Saving Seafood

Scientists see improved ocean conditions for young salmon

March 11, 2019 — Ocean conditions are improving for salmon entering the ocean this year, several years after The Blob, an unusually warm water event that began forming in 2014, scientists announced Friday.

Research surveys in 2018 confirmed tiny animals that stoke the food chain were nice and fatty. Anchovies, an important forage fish, were increasing in number. Sea lion pups were numerous and growing well, and fish-eating sea birds going strong.

However, subsurface sea temperatures were still warmer than average in some areas. Pyrosomes, a warm-water animal that is not supposed to be in Northwest waters, were still numerous.

Forecasts for chinook salmon in 2019 also were for below-average salmon returns to the Columbia River. Extensive ocean acidification and poorly oxygenated waters off both Washington and Oregon also were predicted for this year.

Read the full story from The Seattle Times at The Spokesman-Review

CALIFORNIA: The Battle over Anchovy

January 29, 2019 — A little over a year after a federal judge overturned a catch limit for the central population of north anchovy, nothing has changed.

Now a judge has issued an order that a new federal rule must be made within 90 days, before April 18.

This is the latest development in a battle that began in 2016 when the National Marine Fisheries Service defined the catch level using a study that only included data collected through 1990 instead of a study that included more data extending through 2011.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

Judge: NMFS must rewrite anchovy catch rule

January 22, 2019 — Federal fishing regulators have until April 16 to rewrite a rule that sets annual catch limits (ACL) for commercial fishing of anchovy in federal waters off the northern coast of California, a judge has ruled.

The Jan. 18 order from federal judge Lucy Koh enforces a judgment in a lawsuit brought in 2016 by the environmental activist group Oceana against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Oceana’s lawsuit questioned the science that NMFS relied on in reaching a 2016 decision to set the ACL for northern California anchovy at 25,000 metric tons. The agency set that limit — even though landings typically only total less than a third of that, 7,300t — judging the stock’s maximum sustainable yield to be 123,000t, and calculating an acceptable biological catch of 100,000t. The ACL was set, conservatively, the agency said, at a fourth of that level.

Speaking to Undercurrent in June 2018 about the ruling, Diane Pleschner-Steele, the executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, disagreed with the biomass estimates, but because the harvesters her group works with are seeing more anchovies, not fewer.

Pleschner-Steele said that her group worked in 2017 with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to perform an aerial survey of anchovy stocks.

“The department’s plane flew along the coast inside the area that the NOAA acoustic trawl survey was transecting at the same time, and our spotter pilot estimated tonnage of the schools he observed,” she wrote.   “We documented tens of thousands of tons of coastal pelagic species — both sardine and anchovy —  that the NOAA cruise did not see or factor into its assessment because they survey largely offshore and don’t come into nearshore waters.   This is now recognized as a problem, and we’re hopeful that we can improve stock assessments over time.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Research shows inefficient fishing costs global companies over $51bn annually

November 28, 2018 — An international research initiative has calculated that fishing companies worldwide are losing between $51-$83 billion in unrealized economic benefits every year due to overexploitation and underperforming fish stocks.

According to research undertaken by experts at the organization Sea Around Us, companies are spending too much for the fish, revenue and profits that they ultimately generate.

The organization’s latest report studied menhaden fisheries off the coast of the US and anchovies off the west shores of Peru. In both cases, Sea Around Us believes that profits could be substantially increased if stocks had been fished more intelligently.

“We found that Atlantic and Gulf menhaden stocks were in a healthy state and were being exploited below sustainable levels. By not augmenting their catches the two largest companies targeting them were losing $50 million in additional revenues and $12 million in profits,” lead author Tim Cashion said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Sea Around Us identified that Peru could also have increased its annual revenues by $3m – $9.1m from 2011 to 2015 if anchovy stocks had been allowed to recover in that time.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Omega 3 fatty acids found in seafood tied to healthy aging

October 24, 2018 — People may be more likely to age without health problems when they have more omega 3 fatty acids in their blood, a recent study suggests.

