Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: State Announces Seafood Marketing Program Partnership

December 29, 2016 — BOSTON, Mass. –The Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF)’s Massachusetts Seafood Marketing Program has partnered with the nonprofit Massachusetts Farm to School Project to promote the consumption of local seafood in schools.

“The Massachusetts commercial fishing and seafood industries provide delicious food and employment for thousands of people in the Commonwealth,” said Governor Charlie Baker. “This is a great connection to make and we look forward to the partnership between Massachusetts fishermen and farm-to-school programs to provide the Commonwealth’s children with fresh, nutritious seafood products that support cognitive development.”

During the two-year partnership, the partners will promote seafood as part of Massachusetts Farm to School’s Massachusetts Harvest of the Month campaign, hold a series of local seafood cooking demonstrations for institutional food service providers, and offered a seafood focus track at the Massachusetts Farm & Sea to Cafeteria Conference.

The state launched the Massachusetts Seafood Marketing Program in August to increase awareness and demand for local seafood products and support Massachusetts’ fishing and seafood industries.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Should you worry about mercury in seafood? What you need to know

December 15, 2016 — Are you feeling conflicted about eating seafood? Do you embrace the idea of getting healthy omega-3 fats in your diet — but worry that they might come with an unhealthy dose of mercury? If so, you’re far from alone — that’s one reason that the average American is not eating the recommended amount of fish and seafood.

The official recommendations for seafood consumption from the American Heart Association and the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are to eat fish at least twice weekly — at least 8 ounces total — but only one in 10 of us do. The average person eats 3.5 ounces per week, and that drops to an average of 2 ounces during pregnancy — despite the recommendation that pregnant and breast-feeding women increase fish intake to up to 12 ounces per week.

If you’ve been playing it safe by limiting how much fish you eat, the good news is that you can relax. There’s a game-changer in the seafood and mercury debate — selenium. Selenium is an antioxidant mineral that helps prevent free radical damage to your cells, but it’s also an essential part of a few dozen enzymes (selenoenzymes) that protect your brain from damage. This is where seafood comes in.

According to Nicholas Ralston, Ph.D., a research scientist at the University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environment Research Center, part of the confusion about mercury and seafood comes from conflicting results from large studies on the effects of mercury consumption on childhood brain development. Ralston, who studies the health effects of mercury, spoke at the annual meeting of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in Boston in October.

On one hand, two major studies, one from the Faeroe Islands and one from New Zealand, found low levels of harm from mercury exposure from seafood. On the other hand, studies in the United States and other countries found increased seafood consumption was associated with higher child IQ, despite mercury. Ralston said that when researchers dug harder to figure out what was driving the inconsistencies, they found the selenium link.

Mercury and selenium form an essentially unbreakable bond in your body. If you are getting more mercury than selenium, that doesn’t leave any “free” selenium for those brain enzymes. This can be especially devastating during pregnancy and shortly after birth, when a child’s brain is developing rapidly.

In the Faroe Island and New Zealand studies, the most heavily consumed types of seafood were whale and shark, which are high in mercury and very low in selenium. “That’s not what most people eat,” Ralston said. To top it off, both countries were also selenium-poor. “At the time of the study, New Zealand was one of the most selenium-poor nations on Earth. So throw some mercury at them, and they’re going to go down hard and fast.”

The U.S. is not a selenium-poor nation, but even if that weren’t true, the bottom line is that it is much safer to eat fish than to not eat fish. “There’s so much selenium in ocean fish that rather than falling behind in your selenium, you get enriched,” Ralston said. “The more fish you eat, rather than being in more danger of mercury toxicity, you’re safer.”

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

Partial transcript of Rafael’s meeting with undercover IRS agents revealed

December 12, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Documents filed in U.S. District Court in Boston Thursday show seafood mogul Carlos Rafael implicating his whole family in his alleged scheme to smuggle cash to the Azores and turn large catches of protected fish into large amounts of cash by selling them under the table.

Rafael is also quoted as boasting that he pressured Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson, into giving Deputy Sheriff Antonio Freitas a raise and promotion, and in turn using Freitas to get large amounts of cash around immigration and customs at Logan Airport.

The document is an official response to requests by Rafael and Freitas to be tried separately to preserve their individual rights.

