Saving Seafood

Conservation & Environment

Agreement Reached to Protect Whales Amid Marine Wind Projects

June 6, 2022 — The New England Aquarium recently announced that it is partnering with Cornell University and wind energy consultant LAUTEC US on a project to better assess the relationship between offshore wind developments and the habitats of critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

Although the full impact of wind development on whales is unknown, pile driving activities associated with offshore wind projects could potentially force whales from their habitat and disrupt important behaviors such as feeding and socializing.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

 

New project aims to protect whales while developing offshore wind energy

June 3, 2022 — A new partnership between conservation and renewable energy is coming to Massachusetts.

The Right Wind project, through the combined efforts of the New England Aquarium, Cornell University, and LAUTEC US, aims to help offshore wind developers protect the North Atlantic right whale.

“We’re excited to be starting this project because it gives us an opportunity to develop tools that can help reduce the potential risks of wind energy development to North Atlantic right whales, a critically endangered species that numbers less than 350 individuals,” said Dr. Laura Ganley, an associate research scientist at the New England Aquarium.

Read the full story at Boston.com

The Hail Mary Hatcheries

June 3, 2022 — The Russian River represents one possible future—perhaps the most likely one—for many other rivers on the west coast of North America: they will have hatchery salmon or no salmon at all. In this heavily developed watershed, climate change is already escalating droughts, fires, and floods, providing a preview of what may be in store for other regions. As wild stocks decline due to environmental change and other pressures, the hope is that facilities like Warm Springs, often described as “conservation hatcheries,” can keep salmon runs intact until their habitats are restored. It’s a task that sometimes verges on the impossible. As Mariska Obedzinski, who has led California Sea Grant’s coho monitoring program in the Russian River for almost 18 years, puts it, “It can feel like one step forward and five steps back.”

Hatcheries hold up a mirror to the stubborn belief that salmon can exist without intact habitat. On the west coast of North America, they have been used for over a century to supplement wild salmon in places where logged, dammed, and developed watersheds can no longer support abundant runs. But can salmon raised in captivity really replace wild ones? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for years, and, full disclosure, I once coauthored an opinion editorial with a consortium of salmon conservationists encouraging the British Columbia government to restore fish habitat, rather than build more hatcheries.

By the mid-20th century, scientists were finding evidence that artificially propagated fish were struggling to survive in the wild. “There is something wrong with hatchery trout,” a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist wrote in 1948, suggesting that the fish—close cousins to salmon—were becoming domesticated. Today, hatchery salmon are generally bigger, bolder, and more combative than wild salmon; when produced by the tens or hundreds of thousands, they can outcompete wild fish. Paradoxically, though, nearly all hatchery salmon die quickly from poor life skills—failure to avoid predators or to successfully find food—or succumb to stress in the strange new environment. One facility manager told me that his coho had consumed bits of wood after release, likely mistaking the fragments for commercial feed pellets. “Hatchery fish are animals that are dressed in the skin of the salmon, but they’re missing most of what makes a salmon a salmon,” says Jim Lichatowich, a retired fish biologist and author of Salmon Without Rivers. “They don’t have that 10,000-year study of one place.”

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

 

EPA could kill mining project in the Bristol Bay watershed

June 1, 2022 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will hold public hearings next month on a proposal to restrict mining in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed and possibly kill a large project. 

The move “would help protect the Bristol Bay watershed’s rivers, streams, and wetlands that support the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a subsistence-based way of life that has sustained Alaska Native communities for millennia,” officials said on its website. 

Any changes could kill the proposed “Pebble Mine,” called “one of the greatest stores of mineral wealth ever discovered, and the world’s largest undeveloped copper and gold resource,” by Northern Dynasty Minerals, which is in charge of the project. The National Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups have opposed the project, saying it would damage wildlife there.

Read the full story at KPVI

 

Hawaii longliners convert gear to reduce whitetip shark bycatch

May 27, 2022 — Hawaii’s deep-set longline fleet is completing its changeover from wire leaders to nylon monofilament, a process that fishermen started on their own and is expected to reduce bycatch and mortality of threatened oceanic whitetip sharks by 30 percent.

A new federal regulation effective May 31 will prohibit the use of wire leaders in the fishery, formally instituting the industry-led initiative.

Wire leaders have been used so hooked fish can’t break off, and to make gear safer for fishermen. But even the sharp-toothed oceanic whitetip sharks can’t bite through them, meaning fishermen must release them, a dangerous process for both fish and fishermen.

The Hawaii Longline Association, representing tuna longline fishermen in the area, took the initiative to stop using wire leaders when deep-set longline fishing when its members voluntarily phased out wire leaders starting in November 2020, according to HLA Executive Director Eric Kingma.

