Saving Seafood

Ocean warming is changing the relationship coastal communities have with the ocean

September 11, 2019 — Climate change has made record-breaking heatwaves all the more likely, both on land and beneath the ocean’s surface. As the world’s ocean sucks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—as well as most of the additional heat being trapped by global warming—it is undergoing some significant changes.

Marine heatwaves—prolonged periods of unusually —are one of those changes. These  are increasing in frequency around the globe and wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems.

As an oceanographer, I study the many ways oceans change—from week-to-week, year-to-year and, of course, over decades and centuries—to better understand the changes that are underway and the far-reaching impacts they may have on  and the communities that rely on them.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

U.S. Coast Guard Targets Illegal Fishing in International Waters

September 9, 2019 — The crew of U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Mellon, including two Canadian fishery officers, returned to Seattle on Sunday after an 80-day patrol detecting and deterring illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing activity in the Pacific Ocean. The patrol was performed under the auspices of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and the North Pacific Fisheries Commission.

Economists estimate that IUU fishing costs the international economy billions of dollars per year. By diminishing stocks, it undermines the livelihoods of legitimate fishermen around the world, with negative effects on food security in developing nations. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, combatting global IUU fishing through international partnerships is a priority for Canada and the United States.

“IUU fishing is one of the greatest threats to the ocean’s fish stocks,” said Capt. Jonathan Musman, Mellon’s commanding officer. “It was an honor to be on the front lines of enforcement efforts of the distant waters fishing fleets.”

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

U.S. and Canadian Pacific Halibut Groups Oppose MSC Certification of Russian Halibut

September 6, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Last week, representatives of the Pacific halibut industries in Canada and the United States voiced their opposition to the Marine Stewardship Council’s consideration to award certification to Russian-caught halibut.

“We feel that the fishing practices of the Russian commercial Pacific Halibut fishery is substandard and deficient in the areas of stock rebuilding, harvest strategy, habitat management,” wrote Bob Alverson in a press release August 29.

Alverson teamed with Chris Sporer and Jim Johnson to submit their comments to the current draft report on the Russian fishery’s application for MSC certification. Alverson is executive director of the Fishing Vessel Owners Association and Eat on the Wild Side, which is the current holder of Pacific halibut MSC certification in the U.S. Sporer is executive manager of the Pacific Halibut Management Association of British Columbia, also an MSC client for Canadian-caught Pacific halibut. Johnson is the executive director of the Deep Sea Fishermen’s Union and a trustee of Eat on the Wild Side.

“The Marine Stewardship Council is an independent non-profit organization which sets a standard for sustainable fishing,” said Alverson. “Fisheries that wish to demonstrate they are well-managed and sustainable compared to the science-based MSC standard are assessed by a team of experts who are independent of both the fishery and the MSC. Seafood products can display the blue MSC ecolabel only if that seafood can be traced back through the supply chain to a fishery that has been certified against the MSC standard.”

In Russia it is the recently organized Longline Fishery Associaiton (LFA) applying for MSC certification, with help from the Sustainable Fishery Partnership (SFP) to start a Fisheries Improvement Plan as early as May 2013.

The most recent report from LFA notes few improvements from earlier reports on fisheries management improvements for the Russian halibut industry.

As Sporer noted under the Stock Rebuilding section of the draft assessment, the “stock has been below Bmsy  [a biomass that can support maximum sustanable yield, a Magnuson-Stevens Act standard] since 2011 and seems to have increased only slightly since 2013. The scoring does not explain a) what the rebuilding measure and timeframe for rebuilding are, or b) what is the evidence that continuing current F [fishing] levels will rebuild the stock to Bmsy within two generations time when there is no evidence of this happening to date.”

Alverson is currently a commissioner at the International Pacific Halibut Commission and Sporer has served as chairman of the IPHC’s Conference Board, representing fishermen, in the past. Their comments about harvest strategy used in the Russian fishery noted that it “… is not achieving stock management objectives for the P-K Pacific halibut stock” and ask, “Without evidence that stock rebuilding is to be expected for this stock” how anyone can they know the strategy is effective?

Under the section on Habitats Outcome, Sporer noted “In other jursidictions operating in similar fisheries, sensitive habitat areas have been closed to longline fishing by authorities or voluntarily. Even for non-VME habitats, an inabiilty to recover in less than 20 years should lead to explicit consideration of effects on such habitats. There is every indication that such sensitive habitats would be present, but no evaluation or management in place.”

The group also noted a concern about transparancy. PHMA of BC and Eat on the Wild Side, representing respectively the holders of the Canadian and US MSC certificates for Pacific Halibut have been accepted by Marcert (the Certifying Advisory Board, or CAB for the Russian fishery) as stakeholders, yet they were not advised that the draft public comment draft report (PCDR) was released.

“We were surprised therefore that we had to find out about the PCDR for Russian Halibut from an MSC notification rather than direct from the CAB.  We note that our CAB requires a much higher level of disclosure to stakeholders of key stages in the MSC process than has been followed by Marcert.  We therefore have a procedural issue as well as the substantive ones we have raised,” Sporer wrote.

