so the market is already opned?
The "market" was never closed. There has been a dogfish quota every year. Up until recently it was so small it was hardly worth the effort, so in effect there was no real "market" for them. With trip limits counted in the hundreds of pounds, and only pennies on the pound being offered, it was not worth it.
Recently the quota was raised up quite a bit (but still a shadow of what it was) so there are some docks that are combining efforts to make it worth while getting them shipped to a processor.
Until NMFS admits they were wrong about the population of doggies (they STILL claim that most of the fish we see are males and that breeding females are still at low levels...yeah, that's why every fish we catch squeezes out pups when it hits the deck
)we will continue to have a quota that is insufficient to create a viable market, and will continue to see them running wild over all areas of the ocean.
NMFS insulted us a few years ago by trying to tell us that they had simply shifted their range and that's why we were seeing so many of them. We continue to try and point out that we still see them everywhere we used to (in ever increasing numbers) while also seeing them where we have never seen them before in numbers unlike anything seen in the past.
they did not shift their range, THEY EXPANDED IT!
