Saving Seafood

Federal court upholds ruling in anchovy catch-limit lawsuit

January 22, 2019 — A federal judge in California on Friday, 22 January, upheld her decision from last year that claimed NOAA Fisheries did not follow the law when it set the catch limit on an anchovy stock in the state.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh means the agency will need to set a new limit on the central population of northern anchovy. Environmental advocates argued federal officials kept that figure stationary since 2000 and used nearly 30-year-old data in setting it.

“This decision holds [NOAA Fisheries] to fundamental standards intended by Congress, which require the government to sustainably manage our nation’s fisheries for the benefit of both fishermen and dependent species,” said Mariel Combs, an Oceana attorney in a press release.

Oceana filed the suit in November 2016, a month after NOAA Fisheries maintained the 25,000 metric ton (MT) limit. The environmental organization, represented by Earthjustice is the suit, argued that the catch limit was based on a 1991 study that reported a biomass of more than 700,000 metric tons.

Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director for the California Wetfish Producers Association, told SeafoodSource she was disappointed in Koh’s ruling. She added, however, that the judge did not set a catch limit and ruled that the agency needs to use the best scientific data available to set its limits.

“In any case, there is general agreement, even from Oceana, that the anchovy population has exploded and available data now find the biomass at historic levels,” Steele said.

Steele also noted that members of the Pacific Fishery Management Council management team will be meeting soon to discuss the next steps in wake of the ruling.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Judge: NMFS must rewrite anchovy catch rule

January 22, 2019 — Federal fishing regulators have until April 16 to rewrite a rule that sets annual catch limits (ACL) for commercial fishing of anchovy in federal waters off the northern coast of California, a judge has ruled.

The Jan. 18 order from federal judge Lucy Koh enforces a judgment in a lawsuit brought in 2016 by the environmental activist group Oceana against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Oceana’s lawsuit questioned the science that NMFS relied on in reaching a 2016 decision to set the ACL for northern California anchovy at 25,000 metric tons. The agency set that limit — even though landings typically only total less than a third of that, 7,300t — judging the stock’s maximum sustainable yield to be 123,000t, and calculating an acceptable biological catch of 100,000t. The ACL was set, conservatively, the agency said, at a fourth of that level.

Speaking to Undercurrent in June 2018 about the ruling, Diane Pleschner-Steele, the executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, disagreed with the biomass estimates, but because the harvesters her group works with are seeing more anchovies, not fewer.

Pleschner-Steele said that her group worked in 2017 with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to perform an aerial survey of anchovy stocks.

“The department’s plane flew along the coast inside the area that the NOAA acoustic trawl survey was transecting at the same time, and our spotter pilot estimated tonnage of the schools he observed,” she wrote.   “We documented tens of thousands of tons of coastal pelagic species — both sardine and anchovy —  that the NOAA cruise did not see or factor into its assessment because they survey largely offshore and don’t come into nearshore waters.   This is now recognized as a problem, and we’re hopeful that we can improve stock assessments over time.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

CALIFORNIA: There will be no commercial herring catch in San Francisco Bay this year

January 21, 2019 — During a brief period between December and February, schools of Pacific herring arrive in San Francisco Bay to spawn in waves, laying their eggs in the intertidal zones from Paradise Cove in Marin to Coyote Point in San Mateo, with stops along the way in San Francisco, Alameda and Richmond.

When the herring arrive in the bay, Raylene Gorum, who is organizing the sixth annual Sausalito Herring Celebration on Jan. 27, is one of the first to know as a houseboat resident in the Sausalito harbor. “The harbingers are the sea lions,” said Gorum, who heard the first one barking last week, while cormorants and seagulls were nearby, waiting to pounce.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

CALIFORNIA: Local fishermen and their catch take center stage at Monterey Bay restaurants

January 18, 2019 — In fishing ports across the country, it’s often difficult to find the local catch in local restaurants. Salmon, tuna, shrimp and cod are menu staples. While all delicious, they don’t often reflect seasonal fish local fishermen are taking back to the docks.

To counter this, a group of local organizations, businesses and fishermen in Monterey, Calif. are spotlighting the local catch and area chefs who bring them to plate with “Get Hooked,” a week-long initiative to recognize restaurants that provide the in-season harvest to their patrons.

“Commercial fishing is an icon of Monterey’s history, yet most consumers are unaware that 90 percent of the seafood we eat in the U.S. today is imported,” said Roger Burleigh, marketing and supply chain manager for the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust who’s spearheading the campaign. “We want to draw attention back to our local seafood bounty and the fishermen who catch it.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Global shrimp supply will remain high for foreseeable future

January 18, 2019 — The glut in the global supply of shrimp that persisted throughout 2018 will remain in 2019, as cold storage facilities in the United States continue to have supplies lasting months in storage.

A panel of experts at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California on 17 January said cold storage facilities in the U.S. had, at times, 30 percent more shrimp in storage in 2018 than they did in 2017.

In addition, the panel predicted that the reserves will not be drawn down significantly in 2019. The primary reason for that is production of shrimp in India, which panelists said will remain close to its record high of 740,000 metric tons (MT), with production in other countries starting to increase as well.

“It all comes back to, ‘What are we going to do with all this shrimp?’” said Jeff Goldberg, president of Fortune Imports.

