ELLSWORTH — As if Maine’s lobstermen didn’t have enough to worry about, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) is considering new regulations governing the herring fishery that could have a major impact on the bait market.

Late last month, the ASMFC’s Herring Section met in Delaware to explore ways to improve herring management in conservation area 1A — essentially the Gulf of Maine within about 50 miles from shore. The group voted to begin the process of amending the interstate herring management plan and place several options on the table. Among them are setting harvest quotas monthly or bimonthly, rather than annually. Quotas could be adjusted up or down to account for any excess or shortage of landings during the previous period.

Also on the table are the prohibition of fishing for herring, in addition to existing landings bans, on specified days and a total ban on directed herring fishing in Area 1A before June 1 each year. Other measures call for tougher reporting requirements for state-licensed herring boats and more restrictions on fishing for juvenile fish.

Currently, midwater trawlers — boats, often operating in pairs, that drag huge nets through the water — are banned from fishing for herring in the near-shore Gulf of Maine from June through September. During those months the herring fishery is open only to purse seiners. Those boats locate schools of herring and encircle them with a single net that is shaped like a giant bag.

Under current regulations, landing herring is prohibited on certain days of the week throughout the spring and summer. Until this year, the seiners informally agreed not to fish on those no landing days. That apparently changed this summer, regulators say.

Currently, regulators set an annual total allowable catch (TAC) for the herring fishery. This year, the TAC for Area 1A, which supplies most of the bait for the Maine lobster industry, was less than 90 million pounds. That sounds like a lot of fish, but a shortage of herring this summer and early fall raised the price lobstermen paid for bait to near record levels.

While one group of regulators struggled with questions of how to better manage the herring fishery in state waters, another group was facing many of the same issues with respect to the federal waters (outside the three-mile limit) fishery.

Early last month, the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) decided to table any plans to develop a system of individual fishing quotas (IFQs), or other group quota allocation systems for the time being. Instead, the council will focus its efforts on finding ways to improve the monitoring of the herring fishery.

For many years, conservation groups have called for measures to require placing trained observers aboard herring boats to monitor landings. Currently, observers are on board during just a tiny proportion of herring fishing trips. Conservationists say that allows unscrupulous fishermen to underreport the amount of herring they actually land and evade the TAC limits.

Another problem according to the conservation groups is that herring boats are landing large amounts of anadromous river herring as bycatch to their landings of sea-run herring. The problem appears to be most serious off the southern New England coast, but it also affects Area 1A.

Both the ASMFC and the NEFMC will be scheduling meetings during the coming winter to solicit reactions from the fishing industry and the public to proposed changes in regulations.