Saving Seafood

New protections for right whales

April 27, 2018 — The plight of North Atlantic right whales remains at the forefront of priorities for state and federal fisheries regulators, leading them to impose new measures to protect the marine mammals as their seasonal presence grows in the waters off Massachusetts.

Within the past week, pods of the endangered whales have announced their presence with authority in the waters off the Bay State to the delight of whale enthusiasts, marine biologists and the general public.

According to the state Department of Marine Fisheries, the most recent aerial survey last week showed 100 right whales — or about 25 percent of the species’ known population — in western Cape Cod Bay.

Last weekend, a pod of about 30 right whales — whose global population has shrunk to about 450 — was spotted feeding off the coast of Marshfield. Gloucester-based whale watch boats this week also reported the presence of right whales near the northwest corner of Stellwagen Bank.

On Wednesday, the state Division of Marine Fisheries enacted two emergency regulations “to protect vulnerable aggregations of endangered northern right whales in Cape Cod Bay” from collisions with vessels and entanglements in fishing gear.

The measures are effective immediately.

The first emergency regulation extends trap gear closures throughout most of Cape Cod Bay to May 6 from the original ending date of April 30. The closure extension does not apply to waters north of Cape Cod on Stellwagen Bank or within the Outer Cape Cod Lobster Management Area.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Fate of the Lobster Fishery May Depend on Fate of the Right Whale

April 18, 2018 — The North Atlantic right whale was once seen as an inexhaustible natural resource. It was hunted for its oil and enriched New England. That ended one-hundred years ago, but the right whale’s numbers have never been the same. Now, the whales that are left are in direct conflict with the harvesting of another rich natural resource: lobsters.

About the time when the first crocuses start to bloom, the North Atlantic right whale comes back in numbers to feed in Cape Cod Bay, and researchers go out on the water to count them.

A research vessel from the Center for Coastal Studies is off the coast of Provincetown and coordinating with a crew in a spotter plane. There are so few whales left, the scientists can often identify individual animals.  They see two: Elf and Ruffian.

When commercial whaling ended in the 1930s, there were only about 100 North Atlantic right whales left in the world. Now that people weren’t killing them on purpose, their numbers slowly climbed, topping out at about 550 in the year 2010. Then something happened. Their numbers started to drop. But why? Their relatives, the Southern right whales, are doing fine.

Michael Moore is a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has been examining dead whales for 30 years to figure out what happened to them. Moore says, “The two pieces that make the difference between the Southern right whale’s success and the Northern Atlantic right whale’s struggle has been vessel collisions and entanglement in fixed fishing gear.”

He says, in the southern oceans there are fewer ships and less fishing gear, and that has allowed Southern right whales to grow to a population of 15,000. There are now fewer than 450 North Atlantic right whales here off the coast of New England.

Read the full story at WCAI

 

Research Ramps Up as Right Whales Return to New England

April 9, 2018 — PROVINCETOWN, Mass. –Research is underway in the waters off Cape Cod as critically endangered North Atlantic right whales return to the region in large numbers.

Teams from NOAA’s Northeastern Fisheries Science Center are tracking the animals on the water and in the air via aerial and marine survey efforts.

The right whales congregate in Cape Cod Bay in the late winter and early spring every year to feed, and this year researchers have seen an increase in the number of whales off the shore of the Cape.

“Historically we see the largest number of right whales in April, but this year we’ve already seen 50-60 in March,” said NOAA researcher Lisa Conger.

Read the full story at Cape Cod

 

The Turning Tides of New England Fisheries

April 5, 2018 — Andrew Applegate’s family has been in the fishing business since his ancestors moved from Cranbury, New Jersey, to the Sandy Hook area around 100 years ago. Along with some commercial fishing, Applegate’s father ran a couple of large party fishing boats out of Atlantic City, and through the decades the family caught whatever was available. But now, Applegate is part of a New England fishing community forced to depend on fast-changing marine species they’ve never seen in the region before, and give up on others that are dying out.

The Gulf of Maine has witnessed its cod stocks collapse but its lobster population explode. To the south, in contrast to their current success north of Cape Cod, lobsters have suffered shell-wasting disease and poor productivity down into the Mid-Atlantic. And black sea bass is being found in northern New England when 20 years ago that would’ve been unheard of, says Michael Pentony, regional head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Greater Atlantic fisheries division. In the face of such changes, those involved in fisheries management are trying to prepare for a murky future. Reliable and more timely data paired with flexible regulations could, they hope, allow those in the business to adapt as fisheries change in the coming years.

These changes are forcing some to disregard historical knowledge gathered in logbooks by generations of fishermen who recorded where to catch certain fish at certain times of the year, says Ben Martens, the executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.

“Now you just have to throw those out. They don’t work anymore. And every year is completely different from the year before,” Martens says. “Sometimes we have water that’s too warm; this year we had cooler water. We’re seeing a lot more turbulence in what’s happening in our planning and in our business stability.”

