Co management the zones have the right to vote on certain rules so that the trap limit are the time fishing or whatever can be different in different zones very important issue its owner operator throughout the state of Maine and what this means is that the person who owns the boat is the only person who can lobster off of that and sit when when we had a conference Oh back in 2010 and we brought fishermen we brought fisheries managers and social scientists together from both coasts of the US and Canada and asked one question what's the most important thing for preserving community scale fishing they all said owner operator so this is completely opposite to traditional fisheries management where the idea is its efficient if you give rights people can buy them sell them if they consolidate it and the person who owns the right is ashore and has a hired skipper that's perfectly okay this is the guy on the boat is responsible for the act of the conservation actions directly we have apprentice based based entry as well and the owner operator is now considered so important in Maine that it's been extended by the legislature into Maine State scalloping and Maine urgent fishing so the the end result of this is that lobsters have been the management of lobsters has positions of close to 5,000 in Maine lobster man to take advantage and benefit from the ecological conditions that Ted mentions so you know the reason we have more lobsters is undoubtedly because we have warming waters and an extension of habitat and reduce predation but the but main fishermen and coastal communities have been able to benefit from that just think if we'd had this pulse of moving abundance that you saw on Ted's map and you had the possibility of people who had caught the most getting the most right to lobsters that pulse started down south of the Cape and offshore it moved East we would have had boats moving up the coast fishing and not and we would not have had the benefit of this so to come back to the collaborative we're calling it eastern Maine which we're calling an e m3 Sea and I just wanted to say that there is a lot of science and social science that has is backing up this change and this pilot project is is making one place in the in the country where traditional fisheries management can be we can try an alternative and get some feedback and maybe learn something Elinor Ostrom who some of you may be familiar with who won the Nobel Prize for economics studying irrigation systems around the world and studying the Maine lobster fishery said that Coe management is essential people who are using resources have to have responsibility for the management of those of those resources because otherwise you just don't have the right information flow and the right behavior complex adaptive system says we have to learn as we go and very prominent social scientists said this is the time to try bottom-up ecosystem-based fisheries management I guess that's it yeah I thought that so anyway this is I thought I had one more slide great so we found from Ted ecology matters this is localized and plays bass fishermen are going to be involved in the data collection in thinking through what's smart and the whole system isn't one solution that comes out in one day it's a it's a process of learning making decisions adapting because we now know that change is happening we always knew a change happened but we kind of could have assumed it away because we couldn't see it and now the time horizon is so much closer so it is a tall order but I think we don't have any option and I think we're positioned here with kind of it's a miracle to me that we can try this here thank you so much we'd be happy to take questions culverts are critical and part of the reason that the alewife restoration is such a huge collaborative effort is that there are organizations like the Nature Conservancy who and share there are lots of organizations that are are literally putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into corporate replacement and with the additional rainfall that we're having culverts are becoming [Music] - it worked but the key point there is it was us it was people like yourself and like ourselves and and you know I think what options do we have but to try and and it's been this has been a 4050 year process for both of us watching things taking a look at things and saying this does not make any sense just simply counting fish and telling people how much they can catch is not the only thing that's going on and all of a sudden all of these pieces are coming together but governance this is all about you know what I've been talking about is governance and heaven knows we all know that governance is very difficult so I don't want to underestimate the challenge [Music] those are elvers you're talking about those are small eels and those to notice not as close as one would hope l wives are are basically managed by the state but controlled by the community where the river goes so the cerebrum has has rights to lease out capture of those our wives to one or several individuals Elvis the state must amount that they don't have an owner/operator arrangement with it and to my knowledge thank you they do well anyway but it an elder is a baby eel yeah eels are yeah you know the black things so so eels my annual migration is the opposite event lice and wipes women spawn in freshwater and live in the ocean you'll spawn and the ocean and live in freshwater so the babies go upstream for the eels and for the L wives they it's like salmon they're they're a call the river herring there look like an atlantic herring only slightly different body shape and whatever and they they go up spawn in the lake and then the adults go back down it's not like a Pacific salmon that dies after it spawns they'll do that three or four times when the Penobscot three Western Europe interruptions runs were estimated to be 25 million fish per year that's going up and then when you think of how many babies come down if half of them were female and multiply that by 2 times 10 to the 3 you're getting to be a wicked amount and that's not even counting the baby atlantic herring but they arrive by a different transport mechanism so the prey base that I was showing you is probably just a fraction of what existed before before they reach that point that database is 19 probably 1900 to 1920 let me just say one quick thing then we got endangered and there's just as many down the bay and just as many of can't see up in the lake is so but they have that's their role and so so this is what the the harvesting of alewives is only allowed on 14 rivers in maine all the other ones you can't except for 25 fish so in order to get permission to harvest them you have to collect scale samples for enough years and you have to take scale samples three times a day the whole time they're running and then you have to take scale samples while they're running down yes and that's what the volunteer effort in Brooksville is doing and on what five pawns on Parker not yet but Walker and whites and Pierce's right now Frost and Parker are going to come online in another couple of years and so then you if the Atlantic states Marine Fisheries Commission makes a decision to allow more rivers ever to be allowed because they've been so conservative they haven't been letting anyone harvest this the people from the back of this watershed er with the help of Maine Center for coastal fishery or petitioning Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to make out with the idea that if we can promise all these volunteers the fact that eventually there will be a harvest on these rivers more