Saving Seafood

Management & Regulation

Trawl tensions rise as NPFMC meets in Oregon

June 16, 2025 —A headline in Under Current News published June 9th read: “North Pacific Council Bucks Critics, Preserves Status Quo for Alaska Trawlers”.

This is not the news that Alaskan coastal communities and fishermen were hoping for.  The North Pacific Fishery Management Council at their June meeting, which ended Tuesday, decided once again to postpone meaningful action to update its definition of “pelagic trawl gear” and continue allowing midwater trawl gear to contact up to 100% of the area fished with the seafloor.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Trump reverses course on salmon restoration in the Pacific Northwest

June 16, 2025 — U.S. President Donald Trump has withdrawn the federal government from a salmon restoration deal with Tribes in the Pacific Northwest region, marking the latest development in the president’s efforts to undo his predecessor’s legacy on salmon restoration in the region.

“We are dismayed that an agreement that was among the best roadmaps charted for helping Columbia Basin salmon – representing years of work by Tribes, states, and the federal government – was undone with the stroke of a pen,” Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission Chair Jeremy Takala said in a statement. “This action, done without consultation with the Tribes, dismantles what should have been celebrated as a historic achievement. If you love salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, and lamprey, the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement was a groundbreaking commitment that provided critical funding for Tribal and other hatcheries, habitat restoration, predation management, infrastructure upgrades, and support for energy projects that would be less burdensome on the environment and Tribal cultural resources.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump Withdraws From Agreement With Tribes to Protect Salmon

June 13, 2025 — President Trump moved on Thursday to withdraw from a Biden administration agreement that had brokered a truce in a decades-long legal battle with tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

The federal government has been mired in legal battles for decades over the depletion of fish populations in the Columbia River Basin, caused by four hydroelectric dams in the lower Snake River. Native American tribes have argued in court that the federal government has violated longstanding treaties by failing to protect the salmon and other fish that have been prevented by the dams from spawning upstream of the river. That legal fight is now expected to resume, with no brokered agreement in place.

In its statement announcing the withdrawal, the White House made no mention of the affected tribes and portrayed the issue falsely as revolving around “speculative climate change concerns.”

The tribes had called for the dams to be breached as a way to restore the salmon population, a proposal that has faced intense pushback because of the potential costs. A study found that removing the four dams was the most promising approach to restoring the salmon population, but also reported that replacing the electricity generated by the dams, shipping routes and irrigation water would cost between $10.3 billion and $27.2 billion.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Fishing Group Renews Effort to Stop Empire Wind

June 13, 2025 — The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association is among the groups calling for a renewed halt to the construction of the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind farm, which was the subject of a stop-work order in April that was lifted just a month later.

The organizations, which include Protect Our Coast-New Jersey and the Nantucket-based ACK for Whales, have called on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to issue a stop-work order on the 54-turbine, 810-megawatt project, which is to span 80,000 acres in the New York Bight and send renewable electricity to New York City. Mr. Burgum had done just that on April 16, reportedly at the urging of Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and with the support of Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.

A month later, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management informed Equinor, the Norwegian company that is constructing the wind farm, that the stop-work order had been lifted, allowing construction to resume. Gov. Kathy Hochul took credit for the reversal, saying that she had “spent weeks pushing the federal government to rescind the stop-work order” so that construction on “this important source of renewable power” could proceed.

The groups seeking to halt the project cited the June 2 death of a subcontractor aboard a platform supply vessel.

“Unlike [the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s] public reporting for oil and gas accidents, there is currently no centralized public reporting website for offshore wind fatalities or injuries,” the groups said in a statement. “The public, press, and fishing community were never informed of this fatality, echoing the lack of transparency seen after the Vineyard Wind LM107P blade implosion on July 13, 2024, when 55 tons of material were deposited into the ocean and washed onto Nantucket’s beaches, only disclosed 48 hours later.”

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

Charter company that helped extend Atlantic red snapper season says fight not over yet

June 13, 2025 — A Volusia County charter fishing company that helped lead the charge in extending the Atlantic red snapper season said the fight is far from over. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made a ruling that allows for a one-day extension and removes the consideration to close all bottom fishing for three months.