The items are contained in a partial transcript of a meeting Rafael had with two men he thought were Russian businessmen but who were actually IRS agents operating under cover to learn how Rafael did business.

Rafael explained that as many as eight people in his family would make the trip to the Azores carrying cash that Freitas could bypass from customs.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

‘Codfather’ asks court to split his, deputy’s cases

November 28th, 2016 — New Bedford fishing kingpin Carlos Rafael and the Bristol County sheriff’s deputy indicted as Rafael’s co-defendant each are seeking to be tried separately in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Rafael, known widely as “The Codfather” because of his vast New Bedford fishing assets and waterfront holdings, and Antonio M. Freitas, the Bristol County deputy sheriff, are scheduled to stand trial together on Jan. 9.

Attorneys for both men filed separate motions with the court earlier this week to sever the cases. The motions also seeks to have the court try each defendant separately, each claiming the other’s statements to law enforcement officials would injure their own cases if tried together.

 Both men have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“A joint trial presents a serious risk of compromising Mr. Rafael’s Sixth Amendment confrontation rights in light of incriminating evidence made to law enforcement by Mr. Freitas,” William Kettlewell, Rafael’s defense attorney, wrote in his motion to U. S. District Court Judge William Young. “Moreover, severance in this case would not be administratively burdensome as the defendants are jointly named in only one of 28 counts alleged in the indictment.”

Read the full story at The Salem News 

Fishermen say they’ll appeal mandate to pay at-sea monitors

November 1, 2016 — BOSTON — New England commercial fishermen suing the federal government over the cost of at-sea monitoring say they plan to take their case to the federal Court of Appeals.

At-sea monitors are workers who collect data that help inform fishing regulations. The government shifted the cost of paying for monitors to fishermen earlier this year.

A federal district court judge ruled in July that it was legal to require fishermen to pay for the monitors, who can cost hundreds of dollars per day.

The fishermen behind the lawsuit have filed a notice of appeal that says they intend to take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

Bay State lobstermen press pols to ease access to restricted areas

September 22, 2016 — BOSTON — Bay State lobstermen want federal fishing regulators to work with them to ease restrictions on lobstering in Massachusetts Bay and two areas east of the South Shore, proposing new safety measures that would allow boats to continue to operate while also protecting endangered whales.

Local lobstermen and leaders of the South Shore Lobster Fisherman’s Association met Wednesday at the State House with legislators and representatives for members of the state’s Congressional delegation to discuss their pitch for preventing whale entanglements without having to remove all traps from February through April.

“The point is not to repeal the closure. It’s to reach a compromise,” said Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester.

John Haviland, president of the association who lobsters out of Green Harbor, said lobstermen are proposing to open three sections — representing a fraction of the larger 2,965 square nautical mile restricted area — for parts of the three-month ban as long as traps are retrofitted with sleeves for their vertical lines that would break every 40 feet under 1,575 pounds of pressure.

Haviland said the line-safety improvement proposal is based on research done by the New England Aquarium and Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute showing that right whales would be as much as 85 percent less likely to become entangled in lines engineered to break at those specifications.

Beginning in 2015, the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a rule designed to protect right and humpback whales that prohibits lobster traps in an area stretching from Cape Cod Bay to Boston between Feb. 1 and April 30.

Read the full story from State House News Service at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Bluefin tuna seized for size violation donated to homeless shelter

September 14, 2016 — A bluefin tuna was donated to a local homeless shelter after it was seized for a size violation during a routine inspection on Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, the Massachusetts Environmental Police said in a Facebook post.

Police were inspecting a fleet of more than 100 tuna ships on the sanctuary Tuesday when officers located a vessel with a 55-inch bluefin tuna onboard, according to police.

The fish was about 18 inches under the required size limit for the ship’s fishing permit category, police said. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked that officers seize the tuna because of the violation.

Police transported the fish to Boston, where a NOAA officer took possession of it, according to police. The tuna was then donated to a homeless shelter in the area.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Scientists blame fishing gear for fewer whale births

September 7, 2016 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — A study recently published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science says that, despite efforts by fishermen and federal fisheries management authorities, more right whales than ever are getting tangled up in fishing gear. The study also states that injuries and deaths from those incidents “may be overwhelming recovery efforts” for the endangered right whale population.