people will have motivation to do it when harvest is allowed it will be given either to the town or to one Operator and they have very strict they can only have it open during certain hours on three days a week so it's very very tightly they don't they may to demonstrate if there are five year classes of tell wives returning to the street most streams come because in Ostia the fish the fishing person for the that particular stream would be having a good year which is it everyday and nothing gets up and voila next actually four years from then nobody comes in or very few goons so that's that's the pitfall that they're they're protecting against yeah and you realize the restoration of these rivers throughout Maine in these small streams this is rebuilding things that were Stoppard up in the early 1800s late 1700s when when when damn you know water power was was the way everything happened so this is a this is restoring an ecosystem that's been damaged for a long time [Laughter] and when you're stopping how many mental disease from that go for what it's worth today are listed as over fish and overfishing and the current which means National Marine fishery service is cutting them off what about the Heron that used to be so abundant the latest survey by NOAA was that if you take the last four year classes baby-baby Perry from age zero up to age four and put them all together they are less than the year five class because there's nobody left to reproduce we are heading for at least a decade really role level herring fisheries what does that boil down to those are the two primary weapons which prey sources for the northern gulf of me they're basically guaranteed thin fish will not be restoring in estuaries except for those mid water trawlers that cleaned everything up have been absolutely faithful and avoiding l wise because there's a directive because of the field the condition of hell lies south of name is so poor that environmentalists have threatened to file for endangered species matter if that happens that would put the mid-water trellis of a business of it very cautious that way so we have a lobster dominated system right now and that's not a healthy I think it's really right thinking to know that they're to recognize that there's variability yeah yeah that's why I didn't see any birds in the tree I kept looking to I was going to go down when I saw the birds and I never got but that is am I right in thinking that that is one that potentially does already have rights I think it's one of the few where the Vega dues there are any with heparin doesn't realize looking at the stream that primary harvesters for these guys as a bike and the design capacity for a difficult stirring ferret rolling combination is a million pounds of fish per day and last I knew there were still 18 or 20 of them working the Gulf at night and you do the arithmetic and they've put in constrictions constraints in their efforts but by if I simply examining the survey of what are the species they been targeting my quote inherent natural over fish and over occurring they've been cut way back Atlanta caring just described for you how the reproductive component the adult patient they have done the same thing that they did in in West Africa they have totally trashed the system and now it's time for them to go to South America or some other place one of the things that's exciting about this focusing on eastern Maine is that first of all there's so much alewife restoration so that's putting some large species into the if they don't get hurt rollers but and we know also that herring atlantic herring see hearing spotting is in localized beds they to home to a localized spawning area and so as the science for this ecosystem approach gets going that's gonna get fed into it and it used to be that lobstermen would find herring spawn all over their traps that hasn't happened for quite a while in the same to the same degree so that's one of those things that if you're talking about a small area and local people fishing an area who might eventually get rights to fish some of those other species all of a sudden you have information coming feedback loops the ability to leave a herring spawning bed alone for a critical period of time and all of that kind of behavior which has just been impossible when you're managing it a Gulf of Maine wide spill this is all down the road it's not these subunits of ecological activity that's associated with these these extra we're in areas that have particularly those that have a credible River coming that's an internal dynamic that's going on right there if you can eliminate just that and have everything else going around well around it kind of suggests that this might be possible to regenerate that self up that sweep of subpopulations and have that that critical building block back functional again and I think getting those prey species back incredible abundance locally is the key what you guys are doing is right on point we were men Haven our name isn't allowed to catch very many men hoagies and they come up every summer usually not I mean usually they stay on the west side of the Vltava Scott Bay but this year there and I've seen a bill I'm like herring will splash around on the surface sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah like friends wick the place where is particularly hard luck with this is months week very relatively shallow is that Canadians we're thinking the quite McCoy yeah they run them in and but again we're not used to abundance we're not used to the things that happen when you have abundance strikers over things but I could remember when I was final Haven and I would go headlining when I was hauling traps you chase flocks of gulls and terns and everything else diving on a pod of herring or outlines or whatever and we'd run over there because they were fish underneath it usually they would follow - cause they weren't hate or havoc they don't come up in the water column but it was very exciting to see so much light and if you could see that and create a system where lots of people could share it in it's a huge issue this this summer and will be for the next summers in they're looking for other types of fish to bring in from other places but I will say also allies are an excellent spring date watching but the decrements but the difference is you can control extraction yeah are there any studies or any the people that are addressing the impact of dragging your safe house what's happening right now if you look at Maine's historical landings we find that scallops reappear about every 20 years and if you examine the process on both sides we find scalloped grounds that were used back in the 30s when high my brother picked them out where boulders and waste lands but there had been no settlement and I'm looking at it and saying there's a 20-year hiatus because they totally trashed the nursery grounds where young scallops would settle and that's that's the other thing that's being talked about with the co management of scallops right now just how to can you can you use that same setup over time to lighten up the drags or change diet just diving is not necessarily the answer and dive fishery sir you can't dive in all places where scallops are and that fisheries is really hard to control somebody wants to cheat that's an easy way to cheat so so it's it's one of those things where this is where you got to pull people together with the idea of having scallops in an area for the long term and say what is it that's gonna make that happen let's sort this out rather than just I'm bigger than you so whatever all the things that happen and in power [Music] you