Estimates indicate that there’s 290 million pounds of shrimp currently in cold storage facilities in the U.S., representing a supply that, with no further production or imports, could last more than three months.

That high amount of supply in storage is coupled with increasing supply coming from countries like Ecuador. Between 2013 and 2018, production of shrimp in Ecuador more than doubled, going from 219,412 MT to 471,026 MT.

Ecuador and India aren’t the only countries with increasing supply. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Mexico also saw growth. The most dramatic growth occurred in Guatemala, which has consistently increased between 30 to 40 percent year-over-year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

California opens more coastline to crab fishing, but don’t count on a big haul yet

January 17, 2019 — Woe is the crab lover: More of California’s north coast opened to commercial crab fishing Tuesday, but stormy waters and a shellfish toxin still are limiting the haul and putting a further crimp on the season for the tasty crustaceans.

“It’s not easy to be a crab fisherman in California this year,” said Noah Oppenheim, director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “But they’ll soldier on.”

Crab lovers had hoped for relief this season after several frustrating winters of on-again-off-again crab catching along the California coast. The crab fishery was valued at $67.5 million last season.

Crab fishers began hauling up the tasty crustaceans along the Central Coast south of Mendocino County when the commercial season began in mid-November.

But state authorities kept the fishery north of Sonoma County off limits until Tuesday — the latest date allowed by law — because crabs there were coming in lean and considered not ready for market.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

Chinese processing still dominant, but cracks starting to show

January 17, 2019 — A recurring theme at the 2019 Global Seafood Market Conference, taking place from 15 to 17 January in Coronado, California, U.S.A., has been China’s dominance in the skilled processing sector, and whether rising labor costs would push that processing elsewhere.

A burgeoning middle class in China has steadily driven up the labor costs for skilled processing, particularly in the large groundfish processing sector. The trade for groundfish has historically been dominated by Russian exports to China, and Chinese re-exports to the European Union after processing.

Yet despite the rising labor costs, Chinese importing for processing show no signs of slowing, according to statistics from Rabobank International.

“They’ve had huge wage increases already,” Gorjan Nikolik, a senior industry analyst for Rabobank International, said. “They should not be this competitive, and yet they are.”

Between 2012 and 2017, Russian exports of groundfish to China decreased by more than 50,000 tons. Even with the decrease, the trade between Russia and China was still by-far the largest in the world in terms of volume, and the amount of groundfish exported from China to the E.U. barely slowed.

Those numbers tell the story of Chinese processing still representing a huge portion of the market, given Chinese exports of groundfish to the E.U. are almost exclusively processed.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Shutdown Stunting Oregon Bid to Keep Salmon Alive

January 15, 2019 — Oregon’s effort to prevent California sea lions from feasting on the dwindling winter steelhead at Willamette Falls will not proceed as planned because of the federal government shutdown.

Officials have so far trapped and euthanized four California sea lions that collectively eat about one quarter of the shrinking returns of winter steelhead at Willamette Falls. The water below the falls have become a reliable bonanza for hungry sea lions, along the journey from the ocean back to the headwaters where steelhead were born, and where they will spawn.

Last year, only 512 wild winter steelhead returned from the sea, stymied by poor ocean conditions and a network of dams that crowd the way home. But a relatively new problem threatens to eclipse the first two: the hungry mouths of dozens of sea lions waiting at the falls.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife launched a program to capture and kill the massive marine mammals after attempts to haul them back to the ocean failed. Despite being trucked hundreds of miles to the southern coast of Oregon, the animals promptly swam back – one sea lion made the return trip in three days.

This year could be the third in a row with the worst returns on record, and state biologists aren’t optimistic.

“There’s potential that we’re already past the point where they can recover and we just won’t know it for another decade,” said Shaun Clements, senior policy analyst with Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Oregon begins killing sea lions after relocation fails

January 11, 2019 — Oregon wildlife officials have started killing California sea lions that threaten a fragile and unique type of trout in the Willamette River, a body of water that’s miles inland from the coastal areas where the massive carnivorous aquatic mammals usually congregate to feed.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife obtained a federal permit in November to kill up to 93 California sea lions annually below Willamette Falls south of Portland, Oregon, to protect the winter run of the fish that begin life as rainbow trout but become steelhead when they travel to the ocean.

As of last week, wildlife managers have killed three of the animals using traps they used last year to relocate the sea lions, said Bryan Wright, project manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s marine resources program.

The adult male sea lions, which weigh nearly 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms) each, have learned that they can loiter under the falls and snack on the vulnerable steelhead as the fish power their way upriver to the streams where they hatched.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Pots dropped: Oregon Dungeness season is in full swing

January 9, 2019 — The Tri-State Dungeness Crab Committee, which oversees the northern California, Oregon and Washington Dungeness crab fisheries, opened the season between Cape Arago, Ore., and Klipsan Beach, Wash., after a month-long delay. At 8 a.m. on January 1, 73 hours before the opening, Dungeness crab pots finally splashed into the water off the coast of Oregon and southern Washington.

“They can start to pull pots at 9 a.m. on Jan. 4,” says Troy Buell, the fisheries management program leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “But I don’t know about the weather.”

On Jan. 3, Newport, Ore., crab fisherman Mike Retherford headed out. “We’re leaving now because the bar is going to be pretty bad by morning,” he says. “The swell is building.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman