Saving Seafood

Sweden delivers salvo in lobster ban fight

August 12, 2016 — NOAA Fisheries will brief staff from the Massachusetts congressional delegation Friday on Sweden’s response to the joint U.S.-Canadian scientific effort to keep the American lobster from being included on the European Union’s list of invasive species.

Carrie Rankin, spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, said the Salem congressman’s office was informed Thursday of the briefing, but was not yet made privy to the Swedish response to the scientific analysis mounted in June by the U.S. government, trade officials, marine scientists and lobster stakeholders.

“We don’t know what the official response is yet because we haven’t seen it,” Rankin said Thursday. “We’ll know a lot more (Friday) after the briefing.”

Kate Brogan, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, confirmed Sweden has responded to the North American scientific analysis that strongly rebuts Sweden’s claims that the American lobster, also known as Homarus americanus, is an invasive threat to the indigenous lobsters living in Swedish waters.

Brogan, however, declined to provide details of the response from the European Union member.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Something new in the chill, salt air: Hope

August 8, 2016 — PETTY HARBOUR, Newfoundland — Shortly after dawn, Tom Best prodded his rusting boat past the copper-colored cliffs of the continent’s most eastern point, until it was idling over the deep, frigid waters that were once home to the world’s most bountiful fishing grounds.

The 70-year-old captain, like most other fishermen still working here, is old enough to remember better times. On a recent morning, as he eased up on the throttle and the Motion Bay came to a stop, he signaled to four grizzled men at the stern to cast their lines. Each lowered several specially designed hooks into the dark bay, unspooling their nylon lines by hand, like generations of Newfoundland fishermen before them.

But that way of life ended nearly a quarter century ago. After years of overfishing and damaging changes to the ocean environment, the Canadian government in 1992 banned nearly all commercial fishing of cod, an iconic species even more central to life here than in New England, where the fish stocks are also imperiled.

The demise of the Grand Banks fishery left tens of thousands out of work, desperate, angry, and wondering if the fish, protected by the ban, would ever come back.

Best and his crew weren’t fishing for themselves that day, but helping to seek a long elusive answer to that question. The results were immediate: In seconds, even with unbaited hooks, his men all had caught cod.

And over the course of the next 3½ hours, as puffins swooped overhead and bursts of water shot from the spouts of humpback whales, the men pulled up one fish after another — an impressive 200 in all. The mix of ages — from young to mature fish more than 3 feet long — suggested a healthy population.

“Sure is reassuring to see,” said Best, who has been fishing in these waters since he was 8 and serves as president of the local fishermen’s cooperative, which has lost more than a third of its members since the moratorium took effect. “It’s getting there.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Regulators to Vote on New Lobster Fishing Restrictions

August 5, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine – New restrictions might be proposed for southern New England’s lobster fishery as it deals with a steep decline in population.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering ways to save the lobsters and might cast a vote on Thursday.

A report from the commission says that one way to slow the loss of lobsters could be to increase the minimum harvesting size for the crustaceans.

Scientists say the population off of southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut has declined during a time of warming oceans. Lobsters have remained plentiful to consumers because of heavy supply from northern New England and Canada.

Read the full story at the Maine Public Broadcasting Network

Regulators to vote on new lobster fishing restrictions

August 4, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — New restrictions might be proposed for southern New England’s lobster fishery as it deals with a steep decline in population.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering ways to save the lobsters and might cast a vote on Thursday.

A report from the commission says that one way to slow the loss of lobsters could be to increase the minimum harvesting size for the crustaceans.

Scientists say the population off of southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut has declined during a time of warming oceans. Lobsters have remained plentiful to consumers because of heavy supply from northern New England and Canada.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

NOAA switching fish survey practice

August 3, 2016 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries announced Tuesday afternoon that it will begin the planning process to turn over part or all of a key fish population study from its flagship $54 million research vessel to private commercial fishing vessels.

“We are thinking we want to make good on our commitment in our strategic plan for more transparency and building confidence in (fish) survey results,” said William Karp, the science and research director for NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center. He said other regions, Alaska and the Northwest, use commercial vessels for this purpose.

The spring and fall bottom survey has been done by NOAA vessels since 1963 and is the longest continuous fish survey in the world. Using a special net, the 208-foot-long Henry B. Bigelow samples fish populations at 400 randomly selected sites from Cape Hatteras to the Canadian border. The relative abundance of the species they catch forms an index that helps scientists estimate fish populations along with biological information and landings data.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Minimum size for keeping caught lobster may change south of Cape Cod

August 1, 2016 — Southern New England lobster fishermen might have to start throwing back more small lobsters in an attempt to stem population losses.

New restrictions are on tap for the region’s historic lobster fishery, which is grappling with an unprecedented decline in some areas. Scientists have said lobsters off southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut have declined as ocean waters warm.

The regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering ways to help preserve the species, and a report from the commission says one way to preserve lobsters could be to increase the minimum harvesting size. The commission’s lobster board might take action on the issue Thursday.

“The biggest challenge I see is trying to establish an appropriate goal to manage the fishery in the face of what the scientists are telling us is the decline caused by ocean warming,” said Dan McKiernan, a member of the lobster board.

New England lobster fishing is one of America’s oldest industries, and it was worth more than a half-billion dollars last year. Lobsters have remained plentiful for consumers, and prices have been relatively stable because of abundant supply from northern New England and Canada.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Regulators to revisit saving southern New England’s lobsters

July 28, 2016 — LITTLE COMPTON, R.I. — Regulators are taking another look at potential strategies to revitalize southern New England’s lobster population, which scientists say has sunk to its lowest levels on record.

