Saving Seafood

Sea Watch founder Barney Truex passes at age 70

August 23, 2022 — Leroy “Barney” Truex, a New Jersey surf clam fisherman who built Sea Watch International into the fishery’s biggest integrated harvesting and processing business, died Aug. 11 at age 70.

A lifelong resident of Mayetta, New Jersey, Truex grew up on the shore of Barnegat Bay with its traditional small-boat bay clamming fishery. In the mid-20th century entrepreneurial fishermen were building an offshore surf clam and ocean quahog industry. Truex went to work with his father Leroy Truex as a deck mate on surf clam vessels at age 16.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Oyster Farmers Who Feared Going Broke Brace for a ‘Bonkers’ Summer

June 14, 2021 — A year ago, oyster growers who farm New Jersey’s marshy coastal inlets and tidal flats were fighting for survival.

Restaurants were shut down by the pandemic, and the oysters they had nurtured for two years were growing past their prime. The pricey seafood that should have been sold in raw bars or served at weddings was instead submerged in cages and racks in Barnegat and Delaware Bays, crowding out a younger crop of oysters.

“When Covid hit, that market disappeared,” said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a nonprofit dedicated to the study and conservation of marine life and habitats.

Unable to pay for boat fuel or the following year’s seed, some small aquaculture farmers in New York and New Jersey, struggling to revitalize what was once the country’s pre-eminent oyster market, braced for the worst.

But a year later, against long odds, the industry is poised for a summertime boom.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Who we are: Jeremy and Jason Muermann

August 19, 2020 — The seafood industry’s coronavirus crisis hit early in New Jersey, and Jeremy Muermann was making new calculations even before the crabs started moving around in Barnegat Bay.

“My motto for this whole thing has been just keep it small,” said Muermann, 42, who with his brother Jason, 38, works the bay with a 35-foot Chesapeake-built Evans. They stopped the winter dredge season two weeks early and talked with buyers to carefully gauge how the uncertain spring might pan out.

With supply chains from other Mid-Atlantic states stalled out, local demand was still surprisingly good. But supply disruptions worked the other way too, and menhaden for bait could be suddenly hard to locate.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Volunteers meet goal to remove 1,000 derelict crab pots from the Barnegat Bay within 2 years

March 9, 2017 — A conservation organization has met its goal to remove 1,000 derelict crab pots from the Barnegat Bay within two years.

The Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey (CWF) says its “derelict crab pot teams were out in full force” last weekend, removing 69 from the water and bringing the current total to 1,045. CWF, with state and federal assistance, previously mapped the locations using side scan sonar.

According to CWF, derelict crab pots “ghost fish,” unnecessarily trapping marine life. The program is also helping the organization to understand how much gear is lost annually by recreational and commercial crab fishermen, according to a NOAA release.

Fishing for Energy, a public-private effort that provides commercial fishermen a no-cost solution to recycle old and unusable fishing gear, is partnering with CWF to recycle the materials. Collection bins are situated at the ports in Waretown and Mantoloking.

Read the full story at NewsWorks

JEFF TITTEL: Fish kills result of Christie failed policies

September 2, 2016 — The millions of fish kills happening along the Jersey Shore are like a canary in a coal mine. These fish are dying because they are unable to survive due to low dissolved oxygen levels in the water. When stormwater and pollution enter our waterways, the level of nutrients increases and oxygen levels drop. The warmer water temperatures we have seen also accelerate algae blooms and bacteria growth that come from nutrient runoff. Instead of protecting our bays, the Christie administration has promoted overdevelopment, increased nonpoint source pollution, and failed to address climate change.

While our bays are dying, Gov. Christie is rolling back water quality protections. The DEP is overhauling and weakening rules to protect Category 1 waters, eliminating stream buffers, and increasing development in environmentally sensitive areas, which will all increase pollution. Most of the stormwater control systems we have are broken or do not work, but our governor has weakened stormwater rules. This would have required recharging and detention of stormwater as well as buffers to help clean up our waterways. There is even more potential for fish kills to start occurring on the Barnegat Bay beaches because the DEP’s failure to require Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant to install cooling towers has resulted in millions of gallons of thermal pollution in the Bay.

