Saving Seafood

Is Dogfish the New Cod in New England?

August 15, 2016 — On a wind-tossed autumn morning off the Cape Cod coast, the aft deck of Doug Feeney’s 36-foot fishing boat, the Noah, is buried beneath a squirming, slimy, shin-deep layer of sharks.

The Noah’s hauler growls under the weight of the 300-hook long line emerging from the froth-tipped Atlantic. The reek of gasoline mingles with salt. A procession of small gray sharks, each pierced neatly through the jaw by a steel hook, materializes from the depths. Feeney, a lean fisherman whose goatee and hoop earrings lend him a vaguely piratical mien, yanks the sharks from the line with the steady rhythm of an assembly-line worker. A drained cup of coffee perches on the dashboard; James Taylor warbles on the radio.

“Twenty-five years ago we’d catch 10,000 pounds of these things every day,” Feeney shouts over the roar of the engines and “Fire and Rain.” “We’d just throw ’em back over the side.”

Like many Chatham fishermen, Feeney is a jack-of-all-trades. He gillnets monkfish in early spring, he trolls for bluefin tuna in late fall. But no species occupies more of his energy than the spiny dogfish, the dachshund-size shark now piling up on the Noah’s deck. Though the word “shark” conjures visions of the toothsome great white, spiny dogfish, the most common shark in the world, bears little resemblance to Jaws. For starters, it rarely grows more than 4 feet long. White freckles dot its slate-colored back and its green eyes glow with an eerie feline light. Stroked head to tail, its skin is almost velvety to the touch.

What Squalus acanthias lacks in fierceness, it makes up for in abundance. From Florida to Maine, populations are flourishing, so much so that the annual quota—the total weight that fishermen are allowed to catch—has increased every year from 2008 to 2015, cresting at a whopping 50 million pounds before dipping to 40 million this year. Such bounty stands in stark contrast to the grim status of Massachusetts’ most iconic fish, the cod, so depleted that quotas have sunk below a meager one million pounds. With the cod industry in a state of collapse, dogfish represent perhaps the best hope for struggling local fishermen. “These guys have been through so many cuts,” says Tobey Curtis, a fisheries policy analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “When we have success, we want to be able to pay them back.”

Read the full story at Boston Magazine

IATTC fails to adopt tuna conservation measures, makes shark progress

July 5, 2016 — The annual meeting of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) ended on 1 July in La Jolla, California, without the adoption of new measures for the management of tropical tuna and for the conservation of bluefin tuna, though progress was made on shark conservation and on fishing aggregating device (FAD) management.

Members of the Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) responsible for the conservation and management of tuna and other marine species in the Eastern Pacific Ocean could not agree on the recommendations by scientific experts to extend the fishing closure for bigeye and yellowfin tuna to a total of 82 days in order to ensure sustainable fisheries in the region while accommodating for the recent increase in fleet capacity.

These discussions will resume at an extraordinary meeting to be held in October.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

U.S. Proposes Rebuilding Plan for Pacific Bluefin Tuna

June 24, 2016 — The United States is proposing to extend catch limits on Pacific bluefin tuna in the eastern Pacific for another two years, as scientists have recommended, at the upcoming Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) meeting. The United States is also proposing a long-term framework for rebuilding the overfished species that spans the Pacific and many international boundaries.

The proposal for consideration at the upcoming meeting at the end of June represents the latest step by the United States to manage fishing impacts on Pacific bluefin so the species can recover from its current low levels.

A May 2016 stock assessment conducted by the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean (ISC) found that Pacific bluefin spawning stock in 2014 amounted to just 2.6 percent of what it would be without fishing. The ISC is expected to finalize the stock assessment at its upcoming July meeting.

Read the full story at the Fishing Wire

Sushi Alert: Grim Outlook for Bluefin Tuna

April 20, 2016 — TOKYO — The latest scientific assessment paints a likely bleak future for the Pacific bluefin tuna, a sushi lovers’ favorite whose population has dropped by more than 97 percent from its historic levels.

A draft summary of a report by the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean seen by The Associated Press shows the current population of bluefin tuna is estimated at 2.6 percent of its “unfished” size. A previous assessment put the population at an already dire 4.2 percent.

Overfishing has continued despite calls to reduce catches to allow the species to recover. In some areas, bluefin tuna is harvested at triple the levels considered to be sustainable.

“The situation is really as bad as it appears,” said Amanda Nickson, director for Global Tuna Conservation at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Limits imposed after the previous estimates actually allowed some countries to up their catches, she said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Environmental Bullies – Conservationists or Agenda-pushers?

March 22, 2016 (Saving Seafood) – Dr. John Sibert, an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii, has come to the defense of scientists whose research conflicts with the agendas of conservation ideologues. Dr. Sibert specifically targets Carl Safina and others who have painted recent research by Dr. Molly Lutcavage as “controversial.” Dr. Lutcavage’s research, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was featured in NPR, presented evidence that Western Atlantic Bluefin tuna may be more resilient to harvesting than previously thought.

