September 12, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — Federal fishing regulators are planning to cut back the fishing quota for golden tilefish for the next three years.
New Voluntary Pilot Program to Pre-Measure/Tag Codends Now Underway; Designed to Assist Industry Compliance
September 11, 2017 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:
The New England Fishery Management Council is pleased to announce the launch of a new Codend Compliance Assistance Program (CAP) that’s designed to help fishermen document the purchase of legalsize codends and contribute to the collection of data on codend shrinkage rates. The program is in the pilot phase and participation is voluntary. It was developed by the Council’s Enforcement Committee, which includes representatives from the U.S. Coast Guard and NOAA Office of Law Enforcement.
As fishermen well know, new nets tend to shrink or “harden” once exposed to routine fishing.
“It’s just the nature of the material we use to build twine,” said Terry Alexander, a commercial fisherman and New England Council member who chairs the Enforcement Committee.
The Enforcement Committee began working on the CAP roughly two years ago under the premise that fishermen who volunteered to have codends pre-measured and tagged would be recognized as program participants. Then, in the event that codend mesh inspected during subsequent Coast Guard boardings measured-out smaller than on the original purchase date, the fisherman’s involvement in the CAP would be noted and possibly result in a “fix it” opportunity or reduced penalty.
“This is not a free ticket to tow illegal mesh,” emphasized Alexander. “But if you’re participating in the program and the Coast Guard boards your boat, it sends a signal that you’re a responsible harvester and are trying to fish legally.”
Alaska Sen. Sullivan Schedules Next Magnuson-Stevens Hearing for Sept. 12
September 11, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, is continuing his series of hearings regarding reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, with another one scheduled for next week in Washington, D.C.
Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation member Sullivan, chairman of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, will convene the hearing, “Reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act: Oversight of Fisheries Management Successes and Challenges” at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 12, in Room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building. The hearing is the third of the series and will focus on the perspectives of commercial, charter, and recreational fishermen on the state of our nation’s fishery laws.
The first panel of witnesses include: Phil Faulkner, President, Nautic Star Boats; Jim Donofrio, Executive Director, Recreational Fishing Alliance; and Chris Horton, Senior Director, Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation.
The second panel of witnesses includes: Lori Steele, Executive Director, West Coast Seafood Processors Association; Capt. Robert F. Zales, II, President, National Association of Charterboat Operators; and Greg DiDomenico, Executive Director, Garden State Seafood Association.
The hearing coincides with the National Fisheries Institute’s Annual Political Conference, when many seafood company representatives will be in Washington, D.C.
Witness testimony, opening statements, and a live video of the hearing will be available on www.commerce.senate.gov.
This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.
Trump administration nears decision that sets stage for offshore drilling in the Atlantic
September 11, 2017 — Environmental groups are bracing for the Trump administration to approve controversial testing along the Eastern seaboard that would mark a significant step toward offshore drilling in waters off the coast of Florida all the way north to the Delaware Bay.
Five geophysical survey companies are seeking federal permission to shoot pressurized air blasts into the ocean every 10 to 12 seconds around the clock for weeks and months at a time, seeking fossil fuel deposits beneath the Atlantic Ocean floor.
The testing, which would cover 330,000 square miles of ocean, faces fierce opposition from environmental groups and local officials due to the possible economic and environmental effects.
Because the underwater blasts are louder than a Saturn V rocket launch and can be heard by monitoring devices more than 2,500 miles away, scientists fear long-term exposure to the noise could cause hearing loss and impair breeding, feeding, foraging and communication activity among dolphins, endangered whales, other marine mammals and sea turtles.
Some worry the blasts could cause mother whales and their calves to become separated. Commercial and recreational fisheries could also be affected if fish change their breeding and spawning habits to avoid the noise. Others fear disoriented marine life could collide with the vessels that tug the air guns or become entangled in their lines. Oceana, an international conservation group, estimates that 138,000 marine mammals could be injured in the testing process.
Seventy-five marine scientists asked the Obama administration in 2015 to reject seismic air gun testing in the Atlantic because of these threats. Twenty-eight marine biologists did the same in 2016 over concerns that testing would harm the estimated 500 endangered North Atlantic right whales.
