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NOAA remebers former Senator Theodore “Ted” Stevens
In a press release the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it was deeply saddened by the death of former Sen. Ted Stevens.
Those of us in the fishing world are familiar with Stevens for his role in establishing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Act in 1976, along with Sen. Warren Magnuson.
This legislation, enacted in 1976 and reauthorized most recently in 2006, extended our nation's boundaries on the seas to the 200-mile limit and created regional councils to empower area-specific fishery management the news release said.
Read the complete story from the Asbury Park Press.
Scientists Say as Much as 79% of Oil Remains in Gulf of Mexico
A group of scientists says as much as 79 percent of BP Plc’s leaked oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico, challenging an Obama administration assessment that the crude is largely gone or rapidly disappearing.
Most of the oil that leaked from BP’s Macondo well from April 20 to July 15 is still beneath the water’s surface, five scientists including Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia in Athens, concluded in a memo made public yesterday. The researchers say they drew upon the U.S. government’s study while reaching different conclusions.
The Obama administration’s Aug. 4 report indicated that almost three-fourths of the crude that leaked has disappeared or soon will be eaten by bacteria. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said at least half of the oil released is now “completely gone.”
Read the complete story from Bloomberg.
New NOAA numbers say fishing revenues up 17 percent
By JAY LINDSAY and DAN MCDONALD
BOSTON and NEW BEDFORD, Mass. – August 14, 2010 – The catch for fishermen in the Northeast during the first three months following drastic rule changes fell 10 percent compared to last year but revenues rose 17 percent, according to federal statistics released this week.
It's too soon to draw broad conclusions, but the relatively stable first-quarter numbers are cause for cautious optimism about the switch, said Patricia Kurkul, the National Marine Fisheries Service Northeast regional administrator.
"It's sort of on track with what we saw last year, so there's nothing catastrophic going on here," Kurkul said.
However, in New Bedford, some locals panned the federal findings, saying such numbers do not tell the whole story.
Richie Canastra, co-owner of the Whaling City and Boston Seafood Display Auction, said in New Bedford for the month of July, his operation saw 700,000 fewer pounds of groundfish than it did in July 2009.
Canastra said 65 percent of the boats in New Bedford are tied up and "they're not going to fish for the year."
The boat owners are, however, leasing out their quotas to larger boats at 60 cents to $1 per pound, he said.
"Take that off the top of the price and where are we?" Canastra asked. "Who's profitable here? It's not the pretty picture they're painting. It's costing the fishermen to go fishing."
Canastra said for the first two months, numbers were up because of haddock, which only a small number of boats in New Bedford can catch because of the separator trawl — a special kind of net — that is needed.
"You need to get that net in mid-water and you need a lot of power," Canastra said. "In New Bedford, many of the boats do not have the power, so they can't take advantage."
Jim Kendall, owner of New Bedford Seafood Consulting, chalked NOAA's numbers up to simple supply-and-demand economics.
"If your supply is down 10 percent, your demand is going to be up and that's being borne by the American consumer," said Jim Kendall, owner of New Bedford Seafood Consulting. "It's great that prices are up for fishermen, but if you have less to sell … where's the balancing point?"
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Kendall said, is whitewashing the real state of the industry.
"They're trying to put a happy face on it when they can't," he said. "It's like telling someone: 'The earthquake wasn't that bad. Some people lived.'"
Others are outright questioning the accuracy of NOAA's figures.
Robert Vanasse, executive director of The Project to Save Seafood and Ocean Resources, said NOAA had floated out a number of 38 percent revenue increase earlier this week. NOAA later told him that figure was based on old numbers, he said.
Vanasse, however, was not satisfied with the new numbers, either. He said 36 metric tons of flounder, a "no take, no possession" species, were factored into the new figures.
"It calls into question the whole report," he said. "When we get numbers we can trust, we need to establish who are the winners, who are the losers under catch shares."
Read the complete story from the South Coast Today [subscription site]
Delaware Bay fish kill not expected to have impact on bunker populations, official says
“Not to trivialize it, but it’s a pretty small amount. Even if one million died that is less than .003 percent of the entire population,” Muffley said
The fish kill that littered Delaware Bay beaches with dead menhaden earlier this week is not expected to have any impact on populations of this important forage fish.
