Most of the lobster sold at the fish counter in a Middletown supermarket belonged to American lobsters, and each was illegally undersized. Joe Meyer, deputy chief of the Bureau of Law Enforcement for New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, said that
along with federal agents, they enforce a complex patchwork of state and federal regulations designed to protect ocean waters from over-fishing, which is reducing an already dwindling seafood supply off the U.S. coast.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA in its report mentioned that globally, the illegal, unreported and unregulated ocean fishing business is worth $9 billion a year. It is informed that in the Middletown case, the supermarket was fined and led authorities to a Canadian commercial distributor, ultimately banned from delivering seafood to New Jersey.
According to Meyer there is an illegal market for live tautog in sushi and Asian markets where people like to pick out their own fish. Scott Doyle, supervising criminal investigator for NOAA’s Northeast enforcement division, said that general public sees a fish as a business to them.
As per official record nearly $1 million in fines and several years of suspensions were leveled at the time was the largest penalty ever assessed on the Atlantic Coast. That settlement may now be revised because of the new charges, authorities said. Doyle opined that the authority have just found 335 sublegal sea bass in one recreational fishing boat. His office spent months probing a recreational boat out of Wildwood Crest this year, focusing on a fisherman who illegally sold sea bass to restaurants.
