Federal fishery managers approved a plan to allow rock shrimpers to drag trawling nets along a protected Florida seafloor with rare deepwater coral reefs found nowhere else in the world.
Opening the Oculina Bank Habitat Area to shrimping will destroy one of the most environmentally important and fragile coral reefs that runs from Flagler Beach to Fort Pierce, according to opponents of the plan.
The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council on Jan. 23 approved a plan to reopen a 16-square nautical-mile area along the eastern edge of the northern extension of the Oculina Bank, just north of Cape Canaveral. The U.S. Department of Commerce secretary must give final approval, and denials of council decisions are rare.
Oculina Bank runs from Flagler Beach to Fort Pierce
The Oculina Bank is a narrow strip named for the slow-growing ivory tree coral caled Oculina varicosa. The reef is thousands of years old and habitat for species of grouper and snapper. The mounds stretch up to 100 feet tall in water as deep as 300 feet.
The SAFMC created a Shrimp Fishery Access Area where shrimpers can attain “optimum yield” while minimizing negative effects, in order to reinstate access to the “historically important fishing ground for the rock shrimp fishery.”
Opponents reminded the council there is no solid economic data on the benefits of reopening the area to trawling.
The economic importance is hard to determine, but the area is important to shrimpers because “that’s where the fishing begins,” said Mike Merrifield, who owns Wild Ocean Seafood Market in Titusville.
Cape Canaveral rock shrimp fishing grounds
The South Atlantic Council Coral Advisory Panel was not convened to review and make recommendations, but should have been, member Joshua Voss said. The Coral Advisory Panel’s benchmark for a buffer is 1,000 meters, or 3,280 feet, between shrimp trawling and the Oculina coral reefs. The proposal leaves only 360 meters, or 1,181 feet.
“We’ve been clear that there needs to be a larger buffer area,” Voss said.
The council did not pick the “most liberal” proposal, which would have been a 24 square-mile area, said member and former shrimper Charlie Phillips, who called the 16-mile area the “middle of the road.”
The proposal “protects habitat” and “achieves optimal harvest of rock shrimp,” council member James Hull Jr. added.
Ivory tree coral reef is habitat for snapper, grouper
The Oculina Bank is one of the best-studied deepwater coral reefs in the world and need protection from shrimping, which is a “major destruction of habitat,” said John Reed, a former research scientist at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce. His research helped the Oculina Bank become a protected area.
Trawling would leave “little buffer between the trawl nets and the high-relief coral mounds,” he told TCPalm.
Shrimping also will stir up muddy sediment that could blanket the reef, Reed said. Weights on the bottom of a general shrimp trawl net, which are meant to stay open to entrap shrimp, can penetrate nearly 6 inches into the seafloor, according to University of Miami research.
The council in 2021 approved reopening a 22-square-mile area, but the Secretary of Commerce rejected it in 2022 because the proposal did not include “adequate analysis” that shrimping “would minimize adverse effects of fishing on essential fish habitat,” the secretary’s office stated.
The council oversees fishery regulations in federal waters of the Atlantic Ocean from North Carolina through the Florida Keys.
Tim O’Hara is TCPalm’s environment reporter. Contact him at tim.ohara@tcpalm.com.
This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Florida opens rare ivory tree coral reef to shrimp trawling
Reporting by Timothy O’Hara, Treasure Coast Newspapers / Treasure Coast Newspapers
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