Saving Seafood

Maine May Adjust In-Season Fishing Days for Elvers

SEAFOODNEWS.COM (AP) — January 27, 2016 — Maine fishing regulators are considering changes to the rules governing fishing for baby eels.

Maine’s the only state in the country with a significant fishery for baby eels, called elvers. The elvers are sold to Asian aquaculture companies that raise them and use them as food, including sushi. Maine’s elvers were worth about $875 per pound in 2014, when fishermen caught a little less than 10,000 pounds.

The state Legislature’s marine resources committee is considering changes in the designation of the closed period for elver fishing. It is currently illegal to fish for elvers from noon Friday to noon Sunday during fishing season. A bill would change the closed period to a weekly 48-hour timeframe established before the start of the season.

The committee will consider the bill on Wednesday.

This story from the Associated Press appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

Peruvian Acuapesca Farmed Scallops Certified Sustainable

January 20, 2016 — PERU – The Peruvian company Acuacultura y Pesca Group (Acuapesca) has been confirmed Friend of the Sea certified for scallops from sustainable aquaculture.

After an independent assessment audit Acuapesca was found compliant with Friend of the Sea strict criteria of sustainability.

Acuapesca has been operating since 1989 in the remote and pristine areas of Guaynumá Bay and Nunura Beach with 5 farms and one processing plant.

Water parameters are checked periodically. The development of the facilities has not damaged critical ecosystems. The species (Argopecten purpuratus) is a native species, whose broodstocks are captured in the bay and induced to spawn in laboratory, for later reintroduction in the bay to continue the growth process. The scallops are grown in long line cages.

Read the full story at The Fish Site

 

Auto-aquaculture? Conference in Woods Hole explores possible uses for robots and automation to reduce costs

January 12, 2016 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Yogesh Girdhar wowed the room with a video of what looked like a small shoebox awkwardly paddling underwater.

What Girdhar, a post-doctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, called a “curious robot” had none of the cachet of the sleek autonomously operated torpedoes, high-tech miniaturized laboratories, or parasite-zapping lasers that had already been displayed at a conference held Monday at the institution’s Quissett Campus to explore the role of robots and automation in aquaculture.

But his clumsy looking creation filled a need in the minds of many at the conference. As it paddled along, its software played the favorite childhood learning game — one of these things is not like the others — picking out a small coral head sticking up from the sand and zeroing in on it. The program, Girdhar said, would help a free-swimming vehicle, patrolling inside a fish cage far out to sea, recognize and investigate anomalies such as dead fish, a hole in the net, even evidence of disease. It could then notify its owners that something was wrong, prompting additional investigation.

It’s the kind of innovation conference organizers hope will make offshore aquaculture more cost effective.

“Open-ocean aquaculture is a high-cost way of producing fish that hasn’t really taken hold yet,” said Hauke Kite-Powell, a WHOI researcher in marine policy. “The challenge is to make it cost-competitive with near-shore aquaculture.”

With the world population projected to climb from 7 billion in 2011 to 9 billion by 2040, the demand for food, especially protein, will also soar. A diminishing water supply, droughts and less arable land are squeezing agriculture and land-based meat production.

Unfortunately, the one resource people once believed was limitless, wild fish, has proven to be all too finite. Mismanagement, overfishing, climate change and other factors have depleted fish stocks worldwide.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Would-be mussel farmers fishing for project money

December 14, 2015 — The aquaculture project Salem State University marine research scientists hope might ultimately produce acres of mussels in a stretch of deep, open waters off the coast of Cape Ann has received the necessary permits to proceed.

Now all the project managers need is … what else? Money.

Mark R. Fregeau, a SSU marine biology professor, said the project he is managing with SSU colleague and collaborator Ted Maney has been green-lighted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and will begin in earnest once they raise about $75,000 needed to begin laying the initial long lines upon which the mussels will grow.

The mussel aquaculture — or more simply, farm — will be located in federal waters, about 81/2 miles due east of Good Harbor Beach, at a site the researchers believe will provide the perfect environment for a deep-water mussel aquaculture that would be the first of its kind in the U.S.