The study authors focused on so-called healthy aging, or the number of years people live without developing disabilities or physical or mental health problems. They examined data on 2,622 adults who were 74 years old on average, following them from 1992 to 2015. Only 11 percent of participants experienced healthy aging throughout the entire study period.

“We found that older adults who had higher levels of omega 3 from seafood were more likely to live longer and healthier lives,” said lead study author Heidi Lai of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston.

“These findings support current national dietary guidelines to consume more seafood,” Lai said by email.

Adults should get about eight ounces a week of seafood, ideally by eating it twice a week in place of meats, poultry or eggs, according to U.S. dietary guidelines. Some options that are high in omega 3s include salmon, anchovies, herring, shad, sardines, oysters, trout and Atlantic or Pacific mackerel.

Read the full story at Reuters

 

Judge rules for Oceana in California anchovy dispute

June 20, 2018 — Just how many anchovies are there off the northern coast of California and are there enough to fish commercially?

Environmental activist group Oceana and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) have different answers to those questions, and a federal judge’s ruling recently favored Oceana’s view, reducing opportunities for California fishermen.

At issue is the science that NMFS relied on in reaching a 2016 decision to set the total allowable catch (TAC) for northern California anchovy at 25,000 metric tons. The agency set that limit — even though landings typically only total less than a third of that, 7,300t — judging the stock’s maximum sustainable yield to be 123,000t, and calculating an acceptable biological catch of 100,000t. The TAC was set, conservatively, the agency said, at a fourth of that level.

However, after the 2016 rule was adopted, Oceana sued NMFS in federal court arguing that the rule violated principles established in the the Magnuson-Stevens Act because the agency failed “to articulate the scientific basis for this catch limit”.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Healthy fisheries and aquatic grasses fuel Chesapeake Bay recovery

June 19, 2018 — Booming aquatic grasses and bellwether fisheries are driving sustained progress in Chesapeake Bay health, which experts say is finally showing “significant” overall improvement.

The 2017 Chesapeake Bay Report Card issued by Virginia and Maryland rates the estuary a C for the third straight year as recovery holds steady or improves in five of seven indicators, the James River nails a B- for the first time and the fisheries index scores its first-ever A+.

Experts call their assessment “important evidence that the positive trend in ecosystem health is real” and that cleanup efforts across the watershed are working.

“It is the first time that the … scores are significantly trending in the right direction,” said Bill Dennison at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in a statement Friday. “We have seen individual regions improving before, but not the entire Chesapeake Bay.”

The UMCES compiled the report card along with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and other governmental agencies and academic groups both in this state and Maryland. This is the 12th year of its release.

The fisheries index is comprised of the average score for blue crab, striped bass and bay anchovy indicators. These species are considered ecologically, economically and socially important to the bay.

Last year’s fisheries index was 90 percent. This year, it rose to 95 percent, the highest ever recorded for the annual reports — the average of 100 percent for striped bass and blue crab, and 84 percent for bay anchovy.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

 

D.B. Pleschner: Is court the right place to determine ‘best available science’?

February 12, 2018 — A U.S. District Court judge recently ruled that the federal government’s catch limit for California’s central stock of anchovy — currently 25,000 metric tons — is far too high.

But instead of weighing all the facts, the judge ignored them, shunned the established precedent of deference to federal agencies’ scientific determinations and instead endorsed the flawed arguments of the advocacy group Oceana.

So what happened?

It’s a well-accepted fact that the anchovy population on the West Coast has extreme natural variations in abundance, even without fishing. To account for these wild swings, scientists reduced the overfishing limit of 100,000 tons by 75 percent, setting the annual catch limit at 25,000 metric tons. The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistical Committee approved the numbers as “best available science” and the National Marine Fisheries Service agreed, recognizing that the anchovy resource ranges from peaks of more than two million tons to orders of magnitude lower and quickly jumps back up again.

In California, the anchovy fishery declined in the 1980s due to adverse market conditions and landings have averaged less than 10,000 tons a year ever since. But this fishery is still important because it keeps the local fleet on the water and processing plant doors open when no other fish are available.