Menhaden, also called bunker, is a key species for larger fish such as striped bass, bluefish and weakfish, which are important to the recreation and commercial fishing industries in southern New Jersey.
At this point many of the dead fish have washed out with the tides and are now feeding blue crabs, another important fishery in the Delaware Bay.
“The gulls and crabs are consuming the bunker,” Frank McCall, Cape May County’s emergency management director, said at a press conference Friday.
Read the complete story from The Press of Atlantic City.
What Killed 10,000 Menhaden Off the Shores of Delaware Bay?
This afternoon, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) confirmed that the cause of the massive menhaden die-off in the Delaware Bay is low oxygen levels. This is based on the most recent water sampling results.
What does "low oxygen levels" mean? It's when the water contains less than 5 micrograms per liter of oxygen. The scientific term is "biological stress." The New Jersey DEP also found the lowest oxygen level was at 3.4 micrograms per liter — this water sample was from Pierce's Point in Middle Township, the area with the most dead fish.
On Monday, residents on an island close to Fairhaven, Mass., were struck with a terrible odor: thousands of dead fish on the shores of their beach. Two days later and 200 miles away, beachgoers on the Jersey Shore stumbled across an even worse sight: Tens of thousands of dead menhaden fish splayed ashore for more than eight miles along the Delaware Bay, with tons still floating in the lapping waves.
When the state DEP began investigating the cause, experts said one reason the sensitive species died is "warm waters that have depleted the oxygen," a marine fisheries employee told KSAT.
Read the complete story from Live Journal.
‘Four Fish’ brings marine fish a literary champion they deserve
After 200-plus pages spent unspooling the sorry fate of some of the world's most popular seafood — the virtual elimination of wild Atlantic salmon, the collapse of cod off New England, the disaster that has befallen the magnificent bluefin tuna — author Paul Greenberg does something truly courageous: He actually proposes thoughtful solutions.
Not everyone will find his suggestions entirely satisfying, but Greenberg's fabulous new book, "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food," is still the best kind of environmental journalism: sophisticated but not dry, serious yet marinated in wit, and so well crafted it can be inhaled in one sitting from which you rise amazed to discover how much you've learned.
It seems marine fish are finally getting the literary champions they deserve.
Greenberg's story is deceptively simple: He traversed the globe, from the Arctic to Athens, to explain how human appetites destroyed populations of four significant ocean fish. But he means for those species to represent the hunt for all seafood. And he is trying to explain how it is, in 2010, that most of us still don't think of fish as wildlife.
But Greenberg, whose work regularly appears in The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic, isn't penning a fish-rights manifesto, nor is he building a case that it's time we move away from seafood. Greenberg has spent much of his four decades chasing marine life with hook and line. That background gives him a layered perspective. He details the horrors of bottom-trawling and industrial fishing, but confesses that the sustainable artisanal fisheries he adores can't by themselves feed the world. He raises significant questions about the conceits of Alaska's commercial pollock fleet, but acknowledges that it is, when compared to other white fish grounds, a relatively well-managed fishery. We see aquaculture that may in fact be made to work, and aquaculture that clearly doesn't.
No, Greenberg is on a quest to understand what we've done so humanity can hold on to a central human experience: consuming fish. And he actually manages to make this inherently sad quest fun.
Read the complete story from the South Coast Today [subscription site]
Buyback blues dominate talks
The Environmental Defense Fund, the lead advocate for the catch share system and the organization where National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco honed her catch-share stand as board vice president, has advocated using market incentives to strengthen and modernize fisheries.
In that approach, Giacalone and others noted, the federal buyback fund could be used to fuel consolidation of allocation in an ever-smaller number of hands.
Giacalone noted that the buyback approach could be made to work to reinvigorate the industry if structured differently. He explained that many fishermen in recent years purchased additional days at sea permits when effort control was the business model used by the government to control effort.
When the New England Fishery Management Council last year adopted the catch share approach, it chose 10-year catch histories to determine the allocation or share that went to each fisherman. That made days-at-sea permits next to worthless.
Giacalone argued that compensating fishermen for the devaluation of their investment was justified as government compensation for the destruction of the value of the investment.