In an article for CFOOD, a University of Washington project chaired by Dr. Ray Hilborn that corrects erroneous stories about fisheries sustainability, Dr. Sibert criticizes environmentalists who resort to personal attacks on researchers whose findings they oppose. Saving Seafood partners with CFOOD to help deliver these facts to the public.

“Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular,” Dr. Sibert wrote.

Last week, Dr. Lutcavage wrote a piece about her own struggles with environmental bullies.

Dr. Sibert’s full comments are below:

I, like many other scientists, practice my profession with the expectation that my work will be used to improve management policies. However, scientists who choose to work on subjects that intersect with management of natural resources sometimes become targets of special interest pressures. Pressure to change or “spin” research results occurs more often than it should. Pressure arrives in many forms— usually as phone calls from colleagues, superiors, or the media; the pressure seldom arrives in writing.

I have had a long career spanning several fields and institutions and have been pressured to change my views on restriction of industrial activities in intertidal zones in estuaries, on the necessity of international tuna fisheries management agencies, on the limited role of commercial fishing in the deterioration of marine turtle populations, on the lack of accuracy and reliability of electronic fish tags, and on the inefficacy of marine protected areas for tuna conservation.

My most recent experience with pressure came from a stringer who writes for Science magazine. Some colleagues and I had just published a paper that analyzed area-based fishery management policies for conservation of bigeye tuna. Although the paper was very pessimistic about the use of MPAs for tuna fishery management, this particular stringer contacted me about MPAs. We had an exchange of emails in which he repeatedly tried to spin some earlier results on median lifetime displacements of skipjack and yellowfin tuna into an argument supporting creation of MPAs. We then made an appointment to talk “face to face” via Skype. His approach was to play word games with my replies to his questions in order to make it seem that my research supported MPAs. I repeatedly explained to him that our research showed that closing high-seas pockets had no effect whatsoever on the viability of tuna populations and that empirical evidence showed that the closure of the western high seas pockets in 2008 had in fact increased tuna catches. We hung up at that point, and I have no idea what he wrote for Science.

When critics run out of fact, some resort to personal attack. During discussions about turtle conservation in the early 2000s, an attorney for an environmental group told a committee of scientists that we were in effect a bunch of fishing industry apologists with no knowledge of turtles or population dynamics. More recently, my friend and collaborator, Molly Lutcavage was recently subject of a personal attack by Carl Safina after she and her colleagues published an important discovery of a new spawning area for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. This discovery ought to push the International Commission of the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna to abandon its simplistic two stock approach to management of ABFT. (Whether ICCAT will actually change its approach is another question.) Safina made the outrageously false assertion that the authors’ “… main concern is not recovery, not conservation, but how their findings can allow additional exploitation.”   Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular.

Read the commentary at CFOOD

 

End of an era as Tokyo has last New Year tuna auction before historic fish market closes

January 5, 2015 (AP) — TOKYO — It’s among the biggest of Japan’s many New Year holiday rituals: Early on Tuesday, a huge, glistening tuna was auctioned for about $118,000 at Tokyo’s 80-year-old Tsukiji market. Next year, if all goes as planned, the tradition won’t be quite the same.

The world’s biggest and most famous fish and seafood market is due to move in November to a massive complex farther south in Tokyo Bay, making way for redevelopment of the prime slice of downtown real estate.

The closure of the Tsukiji market will punctuate the end of the post-war era for many of the mom-and-pop shops just outside the main market that peddle a cornucopia of sea-related products, from dried squid and seaweed to whale bacon and caviar.

The auction is typical of Japan’s penchant for fresh starts at the beginning of the year — the first visit of the year to a shrine and the first dream of the year are other important firsts — and it’s meant to set an auspicious precedent for the 12 months to come.

Sushi restaurateur Kiyoshi Kimura has prevailed in most of the recent New Year auctions, and he did so again this year in the bidding for a 440-pound tuna.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New York Post

 

NORTH CAROLINA: Bluefin tuna sighted early in season off Outer Banks

December 26, 2016 — MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. — Bluefin tuna season is here again, traditionally running from November through March, sometimes into April, and there have already been landings in Carteret County, as well as some anecdotal reports of the prized commercial fish showing up off the Outer Banks. 

Bluefin tuna are a sought-after commercial finfish for sushi, and individual fish can sell for several thousand dollars on the international market. Matt Frost, owner and operator of Homer Smith Seafood in Beaufort, said as of Wednesday he’s had about 6,100 pounds of bluefin tuna landed at his fish house.

“I’ve had about 20 fish this year (so far),” he said. “My first was Nov. 18. They’re pretty much right off our beach, within 3-15 miles.”

