Saving Seafood

All shell, no shock: Lobster prices strong as season picks up

July 23, 2018 — New England’s lobster industry faces big new challenges in selling to Europe and China, but the trouble hasn’t caused prices to budge much for American consumers.

The business is in the midst of its busiest part of the year, when tourists flock to coastal states with a beachside lobster dinner in mind. Summer is also when prices tend to fall a bit because it’s when the majority of lobsters are caught.

But the prices haven’t fallen much. Retailers are selling live lobsters in the $7 to $12 per pound range in Maine, where the American lobster industry is based. That’s not too far behind recent summers.

“It’s starting to pick up, so of course the price is dropping. But that’s pretty normal,” said William Adler, a lobsterman out of Green Harbor, Massachusetts. “Now it’s starting to come alive, and prices are still good right now.”

Members of the industry are concerned about heavy new tariffs applied by China to U.S. seafood this month, because that country is a major lobster buyer. Canada also recently brokered a deal with the European Union to remove tariffs on Canadian lobster exports to Europe, while the U.S. has no such agreement.

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

This strange, lobster-fueled border dispute off Maine has been simmering long before Trump

July 23, 2018 — For all the attention being paid on southern immigration, the shared border itself between the United States and Mexico is actually something on which all sides have agreed for decades.

However, the efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to ramp up immigration enforcement all along the perimeter of the United States recently shed light on a uniquely unsettled border dispute much closer to home. Machias Seal Island, a 20-acre island 10 miles off the coast of Maine, is claimed by both Canada and the United States.

“We have a 5,525-mile-long border with Canada, and all but this little chunk of it is firmly established and accepted by both countries,” says Stephen Kelly, a research scholar at Duke University and former diplomat who has long urged the two neighbors to settle the disagreement.

The conflict was recently cast into international focus after reports that U.S. Border Patrol agents were stopping Canadian fishermen in the area, causing a modest uproar in the Great White North. It was likely the first time many Americans had even heard of Machias Seal Island, if the story broke through at all.

Read the full story at Boston.com

Officials: No right whale deaths in Canada

July 10, 2018 — Canadian fisheries and ocean transportation officials said Friday that so far this year no North Atlantic right whale deaths have been reported in theirwaters, but the critically endangered animals are expected to remain in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for a least another two months.

Last year 12 right whale deaths were documented, largely attributed to gear entanglement and ship strikes, along with five documented live whales entangled in rope. In total, 17 right whales in both Canadian and U.S. waters were documented as having died last year, representing about 4 percent of the total North Atlantic right whale population of about 450.

Canadian officials have been under pressure to prevent deaths this year. Many of the migratory whales tend to head toward Canadian waters after leaving Cape Cod Bay in the middle of May.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Border Patrol Stops Canadian Fishermen in Disputed Waters Off Maine

July 9, 2018 — As tensions rise between the United States and Canada, there’s a new clash in the cool waters off the northeast tip of Maine, which are rich with lobster, scallops and cod.

For more than a decade, American and Canadian fishermen largely have had a friendly but competitive relationship in an oval-shaped region of the Bay of Fundy known as the gray zone. But this summer that camaraderie has been threatened, Canadian fishermen claim, as officers with the United States Border Patrol have started to wade into the area, pull up aside their vessels and ask about their citizenship.

“We don’t want this to be a great international incident, but it’s kind of curious,” said Laurence Cook, the chairman of the lobster committee at the Grand Manan Fishermen’s Association in New Brunswick. “They say it’s routine patrolling, but it is the first routine patrolling in 25 years.”

At least 10 Canadian fishing boats have been stopped by American immigration authorities within the past two weeks, Mr. Cook said, the latest escalation in a more than 300-year disagreement in the disputed waters off Machias Seal Island. Both countries claim the island, which is about 10 miles off Maine and home to two full-time residents (both Canadian), puffins, rocks and not much else, and say they have the right to patrol its boundaries.

Read the full story at the New York Times

U.S. law enforcement’s boat stops along maritime border rankle Canadian fishermen

July 6, 2018 — U.S. Border Patrol agents have ramped up their activities along Maine’s maritime border with Canada in an operation that has rankled Canadian fishermen, surprised Americans and alarmed civil liberties groups already concerned about the agency’s activities.

The agents are stopping vessels in a rich lobster fishing area known as the Gray Zone that is claimed by both the United States and Canada.

Twenty-one Canadian vessels and an unknown number of American boats have been questioned by Border Patrol since October 2017 with no immigration arrests, said Stephanie Malin, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman.

Maine fishermen report being stopped and asked for identification, and some boats have reportedly been boarded by Border Patrol agents. Canadian fishermen, meanwhile, say the stops are occurring in international waters and Border Patrol agents shouldn’t be boarding their vessels.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Why Canadians are upset about Border Patrol run-ins in the disputed waters off Maine

July 6, 2018 — Border Patrol agents in northern New England apparently aren’t just ramping up their immigration enforcement on land. They’re also doing so on the water.

Canada is investigating at least two incidents in which two Canadian fishing vessels were reportedly stopped and questioned by U.S. Border Patrol agents in disputed waters off Maine, a spokesman for the country’s foreign affairs department confirmed Thursday.

The CBC reported Wednesday that the encounters occurred on June 24 and 25 in a so-called “grey zone” around Machias Seal Island and North Rock between the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the agents were just conducting “regular” patrol operations. However, Canadian officials are not happy.

