Every late June/early July, Maine’s coast is just the right temperature for the spiny dogfish. These long, flat sharks, with their pointed snouts and white bellies, cruise the ocean’s sandy, muddy floor, feasting on young ground fish.
While all the young cod, halibut, haddock and flounder (to name a few) try to grow; it’s this far less popular shark, the spiny dogfish that proliferates. “These dogfish are pretty much everywhere,” says Jeff White, commercial fisherman based in York. “And you can’t expect the other stocks to be rebuilt while simultaneously rebuilding their predators.”
To add insult to injury, there’s no sizeable financial glory in selling the spiny dogfish, which George Parr, of Upstream Trucking of Portland, describes as “dominating the ecosystem.”
Nevertheless, while the spiny dogfish may sell for chump change, it does merit top rank as the recession fish of the month. In these days of furloughs, layoffs and foreclosures, while fishermen may not make a living catching dogfish, selling this shark means a little extra cash on the side, coming at a time when every penny counts. Last summer, for example, many struggling lobstermen diversified their seafood portfolio by simply setting gill nets to catch dogfish-If nothing else, the dogfish profits covered last summer’s high price of gas.
Meanwhile, although Americans have yet to develop a taste for a bladderless shark that urinates through its skin, in other parts of the world, the spiny dogfish is the main ingredient in some very popular dishes.
The English buy the shark’s torso to prepare the country’s culinary mainstay, fish and chips. The Chinese use the dogfish fin to make shark fin soup. And in Germany, the belly flaps are smoked and turned into a popular dish called “schillerlocken.” And as for those bits most Americans would think twice before turning into cat food, when in Prague these leftover morsels are transformed into tasty pickled beer garden snacks.
The spiny dogfish, however “local” and therefore by definition desirable, may never capture the American culinary imagination. “If not bled right away, the dogfish has a strong taste the U.S. consumer just doesn’t like,” says Terry Stockwell, the director of external affairs for Maine’s Department of Marine Resources.
In the 1950’s, legend has it, there was a bounty on the dogfish. “They give birth and the minute they’re out of the womb they become predators-and they continually breed,” says Parr, who plans to devote the majority of his fishmonger business in July to buying the spiny dogfish for 17-to-25 cents a pound, and sending iced loads via tractor trailers to his New York connection.
Last summer, the three processors in New Bedford, Massachusetts, paid roughly 30 cents a pound, according to White. Corroborating the picture of fishermen catching small change for big fish, Jim Armstrong, fishery management specialist for the National
Marine Fishery Service (NMFS), says that last season, at 20 cents a pound, fishermen who took their dogfish to one of three processing plants in New Bedford only took away “a couple hundred dollars.”
The quota for July, set by the Atlantic States Fisheries Management Commission (ASFMC), is 3,000 pounds a day per fisherman. Massachusetts has elected to limit their day trip limit to 600 pounds per day this month, knowing that the fish will swim south from Maine in abundance come August, a better month to enjoy a high quota. Come fall, states south of Maine will be able to ship the spiny dogfish fresh, not frozen, because as fall approaches, this shark is in higher demand fresh overseas. In the 2007-2008, May-to-May calendar year, the annual ASFMC quota allowance was 8 million pounds; this past year the limit rose to 12 million pounds.
Furthermore, while nearly 95 percent of dogfish are caught in state waters, three miles off the coast (where the federal line begins) the quotas for fishing this shark also went up this year because “the stock has rebuilt at a level of 16 percent above “target biomass,” according to Jim Armstrong. So NMFS raised the quotas; starting last May, the trip limit rose from 600 to 3,000 pounds and the yearly quota jumped from 4 to 12 million pounds, from North Carolina to Maine.
Every year, interested agency representatives meet to perform a stock assessment of the spiny dogfish; this fall scientists will meet at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “There’s often a level of contention between what fishermen see and what state and federal regulators estimate,” says Christopher Vonderweidt, fisheries management plan coordinator for ASMFC.
In the late 1990’s, the females were endangered and a fishery management plan was put into effect to prevent them from disappearing. “Over 70 percent of the spiny dogfish are females, seven pounds and up,” says White. “And the females are what the processors want.”
Vonderweidt is one of a group of government agency scientists whose job, in part, requires him to be protective of the female-defining her as “the metric used to quantify over fishing.” The fishermen, on the other hand, want the female dogfish because she’s larger and therefore provides less work for more meat.
Right now, all the fishermen see are swarms of dogfish, predators endangering the more lucrative ground fish. This is not the year to dismiss the merit in catching them-either to rebalance the ocean ecosystem or to raise a little much-needed extra cash.