Haley Stephens, owner of Sea Spirit Fishing Charter in Ponce Inlet, has been meeting with government agencies about this issue for the last year.

“What we’re seeing on the water is just a record abundance of these fish, so to hear that it’s being overfished raises the question of what in the world is going on,” said Stephens.

Read the full article at WFTV

WPRFC approves mandatory electronic monitoring of longline vessels

June 13, 2025 — The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Council (WPRFC) has authorized mandatory electronic monitoring of all commercial longline vessels operating in the Hawai‘i and American Samoa fisheries.

With the number of human observers dwindling due to limited funding, the council determined that it was necessary to adopt electronic monitoring in order to adequately track the fisheries’ operations and ensure compliance with the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump can revoke national monument designations, Justice Department says

June 12, 2025 — President Donald Trump has broad authority to revoke protected land designated as national monuments by past presidents, the Justice Department said in a new legal opinion.

The May 27 legal opinion from the Justice Department found that presidents can move broadly to cancel national monuments, challenging a 1938 determination saying monuments created under the Antiquities Act cannot be rescinded and removed from protection.

The memo could serve as a legal basis to attempt to withdraw vast amounts of land from protected status. Trump’s administration wants to prioritize fossil fuel and energy development, such as drilling for oil and gas and mining for coal and critical minerals, including on federal lands.

“For the Antiquities Act, the power to declare carries with it the power to revoke,” the Justice Department memo states. “If the President can declare that his predecessor was wrong regarding the value of preserving one such object on a given parcel, there is nothing preventing him from declaring that his predecessor was wrong about all such objects on a given parcel.”

The DOJ memo mentioned two California national monuments designated by former President Joe Biden shortly before leaving office. In Trump’s first term, the president shrank the size of two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, and reduced the size of a national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean.

Biden restored the three areas upon taking office and designated or expanded 12 national monuments during his term.

Environmental groups blasted the DOJ opinion.

Read the full article at CNN

Trump’s NOAA cuts clash with seafood competitiveness goals

June 12, 2025 —  During a Republican-led hearing touting U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on restoring American seafood competitiveness, Democrats and assembled witnesses questioned whether the administration’s actions align with its stated purpose.

“I hope to work with the administration and my colleagues and the majority to achieve that goal, but I don’t see how the administration is going to succeed when it spent the last four months haphazardly cutting the funding and workers that our fisheries rely on,” U.S. Representative Val Hoyle (D-Oregon) said during a House Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee hearing title “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Final rule for Amendment 59 sets stricter red snapper limits

June 10, 2025 — NOAA Fisheries has finalized new regulations for the South Atlantic red snapper fishery through Amendment 59 to the Fishery Management Plan for Snapper-Grouper Fishery of the South Atlantic Region, tightening limits and restricting access for both commercial and recreational fishermen in the 2025 season.

According to NOAA Fisheries, the red snapper population in the South Atlantic is “undergoing overfishing, not overfished, but not yet rebuilt,” prompting the agency to revise catch limits and season dates through this final rule. The changes are based on the most recent update to the SEDAR 73 stock assessment, which includes data through 2023.

“NOAA Fisheries developed Amendment 59 on the Secretary’s behalf to comply with the Magnuson-Stevens Act and a court order,” the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) stated, “because the SAFMC failed to develop and submit, after a reasonable period of time, needed conservation and management measures to end and prevent overfishing of the South Atlantic red snapper population, as required by the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

NOAA reverses course on winter Florida groundfish ban

June 10, 2025 — In a victory for sport fishermen, NOAA has scrapped a proposed rule that would have banned fishing for 55 fish species off Florida’s Atlantic coast during the winter to aid the recovery of overfished red snapper, one of the region’s most prized sport species.

In a bulletin announcing a suite of changes to federal management of South Atlantic red snapper, NOAA said it had axed the three-month ban — called a “discard reduction season” — on dozens of species that share the same near-bottom habitat with snapper, citing heavy opposition from fishing interests.

Those species include black sea bass, red grouper, vermillion snapper, gag, scamp, greater amberjack and gray triggerfish.

Read the full article at E&E News