While the bluefin tuna mean a good profit for those who catch them, Mr. Frost said he’s still not sure if this will be a good tuna season.

“In a really good season, you’d see 10-20 fish a day,” he said. “Only about eight to 10 percent of the boats fishing (for bluefin tuna) have caught a fish yet.”

Carteret County isn’t the only area where the tuna are showing up. Brad McHale, branch chief of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s highly migratory species division, said Dec. 7 his division has heard from commercial fishermen in North Carolina that bluefin tuna have been spotted off the state coast, in particular near Southport.

Read the full story at Carteret County News-Times

 

DAVID SCHALIT: Report from ICCAT

December 7, 2015 — The following is a commentary submitted to Saving Seafood by David Schalit, the Vice President of the American Bluefin Tuna Association:

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) used to be the regional fishery management organization everybody loved to hate.  Its dysfunctionality was legendary.  ICCAT became famous because it is the regional fishery management organization responsible for Atlantic bluefin tuna, the famously “iconic” and “charismatic” tuna stock that has been the subject of intense media interest for a very long time and the only tuna species to star in its own cable television series. 

ICCAT’s Problem

In the mid-late 1990’s, due to concerns expressed by ICCAT scientists about the status of Atlantic bluefin, ICCAT began adopting measures to limit harvest of both east and west stocks.  Only the west Atlantic harvesters heeded the advices of ICCAT scientists.  European Union fishing countries and other eastern harvesters who target east Atlantic bluefin weren’t listening.  During the next several years the east Atlantic stock was subject to consistent and increasing overfishing, illegal fishing and unreported fishing.  In 2007 – the worst year on record for east Atlantic bluefin – ICCAT scientists estimated that catch in the east Atlantic could be as high as 60,000 MT, almost twice the allowed quota.  

As a consequence, “the plight of the Atlantic bluefin” became the subject of ongoing public relations campaigns by numerous environmental organizations.  Annual meetings of ICCAT in the years leading up to 2008 developed a circus atmosphere, consisting of a full complement of delegates, a large number of industry representatives, media and environmental observers as well as environmental activists who regularly demonstrated outside of the meeting venue.  As a result, ICCAT meetings were regularly covered by media worldwide.  

ICCAT’s Redemption

ICCAT finally began to redeem itself during its 2008 meeting when it mustered the political will to cease overfishing and begin the process of rebuilding east Atlantic bluefin stock.  Today, both east and west Atlantic bluefin stocks have become a fishery management success story. 

The New Problem

However, ICCAT may be returning to its old ways.  This time, the problem is with Atlantic bigeye tuna.  ICCAT scientists turned in a stock assessment on Atlantic bigeye this October indicating that the stock is presently overfished and with overfishing presently taking place.  ICCAT scientists urged the adoption of conservation measures to immediately address this problem.  Last week, the 24th annual meeting of ICCAT was held in Malta.  Unfortunately, when the meeting came to a close on November 17, ICCAT had failed to achieve meaningful conservation measures for Atlantic bigeye tuna.  Sound familiar?

What Were the Objectives?

The scientists recommended steps that would lead to increasing “future chances that the stock will be at a level that is consistent with the convention objectives.” The primary means available to ICCAT for achieving this were a reduction in harvesting of mature bigeye in the central/south Atlantic and a reduction in bycatch of juvenile bigeye in the Gulf of Guinea skipjack fishery.  Neither of these goals was met.

Major Harvesting Forces

The Atlantic bigeye tuna fishery consists of 8 major harvesters and 11 minor harvesters.  The eight major harvesters (China, EU, Ghana, Japan, Panama, Philippines, Korea and Chinese Taipei) are, in total, a fleet of 659 longline vessels plus assorted “support vessels”, mostly fishing in the equatorial Atlantic, in deep water, for mature bigeye.  The EU alone has 269 vessels in this fleet, and Japan has 245.  

In addition, there are 51 purse seine vessels permitted by ICCAT to operate in the Gulf of Guinea skipjack fishery that are responsible for significant bycatch of juvenile bigeye and yellowfin.  Of those 51 vessels, the EU (France and Spain) is the largest fleet, with 34 vessels.

To put this in perspective, in 2014, the 8 major harvesters were responsible for over 53,000 MT of bigeye catch, whereas the 11 minor harvesters, including the U.S. and Brazil, were responsible for just under 14,000 MT.  (The U.S. reported 800 MT of catch in 2014.)  And there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the level of mortality on juvenile bigeye in the purse seine fishery. 

The Negotiations

During the negotiations at last week’s meeting, the U.S., Brazil and a few other minor harvesters squared off against the very well prepared forces of the EU and Japan who had the backing of their formidable fishing industries.  It is said that those who have “the most skin in the game” tend to prevail and so, notwithstanding the efforts of the U.S., Brazil and others to reduce fishing effort by these major harvesters, the EU, Japan and the 6 other major harvesters were the winners and Atlantic bigeye tuna was the loser.