Read the full story at Ozy

Canada issues safeguards to protect right whales

March 29, 2018 — OTTOWA, Canada — New restrictions on snow crab fishing, along with new restrictions on ship speeds and $1 million more each year to free marine mammals from fishing gear, have been put in place this year to protect North Atlantic right whales, Canadian government officials announced Wednesday.

“We’re confident that these measures will have a very significant impact in protecting right whales,” Fisheries and Oceans Canada Minister Dominic LeBlanc said.

But, LeBlanc said, he and Transport Minister Marc Garneau are prepared to modify the new restrictions or add more as the weeks and months unfold.

Canada was under pressure to act after the deaths of 12 right whales last summer in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from June to September, most either hit by ships or from gear entanglement.

“Our resolve is to avoid the kind of situation we had last year,” LeBlanc said.

That resolve in Canada is encouraging, said attorney Jane Davenport with the Defenders of Wildlife, a U.S.-based environmental group that with two other groups have sued the National Marine Fisheries Service and two other agencies for failing to protect right whales from lobster gear entanglements.

With the 12 dead in Canada last year and at least four identified dead off Cape Cod and the Islands, and with only five births, the North Atlantic right whale population is expected to dip below 451 from 2016.

“The government of Canada may be late to the table, not realizing the risk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but at least they’ve gotten off the stick and they’re moving forward,” said Davenport, who said she worries about what she says is a slower, less-well-funded pace in the U.S. “We need a moonshot, that kind of government investment,” she said.

Biologist Mark Baumgartner, head of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, said he was encouraged by the proposed measures in Canada, which also include more airplane and boat surveys of right whales. That amount of surveillance means that any entangled or killed whales will have a good chance of being detected, Baumgartner said.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

April Showdown Looming for Battle Over Atlantic Ocean Monument

March 28, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Fisherman and lobstermen reeled in a temporary victory after a federal court agreed to lift a 10-month stay on a lawsuit that seeks to reverse Obama-era protections for the first national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean.

In September 2016, former President Barack Obama used powers under the Antiquities Act to designate the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument.

The 5,000-square-mile monument, rich with deep coral and home to sperm whales, sea turtles and dolphins, is located just off the Georges Bank near Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The Obama-era order closed off the area to commercial fisherman, except for a handful of crabbers who were grandfathered into the deal and allowed to continue trawling for just seven years more until fishing activity would be completely barred in the region.

The plaintiffs who originally challenged the monument designation in March 2017 include the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Atlantic Offshore Lobsterman’s Association, the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, the Rhode Island Fisherman’s Alliance and the Garden State Seafood Association.

In their original lawsuit, the groups claimed Obama “exceeded his power under the Antiquities Act” when cordoning off the ocean acreage.

They argued the sea is not “land owned or controlled by the Federal government and thus not within the president’s proclaiming authority.”

“Unless a permanent injunction is issued to forbid the implementation of the proclamation’s fishing prohibitions, plaintiffs are and will continue to be irreparably harmed … and will continue to suffer a diminution of income, reduced fishing opportunities and depletion of their investment in their boats and permits,” the March 2017 complaint states.

This March 15, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg finally agreed to allow the fisherman’s lawsuit to continue, effectively turning up  pressure on the Trump administration to act.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

 

NOAA closes areas to protect whales

March 20, 2018 — As NOAA Fisheries continues to address the rising peril to whales in coastal waters stretching from New England to Florida, it is reminding local fishermen of current or impending gear closures off Massachusetts.

The closures, primarily around Cape Cod and in Cape Cod Bay, are part of NOAA Fisheries’ Atlantic large whale take reduction plan developed to provide increased protection to several species of whales — particularly the endangered North Atlantic right whales whose population continues to plummet.

Some of the gear closures impact trap and pot fishermen, while other impact gillnetters.

The closures have been greatly enlarged as part of a 2015 amendment to the large whale take reduction plan, according to Mike Asaro, the Gloucester-based marine mammal and sea turtle branch chief for NOAA Fisheries.

“The Cape Cod Bay closure has been greatly expanded northward and out beyond the outer Cape toward Nantucket,” Asaro said.

The closest closure to Cape Ann is the Massachusetts Restricted Area that encircles Cape Cod, with its northwest corner approaching the southern end of Cape Ann. The area is closed to all trap and pot fishing until April 30.

The Great South Channel restricted area, which sits to the east and southeast of Cape Cod, will be closed to all trap and pot fishing from April 30 until June 30. The Great South Channel also will be closed to all gillnetting during the same time.

Gillnetters also will be prohibited from fishing in the Cape Cod Bay restricted area until May 15.

Asaro said the closures are just one element in NOAA Fisheries’ strategy for mitigating dangers to the whales from gear and other man-made obstacles in the ocean’s waters.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester again at center of drilling fight

March 8, 2018 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — In the late-1970s, an unlikely alliance between environmentalists and commercial fishermen in this storied seaport helped block plans to open up Georges Bank to oil exploration — an effort that ultimately led to a federal moratorium on offshore drilling.