By offering to buy up the days-at-sea permits, the government would be recapitalizing the industry.
"Keep fishermen in the game, buy days-at-sea permits," Giacalone urged.
Lubchenco has conceded that her catch share plan will see a "significant fraction" of the fleet removed.
Industry analysts counter that, with the total allowable catch now set by regulators, the government has no legitimate interest in culling down the size of the fleet, and that at some point there could be so few boats the support businesses could collapse.
Consolidation into the hub ports of Gloucester and New Bedford from smaller ports is already underway. Landings statistics published this week indicate that the bigger ports are handling a larger percentage of the total catch.
Odell told the City Hall gathering Friday that the West Coast groundfishery, also in the midst of a catch share consolidation, is already showing the signs of hyper consolidation that worries fishermen and industry leaders in New England and the Middle Atlantic states.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Daily Times.
Fishing activists dig in vs. buyout
"The only assistance the fishing industry needs in the Northeast is for Congress to demand, or legislate (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to utilize common sense in interpretation and implementation of the Magnuson Act," Ouellette wrote amid a rolling online debate that has raged since the relief package was floated out on Aug. 5.
Amid pleas for the $100 million relief package, backed by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, are a growing number of hardline arguments by prestigious fishing industry backers — including Gloucester-based attorney Stephen Ouellette and academic scientist Brian Rothschild — that throwing money at the problem would merely allow politicians to escape their own complicity in the growing crisis and undercut efforts to forge policies aimed at the root of the industry's clash with the federal regulatory system.
"Fishermen didn't ask for handouts when stocks were overfished; they certainly don't want them now that stocks are rebuilt," wrote Ouellette, co-author of a suit challenging the constitutionality and legality of the management regimen that brought the catch shares system to New England on May 1.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.
New England Fishery Management Council’s Herring Oversight Committee
The New England Fishery Management Council's (Council) Herring Oversight Committee will meet to consider actions affecting New England fisheries in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
Dates: The meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 9:30a.m. and Thursday September 2, 2010 at 9 a.m.
Addresses: Meeting address: The meeting will be held at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel, 250 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801: Telephone: (603) 431-2300; Fax: (603) 433-5649.
Council address: New England Fishery Management Council, 50 Water Street, Mill 2, Newburyport, MA 01950.
For further information contact: Paul J. Howard, Executive Director, New England Fishery Management Council; telephone: (978) 465-0492.
Supplementary information:
The items of discussion in the committee's agenda are as follows:
1. Wednesday, September 1, 2010 beginning at 9:30 a.m.
The Committee will review/discuss report from Herring Advisory Panel. They will also continue development of catch monitoring alternatives for inclusion in Amendment 5 to the Atlantic Herring Fishery Management Plan (FMP); alternatives may include management measures to: improve quota monitoring and reporting; standardize/certify volumetric measurements of catch; address vessel-to-vessel transfers of Atlantic herring; address requirements for catch monitoring and control plans (CMCPs); address maximized retention; maximize sampling and address net slippage; address at-sea monitoring; address portside sampling; require electronic monitoring; and address other elements of catch monitoring in the Atlantic herring fishery. Other business may also be discussed.
2. Thursday, September 2, 2010 beginning at 9 a.m.
The Committee will continue agenda from September 1, 2010 meeting to develop catch monitoring alternatives for inclusion in Amendment 5; discuss outstanding issues and other elements of Amendment 5. They will also develop management measures and alternatives to address river herring bycatch for consideration in Amendment 5. They will review/discuss management measures under consideration to address interactions with the mackerel fishery. The Committee will develop recommendations for Council consideration regarding management alternatives for inclusion in Amendment 5 Draft EIS (catch monitoring program, measures to address river herring bycatch, access to groundfish closed areas, interactions with the mackerel fishery, protection of spawning fish). Other business may be discussed.
Although non-emergency issues not contained in this agenda may come before this group for discussion, those issues may not be the subject of formal action during this meeting. Action will be restricted to those issues specifically identified in this notice and any issues arising after publication of this notice that require emergency action under section 305(c) of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, provided the public has been notified of the Council's intent to take final action to address the emergency.
Read the complete agenda from GovPulse.