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WHOI Center for Oceans and Human Health to Receive $6.9M in Grant Funding

September 19, 2018 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will receive nearly $7 million in grant funding to continue the operation of its Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health.

The collaborative award from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will be dispersed over 5 years.

The funding will benefit three centers and four projects aimed at improving public health by investigating the ways oceanic processes affect the distribution and persistence of human pathogens or the products of toxin-producing algae.

“These projects bring together scientists doing basic research on the oceans and Great Lakes with those in biology and human health to study processes that affect millions of people,” said Hedy Edmonds, a program director in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which co-funded the awards.

Read the full story at CapCod.com

 

Processor: New hire had no know-how to steal fish secrets

September 14, 2018 — Tampa Bay Fisheries, the Florida seafood company that Gloucester-based National Fish & Seafood accuses of stealing trade secrets, has come out swinging in its first response to the charges.

In a document filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, Tampa Bay Fisheries characterized the civil lawsuit filed by NFS as “a fish tale about the one that got away” and claimed it never obtained any of the Gloucester seafood processor’s secrets.

The document was filed in opposition to NFS’ motion for a preliminary injunction. It  highlighted financial problems at NFS parent company Pacific Andes International Holdings — which is in the midst of an extraordinarily complex bankruptcy proceeding — and the criminal convictions of three top NFS executives or board members during the past two years.

“This is not a case about Tampa Bay seeking any information whatsoever from NFS,” Tampa Bay’s lawyers argued in their filing. “This is a case about NFS, a bankrupt company run by investors and still reeling from its top executives’ criminal convictions, seeking a pretext to undermine Tampa Bay’s legitimate success. The evidence is clear — there is no scheme and no grand conspiracy.”

U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin has yet to rule on NFS’ motion for the preliminary injunction.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Five Wild Days Aboard a New England Squid Boat

September 12, 2018 — Corey Harris wasn’t concerned about the storm. The captain of Rhonda Denise, a 77-foot commercial trawler, he’d been stuck in port all week, as two nor’easters, in early March, slammed the New England coast back-to-back. Now a third brewed offshore. But Harris saw an opportunity. “We’ll thread the needle between the storms,” he told me over the phone. We’d catch as much squid as possible, then haul ass back to port before the next system hit. Bring seasickness. medicine, he added. “It’ll be rough—but worth it.”

On the Thursday of our departure, the Port of Galilee, in Point Judith, Rhode Island, was full of boats but empty of people. If you’ve eaten calamari at a seafood shack or a little red-sauce joint, odds are it crossed the dock here in Point Judith. In 2016, the village’s 119 vessels landed 22.6 million pounds of squid, valued at $28.6 million—its best haul to date. It’s the 15th-highest-earning seaport in the country and first in squid on the Atlantic seaboard. By all measures, it’s the calamari capital of the East Coast. And with ongoing downturns in cod, flounder, and haddock, scores of commercial fishermen, not only here but also up and down the New England shore, now depend on squid to stay afloat in a notoriously unpredictable industry.

Harris met me in the parking lot. Among the local fishermen, he’s one of “the few young guys worth a shit,” a longtime captain told me. He’s also something of an anomaly. The salutatorian of his high school, in Babylon, New York, he dropped out of his university’s pre-dental program, in 2007, to work on trawlers, drawn to fishing for reasons that he can’t quite explain. Soft-spoken and ambitious, with a tight red beard, he started as a deckhand on Rhonda Denise, made captain by age 22, and became a co-owner a few years later. Now, at 31, he’s still 20 years younger than the majority of guys on the dock. “The storms have kept most boats in,” he told me. “There’s no fish on the market. Prices will be high.” There was no need to worry about the weather, he added—as long as we made it back by Monday.

Read the full story at Men’s Journal

 

Infected East Coast seals are washing ashore – and are a danger to people and pets, experts say

September 4, 2018 — Hundreds of East Coast seals are showing up, stranded on New England shores dead or sick.

Harbor and gray seals on the northern Atlantic Coast of the United States have tested positive for avian influenza, or bird flu, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries. Others have tested positive for phocine distemper virus, similar to the virus dogs can contract and which has caused epidemics among seals in other parts of the world, killing thousands, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Both gray and harbor seals can range as far south as the Carolinas, where they sometimes travel during the winter months and haul themselves onto beaches to rest and soak up some sun.

