Saving Seafood

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

Strong halibut catches in Alaska leading to higher quotas

July 1, 2016 — After years of slashed quotas, the Alaskan halibut fishery is enjoying a second year of growth in 2016.

The 2016 quota share commercial halibut fisheries opened on 19 March with a fleet-wide quota of 18.16 million pounds. The quota is up from 17.93 million pounds in 2015 and 16.75 million pounds in 2014.

Quota improvements have also been seen in British Columbia, Canada. The 2016 B.C. quota is 6.20 million pounds up from 5.91 million pounds in 2015 and 5.79 million pounds in 2014.

“We’ve been on a bit of decrease since the peak of the halibut stock abundance in the late 1990s, but last year [2015] saw the first year of an increase in quite a number of years,” said Bruce Leaman, the executive director of the International Pacific Halibut Commission, the public international organization responsible for managing the fisheries.

IPHC released its latest landing report on 21 June, 2016, and to that date, catch rates have been similar to last year. Alaskan fishermen have landed 8.8 million pounds of halibut, or 48 percent of the 2016 commercial fishery catch limit. At this same date last year 8.8 million pounds had been harvested, representing 49 percent of the 2015 catch limit.

“[The fishing is] about on par with what we’ve seen other years in terms of how quickly the quota is being caught,” Leaman said.

He went on to predict a lull in halibut landings during the summer as many vessels leave off halibut fishing to pursue salmon and other species caught during shorter management periods.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Canada’s fish stocks poorly tracked — report

June 30, 2016 — As the federal government prepares to make major decisions about whether or not to expand access to clam and shrimp stocks in Atlantic Canada, a group of marine researchers are urging better tracking and more accountability for one of the country’s most valuable resources.

The Canadian chapter of international ocean conservation organization Oceana recently completed the most comprehensive public study ever conducted on the state of Canada’s fish stocks. But, according to Halifax-based marine biologist and report co-author Susanna Fuller, it wasn’t easy.

“It should not be that hard to find management decisions, whether or not something has a management plan, and the state of a stock, and it is hard right now,” she said.

Compiling the report often came down to calling individual scientists to get the data required, Fuller said, and some data wasn’t available at all — they were only able to get information on 125 of the 165 stocks they looked at.

“It’s shocking that in Canada you can’t find anywhere a list of all the fisheries in Canada that is publicly available” she said.

“When you compare that to the U.S., all that information is online. You can find it, it’s easy, and there’s an obligation in the U.S. that they actually have to report to Congress on how the fish stocks are doing.”

Read the full story at the Herald News

EU wants bolstered lobster claim

June 27, 2016 — As if the European Union doesn’t have enough trouble with Britain pulling the big vamoose Thursday. It still has the whole issue of American lobsters to resolve.

An EU scientific forum has given Sweden until July 31 to respond to the avalanche of U.S. and Canadian diplomatic, scientific and commercial opposition to the Swedish-led proposal to label the American lobster an invasive alien species and ban its import by the EU.

The action by the EU scientific forum, announced in a statement from the Maine congressional delegation, gives Sweden’s scientists until the end of the month to reinforce or expand their scientific basis for the American lobsters as an invasive species posing a threat to the indigenous European lobster population.

According to the office of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, an EU official told the Maine delegation that “the feedback provided by Canada and the U.S. provided new elements, some of which were not yet considered in the (Swedish) risk assessment” and that led to the forum’s request that Sweden “update the risk assessment taking into account these elements as appropriate.”

Combined, the U.S (about $160 million) and Canada (about $75 million) ship about $235 million worth of live lobsters to the EU, which sits at 27 members with Britain’s departure.

“We’re very happy with the EU scientific forum’s ruling,” said Beth Casoni, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association. “We’ve had discussions with everyone from Secretary of State (John) Kerry’s office to our state and local officials and everyone has been unbelievably supportive. Now we’re in sort of a holding pattern, waiting to see what Sweden does.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times