“We’ve been authorized to put out a couple of (experimental) lines and see how they work and what issues might arise,” Fregeau said. “The reality is that until we actually get into the water, we don’t know exactly what we’ll be dealing with. So, it will be rolled out in phases, a couple lines at a time, and that will give us the opportunity to report back to the Army Corps of Engineers and NOAA.”

Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times

New York State gives fishing industry extra time to seek Sandy aid

December 7, 2015 — New York State extended the application deadline for marinas, aquaculture facilities, commercial boat operators, harvesters and other fishery industry professionals to apply for superstorm Sandy recovery money.

The new deadline to apply for the Superstorm Sandy Fishery Disaster Grant is Jan. 29 and is open to businesses and individuals that lost more than $5,000 in revenue or gross income as a result of the 2012 storm.

Eligible businesses must have at least $15,000 in annual earnings and be in operation at the time of the application.

The Governors Office of Storm Recovery and state Department of Environmental Conservation will issue up to $3.6 million in grants, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Eighty applications have been filed since the grant program was announced in September.

Read the full story at Newsday

 

Europêche hits back at Pew response

November 23, 2015 — In a further letter to Pew, Javier Garat, President of Europêche and Pim Vasser, President of EAPO, said: “It is disappointing that your response fails to address the issues that we have raised. We drew attention to the startling divergence between the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) view and Pew’s claims about fishing pressure and the state of the stocks off North Western Europe.”

Just last week an initial open letter to Pew, Europêche accused the report of making the assertion that fishing in pursuit of food and profit off North West Europe in recent decades has dramatically expanded.

Read the full story at World Fishing & Aquaculture

Aquaculture Exchange: Andrew Jackson, IFFO

November 12, 2015 — Despite great advances in aquafeed formulations aimed at lowering aquaculture’s dependence on wild-capture fishery resources, there is little doubt that fishmeal and fish oil still play a crucial role in the global seafood supply. The highly nutritious marine ingredients are chief components in the production of the world’s animal protein supply — some 20 percent of the global fishmeal supply goes to pig farmers, while high-quality fish oil remains in strong demand for direct human consumption as well.

The shape of the world’s reduction fisheries, therefore, has never been more important. Andrew Jackson, technical director at IFFO (The Marine Ingredients Organisation), recently spoke with the Advocate about the latest in reduction fisheries, the ever-increasing part that processing byproducts has to play and why fishmeal is so hard to replace, even for fish considered to be largely herbivorous.

Jackson announced earlier this year that he would step down from his post as technical director at the end of 2015, after nearly a decade of service. He will, however, take up the reins as chairman of the IFFO RS (Responsible Supply Certification Program) independent standards board. “It is my hope and intention to keep serving,” he said of his upcoming two-year appointment.

WRIGHT: What is the difference between “mining” a resource like a forage or reduction fishery and “cropping” it?

JACKSON: People often associate fishing with removing a resource as you would with mining. Like with coal, once it’s taken out of the ground, that’s it, unless you’ve got several million years to wait. You’re not going to get anything back; it’s a one-use resource. You can look at fisheries as, we’ve got this valuable thing, not in the ground but swimming around in the sea, and we can go out there, and we can take it out and we call sell it all and it’s worth this much. You can look at it like that.

But how much better to crop it, as you would a sustainably managed forest. You take it out at a rate at which it can be replenished by nature. That’s what the best management does. And that is when you become truly sustainable. In my book, sustainable means you can keep doing the same thing over and over again, year after year, and it’s always there. That’s what we should be looking to do, in any fishery, whether we’re taking it out for direct or indirect human consumption.

Read the full story at The Advocate

Maine isn’t doing enough to protect the Gulf from the effects of climate change

October 30, 2015 — When the Maine Legislature’s commission on ocean acidification reported its findings – that the state’s fisheries and aquaculture industries were threatened by this baleful byproduct of global warming – officials here were not exactly spurred to action.

Acidification, driven by increased carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and freshwater runoff from extreme rainfall in river basins, has been implicated in failures at oyster hatcheries and mussel farms, and has been shown to weaken clams and other shell-building animals vital to Maine’s fishing and aquaculture industries. But bills introduced in the last session – one each by a Democratic marine scientist and a Republican lobsterman – to implement many of the panel’s findings were withdrawn, one for lack of resources, the other for lack of support from Gov. Paul LePage’s administration.

