Fish Habitat: Essential Fish Habitat and Rehabilitation

An Environmentalist’s Perspective on Essential Fish Habitat

Cynthia M. Sarthou

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569124.ch3

Abstract.— It cannot be denied that habitat is essential to healthy fish populations. A significant number of fish species in the Gulf of Mexico and around the country depends on estuaries during some stage of their life cycles. Despite this fact, fish habitats are increasingly destroyed and degraded by pollution, dredging, freshwater influx, and other human activities. If healthy fish populations are to be maintained, threats to fish habitat must be addressed. However, traditional management practices have neglected and continue to ignore threats to important fish habitat. The essential fish habitat (EFH) provisions of the 1996 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens Act) present an unprecedented opportunity to develop habitat-based management approaches to protect and restore important fish habitats in the ocean and in vital estuarine areas. This is not to say the EFH provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act are a panacea for habitat protection. For example, there is no enforceable mechanism for preventing activities that destroy areas of EFH. Nonetheless, the EFH provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act can go far in achieving the intended results if the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) promulgates guidelines requiring ecosystem-based management, if regional EFH amendments go beyond minimalist requirements to address threats to habitat through comprehensive habitat management plans, and if regional fishery management councils become important players in the host of federal decisions that affect fish habitat. The NMFS and the regional fishery management councils must be required to take full advantage of this unique opportunity.