Regardless, environmentalists began lobbying the council in 2015 to curtail California’s anchovy catch limit after one advocacy group funded a new research paper that reassessed the basis for anchovy management — a 1991 study based on egg and larval data that represented long-term average biomass abundance, not a single-year stock assessment. Because the reassessment had virtually no adult anchovy biological data from recent years to correlate, the authors had to make assumptions. They concluded that the anchovy population had collapsed, with current biomass estimated at only about 15,000 tons coast-wide.

But other scientists challenged the findings, in part because the new estimate excluded Mexico where a substantial portion of the stock resides, and it also omitted nearshore waters where fishermen were reporting masses of anchovy.

Richard Parrish, retired from NMFS after decades of experience with anchovy, critiqued the paper and stated, “The biomass estimates in the paper cannot be used to estimate the 2016 biomass of the northern stock of anchovy…” He continued, “Clearly, with northern anchovy a five-year-old biomass estimate is not significantly better at estimating current biomass than a 25-year-old biomass estimate.” That statement was included in the Administrative Record (AR) for the Oceana lawsuit, but the judge ignored it.

In 2016, the council sponsored a data-poor workshop where internationally recognized scientists reviewed the new egg-larval analysis along with other available data and also rejected the study’s findings. As one member said, “The estimate did not pass the straight face test.”

Here’s why: the new assessment did not consider anchovy fishery landings, which in 2015 totaled about 64,000 tons, only 17,000 tons in California (still under the 25,000 ton catch limit) and the rest from Mexico. As Parrish pointed out, “Clearly, the absolute minimum biomass estimate for 2015, assuming that the fishery caught every last anchovy in the population, would be 64,114 tons. If fishermen took 50 percent of the biomass, based on recorded landings, the estimate would be 128,000 tons and if they took only 20 percent of the biomass, the estimate would be 320,000 tons, massively above the study’s assertions.”

Read the full opinion piece at the Santa Cruz Sentinel 

 

Peru’s Anchovy Season Has Officially Ended With Shortfall

February 2, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Peru’s anchovy fishing season officially concluded at the end of January. Fishing was constrained by fishing bans and restrictions put in place due to the large percentage of juveniles.

The bans were lifted in early January, but the season closed less than a month later due to the beginning of spawning.

According to Wayne Bacon of Hammersmith Marketing Ltd., the Peruvian anchovy fishery failed to reach their quota. The total catch appears to be at 650,000 m/t, which is under the anticipated quota by approximately 850,000 tons.

The catch will produce 148,000 metric tons of fishmeal.

Trade sources told Bacon that approximately 160,000 m/t of fishmeal has been presold. With production expected to be less than 150,000 metric tons, there is speculaton that there will be limited supplies for new sales, not already contracted.

This sets the stage for prices of fishmeal to increase.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

 

D.B. Pleschner: Nearshore anchovy abundance not proof fishery is collapsing

November 2, 2017 — Recently, Dr. William Sydeman of the Farallon Institute, published a study claiming that the abundance of anchovy near shore — especially in places like Monterey — is evidence that the population is collapsing.

Sydeman’s logic is based on an old argument that collapsed populations always shrink inshore. But there’s one big problem with that theory — it’s unsupported by scientific evidence. In fact, that logic was based on an old sardine theory that has since been debunked. There’s certainly no evidence that low anchovy biomass results in an increase in anchovy in the nearshore area of Central California.

In fact, the opposite is likely true. According to the Monterey Herald, the anchovies that flooded into Monterey Harbor in September were 3 inches long. Pete Guglielmo, an anchovy processor in Monterey, exclaimed, “Inside Monterey harbor and the outer break wall, you can walk on 3-inch anchovy. What a sight to see! They are running the air pumps in the harbor to keep them alive.”

In other words, the abundance of 3-inch (young-of-the-year) anchovy in the nearshore region implies that there is a strong 2017 year-class. A record abundance of young-of-the-year also was documented in scientific cruises going back to 2015, as well as observed by fishermen in both northern and southern California.

Read the full story at the Monterey Herald