“I could see the bill wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the governor was going to veto it,” Rep. Mick Devin, a Democrat from Newcastle, says of legislation he sponsored to allow the commission to continue its work for another three years.

Patricia Aho, who was the commissioner of environmental protection until she resigned in August, opposed Devin’s bill, saying the status quo was sufficient. “Since the issues of climate change and ocean acidification are inextricably linked, we think it will be more efficient to consider this issue in the broader context of climate change and adaptation programs,” she said in written testimony to legislators.

Devin’s bill and another one sponsored by Rep. Wayne Parry, a Republican from Arundel, were carried over to the next legislative session. Parry’s bill would have put a bond issue on the ballot that would borrow $3 million to fund several of the expert committee’s recommendations: collecting data, monitoring waterways, and performing tests in coastal waters to better assess the impact of acidification on wildlife and commercial fish species. It was withdrawn after failing to make it to the top of an informal list of bonding priorities drawn up by legislative leaders.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

Ocean acidification threatens future of aquaculture, shellfish industries

October 29, 2015 — In seawater tanks in a refrigerated room at the Darling Marine Center, the baby mussels are thriving.

Two months ago they were near-invisible larvae, swimming around in the tanks. Now tens of thousands of the tiny mollusks, each just a few millimeters long, have attached themselves to the different kinds of rope scientists have been testing here, and are eating the lab’s stock of algal food at an impressive clip.

Mick Devin, the lab manager at this University of Maine marine research facility, has been overseeing this experiment, part of an effort to master the art of hatching mussels, something mussel farmers – who grow their product on lines hanging in seawater – have never previously needed to do.

“Mussel farmers have been able to just throw their lines out and collect all the larvae they want from nature,” Devin says. “But mussel populations are down drastically in this state, so that may not be working so well now.” Hatcheries, he expects, may have to step up in the not-too-distant future.

Mussels have been vanishing from stretches of coastline where they once were ubiquitous, and scientists remain uncertain as to why. Green crabs, whose population exploded after an “ocean heat wave” in 2012, may have stripped many sections clean. But warmer water and increased rainfall – both problems expected to grow in Maine as a result of global climate change – may be creating a far worse problem: an acid sea.

“We know this affects larval development in bivalves, (and) chances are it will result in decreased numbers, whether it’s a natural population on a bed or one in a farm,” says Paul Rawson of the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, who is in charge of the research. “We need to make sure the technology is in place so the farms will have a reliable source of seed.”

The world’s oceans are turning more acidic. Since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have grown by more than 70 percent and now stand at the highest level in at least 800,000 years. As the oceans absorb additional CO2, they’ve become 30 percent more acidic over this period. By 2050, scientists estimate surface pH levels will be lower – that is, more acidic – than at any time in several million years and by 2100 more acidic than any time in the past 300 million years – two or three times more so than today.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

The next food revolution: fish farming?

October 25, 2015 — Sanggou Bay looks like a place where the pointillism movement has been unleashed on an ocean canvas. All across the harbor on China’s northeastern coast, thousands of tiny buoys – appearing as black dots – stretch across the briny landscape in unending rows and swirling patterns. They are broken only by small boats hauling an armada of rafts through the murky waters.

For centuries, Chinese fishermen have harvested this section of the Yellow Sea for its flounder, herring, and other species. Today the area is again producing a seafood bounty, though not from the end of a fisherman’s rod or the bottom of a trawler’s net. Instead, the maze of buoys marks thousands of underwater pens or polyurethane ropes that hold oysters, scallops, abalone, Japanese flounder, mussels, sea cucumbers, kelp, and garish orange sea squirts. They are all part of one of the world’s biggest and most productive aquaculture fields. Sanggou Bay is a seafood buffet on a colossal scale.

The buoys here extend for miles out to the horizon, offering, on an aluminum-gray day, the only clue to where the ocean stops and the sky begins. Hundreds of migrant workers – many from as far away as Myanmar (Burma) – pilot the fishing boats zigzagging around the floats, shuttling fish to shore, checking the lines for mussels and oysters, and voyaging farther out to sea to harvest seaweed.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor