Saving Seafood

Enforcement

US Navy Supports Sustainable Fisheries

September 16, 2016 — “You’re probably wondering why the Navy is up here today,” said Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy, who moderated a panel regarding the sustainment of fisheries around the world’s oceans at a conference at the State Department attended by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

“We do much to support this [combating illegal unregulated unreported fishing] through the detection and the monitoring of illegal fishing using our very vast maritime domain awareness capabilities and surveillance assets on the sea, in the air and even under the sea,” Gallaudet said. “The Navy is very invested in this area. The whole key is, this will build our regional partnerships and advance collective maritime security.”
 
The panel was made up of fishery experts from around the world, who examined options that fishery management authorities may use to combat overfishing and mitigate adverse impacts on the broader marine environment.
 
The panel was part of a two-day conference titled Our Ocean that in addition to discussing sustainable fisheries focused on issues such as marine protected areas, marine pollution and climate-related impacts on the ocean.
 
Panelists for Fisheries for the Future included Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries of the Republic of Indonesia Susi Pudjiastuti, the Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture Development of the Republic of Ghana the Honorable Sherry Ayuttey, investigative reporter for the New York Times Ian Urbana, Director of Global Fisheries and Aquaculture Monterey Bay Aquarium Jennifer Kemmerly and Executive Director for the Community and Biodiversity Association Jorge Torre.
 

Obama creates the first US marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean

September 16, 2016 — WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama created the Atlantic Ocean’s first marine monument Thursday, protecting an expanse of underwater volcanoes and canyons, along with the creatures that live among them, off the coast of New England.

“If we’re going to leave our children with oceans like the ones that were left to us then we’re going to have to act. And we’re going to have to act boldly,” Obama said during the Our Ocean conservation conference in Washington, D.C.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is an area roughly the size of Connecticut and falls 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass.

There, the steep slopes of the canyons and seamounts meet currents that push nutrient filled water from the depths of the ocean to the surface. Those nutrients mix with sunlight to spur the growth of phytoplankton and zooplankton. The microscopic life forms the basis of the food chain, drawing in schools of fish and the animals that feed on them — whales, sharks, tunas, porpoises, dolphins, sea turtles and seabirds.

Read the full story at Talk Media News 

Local fishermen upset about new marine monument

September 16, 2016 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — President Obama has created the first marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean saying it’s an effort to protect the planet from climate change.

The president said the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, located off George’s Bank, will help safeguard the oceans.

The monument consists of nearly 5,000 square miles including three underwater canyons and underwater mountains.

While the decision makes environmentalists happy, many fisherman said the announcement is deeply disappointing.

“People have made business plans to use this area and then all of a sudden the rug is getting pulled out from under them,” commercial fisherman Al Cottone told FOX25. “How do you plan for the future when you can be basically be shut down with a stroke of the pen?”

The head of the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership and Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association said these farmers can’t just pick up and move their operation.

“The ocean is huge but fish are not everywhere. Fish live in designated area by nature. Just like we live,” Angela Sanfilippo said.

Read the full story at Fox25

PT Bali Seafood International announces partnership with Pelagic Data Systems and Global Fishing Watch

September 15, 2o16 — The following was released by PT Bali Seafood:

WASHINGTON — A new pilot program, resulting from a partnership of PT Bali Seafood International (BSI), Pelagic Data Systems (PDS) and Global Fishing Watch, will install lightweight passive tracking devices on approximately 100 small artisanal fishing vessels to provide consumers with boat-to-port traceability of wild-caught seafood. A memorandum of understanding was executed by the parties in Jakarta in July, 2016, at The Economist Regional Ocean Summit, allowing for implementation to begin immediately. Bali Seafood has placed itself on the leading edge of seafood traceability by developing this partnership.

“Vessel location transparency for the global fishing fleet is a game changer. Global Fishing Watch makes it possible to understand catch locations and control harvest, cornerstones of sustainable fishing,” explained BSI President and founder Jerry Knecht. “Now that we are scaling the electronic tracking of the small boat fleet, we can begin to fill in the coastal vessel location and harvest picture, allowing for effective management at all levels of harvest.”

BSI and PDS completed a successful 20-boat pilot tracking Ahi tuna caught off Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago in 2015. This program addresses a data gap, as artisanal boats are not typically outfitted with the same tracking technology as the large-scale fishing fleet. Expanding monitoring beyond the initial pilot further improves transparency across the small-boat fishing fleets of the developing world.

By outfitting small vessels with the means to track product from boat-to-port, this program will help increase the value of the seafood harvested by participating small boat fishers, will provide robust data about fishing activity to inform sustainable management practices, and will demonstrate a novel, cost- effective transparency approach that can be scaled globally.

Global Fishing Watch, itself a partnership of Oceana, SkyTruth and Google, will publish the data, free and available to the public with the official launch of the platform today in Washington DC at the Our Ocean conference hosted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

“We’re excited to see Global Fishing Watch used as a positive market incentive, helping producers move toward greater transparency in their operations,” said Brian Sullivan, Google’s lead on the project.

“This collaboration takes us one step closer to ridding the world of illegal fishing,” said Dave Solomon, PDS’s CEO. “We are fortunate to be at a place where we have the technology, the partnerships and the momentum to make fishing activity as transparent as possible.”

Read the full release here

What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first

September 15, 2016 — We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

In this case, the perturbation is us — rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

From sharks to whales, giant clams, sea turtles, and tuna, the disproportionate threat to larger marine organisms reflects the “unique human propensity to cull the largest members of a population,” the authors write.

“What to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,” said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the study’s lead author. “So that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogue…this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.”

The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species — called “genera.” And they found that increases in an organism’s body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period — but that this was not the case in the Earth’s distant past.