In the report published in July, lead author Scott Kraus, a whale researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, says that while the population of whales has increased from fewer than 300 in 1992 to about 500 in 2015, births of right whales have declined by 40 percent since 2010.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, between 2009 and 2013 an average of 4.3 whales a year were killed by “human activities,” virtually all of them involving entanglement with fishing gear.

From 2010 to 2015, 85 percent of right whale deaths resulted from entanglements with fishing gear. Those numbers stand in sharp contrast to what occurred between 1970 and 2009.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

More fishing gear entanglements jeopardize right whale’s recovery

August 31, 2016 — The ability of an endangered whale species to recover is jeopardized by increasing rates of entanglement in fishing gear and a resultant drop in birth rates, according to scientists who study the animal.

The population of North Atlantic right whales has slowly crept up from about 300 in 1992 to about 500 in 2010. But a study that appeared this month in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science said the number of baby right whales born every year has declined by nearly 40 percent since 2010.

Study author Scott Kraus, a scientist with the New England Aquarium in Boston who worked on the study, said the whales’ population suffers even when they survive entanglements in fishing gear. He said data suggest those entanglements have long-term negative physical and reproductive effects on them.

“They are carrying heavy gear around, and they can’t move as fast or they can’t feed as effectively,” Kraus told The Associated Press in an interview. “And it looks like it affects their ability to reproduce because it means they can’t put on enough fat to have a baby.”

Entanglements have surpassed ship strikes as a leading danger to right whales in recent years. Forty-four percent of diagnosed right whale deaths were due to ship strikes and 35 percent were due to entanglements from 1970 to 2009, the study said. From 2010 to 2015, 15 percent of diagnosed deaths were due to ship strikes and 85 percent were due to entanglements, it said.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Is That Real Tuna in Your Sushi? Now, a Way to Track That Fish

August 18, 2016 — “Most people don’t think data management is sexy,” says Jared Auerbach, owner of Red’s Best, a seafood distributor in Boston. Most don’t associate it with fishing, either. But Mr. Auerbach and a few other seafood entrepreneurs are using technology to lift the curtain on the murky details surrounding where and how fish are caught in American waters.

Beyond Maine lobster, Maryland crabs and Gulf shrimp, fish has been largely ignored by foodies obsessing over the provenance of their meals, even though seafood travels a complex path. Until recently, diners weren’t asking many questions about where it came from, which meant restaurants and retailers didn’t feel a need to provide the information.

Much of what’s sold has been seen as “just a packaged, nondescript fish fillet with no skin,” says Beth Lowell, who works in the seafood-fraud prevention department at Oceana, an international ocean conservation advocacy group. “Seafood has been behind the curve on both traceability and transparency.”

What’s worse is that many people have no idea what they’re eating even when they think they do. In a recent Oceana investigation of seafood fraud, the organization bought fish sold at restaurants, seafood markets, sushi places and grocery stores, and ran DNA tests. It discovered that 33 percent of the fish was mislabeled per federal guidelines. Fish labeled snapper and tuna were the least likely to be what their purveyors claimed they were.

Several years ago, Red’s Best developed software to track the fish it procures from small local fishermen along the shores of New England. Sea to Table, a family business founded in the mid-1990s with headquarters in Brooklyn that supplies chefs and universities, has also developed its own seafood-tracking software to let customers follow the path of their purchases. Wood’s Fisheries, in Port St. Joe, Fla., specializes in sustainably harvested shrimp and uses software called Trace Register.

And starting this fall, the public will be able to glimpse the international fishing industry’s practices through a partnership of Oceana, Google and SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses aerial and satellite images to study changes in the landscape. The initiative, called Global Fishing Watch, uses satellite data to analyze fishing boat practices — including larger trends and information on individual vessels.

Sea to Table hopes to sell fish directly to home chefs starting this year, too.

But local seafood can cost more than many Americans are accustomed to paying, which partly accounts for the rampant seafood fraud in this country.

“U.S. fisheries are very well managed and are actually growing nicely,” said Michael Dimin, the founder of Sea to Table. “But the U.S. consumer’s been trained to buy cheap food, and imported seafood is really cheap because of I.U.U. fishing.” I.U.U. stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated. The result is unsustainably fished, cheap seafood flooding American fish markets and grocery chains.

“To us, the secret is traceability,” Mr. Dimin said. “If you can shine a light on where it came from, you can make informed decisions.”

Read the full story at the New York Times