Commercial fishermen are worried an endangered species listing for the Atlantic sturgeon, announced last week by the National Marine Fisheries Service and set to take effect in April, could have a major impact on their operations.
Atlantic sturgeon, a prehistoric fish that once made South Jersey the caviar capital of the world, would be the first ocean fish in the region to win endangered species protection. A smaller sturgeon, the short-nosed sturgeon, which lives in rivers, already is protected but it doesn’t end up in the nets of ocean fishermen. The nearest fish with such protections is the Atlantic salmon in New England.
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You remember the spotted owl? That’s all I have to relate it to, said local net fisherman Kevin Wark.
Wark said the Endangered Species Act makes it illegal to land a sturgeon but he said it’s almost impossible to avoid them.
The listing says basically you can’t touch them, you can’t handle them, you can’t catch them. This is going to be huge. This is going to affect every otter trawl and gillnet from North Carolina to Maine. This is going to affect a lot of people, Wark said.
The NMFS says the impact will vary depending on the type of fishing. The agency already is trying to reduce the impacts and has been working with Wark for several years to develop gillnets, a type of net that catches fish by the gills, which are less likely to catch sturgeon. Wark has also caught 344 sturgeon off Delaware in the past three years as part of a University of Delaware study to identify the health of the brood stock for the New York Bight region, which includes both the Delaware and Hudson rivers. Sturgeon live most of their lives in the ocean but go up rivers to spawn.
The government is promising to work with fisherman and others impacted by the listing, which includes the shipping industry, dredging projects, and other occupations that can come into contact with sturgeon. Wark is worried environmental groups won’t be as patient.
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