Curiously, the major harvesters can make the claim to have reduced the overall TAC.  Atlantic bigeye harvesting is presently governed by an Atlantic-wide TAC from which each of the 8 major harvesters are given a fixed, “not to exceed” individual TAC. Last week, the major harvesters agreed to reduce their combined allowed TAC from its present level of 79,000 MT to to 58,000 MT.  This gives the distinct impression that significant conservation measures were taken.  However, landings averaged over the last 5 years are below 58,000 MT.  In actual fact, this agreement allows these harvesters another 9,000 MT above their reported landings of 2014.  Consequently, no actual cuts in catch were made. 

The Fiasco in the Gulf of Guinea

The problem in the Gulf of Guinea is an issue that has plagued ICCAT since the 1990s. ICCAT has made various attempts, beginning in the late 90’s, to reduce bycatch of juvenile bigeye and yellowfin typically weighing no more than 3-6 lbs, in the Gulf of Guinea purse seine skipjack fishery.  According to the scientists, none of these attempts yielded any reduction in bigeye bycatch.  Why?

At each ICCAT meeting in which this bycatch problem was addressed, the EU has tendered its own fully detailed proposal to address the problem.  In each instance, their proposal involved a variation on the concept of a time/area closure in the Gulf of Guinea for a fixed period during each fishing season.  Since the EU purse seine fleet is the dominant force in the Gulf of Guinea skipjack fishery, it is difficult to imagine why ICCAT would have ever seriously considered an EU proposal.  Clearly, the EU’s interests are best served by thwarting any conservation action that would have a negative effect on its seining activities in the Gulf.  However, in each instance, ICCAT has adopted the EU’s proposal.  And in every instance, ICCAT scientists subsequently found that these closures did not result in the reduction of bycatch.  Today, these facts are well known to ICCAT member countries.  So, why did ICCAT, in last week’s meeting, adopt a new EU-authored solution to the problem of bigeye bycatch that is likely to achieve nothing?  This, too, is reminiscent of the “old” ICCAT.

Final Outcome

We can point to other successes that came out of the ICCAT meeting such as significant progress on Convention amendments, eBCD and the development of harvest control rules; all important issues.  But if ICCAT fails in its primary task – the “conservation of Atlantic tunas” – all other successful initiatives are diminished in importance because of that failure. 

Fortunately for ICCAT, it has a chance to partially redeem itself at next years’ meeting, when it will address Atlantic yellowfin tuna, a stock that has some of the same problems as Atlantic bigeye.  Unfortunately, ICCAT will have to wait until 2018 to have a chance to again address the issue of conservation of bigeye tuna.

EU looks into reports of fake fish labeling in Brussels

November 3, 2015 — BRUSSELS (AP) – The European Union is looking into reports that cheap seafood is often mislabeled as choice fish in some of the Belgian capital’s fine restaurants and even in EU cafeterias.

The Oceana environmental group said Tuesday it found that 31.8 percent of seafood it tested in and around EU institutions in Brussels was a different fish than what was labeled on the menu. In the cafeterias of the EU, which sets fishery policies for the 28-nation bloc, the total amount of falsely labeled fish stood at 38 percent.

“We take this very seriously,” EU spokesman Alexander Winterstein said of the report.

Oceana said 95 percent of what was labeled Bluefin tuna – a fatty, sublime sushi favorite – was actually a less expensive species, served to make a hefty profit. In 13 percent of the cases, cod was also mislabeled and people sometimes were fed pangasius instead, a freshwater fish farmed in southeast Asia.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at New Jersey Herald

 

Cuba launches shark protection plan produced with US group

October 21, 2015 — HAVANA (AP) — Cuba announced Wednesday that it is launching a long-term plan to preserve its sharks in cooperation with a U.S. environmental group, part of a rapidly accelerating partnership between the two countries aimed at preserving their shared waters in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Straits.

Nearly a year after Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced that they would end a half-century of official hostility and start moving toward normalization, the most visible progress has been in the realm of environmental protection.

The shark plan announced by Cuba after two years of work with the U.S -based Environmental Defense Fund commits Cuba to recording shark catches by fishing vessels and eventually implementing stricter rules that would limit shark fishing and protect shark nurseries.

Secretary of State John Kerry announced in Valparaiso, Chile this month that the U.S. and Cuba were signing an accord to work together on protecting marine preservation areas in far western Cuba located a relatively short distance from Texas and Florida across the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Straits.

In April, a research vessel operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration carried marine scientists from Cuba and other countries on a research cruise aimed at gathering information about the spawning of blue-fin tuna, a commercially valuable and highly threatened species.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard – Times