“They’re being harassed,” Rick Doucet, New Brunswick’s fisheries minister, told the Toronto-based National Post. “Canadian fishermen are being harassed by U.S. border patrol. As far as I’m concerned, it needs to stop immediately.”

Doucet said Wednesday that the “heavily armed” Border Patrol agents were looking for undocumented immigrants, but that the fishermen were just “doing their job.”

“Absolutely overkill,” he said of the “disturbing” stops.

Laurence Cook, the chair of the Grand Manan Fisherman’s Association, wrote on Facebook at the time that the Border Patrol agents said they were “looking for illegal immigrants.”

“Typical American bullies,” Cook wrote in the June 25 post, asserting that the Canadian vessels were rightly fishing in Canadian water.

Read the full story at Boston.com

US border patrol boat strayed into Canadian waters chasing migrants: fishermen

July 5, 2018 — A US border patrol boat strayed into Canadian territorial waters while chasing “illegal immigrants” off the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia, Canadian fishermen said Wednesday.

Laurence Cook, chair of the Grand Manan Fishermen’s Association, said on Facebook that a US border patrol launch out of Maine attempted to stop a Canadian fishing vessel in Canadian waters.

Grand Manan is a Canadian island in the Gulf of Maine, right off the coast that hosts the border between the United States and Canada.

Cook said the incident took place on June 24 near Machias Seal Island, a tiny and rocky outcrop a dozen miles (kilometers) south of Grand Manan with rich lobster grounds, and whose sovereignty is disputed by Washington, although the Canadian Coast Guard maintains a lighthouse there.

According to Cook, the Canadian fishing captain, Nick Brown, informed the US vessel that “he was a Canadian vessel legally fishing in Canadian waters.”

“Typical American bullies,” said Cook, who said he was “not surprised to see the Americans trying to push people around.”

Ties between Canada and the United States have been strained since President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, citing US national security, with Trump calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “very dishonest” and “weak” after a spat at the G7 meeting in Quebec last month.

Read the full story from the Agence France-Presse at Yahoo.com

NOAA Fisheries Agency To Hold ‘TRAC’ Meeting with Foreign Officials

July 5, 2018 — Officials with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center are gearing up for their 20thannual ‘U.S-Canada Trans-boundary Resource Assessment Committee Meeting’ where scientists from each country will update the status of various Eastern Georges Bank fish species.

During the assessment, research survey and fishery catch data will be used to build a current picture of population sizes, numbers of young fish coming into the population, the amount of fish removed through harvests, and more.

U.S. scientists will also present some new work that evaluates how much variation there is in area swept by the trawl gear used in federal research surveys, and how this affects survey results for the TRAC species.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Canadian tariffs on US goods go into effect, but spare seafood industry

July 3, 2018 — Canada has placed tariffs valued at CAD 16.6 billion (USD 12.6 billion, EUR 10.8 billion) on American products as retaliation for a 25-percent tariff on steel and 10-percent tariff on aluminum the United States instituted earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Canada’s tariffs took effect 1 July – Canada Day. While the new tariffs affect goods ranging from beer kegs to ball point pens, orange juice to candy to bourbon, they appear to have largely spared the seafood industry.

It’s an extraordinary situation for the two countries which traditionally tout their undefended border, close relationship, and are the world’s second-largest trading block.

More than USD 1.5 billion (EUR 1.3 billion) in goods and more than 300,000 people cross the U.S. Canada border every day. The value of trade crossing the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan is equal to all of Japan’s exports to the U.S. Canada is a bigger market for U.S. goods than the 27 countries of the European Community. For example, 4,000 shipments of ingredients for Campbell’s Soup products cross from the US into Canada each day and 3,500 travel from Canada into the U.S.

Since introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1985, there has been a 350 percent rise in trade between the U.S. and Canada. Canada is one of the top five investor nations in the U.S. and is America’s primary energy source (oil, natural gas, and electricity), while Saudi Arabia is number three.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Whale Deaths Increasing Up and Down East Coast

July 3, 2018 — Determining the cause of whale deaths is slow and difficult. A vessel strike likely killed the juvenile humpback whale that washed ashore in Jamestown in June 2017, but the determination is not conclusive, according to federal Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program.

It’s common not to know what killed a whale because decomposition, especially of internal organs, happens quickly. Large sea mammals like right whales are too large to bring to a labratory and often have to be towed to shore — trailed by sharks — to perform a thorough examination. A full necropsy may take days to complete and require large equipment such as a backhoe to move a carcass that can weigh up to 150 tons. Scientists must contend with odors, layers of blubber, and offshore conditions.

“If you don’t have the machinery it can take days and days, you may never finish,” said Michael Moore, a veterinarian and whale biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in an interview with NBC News.

What is known is that whale deaths have spiked in the Atlantic. Currently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is monitoring an unusual increase in whale deaths, called unusual mortality events (UME), for three species of whales: minke, humpback, and the North Atlantic right whale.

North Atlantic right whales are highly endangered, with an estimated population of 450 and declining since 2010. If the current trend continues, the species could be extinct in 20 to 25 years, according to researchers.

Vessel collisions and entanglements with fishing gear are the leading causes of whale deaths. Fishing gear snares some 83 percent of North Atlantic right whales at least once in their lives.

The right whale UME began in June 2017 and, so far, 12 of the 19 deaths occurred in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Four washed ashore in Massachusetts.

Read the full story at ecoRI