Hawaii FEP - Western Pacific Fishery Council

4.2.4 Bottomfish MSYA 2009 report by PIFSC (Brodziak et al. 2009) provides the most recent estimates of MSY forHawaii’s bottomfish complex. Although the report’s stock assessment considers the Hawaiianbottomfish stocks to be a single, archipelago-wide multispecies complex, annual MSY estimatesfor each of the three management zones are also provided as follows: MHI 456,000 lbs; MauZone 126,000 lbs; Ho’omalu Zone 437,800 lbs; Total 1,020,100 lbs.4.2.5 Bottomfish Optimum YieldOptimum yield for Hawaii’s bottomfish fishery is defined as the amount of fish that will becaught by fishermen fishing in accordance with applicable fishery regulations in this plan, in theEEZ and adjacent waters around the Hawaii Archipelago.4.2.6 Bottomfish Domestic Processing CapacityBottomfish harvested in Hawaii are marketed as fresh product with each vessel processing itscatch at sea. Therefore the domestic processing capacity and domestic processing levels willequal or exceed the harvest for the foreseeable future.4.2.7 Bottomfish Total Allowable Level of Foreign FishingDomestic vessels have sufficient harvesting capacity to take the entire OY. Therefore the level ofTotal Allowable Foreign Fishing (TALFF) appears to be zero.4.3 Hawaii Archipelago Crustacean Fisheries4.3.1 History and Patterns of UseUla (lobster) was a traditional source of food for Native Hawaiians and was sometimes used inearly religious ceremonies (Titcomb 1978). After the arrival of Europeans in Hawaii, the lobsterfishery became by far the most productive of Hawaii’s commercial shellfish fisheries. It wasreported that the MHI commercial lobster catch in 1901 was 131,200 pounds (Cobb 1902).Bythe early 1950s, the commercial catch of spiny lobsters (P. penicillatus) around the MHI haddropped by 75 percent to 85 percent (Shomura 1987). A statewide analysis of MHI commerciallobster catch data by Kelly and Messer (2005) found that 185,263 pounds of lobster were caughtbetween 1984 and 2004 with annual landings ranging between 7,000 and 12,000 pounds.In the late 1970s NMFS, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hawaii’s Division of AquaticResources, and the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant Program joined in a cooperative agreementto conduct a 5-year assessment of the biotic resources of the NWHI. The survey reported thatNecker Island and Maro Reef had sufficiently large stocks of lobsters to support somecommercial exploitation (Uchida and Tagami 1984).Shortly after, several commercial vessels began lobster-trapping operations in the NWHI. Aperiod of low catches was followed by a rapid increase in landings as more vessels entered the104