The seals that end up stranded but alive are “in poor body condition with clinical signs of lethargy, coughing, sneezing and seizing,” according to NOAA. As of last week, 532 seals had washed up on the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Of those, more than 400 were found dead.

Samples from those seals were sent to Tufts University and the University of California, Davis labs for testing, NOAA said. Samples tested “preliminarily positive” for either bird flu or the distemper virus. Four of the seals tested positive for both viruses.

Read the full story at The Charlotte Observer

In Their Own Words: ‘Dead In The Water’ Lets Fishermen Tell Their Story

August 29, 2018 — What convinced Angela Sanfilippo, president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association, that filmmaker David Wittkower could tell the story of the decline of the New England commercial fishing industry was that he wanted to interview fishermen and let them speak in their own voice.

“That never happened,” she said. In most stories in the media about the industry, fishermen’s words “are always twisted,” she said. But she sensed that wouldn’t happen with Wittkower, that he’d let fishermen tell their own stories.

“This documentary tells the story of what people have endured through the years, and what we’re still enduring,” said Sanfilippo, whose organization helped finance “Dead in the Water,” Wittkower’s documentary on the industry, which screens at the Chatham Orpheum Theater on Saturday, Sept. 8 at 10 a.m.

Wittkower, who lives in Los Angeles but spent his middle and high school years in Rockport, where his parents still live, said he became interested in the plight of the commercial fishing industry about four years ago when he noticed fewer and fewer fishing boats docked in Gloucester. He began talking to folks and eventually made his way to Sanfilippo, who gave him the lowdown about how catch limits, days at sea restrictions and other regulations were killing the industry and making it impossible for young people to take up fishing.

Read the full story at The Cape Cod Chronicle 

 

Our Coast’s History: NC’s Oyster War

August 29, 2018 — Late January 1891, the steamer Vesper, rented from the Wilmington Steamship Co. and mounted with a well-used howitzer and caisson borrowed from the state of Virginia, left Elizabeth City with militiamen of the Pasquotank Rifles. Their mission: To enforce “An Act to Promote and Protect the Oyster Interests of the State” that had been passed barely a week earlier.

After three years of growing tension between North Carolina oystermen and vessels drifting down from Chesapeake Bay to harvest oysters in Pamlico and Roanoke sounds, North Carolina’s legislature had acted, creating a list of draconian restrictions on the harvest that prohibited dredging and allowed only in-state residents to gather oysters.

Tasked with telling the oyster poachers — mostly from Maryland — of the new law, as conflicts go, the North Carolina oyster war wasn’t much of a war, the rhetoric far outstripping the action.

“As she (the Vesper) proceeds on the return trip if any dredgers are found continuing to ravish the oyster beds they will be arrested, even if their boats have to be blown out of the water and their crews killed,” the Wilmington Weekly Star wrote.

In the end, the Vesper made one arrest, with other boats heeding the warning and leaving North Carolina waters.

Although short-lived and bloodless, what occurred on the water was but a part of an intersection of changing priorities in northeastern North Carolina.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online 

 

International Year of the Salmon Will Open at the Global Fishery Forum & Seafood Expo 2018

August 27, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — It’s no secret that salmon is an important market and they’re going to get the spotlight at the Global Fishery Forum & Seafood Expo 2018 where an opening ceremony will be held for the International Year of Salmon. A global community of scientists and ecologists has established the International Year of Salmon. The year will include a series of events aimed at addressing, reducing, and resolving the various problems of maintaining global salmon stock.

According to a TASS press release Deputy Minister of Agriculture and head of the Federal Agency for Fishery Ilya Shestakov, NASCO President Jóannes Hansen, NPAFC President Suam Kim, NPAFC Executive Director Vladimir Radchenko, Director of the Russian Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO) Kirill Kolochin and Director of WWF Russia Igor Chestin will attend the International Year of the Salmon opening ceremony.

The opening ceremony for the International Year of the Salmon will take place in St. Petersburg on the third day of the second annual Global Fishery Forum & Seafood Expo which is being held from the 13 through the 15 of September at the Expo Forum Convention and Exhibition Complex. The Global Fishery Forum & Seafood Expo is being organized by the Federal Agency for Fishery and the operator is the Roscongress Foundation.

The TASS press release also highlighted that the International Year of Salmon has been a long time coming stating: Specialists first spoke of the need for this project over ten years ago. Co-operation between countries will create an opportunity to clarify many aspects of the ecology of salmon, the study of which requires considerable resources considering the salmon’s extensive natural habitat and their complex life cycle.