“Our members—which include all of the Hawaii-based longline fleet of around 145 vessels—don’t want to catch sharks,” Kingma said in a joint statement with NMFS. “While the amount of fishing effort by Hawaii vessels is small compared with foreign fleets, we continue to work with our members and researchers on innovative methods to minimize the impacts of our fishery on these sharks and other protected species.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

The US has spent more than $2B on a plan to save salmon. The fish are vanishing anyway.

May 25, 2022 — The fish were on their way to be executed. One minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine.

Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor. Hatchery workers in splattered chest waders gutted globs of bright orange eggs from the dead females and dropped them into buckets, then doused them first with a stream of sperm taken from the dead males and then with an iodine disinfectant.

The fertilized eggs were trucked around the corner to an incubation building where over 200 stacked plastic trays held more than a million salmon eggs. Once hatched, they would fatten and mature in rectangular concrete tanks sunk into the ground, safe from the perils of the wild, until it was time to make their journey to the ocean.

Read the full story at OPB

 

Rare Right Whale Sightings Reported Along New England Shoreline

May 24, 2022 — Several people have reported rare sightings of North Atlantic Right Whales this month along the New England coastline from Provincetown to Portsmouth.

“It is pretty rare to see them that close to shore,” Heather Pettis of the New England Aquarium said.

With its bristle-like baleen plates and distinctive callosities decorating its head to its massive size and characteristic tail flukes, the North Atlantic Right Whale has been entertaining New Englanders this spring with some shoreline shows.

“Sure enough, there was a right whale skim feeding right off of Route 1A,” Pettis said. “This time of year whales sort of leave Cape Cod Bay, where they’ve been feeding over the winter. They disperse and we have these opportunistic sightings pop up.”

Read the full story at NBC Connecticut

Feds accused of dragging feet on threatened whitetip shark review

May 18, 2022 — The National Marine Fisheries Service has for years failed to complete its legally required consultation regarding the effects authorized fisheries in Hawaii and Samoa have on the threatened whitetip shark population, according to a new lawsuit.

The oceanic whitetip shark has suffered a precipitous population decline of up to 88% in recent decades, the Conservation Council for Hawaii says in a complaintfiled Tuesday in Honolulu. The decline is due primarily to the sharks ending up as “bycatch” of longline fishing fleets in the Pacific Ocean that target tuna and swordfish.

The fisheries service has recognized the whitetip shark as a threatened species but so far has failed to complete the so-called consultation it is required to conduct under the Environmental Species Act to determine the impact the fisheries the agency authorizes have on the sharks.

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

US Atlantic scup bottom-trawl fishery achieves MSC certification

May 18, 2022 — The U.S. Atlantic scup bottom-trawl fishery has achieved Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification, verifying sustainable fishing practices are being used in the fishery. The certificate will be jointly held by commercial fishing operations of Cape May, New Jersey, U.S.A.-based Lund’s Fisheries and North Kingstown, Rhode Island, U.S.A.-based Seafreeze.

Scup (Stenotomus chrysops) is a brown and silver food fish found in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, primarily between Cape Cod, Massachusetts, U.S.A., and Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, U.S.A.. The fish is also known as porgy, maiden, fairmaid, and ironsides. Unlike many fish populations, scup is considered an “underutilized species.” Scup populations have been steadily increasing along the U.S. East Coast since the mid-1990s, MSC said.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Atlantic Scup Fishery Achieves MSC Certification

May 11, 2022 — The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced that the Atlantic Scup (Stenotomus chrysops) bottom trawl fishery has achieved MSC certification for sustainable fishing practices. The MSC Fisheries Standard is a globally recognized standard used to assess if a fishery is well-managed, and reflects the most up-to-date understanding of internationally accepted fisheries science and management. The MSC certificate for scup is jointly held by commercial fishing operations Lund’s Fisheries, Inc. and Seafreeze, Ltd.

The Atlantic scup certification follows a rigorous twelve-month review carried out by a third-party assessment body, SCS Global Services. The MSC Fisheries Standard has three core principles that every certified fishery must meet including 1) sustainable fish stocks, 2) minimizing environmental impact, and 3) effective fisheries management.  As well as preserving fish stocks and the marine environment,  the MSC certification process ensures that scup products can be traced to a sustainable source through required recordkeeping.

Eric Critchlow, US Director for the MSC, said: “The certification of the scup fishery will help safeguard livelihoods, seafood supplies, and healthy oceans for future generations. Being a new whitefish fishery to gain MSC certification is a notable achievement and we welcome Lund’s and Seafreeze’s commitment to fisheries sustainability.”

Lund’s Fisheries principals own and operate 20 fishing vessels delivering a variety of seafood to its freezing and processing facility year-round. Other, independent vessels, from North Carolina through Maine, land scup at the company’s Cape May, NJ plant, as well.

Read the full story at National Fisherman