Read the full letter at the Asbury Park Press

Maturing oyster recovery projects bring calls for money

July 26, 2016 — LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. — Oysters were once so abundant in New Jersey that vacationers would clamber off trains, wade into the water and pluck handfuls to roast for dinner. Their colonies piled so high that boats would sometimes run aground on them, and they were incorporated into navigation maps. Even earlier, Native American tribes would have oyster feasts on the banks of coastal inlets.

But over the centuries, rampant development, pollution, overharvesting and disease drastically reduced the number of oysters, here and around the country; many researchers and volunteer groups estimate oyster populations are down 85 percent from their levels in the 1800s.

That has sparked efforts throughout the coastal United States to establish new oyster colonies, or fortify struggling ones. Though small in scale, the efforts are numerous and growing, and they have a unified goal: showing that oysters can be successfully restored in the wild, paving the way for larger-scale efforts and the larger funding they will require.

While a main goal is increasing the numbers of succulent, salty shellfish bound for dinner plates, oysters also serve other useful purposes. They improve water quality; a single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. They also can protect coastlines; the hard, irregular oyster beds serve as speed bumps that obstruct waves during storms.

“It’s many years and millions of dollars away, but it is attainable,” said Steve Evert, assistant director of the Marine Science and Environmental Field Station at New Jersey’s Stockton University, one of hundreds of organizations working to start or expand oyster colonies.

Most of the projects are small-scale, funded by government grants and volunteer donations. Helen Henderson, of New Jersey’s American Littoral Society, which is growing an oyster reef in Barnegat Bay, hopes successful demonstration projects can lead to an exponential increase in funding for bigger projects.

“Nature has shown us this can be done; we’re just giving it a kick-start,” she said. “Hopefully funding will flow from that once we can show successful outcomes, and we can really make a difference on a much larger scale.”

Read the full story at the Oneida Daily Dispatch

Explore Commercial Fishing in the Mid-Atlantic with New Interactive Maps

April 19, 2016 — The following was released by Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute:

Over two dozen maps now available on the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal present a more detailed picture than ever before of the extent and locations of commercial fishing activities throughout the upper East Coast.

With the new “Communities at Sea” and Federal Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) map collections, Portal users can identify the ocean places upon which the Mid-Atlantic’s commercial fishing communities most depend.  Specifically, these interactive maps enable users to better understand places that are most important for particular ports, specific fisheries, and gear types.

The public release of these datasets is an important step forward for ocean planning and education in the Mid-Atlantic. The maps can help focus and guide essential engagement and consultation with specific fishing communities for a range of ocean planning, permitting and management decision-making processes.

Over two years in the making, the Portal’s Communities at Sea maps (labeled in the Marine Planner mapping application as “Commercial Fishing – VTR”) were created using methodology developed by Dr. Kevin St. Martin at Rutgers University.  Vessel Trip Report (VTR) and permit information were integrated to create a new database that links fishing port communities to the places at sea where they spend the most time. Produced at much higher resolution than previous VTR maps, warm and cool colors are used to represent higher and lower number of days spent fishing. Portal users can click on any point on the map to activate a pop-up window that indicates which specific communities use the area. For example, clicking on an area off the New Jersey Shore may reveal that that gillnetters from Barnegat Bay or trawlers from Ocean City fish in the selected waters.

The maps were reviewed, discussed and improved though meetings with commercial fishermen throughout the Mid-Atlantic. The Communities at Sea collection currently includes eight maps based on 2011-13 data and will be expanded this summer via a new user interface for querying and selecting from the full library of over 100 maps.

“We really appreciate the critique and advice we got from fishermen from Montauk to Virginia Beach during our map review sessions,” said Jay Odell, Technical Lead for the Portal and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Marine Program at The Nature Conservancy.  “They noted some important strengths and limitations of the data and what we learned is helping to drive the development of an expanded map library that we hope to have ready for the Portal this summer.”

The Portal’s Data Catalog section summarizes some of the caveats raised by commercial fishermen. For example, the maps are based on information from recent years and may not represent fishing areas that were historically important and could be again. Also, fishing patterns are driven by complex ecological, regulatory and economic factors that can change from year to year.

