Gorgonian Harvest in Jeopardy?

Bushy Sea Whip, Nitella schmidtti, one of the gorgonians currently collected in the Florida Keys/Image courtesy Henry Feddern, PhD.

Urgent Message from COLIN FOORD, of Coral Morphologic:

I'm not sure if you are aware or not, but the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council is going to be voting on restrictions/closure of the gorgonian fishery here in Florida and the Gulf on June 8th at their meeting in Orlando.

This is based on a new mandate from the Magnuson-Stevens Act that requires statistical analysis of all the fisheries that that the SAFMC controls. Of course these people have no real concept of the natural history of gorgonians, ornamental collection, or population data. They are mostly concerned with large commercial fishery management of food and  sportfish spcies like snapper and grouper.

The president of the Florida Keys Marinelife Collectors Association, Henry Feddern, is a major gorgonian collector for the trade, and also has his BS, MS, and PhD from the University of Miami. 

He sent the message below to the board members back in December, but it seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.  It clearly explains how abundant gorgonians are in the wild, and how their natural history and collection methods make overfishing nearly impossible. 

Currently the State of Florida has a management plan organized with the ornamental fishermen.  The state has a much better handle of the situation, so we are trying to lobby to the SAFMC that they rescind control of the fishery to the state for further management, especially since the vast majority of gorgonians collected come from state, and not federal, waters.

Please read Henry's letter to see just what an uninformed debacle this is.

In it you can find a transcript of the last SAFMC meeting minutes in which you can see the sheer ignorance that the council members have regarding the issue.  They all seem to agree that they don't have enough information to make an informed decision, despite acknowledging that gorgonians  are abundant and fast growing.  They seem to think that 'erring on the side of caution' is simply the smartest move. 

They don't seem to take the only data they have (the data submitted to them by the fishermen themselves), very seriously, so they are just making blind moves.

Hopefully we can get some people to write e-mails to each of the board members to let them know that we care and that this is a decision of major importance to a small group of fishermen who are having little impact on the gorgonian population.  For these council members, our fishery is just a blip compared to their 'real' fisheries, so we need to let them know that we are watching them make uninformed decisions.