Within the scope of International Year of the Salmon, from autumn 2018 to the end of 2019, it is planned to implement a complex of measures base on proposals made by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC) and the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO).

The program includes scientific expeditions and other events designed, among other things, to popularize research and ecological education, to develop exchange of information about the state of popularization and the industry. An important component of the project remains the fight against the illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and to control the fish catch.

According to the NPAFC, the global catch of Pacific salmon, has no, since the drop in the 1950s–1970s to 400 thousand tonnes, risen to almost one million tonnes. ICES statistics indicate a drop in the global catch of anadromous Atlantic salmon from 12 thousand tonnes in the 1970s to 1.2 thousand tonnes in 2017. This is connected with a cut in the numbers of salmon and restrictions on the industry. A large part of the Atlantic salmon catch in 2017 was taken from rivers (64%), though a significant number of fish are still caught in the sea on migration routes in the countries of the South East Atlantic. The biggest sea catch in 2017 was registered by Norway – 290 thousand tonnes, including 138 thousand tonnes declared in the province of Finnmark, where salmon of Russian origin are caught.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, it is republished with permission.

 

Seafood industry counters PETA protest with anger, humor

August 27, 2018 — Anti-seafood advertising messages in a few U.S. and Canadian cities are gaining attention this summer – positive, negative, and humorous.

Timed before major summer seafood festivals, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)-sponsored billboards express the individuality of crustaceans. For example, the current billboard displayed in Baltimore, Maryland, which includes an image of a Maryland blue crab, states: “I’m me, not meat. See the individual. Go vegan.”

The billboard, near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and several seafood restaurants such as Phillips Seafood, McCormick & Schmick’s, and The Oceanaire Seafood Room, will be in place for the Baltimore Seafood Festival on 15 September.

In late July, PETA posted ads with the same message: ”I’m ME, Not MEAT. See the Individual. Go Vegan,” along with the image of a Maine lobster, on the concourse in the Portland International Jetport. The ads are near several airport restaurants, including Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster Cafe, which sells live lobsters.

A previous PETA investigation of Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster revealed that live lobsters were “impaled, torn apart, and decapitated – even as their legs continued to move,” PETA said in a statement.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

The modern lobster trap was almost a model for Trump’s border wall. Its inventor is dead at 88.

August 22, 2018 — The ocean floor off the coast of New England is dotted with rectangular boxes split into two compartments — a “kitchen,” where lobsters are lured into the trap, and a “parlor,” where the crustaceans remain before they’re hauled up, rubber bands slipped over their menacing claws. Along with the multicolored buoys that mark their location, these underwater boxes are the chief emblems of the hard-knock marine endeavor that supplies the Atlantic delicacy.

Once rendered in wood, lobster traps are now mostly fashioned out of welded wire mesh, thanks to a Massachusetts man, James Knott Sr., who died last week of natural causes, according to the company he founded, Riverdale Mills Corp. He was 88.

He was acclaimed by the company as a “profoundly influential innovator, whose products help millions of people.”

Most who enjoy a buttered lobster tail are benefiting from Knott’s creation. Aquamesh, the wire mesh fabric he invented, is used for 85 percent of lobster traps in North America, the company said. In a testament to its broad applications, a variant of the welded wire almost became an option for President Trump’s border wall, funding for which remains in limbo.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

The blood of horseshoe crabs is important for its medical benefits. Now they’ll get a relaxing place to recover.

August 20, 2018 — William Hall, a retired marine scientist, is scheduled for cataract surgery soon, and a horseshoe crab will play a crucial role in the surgery’s success.

The blood of horseshoe crabs contains an agent that clots when exposed to gram-negative bacteria, such as E. coli and salmonella. Since the 1980s, the blood has been used to detect toxins in medical procedures, including inoculations, intravenous drugs and even rabies shots for pets.

Decades ago, scientists conducted less accurate toxin tests on rabbits. If the injected rabbit got a fever, the sample was contaminated.

Now, they use the blood of hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs. But blood extraction stresses the creatures. Fishermen under contract collect them from their habitat and haul them to a lab, where technicians extract their blood before they are carried back to the ocean and released. About 15 percent die from the process.

Thanks in part to funding from North Carolina Sea Grant, a Greensboro-based life sciences company plans to establish natural salt-water ponds where horseshoe crabs can rest and eat after having their blood extracted.

Read the full story at The Virginian-Pilot