Saving Seafood

It’s Not Okay To Sell Tuna Under The Radar Or Without A Permit

August 24, 2017 — The following is excerpted from an article published Tuesday by Fissues.org, a project of the Marine Fish Conservation Network:

As we get into the thick of tuna season right now, and plenty of “large-medium” and “giant” class bluefin tuna are being caught by anglers around Cape Cod, and “small mediums” as well as good-sized yellowfin in the New York Bight, I thought it more than appropriate to say this…

It’s not okay….

It’s not okay for an angler to take his or her bluefin, or yellowfin, or bigeye or any fish for that matter and sell it to the local restaurant through the back door… for freak’n gas money. Unfortunately, this kinda thing happens pretty regularly up here. Don’t tell me that it doesn’t, because I hear the bragging frequently.

And don’t tell me that it’s a victimless crime. The hard-working full-time commercial fishermen are the first to get screwed. But it’s the consumer as well, who ends up eating a fish that hasn’t been properly cared for without knowing the risks (in the case of tuna, it needs to be flash frozen so as to get rid of parasites). And the fish? Well, none of that backdoor stuff gets reported so we have no idea the scale of such removals… And that affects how these fish are managed and ultimately the long-term sustainability of the stock.

Let’s be crystal clear about one thing. You cannot legally sell tuna to anyone but a federally permitted HMS (Highly Migratory Species) dealer and you aren’t supposed to do so without the proper federal permits and state landing permits.

Under no circumstances are those backdoor sales legal.

But really, that’s not the main reason I felt compelled to write this.

What’s starting to become a big problem is the HMS “Charter/Headboat” permit, which inexplicably allows anyone with such permit running a charter to sell their bluefin, as long as they are of commercial size (73”-plus).

So here’s the deal… If I understand the intent of the permit correctly – and I’ve discussed with NOAA HMS, so I think I do – you can’t run both a commercial and charter fishing trip at the same time. Directly from HMS Permit FAQs site: “This permit allows a vessel to fish both commercially for tunas and recreationally for HMS, although not on the same day.” 

Read the full story at Fissues.org

How Ocean Aquaculture Could Feed the Entire World – and Save Wild Fish

Marine researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, mapped out the potential of the open ocean to support farmed fish and came to some surprising conclusions.

August 21, 2017 — About five out of every six fisheries worldwide has reached or passed the limit of what it can sustainably produce, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Drought, dams, agricultural runoff and other pressures have depleted wild salmon populations in the Eastern Pacific, while on the east coast of North America, wild Atlantic salmon exists mainly in the memories of the Greatest Generation. Bluefin tuna, the preferred delicacy of the world’s finest sushi chefs, is at 2.7 percent of its historical population – about the same as the Bengal tiger.

Meanwhile, seafood farmed in coastal regions has been infected with sea lice, pollutes neighboring ecosystems with waste, sometimes produces fewer nutrients than are fed into the system, often destroys carbon-sequestering mangroves and can require large amounts of antibiotics to stave off disease.

But according to a new study from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, aquaculture could feed a global population expected to grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050. Lead author Rebecca Gentry, a newly minted PhD in marine ecology, and her colleagues wrote that the open ocean “is largely untapped as a farming resource,” representing “an immense opportunity for food production.” In the study published August 14 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, they found that the entire world’s current output of wild-caught seafood could be farmed in areas that in total would comprise just 0.015 percent of the ocean’s surface area, if grouped together in a way that the authors note would not be realistic or recommended. That’s the equivalent to the size of Lake Michigan.

“People assume the oceans are big but no one had quantified it,” Gentry said. “There’s not that much broad-scale ecological research on marine aquaculture, so we needed a base of information to get an idea of where we can do it.”

Read the full story at Aquaculture Magazine

NOAA: Determination that bluefin aren’t ‘endangered’ unlikely to affect quota setting

August 15, 2017 — US regulators’ recent decision to reject a petition from environmental groups to list Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species is unlikely to affect quota levels, which are set by international bodies.

“I don’t envision this domestic Endangered Species Act determination directly implicating the international management of this species,” Chris Yates, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s west coast assistant regional administrator for protected resources said, in response to a question from Undercurrent News.

The US government doesn’t directly determine bluefin fishing rules in the Pacific, having ceded that authority by treaty to Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), of which major bluefin catchers Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan are also members. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) also manages bluefin stocks in those areas of the ocean.

IATTC, which is under strong pressure from environmental groups to conserve declining bluefin stocks, recently failed to agree to new measures at a meeting earlier this month in Mexico City. But members have agreed to revisit the issue at a future meeting in Busan, South Korea.

NOAA assessment

After a recent review of the stock, NOAA scientists struck a mostly positive tone about the stock’s prospects to recover.

Yates, and Matthew Craig, who recently chaired a NOAA review into the health of bluefin stocks, said that there are roughly 1.6 million individual bluefin in the North Pacific Ocean, with 140,000 bluefin being of reproductive age and size.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

UMaine to Receive More Than $220K From NOAA to Study Tuna

August 11, 2017 — ORONO, Maine — The University of Maine is slated to receive more than $220,000 from the federal government to support research of Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins and independent Sen. Angus King say the money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will help with UMaine’s research about the tuna’s age, growth and population in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.

UMaine researchers will work with dealers, fishermen and other stakeholders from Maine to North Carolina on the work.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the U.S. News & World Report

NOAA rejects bid to list tuna as endangered

August 9, 2017 — The Trump administration on Tuesday chose not to list the Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species, rejecting a petition by the largest global conservation group that the U.S. is a member of, with France, South Korea, Australia, and several other countries.

The Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service announced the decision after a 12-month review of the request that started under the Obama administration.

In response, environmentalists are organizing an international boycott of sushi restaurants, decrying what they say is the startling reversal of the agency’s original intent to list the tuna under the Obama administration.

The agency said that it looked at all factors affecting the bluefin tuna’s habitat, and based “on the best scientific and commercial data available … and after taking into account efforts being made to protect the species, we have determined that listing of the Pacific bluefin tuna is not warranted,” the agency said in a notice published in the Federal Register.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature had petitioned the U.S. government to list the tuna after assessing “the status of Pacific bluefin tuna and categorized the species as ‘vulnerable’ in 2014, meaning that the species was considered to be facing a high risk of extinction in the wild,” the notice read.

Read the full story at the Washington Examiner

Tuna won’t be listed as endangered, Trump administration says

August 8, 2017 — Rejecting a petition from environmental groups, the Trump administration announced Monday that it will not list Pacific bluefin tuna — a torpedo-shaped fish that can grow to 1,000 pounds and which sells for $100,000 or more per fish in Japanese sushi markets — as endangered, despite that fact that the animal’s population has fallen 97 percent.

Even with heavy fishing pressure, the steely fish, which swim 6,000 miles between California and Asia, still number about 1.6 million, officials from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monday.

“The Pacific bluefin tuna does not meet the definition of threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act; that is, it’s not likely to become extinct either now or in the foreseeable future,” said Chris Yates, assistant regional administrator for protected resources at the NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region in Long Beach.

“The population has been at low levels before and has rebounded,” he added.

Environmental groups, however, were disappointed. They have compared bluefin tuna to elephant tusks or shark fins — products that come from an important, but vulnerable, species and command high prices for status value.

Read the full story at the Mercury News

NOAA Requests Comment on a Change to Bluefin Regulations

July 24, 2017 — CAPE COD, Mass. — NOAA is seeking public comment regarding a request from the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance for an exemption from a regulation that prohibits having unauthorized gear on board while fishing for, retaining, or possessing a bluefin tuna.

In their application, the Alliance suggest that the use of electronic monitoring, already required by federal fishing authorities is a sufficient at-sea monitoring to verify that the catch of bluefin tuna occurred on authorized gear.

The regulation was designed to allow enforcement to not only verify that only the authorized gear type was used to catch the bluefin tuna, but also serves as an effort control for bluefin tuna as it limits the number of vessels that can actively pursue bluefin tuna to those with only authorized gear.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

JAPAN SET TO REACH ITS PACIFIC BLUEFIN TUNA FISHING QUOTA TWO MONTHS EARLY

April 26, 2017 — Japan is on track to meet its annual Pacific bluefin tuna quota two months early, frustrating activists trying to protect the species from overfishing.

Japan, where bluefin tuna is considered a delicacy, consumes significantly more of the fish than any other country. But its quota for the year ending in June 2017 is likely to be reached as early as this month.

Despite the country’s aggressive approach to fishing, bluefin tuna isn’t cheap. At Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish auction, a 467-pound bluefin tuna sold for 74.7m yen ($700,000) in January.

The seemingly insatiable appetite for the tuna is causing concern among conservationists. Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at Pew Charitable Trusts, said Japan is irresponsible in its approach to bluefin tuna fishing, The Guardian reported.

“Just a few years of overfishing will leave Pacific bluefin tuna vulnerable to devastating population reductions. That will threaten not just the fish but also the fishermen who depend on them,” Nickson told The Guardian on Monday.

Overfishing has already caused the Pacific bluefin population to fall by 97 percent.

In 2015, Japan and other members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission agreed to reduce their catch of immature bluefin.

Read the full story at Newsweek

Fish fight: Scientists battle over the true harm of mercury in tuna

March 6, 2017 — Molly Lutcavage thought she had a deal. For more than a decade, she had collected hundreds of tissue samples from bluefin tuna in hopes of settling a question that has long vexed pregnant women and the parents of young children: Should they eat the big fish, a beneficial source of protein and fatty acids? Or did mercury contamination make them too dangerous?

Lutcavage hoped to test the theory that selenium, a key chemical found in tuna, prevents mercury from being transferred to the people who eat them and that, therefore, the fish are safe to eat. So she gave her hard-won samples to a colleague, Nick Fisher, to analyze in his lab.

But Fisher, it seems, didn’t have as much interest in Lutcavage’s selenium theory. Two years later, he produced a study focused almost exclusively on his own hypothesis: that lowering pollution emissions from power plants reduced the levels of mercury in bluefin tuna.

Lutcavage was furious, and the two scientists went to war.

“We kept fighting on this,” said Lutcavage, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “I feel that the paper didn’t advance the issue whatsoever on this divide between scientists over methylmercury. I can’t tell you how much [my colleagues and I] agonized over taking our names off the paper.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Eel farming coming closer to reality in Japan

March 6, 2017 — At the 14th annual Seafood Show Osaka, held 22 to 23 February at ATC Hall, the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency operated a booth highlighting its work in closed-cycle breeding of Japanese eel.

Osamu Tamaru, a researcher at the research Center for Fisheries System Engineering, of the National Research Institute of Fisheries Engineering, said that his group has achieved survival rates of 10 percent, but estimates that this figure needs to be doubled to be commercially viable. Asked what the difficult point was, he said, “The feed, the tank, everything…”

That is to say, it often hard to discover the cause of mortality. However, as commercialization of closed-cycle breeding of bluefin tuna is advancing in Japan, there is hope that pressure on threatened eel populations can be relieved through the research.

Read the full story at Seafood Source