The Portal’s 19 new Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) maps show areas where commercial fishing activities take place, grouped by specific regulated fishery categories (for example, scallops, herring or monkfish). These maps (labeled “Commercial Fishing – VMS”) were created by our ocean planning partners in the Northeast region using VMS data from 2006-2014. VMS data are produced by satellite technology that tracks the movements of vessels participating in several federally managed fisheries. This data is also presented in a heat map format, with cooler colors representing low activity and dark reds showing high activity.

The Communities at Sea and VMS maps can be layered together on the Portal in complementary ways to provide rich detail about the region’s fishing communities and the ocean places they depend on. Both datasets were carefully screened and aggregated by NOAA before maps were made so that the fishing activity of individual fishermen or vessels would not be revealed.

Finally, additional maps were added at the request of commercial fishing advisors to show the boundaries of some of the region’s important fishery management zones, including ocean quahogs, surf clams and scallops.  Additional regulatory boundaries may be added in the future based on specific interests and requests.

To access and explore the new maps, please visit the Marine Planner page and click on the Fishing link for a dropdown menu of map layer options. Additional map options currently available in the Fishing theme include party and charter boat fishing activity, artificial reef locations and fathom lines.

Users can register for a free Portal account to start and join online map groups, draw and share their own map shapes, create and save map bookmarks and more.  Please use the Portal’s feedback tab to share any comments, concerns or questions.

About the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal

The Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal is an online toolkit and resource center that consolidates available data and enables state, federal and local users to visualize and analyze ocean resources and human use information such as fishing grounds, recreational areas, shipping lanes, habitat areas, and energy sites, among others. The Portal serves as a platform to engage all stakeholders in ocean planning from the five-state Mid-Atlantic region—putting all of the essential data and state-of-the-art mapping and visualization technology into the hands of the agencies, industry, and community leaders engaged in ocean planning. The Portal is maintained by a team consisting of the Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute, Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School and Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, The Nature Conservancy, MARCO and other partners.

Land Mines of the Sea: Movement to Clean Up Fishing Gear Lost at Sea

April 14, 2016 — They are the land mines of the sea, killing long after being forgotten.

Abandoned or lost fishing gear, including traps, crab pots and nets, litter the ocean floor in coastal areas around the world. Many continue to attract, entrap and kill fish and other marine life in what’s called “ghost fishing.”

Groups, governments and companies around the world are engaged in efforts to retrieve and recycle as much of the abandoned gear as they can get their hands on. The goal is to protect the environment, prevent marine life from being killed, remove threats to navigation, and in some cases, generate energy.

Pascal van Erp, a Dutch diver who was horrified by the amount of abandoned fishing equipment he encountered, founded the Ghost Fishing Foundation to tackle the issue.

See more at NBC Philadelphia

Conservationists Making Headway In Rebuilding Oyster Populations in New Jersey Barnegat Bay

July 30, 2015 — BARNEGAT BAY NJ — A team of animal conservationists have begun re-establishing the local colony of oyster in New Jersey by releasing more than a million seedlings of the shellfish, known as spat, off of Barnegat Bay.

Members of the American Littoral Society sent off around 1.5 million oyster spat in Ocean Gate, which were then taken to an artificial reef system located around a quarter-mile off of the township of Berkeley known as Good Luck Point.

The group was joined by several other volunteers on boats in taking the seedlings to the reef, where they released the oysters into Barnegat Bay before returning to shore.

The goal of the Littoral Society with the oyster colony is to improve the quality of the water in the bay through the shellfish’s natural ability to filter out impurities and pollutants in the ocean.

The group also believes that by bolstering the number of oysters found in Barnegat Bay, the creatures can help strengthen the shoreline against the effects of devastating weather occurrences such as Superstorm Sandy. The hard shells of oysters and the raise profile and irregular shape of their beds can considerably reduce the impact of storm surges waves on the bay’s shoreline.

The presence of the oyster colonies also boosts the local boating and recreational fishing industries as it provides habitats for other sea creatures such as crabs and fish.

Read the full story at the Tech Times