Georges Bank, a shallow and turbulent fish spawning ground southeast of Cape Ann and 100 miles east of Cape Cod, has been fished for more than 350 years. It is once again the center of a battle over drilling, this time stemming from President Donald Trump’s plan to allow private oil and gas companies to work in federal waters.

And, once again, Gloucester is poised to play an oversized role in opposing the efforts.

“It was a stupid idea back then, and it’s a stupid idea now,” said Peter Shelley, a senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, which teamed up with Gloucester fisherman to fight the proposal more than three decades ago. “But yet here we are, fighting it once again. It’s ridiculous.”

The Trump administration says existing federal policy keeps 94 percent of the outer continental shelf off-limits to drilling. A five-year plan announced by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke last year would open at least 90 percent of that area beyond state waters to development by private companies.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Massachusetts: Cape Cod drilling protesters dress to express

February 28, 2018 — BOSTON — They came dressed to make a public statement.

Brewster’s Christopher Powicki’s bearded face poked out of a plush full-length lobster costume. Kevin O’Brien of Boston was head-to-toe great white shark, and Don Mallinson of East Falmouth wore a cardboard tricorn hat — think homemade “Cheesehead” — with each side bearing an anti-oil and gas drilling message like “Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, New England.”

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management didn’t allow oral testimony at its public meeting Tuesday at the Sheraton Boston Hotel on a Trump administration proposal to open New England’s ocean waters to gas and oil exploration and extraction. While speakers lining up to give testimony at public hearings has been a familiar sight for other controversial proposals, like the defunct Cape Wind project, that practice ended for the bureau five years ago under the Obama administration.

That didn’t stop people from making their voices heard Tuesday. A costumed, sign-bearing crowd jammed into a conference room a floor above the agency’s public meeting rooms to listen to representatives from a panoply of environmental organizations, more than 20 nonprofit organizations, state elected officials, and others, speak in opposition to exploration and drilling anywhere off the New England coastline.

Their concerns ranged from the effects on everything from plankton to whales of seismic testing, which is used to pinpoint likely oil and gas deposits, and the possible effects of an oil spill on fisheries, marine life and our valuable coastline and tourist economy.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

NMFS Northeast Administrator Michael Pentony taking on whale crisis

February 23, 2018 — In January, Michael Pentony was named to replace John Bullard as the new Regional Administrator for NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Regional Office. Pentony has been with NOAA since 2002 and was most recently the Assistant Regional Administrator for the Sustainable Fisheries Division. Prior to joining NOAA, he was a policy analyst for five years at the New England Fishery Management Council.

Supervising recreational and commercial fisheries, as well as overseeing the welfare of marine species like whales and seals in 100,000 square miles of ocean from the Canadian border to Cape Hatteras and the Great Lakes is no easy task. Pentony inherited a region of tremendous potential but beset by problems both environmental and regulatory.

“The number one issue right now is the right whale crisis,” Pentony said in a phone interview Thursday. “It will occupy our resources and energy for the next several years until we can reverse the trend. That’s going to be a significant challenge.”

NOAA has the unenviable task of managing fisheries so that fishermen get the maximum sustainable yield out of commercial species while being legally bound to protect and restore the endangered North Atlantic right whale. Pentony’s agency has been named in two recent lawsuits that homed in on its management of the New England lobster industry, one of the primary culprits responsible for whale deaths through entanglement in buoy lines.

“There’s definitely a sense of urgency. We have to take action and look at all possible avenues,” Pentony said. “We have a lot of faith in the (Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team) process…Right now everything has to be on the table because it’s such a crisis.”

At the same time, lobsters, which are critical to the economy of many small coastal communities, particularly in Maine, are showing some signs that their boom years may be coming to an end. “Hopefully, lobster in the Gulf of Maine is not going to be a problem like we’ve seen in Southern New England lobster. It’s something we are keeping an eye on,” Pentony said.

A large part of the decline of the lobster population to the south of Cape Cod was warming waters due to climate change. Pentony said a warming ocean and its effect on stock abundance, prey, water currents, temperature gradients, increased susceptibility to disease, impacts many species. Many are on the move, seeking cooler water, perhaps in habitats that provide less food or inadequate protection from predators. Others require management changes that could take time.

Black sea bass, for instance, appear to be moving north into the Gulf of Maine where they were rarely seen in numbers. But the bulk of the quota is held by southern states. Unless higher quotas are negotiated for New England fishermen, they could find their fishery on other species restricted by a limit on black sea bass while losing out on selling the bass they do catch.

“That’s a climate change issue and a management conundrum,” Pentony said. “We have management challenges on stocks that are in poor shape, but even on a healthy stock we have these challenges.”

Pentony would like to see the expansion of aquaculture, both shellfish and finfish.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times