The lobster management board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is planning to discuss possible solutions to the problem Aug. 4 in Alexandria, Virginia, near where the commission is based.

The commission’s members have expressed a desire to find new management options to increase egg production in southern New England lobsters by 20 to 60 percent.

Among the options being considered are reducing traps and shortening the fishing season so lobsters have time to reproduce. The population has declined in the face of warming oceans.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WMDT

ALASKA: Salmon season is in full swing, and dungeness is going strong

July 11, 2016 — Salmon takes center stage each summer but many other fisheries also are in full swing from Ketchikan to Kotzebue.

For salmon, total catches by Friday were nearing 28 million fish, of which 10 million were sockeyes, primarily from Bristol Bay. Last week marked the catch of the 2 billionth sockeye from the Bay since the fishery began in 1884.

Other salmon highlights: Southeast trollers wrapped up their summer chinook fishery on Tuesday after taking 158,000 kings in just eight days. The chinook catch is strictly limited by a U.S. and Canada treaty, and for only the third summer in 15 years, trollers won’t get another allotment for an August opener.

Sockeye catches at the North Peninsula were so strong, the fleet was put on limits by Peter Pan Seafoods, the lone processor in the region. The harvest there topped 1.3 million reds last week.

It’s been slowing going around Kodiak Island, where the catch was approaching 700,000 fish, mostly sockeyes. The pace was picking up at Cook Inlet with a catch nearing 400,000, primarily reds. At Prince William Sound, the harvest of chums, pinks and sockeyes topped 7.6 million fish.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

MAINE: Herring shortage may affect the price of lobster

July 7, 2016 — Usually a Maine lobsterman can choose to either fish or cut bait, but as the result of a herring shortage, neither may be an option for awhile. Local lobster co-op managers say fishermen may have to pay more for imported frozen bait from New Brunswick until the herring spawning season ends and stocks return to normal levels off the Georges Bank. In the meantime, new state harvest restrictions for herring fishermen also may be implemented.

Inside the lobstermen’s co-op in Corea, a small Down East fishing village, the phone is ringing off the hook. Some are lobster dealers contacting co-op manager Warren Polk about prices, but more want to know about the availability of bait. And in Corea, Polk is doing a little bit better than others in that department.

“I got a load of frozen bait in this morning out of Canada,” Polk said.

Maine lobstermen prefer the herring that is caught in the Gulf of Maine and from the Georges Bank off Massachusetts. But herring fishermen are not catching the small silver-colored fish in significant numbers. The herring fishery is limited to a little more than 19,000 metric tons through the harvest season that ends in September.

Maine fishermen who fish closer to shore are concerned that some of their larger out-of-state competitors may come here and deplete the local resource if they can’t find the herring they need off the Georges Bank.

Read and listen to the full story at Maine Public Broadcasting

Carl Walters on the “precautionary approach”

July 6, 2016 — Carl Walters is a Professor Emeritus at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. His area of expertise includes fisheries assessment and sustainable management and has used that expertise to advise public agencies and industrial groups on fisheries assessment and management. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Volvo Environmental Prize in 2005. He has been a member of a number of NSERC grant committees since 1970, and received the AIFRB Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in 2011. Walters is considered the ‘father’ of adaptive management.

Misuse of the precautionary approach in fisheries management

We spoke with Carl Walters of the University of British Columbia about the misuse of the precautionary approach by risk-averse scientists and conservation advocates. His concern arises from the application of the precautionary approach to Western Canadian salmon fisheries, which he believes has negatively impacted Canadian salmon fishermen and resulted in “virtually, an economic collapse.”

He began by first differentiating between the precautionary principle and the precautionary approach, the former he claimed to be “a perfectly sensible statement that I think almost everyone would subscribe to about the need to avoid irreversible harm when possible…in the management of any system. There’s a different creature that has arisen in fisheries policy…called the precautionary approach to management” – this is the one that upsets him (00:35).

According to Walters, there are two problems with the precautionary approach (PA). First, it was concocted intuitively by highly risk-averse biologists and managers. “Those people are not the ones who bear the costs of having such a policy. It’s really easy for a highly risk-averse manager to recommend a very conservative policy because it’s not his income and economic future that’s at stake” (03:18). In fact, fishermen are seldom consulted about what harvest control rule they would prefer. Fishermen are often perceived to be relentless natural resource extractors that demand to keep fishing until it can be proven that the stock is collapsing. “That’s not the way fishermen behave” Walters says. “It turns out that most fishermen are risk-averse. They’re not pillagers, they’re not gamblers willing to take any risk at all in order to just keep fishing. They are concerned about the future and they are generally willing to follow some kind of risk-averse harvesting policy” (04:40). “Fishing is a risky business, and fishermen in general are far less risk averse than the people who end up in government and academic jobs.  But that does not mean fishermen are willing to take high risks with the productive future of the stocks that support them.”

So if both fishermen and managers are risk-averse, what’s the problem? The issue is that the interests of only one of these stakeholders is truly accounted for when designing precautionary harvest policies. In Canadian fisheries, there has been “a deliberate exclusion of fishermen in the development of these critical harvest control rules. They have no say in it. The decision rule should be based, at least to some degree, on patterns of risk-aversion that fishermen have since it’s the fishermen who bear the burden of the regulation” (09:48).

Read the full story and hear the conversation at CFood