“That’s the species we are most concerned about,” said Doug Nowacek, associate professor of conservation technology at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina. “They are in decline. They live coastally along the U.S. They were hunted (by whalers) and they were slowly recovering. And now they’re starting to decline again.”
Read the full story from the McClatchy Company at the Miami Herald
As glaciers melt, scientists try to figure out how fish will respond
As climate change puts fisheries, ecosystems on the line, scientists work to understand how marine life will respond
September 11, 2017 — Glaciers in Southeast and around the world are melting. This much scientists know.
About half of the water in the Gulf of Alaska comes from glacial melt, current estimates hold. In Southeast, about 30 percent of all the water flowing from land to sea is glacier melt water.
That percentage is expected to increase due to climate change. But scientists don’t yet know how all that melt water might affect the animals swimming through it.
With the help of a net and a small crew, that’s a problem ecologists Anne Beaudreau and Carolyn Bergstrom have been trying to solve by continuing five years of research this summer. The professors — Bergstrom from the University of Alaska Southeast and Beaudreau from the University of Alaska Fairbanks — have been studying marine biodiversity at the mouths of the Mendenhall, Cowee and Eagle rivers.
Researchers find summer heat’s lasting longer in the Gulf of Maine
The warmer conditions endure two months longer than in the early 1980s, posing threats to the food chain and raising risks from more powerful hurricanes.
September 11, 2017 — New scientific research has revealed that summer temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, the second fastest warming part of the world’s oceans, are persisting two months longer than they were as recently as the early 1980s.
The findings, by a Maine-led team of scientists, have ramifications for marine life, fishermen and the strength of hurricanes, which appear in late summer and are fueled by warm water.
“What we found was quite astonishing in that almost all the warming is in the late summer and the winter is not contributing very much at all,” says the project’s lead scientist, University of Maine oceanographer Andrew Thomas. “You can think of impacts all across the food chain, from animals that have actual temperature tolerances to the distribution of species, their prey, and even their predators, not to mention the bacteria and viruses, which we have no idea how they will react.”
The researchers used daily satellite readings collected between 1982 and 2014 to map changes in sea surface temperatures along the Eastern Seaboard from North Carolina to Nova Scotia, breaking out the data by month to reveal seasonal differences in warming rates. They weren’t surprised to find the strongest warming in the Gulf of Maine and adjacent Scotia Shelf – team members had worked with Andrew Pershing of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland to demonstrate this in a 2015 study – but the profound seasonal differences were unexpected.
The satellite data show warming trends across the Gulf of Maine for every month and very sharp increases during July, August and September, especially off the Maine coast. While the Gulf of Maine warmed by an average of 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit per decade during the 33-year period, the warming rate was twice that in the months of July through September, or 1.44 degrees F per decade.
Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald at Central Maine
Shrimp plan changes advance
September 11, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Meeting in Portland at the end of August, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section selected several final measures for inclusion in the latest revision to the Fishery Management Plan for northern shrimp.
Known as “Amendment 3,” the latest version of the plan will bring about a number of significant changes to the way the fishery is managed — if indeed the northern shrimp fishery is ever resuscitated. Because fisheries scientists believed that the northern shrimp population had collapsed, commercial shrimp fishing on the Gulf of Maine has been banned since 2014 with only an extremely limited harvest for scientific data collection purposes permitted.
Before the amendment becomes effective, it will have to be approved by the ASMFC. In its recent action, the shrimp section also recommended that the commission approve the amendment at its next meeting, tentatively scheduled to be held in Norfolk, Va., next month.
The newly recommended provisions would make several changes in both the philosophy and the practical measures affecting the management of the shrimp fishery.
The plan’s stated objectives will now call for managing the resource to support a viable fishery and will give individual states more control over the way the fishery is managed.
TEXAS: Gulf Oysterman Displays Heroics During Hurricane Harvey Flooding
September 11, 2017 — Sitting in his Kemah, TX home on Galveston Bay, Raz Halili was sure the small tropical storm named Harvey hovering off the coast of Texas was of little concern. A week later with his family’s oyster damaged, shrimp boats sunk, fishermen’s homes underwater or destroyed he realized his miscalculations on the impact of Hurricane Harvey.