According to the most recent report on management of the Russian halibut fishery, stock assessments are still not being done annually, or on any regulary basis. Much of the data on stock size and health is being determined through catch data. Six areas of improvement were targeted as of November 2017:

1. Improvement of data on all removals including bycatch.
2. Standardize methods used for stock assessments in different management areas.
3. Develop robust harvest control rules (HCR), establish biological reference points and create simulation models.
4. Establish clear internal rules of behavior for the fishermen while in the fishery.
5. Better understand and analize how IUU fishing occurs.
6. Improve transparency and public access to information about management, harvests, and monitoring.

This story was originally released by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

U.S.-Canada dispute over fishing grounds focus of film

September 6, 2019 — Award-winning Boston filmmaker and journalist David Schwab Abel’s documentary “Lobster War: The Fight Over the World’s Richest Fishing Grounds,” about the conflict between the United States and Canada over waters that both countries have claimed since the end of the Revolutionary War, will be shown at 7 p.m. on Tuesday Sept. 10, in the Moore Auditiorium on the Schoodic Institute campus. Admission is free.

Abel, who was part of The Boston Globe team covering the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, covers fisheries and the environment for The Globe.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Lobstermen seek help in protecting right whales

August 22, 2019 — Commercial lobstermen urged federal regulators Wednesday to take Canada to task for its failure to protect North Atlantic right whales and to remember that local lobstermen carry a heavier burden of regulation than others in U.S. waters.

“We as lobstermen do not want to see harm come to the right whale,” Plymouth lobsterman Tom O’Reilly said at a public forum at Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School, the eighth in a series of meetings held this month on revisions to the plan to reduce the risk to whales posed by fishing gear. “We have done so much as an industry to try to prevent this.”

The Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association believes Canada can do more, as can other coastal areas in the Northeast. “We’re still at the table today,” said Beth Casoni, the association’s executive director, despite what the fishermen see as a heavier regulatory burden.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Canada’s Nova Scotia province beefs up aquaculture escape rules

August 20, 2019 — The Canadian province of Nova Scotia is moving forward with aquaculture management regulations intended to make it more difficult for fish to escape from net pens and easier to trace escaped fish to their original farms later, bringing the new rules into effect last week, the CBC reports.

The news service quotes Keith Colwell, Nova Scotia’s minister of fisheries and aquaculture, as saying that the changes approved by his cabinet follow an earlier report by a committee looking at the issue of fish containment.

The tracking options including testing DNA or tagging fish, while other changes include rules on making sure fish pens are strong enough to withstand bad weather, requiring operators have farm management plans and creating separate ocean bottom assessment requirements for shellfish-based aquaculture projects.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Century-old salmon-smeared notebooks reveal past bounty of fisheries

August 20, 2019 — One day in June 1919, workers in a busy Canadian cannery in Port Essington rushed to clean, cook, and can the bright red flesh of a huge number of sockeye salmon hauled from the nearby Skeena River. Watching the frenzy was a government “fisheries overseer” named Robert Gibson. Periodically, Gibson selected a fish, scraped off a few scales, and affixed them to the pages of a small notebook using the salmon’s own slime. Next to each sample—he collected a total of 125 on this day—Gibson wrote the weight, length, sex, and catch date. A U.S. fish biologist hired by British Columbia would follow up by calculating each fish’s age with the then-new technique of using a microscope to count the growth rings visible on the scales, much as botanists age a tree.

Over more than 3 decades, from 1912 to 1948, Gibson and colleagues filled dozens of notebooks with fish scales from the Skeena, Canada’s second-largest salmon river. Ultimately, however, the records were dumped in a box and largely forgotten.

Read the full story at Science Magazine

Watch as a response team helps partially untangle a right whale

August 8, 2019 — A right whale received some extra help off the coast of Cape Cod as a response team partially disentangled him Aug. 2.

“Despite a horrific entanglement, the whale was highly mobile,” according to the Center for Coastal Studies.

This particular whale, a male, was initially discovered July 4 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. He was spotted again July 19, and a team from the New England Aquarium was able to attach a telemetry buoy to the whale to track his movements, the center said.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Scientists Say More Right Whales Are Dying Off Canada As Climate Change Disrupts Food Sources

August 6, 2019 — For the past several years, including this one, endangered North Atlantic right whales appear to have been bypassing traditional feeding grounds off Maine’s coast, congregating instead off Canada in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where some are dying.

Scientists are working hard to understand that shift, while lobstermen here in Maine say it shows the whales’ risk of entanglement in their gear is overblown.

For decades, the North Atlantic right whales’ annual migration took them from the Florida coast up past Maine and into the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, where, from midsummer to fall, they would feast together on massive plumes of tiny crustaceans.

But these days, the whales are showing up far from their usual haunts.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Changing climate boosts Maine lobster industry — for now

August 1, 2019 — Maine’s lobster industry has found itself in something of a climate change sweet spot.

The state’s coastal waters are still cold enough for lobster to thrive, but warming ocean temperatures are now encouraging them to settle here, mate and eventually shed their hard shells.

That’s made the past few years some of the best on record for Maine lobstermen.

But those ideal conditions may be short-lived.

As ocean temperatures rise, lobster populations have been moving steadily north, prompting concerns among politicians, scientists and fishermen that Maine lobster will eventually become Canadian lobster.

Read the full story at The Hill