Indeed, during the past 66 million years, there was actually a small link between smaller body sizes and going extinct, marking the present as a strong reversal. “The extreme bias against large-bodied animals distinguishes the modern diversity crisis from all potential deep-time analogs,” the researchers write.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

How a spy satellite could cut down on illegal fishing

September 15, 2016 — Environmentalists hope a new satellite service that scans the earth’s seas from space in search of illegal fishing activity can act as a watchdog service, holding those who overfish or intrude on protected areas accountable for the adverse effects of their actions.

The Google-powered technology, which has been named Global Fishing Watch, monitors more than 35,000 commercial fishing vessels using public broadcast data and is available to anyone with an internet connection, The Washington Post reported. Such information allows governments, journalists, and citizens to track the movement of boats, making it easier for nations with limited resources to apprehend the fishermen illegally depleting their oceans.

“We have to find a way to enforce [fishing laws],” Secretary of State John Kerry told The Washington Post. “We have to find a way to monitor it. And that’s very difficult in vast oceans with resources that are [limited]. We’re trying to create accountability where there is very little.”

Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio will unveil the new technology Thursday at a conference for ocean preservation in Washington, D.C.

Read the full story at the Christian Science Monitor

Fishing industry pushes back following questions about labor practices

September 15, 2016 — HONOLULU — Allegations of harsh treatment of workers in Hawaii’s longline fishing fleet have made headlines nationally.

Now, the industry is defending itself, one day after a grocery store chain stopped buying tuna from Hawaii’s fish auction.

There are 140 longline boats and 700 fishermen in Hawaii’s fishing fleet. The undocumented workers’ employment is legal.

“It’s a very in-demand job for them,” Hawaii Longline Association president Sean Martin said.

University of Hawaii professor Uli Kozok interprets for Indonesian fishermen. He’s heard complaints of physical abuse aboard the boats.

“They’re quite a few stories that I’ve heard where fishermen were beaten by the captain or by the first officer,” he said.

He said fishermen complain of insufficient food and third-world working conditions.

Martin thinks the allegations are unfounded.

“It’s a long ways from slave labor and human trafficking,” he said.

He insists the fishermen are treated fairly and humanely.

“The idea that there’s these abuses going on and nobody knows about it and they haven’t been reported — I can’t buy it,” he said.

Immigration attorney Clare Hanusz helped a foreign fisherman who sustained a serious eye injury.  He claimed his captain refused to take him to the doctor.

“So I asked the man could you go and show me what kind of medication that you had been given. He went back on the boat and came back with a vial of Visine,” she said.

The fishermen sign contracts to work for $500 a month.

Read the full story at Hawaii News Now

RHODE ISLAND: Newport lobsterman opposes plan for marine national monument

September 14, 2016 — In a move that will rile at least one Newport lobsterman, President Obama is expected to designate the first marine national monument Thursday in a bid to preserve underwater mountains, canyons and ecosystems about 150 miles off the New England coast.

The president is expected to announce the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument at the third annual Our Ocean Conference, hosted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington D.C., according to the White House.

The offshore monument aims to protect 4,913 square miles of ocean ecosystems. The protected area includes three underwater canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon.

It also encompasses four underwater mountains known as “seamounts,” which “are biodiversity hotspots” and home to many rare and endangered species, according to the White House.

The “designation will help build the resilience of that unique ecosystem, provide a refuge for at-risk species, and create natural laboratories for scientists to monitor and explore the impacts of climate change,” says a press release.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

Obama Closes Ocean Waters South of Cape Cod

September 15, 2016 — WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will declare the first marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean today, barring uses including commercial fishing in nearly 5,000 square miles of waters southeast of Cape Cod.

Obama’s designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument — in an area also known as New England Canyons and Seamounts — follows at least a year of concerns and opposition from advocates of the commercial fishing industry, including local elected officials.

Marine monument debates over the past year have involved balancing the preservation of marine life, ocean health and sustainable fisheries with potential oil and gas exploration, unsustainable fisheries, mineral mining, fishing-reliant regional economies and more.

Jon Williams, president of Atlantic Red Crab Co. on Herman Melville Boulevard, said in November 2015 that a monument designation “would be a big hit for the company,” which employs about 150 full-time workers in New Bedford and fishes several times a year in the affected areas.

Mayor Jon Mitchell acknowledged potential challenges for the commercial fishing industry Wednesday night.

“While I believe the industry generally was in a position to manage the implications of the so-called ‘seamount’ area of the monument, the inclusion of the ‘canyons’ area would have benefited from more industry input,” Mitchell said. “I appreciate that the White House sought out more input than is required, but these types of decisions should be subjected to the more robust regulatory processes under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which has successfully led to the protection of sea canyons in other parts of the Atlantic without unduly burdening the commercial fishing industry.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

New England Fishermen Troubled by Marine Monument Designation

September 15, 2016 — WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Thursday that creating the Atlantic Ocean’s first marine national monument was a needed response to dangerous climate changes, ocean dead zones and unsustainable fishing practices.

The new Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument consists of nearly 5,000 square miles of underwater canyons and mountains off the New England coast. It’s the 27th time that Obama has created or enlarged a national monument.

Supporters of the new monument say protecting large swaths of ocean from human stresses can sustain important species and reduce the toll of climate change. Fishermen worry it will become harder for them to earn a living as a result of Obama’s move.

“We’ve been fishing out there for 35 years. It’s a big blow to us,” said Jon Williams, president of the Atlantic Red Crab Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

White House officials said the administration listened to industry’s concerns, and noted the monument is smaller than originally proposed and contains a transition period for companies like Williams’.

Williams said his company will survive, but the changes designed to address some of his concerns don’t sway him about the merits of the monument.

“I think the entire New England fishery is upside down over this,” Williams said.

Read the full story at the Associated Press