Halili, a Board Member of the Gulf Seafood Foundation, considers himself lucky. Although the family oyster business, Prestige Oysters, suffered damage to both buildings and docks, his family was safe and houses stayed dry.
Worst Flood in U.S. History
“The small tropical storm that everyone thought was going to be no big deal turned into the worse flooding disaster in U.S. history of our country,” said the Galveston oysterman. “It is just devastating when viewed first hand. But there was a silver lining. In this time of need our community came together to help each other without regard to race, religion or political views. This is Texas spirit and the true character of America.”
While Harvey was dumping more than 30 inches of rain on the Houston area, Halili and his cousins, Gezim Halili, an oyster boat captain for the family business and Fatmir Halili, took to jet skis to perform water rescues as floodwaters rose in Dickerson, Friendswood and Port Arthur.
“We would leave the house in the early morning, do water rescues for more than 12 hours and then come back to relocate our refrigerated trucks from different shelter to keep food from spoiling,” he said. “We didn’t really count the number of people we ferried from their flooded homes to dry land, it was helping in any way we could.”
One of the most harrowing experiences for Halili’s was rescuing a man who had managed to flip his canoe in the middle of a rushing creek while trying to get back to his flooded house in Houston. “We managed to scoop him up, but it’s a great possibility if we weren’t there he wouldn’t have survived,” said the Jet Ski hero.
Something fishy in the quotas?
September 8, 2017 — There hasn’t been a large enough quota for fishermen to intentionally catch cod for four years, said Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, which contends the federal limits on groundfish such as cod and flounder contradict what commercial fishermen are finding. The coalition has launched an effort to have input into the research done by the federal government as it sets the regulations.
“We’ve been seeing it for the past two decades, but more so in the past seven or eight years, especially on the [flounder and cod],” Giacalone said. “What we’ve seen in the last seven or eight years is that you can catch any fish you want at any time. That’s how available it is. So, we’re certain that the government estimates are wrong.”
Giacalone noted that scientists have a huge area to cover, and variables such as fish behavior — sometimes swimming near the top, sometimes the bottom, or abandoning certain geographic areas that are still included in the surveys — can influence the results.
The management plans are written by the New England Fishery Management Council in Newburyport, with input from several sources, including stock assessments from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole. The assessments include surveys and catch and discard numbers from the commercial fishing industry, said Teri Frady, spokeswoman for the center.
The Northeast Seafood Coalition wants to play a bigger role by providing more information from the field. To do so, it is fund-raising to hire independent scientists to develop a method of collecting information that could be shared with government officials to develop more accurate assessments of species numbers.
“What [the regulators] should be doing is using the industry’s data to come up with a relative abundance index,” Giacalone said. “We realize it’s difficult because it has to be standardized, [and] it has to be unbiased. But until they admit that they could be getting it wrong, by a lot, they’re never going to put that work in. What the coalition is trying to do is shine a light on that.”
Frady said the NOAA center in Woods Hole is interested in any input.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe
Conservation Law Foundation submits victim impact statement in Carlos Rafael case
September 7, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD — Within the past 10 days, the Conservation Law Foundation sent three letters to various individuals involved — either directly or indirectly — with the Carlos Rafael case.
The foundation doesn’t represent any party directly, but its goal is to “use the law, science and the market to create solutions that preserve our natural resources, build healthy communities, and sustain a vibrant economy,” according to its website.
CLF sees Rafael’s guilty plea in March to illegal fishing as infringing on its principles.
“Discovering there’s been someone who has been systematically trying to undercut management, from our perspective not only harms the fisheries but also the work we’ve done,” senior counsel for CLF Peter Shelley said.
Shelley drafted all three letters. The first, he sent Aug. 29 to the New England Fishery Management Council’s Chair John Quinn and Executive Director Thomas Nies.
The second was addressed to NOAA’s John Bullard, the regional administrator, and Joe Heckwolf, an enforcement attorney, was sent Sept. 1.
The final letter, dated Sept. 6, was addressed to Judge William Young, who presided over Rafael’s plea agreement and will sentence the New Bedford fishing giant on Sept. 25 and 26.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times