Saving Seafood

To protect right whales, scientists propose major changes for lobstermen

February 20, 2018 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Without prompt action to reduce entanglements in fishing lines, North Atlantic right whales could disappear from the planet over the next two decades, scientists say.

In response, scientists here on Cape Cod are proposing a novel way to save the species — one that many New England lobstermen fear could destroy their livelihoods.

At a recent meeting with a host of skeptical lobstermen, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution presented the concept of ropeless fishing, a nascent technology that eliminates the need for the long, taut ropes that extend from millions of traps at the bottom of the ocean to their buoys at the surface. These ropes have killed many of the docile mammals.

“I want to see a profitable, sustainable lobster industry that’s not abusive to the animals,” said Michael Moore, director of the Marine Mammal Center at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “But what’s happening now isn’t working. We’re painfully and inexorably squeezing the life out of these animals.”

Over the past year, at least 18 right whales have died — a grave blow to a species with only about 450 left in the world and just 100 breeding females. Scientists fear they’re not reproducing fast enough and could face extinction as soon as 2040.

The problem, Moore and his colleagues say, is that most fatalities appear to be the result of right whales becoming entangled in fishing lines. In a federal survey of right whale deaths between 2010 and 2014, scientists found that 82 percent died as a result of entanglements. The rest died from ship strikes.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

Commercial fishermen question wind farm video

February 16, 2018 — BOSTON — Offshore wind proponents are touting new undersea footage that suggests a vibrant marine habitat is growing around the nation’s first offshore wind farm — a five-turbine operation off Rhode Island’s waters.

The American Wind Energy Association, an industry trade group, says the roughly two-minute clip it posted on YouTube this week shows the potential for the nation’s fishing industry as larger projects are envisioned up and down the East Coast.

“The turbine foundations are now acting as an artificial reef,” said Nancy Sopko, the wind energy association’s director of offshore wind and federal legislative affairs. “This is a success story that can be replicated all along our coastlines.”

But the video does little to temper the concerns of commercial fishermen, who are worried about navigating dense forests of turbines to get to their historic fishing grounds, says Jim Kendall, a former scallop fisherman in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

“This is nice and fun to see, but it doesn’t tip the conversation,” Seth Rolbein, of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance in Chatham, Massachusetts, said of the video.

Offshore wind developers from New England to the Carolinas are racing to build the nation’s first large-scale wind farm. Many of the projects call for hundreds of turbines to be built miles away from shore, sometimes within or along the path to lucrative fishing spots.

The wind energy association video shows beds of mussels taking shape and small fish swimming around the turbine bases. The brief underwater footage is juxtaposed with longer testimonials from local recreational fishermen and charter boat owners who say the Deepwater Wind project has been a boon for them since opened it more than a year ago.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Coast Guard saves crew of 4 from sinking New Bedford vessel

February 15, 2018 — A New Bedford-based fishing vessel sank Wednesday night off Martha’s Vineyard, but its crew of four is fine thanks to their fast action in taking safety measures, the Coast Guard said.

The Sea Star radioed about 6:20 p.m. that it was quickly taking on water, listing heavily and crew members were donning their survival suits, Petty Officer Nicole Groll, a Coast Guard public affairs specialist said about 9:10 p.m. Wednesday.

A Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter and plane from Sector Southeastern New England, in the area for a training exercise, were diverted to the scene, Groll said. Determining that the vessel couldn’t be saved, the Coast Guard ordered the crew into the waters about 18 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, where they plucked them to safety via basket, she said.

The water temperature was 37 degrees, with 5-foot seas and 20 to 25 knot winds, making conditions difficult, Groll said.

The crew members were airlifted to Air Station Cape Cod where they were checked out by medical personnel and pronounced in good health, she said.

“The most important thing the crew did was to activate their EPIRB” (a positioning beacon) and don their survival suits, said Scott Backholm, the command duty officer at Sector Southeastern New England. While the EPIRB automatically goes off when a boat is sinking, the fact that they had the presence of mind to activate it before that “allowed us to get their exact location and get to them as quickly as possible,” he said.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Massachusetts: Vineyard Wind wins state nod for undersea transmission cable

February 14, 2018 — BOSTON — One of three offshore wind developers hoping to score major Massachusetts utility contracts has made progress in its state environmental review.

Vineyard Wind LLC gained an Environmental Notification Form certificate for a transmission cable from a spot in the Atlantic Ocean to a substation on Cape Cod, the company announced Monday. The ENF certificate lists the issues that must be addressed in an upcoming Draft Environmental Impact Report.

Vineyard Wind plans an 800-megawatt wind farm 34 miles from Cape Cod. The planned transmission cables would travel 40 miles underwater and six miles underground to a switching station in Barnstable, where they would connect to New England’s bulk power grid.

In December, three entities — Baystate Wind, Deepwater Wind and Vineyard Wind — submitted proposals under the Massachusetts Clean Energy RFP. The solicitation seeks up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power. The winner, to be announced in April, will gain valuable long-term power contracts with Eversource, National Grid, and Unitil.

Vineyard Wind says it is further along than its competitors, could begin construction in late 2019, and is “the only proposed offshore wind project in Massachusetts that has begun the process of obtaining state and federal permits.”

Read the full story at MassLive

 

Attorneys general urge offshore drilling plan’s cancellation

February 2, 2018 — The top lawyers for a dozen coastal states want the U.S. Interior Department to cancel the Trump administration’s plan to expand offshore drilling, warning it threatens their maritime economies and natural resources.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and her fellow attorneys general, all Democrats, wrote Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday about his agency’s proposed five-year oil and gas leasing plan that opens new ocean waters.

“Not only does this irresponsible and careless plan put our state’s jobs and environment at risk, but it shows utter disregard for the will and voices of thousands of local businesses and fishing families,” said Healey in a prepared statement. “My colleagues and I will continue to fight this plan.”

Healey first announced her opposition to the plan in an August 2017 letter to Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The Northeast Seafood Coalition and the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association agreed with her that the Interior Department’s plan to expand offshore drilling threatens Massachusetts’ $7.3 billion commercial fishing industry — the third largest in the country — and more than 240,000 jobs in the state.

The plan also could devastate the state’s robust recreation and tourism industries, according to Healey, as well harm the state’s coastal environment and protected endangered species, including the Northern Right Whale, which feeds in the waters off of Cape Cod and Nantucket, according to the comment letter. There are only about 460 critically endangered Northern Right Whales remaining worldwide.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Susan Larsen: What’s causing right whale decline?

January 30, 2018 — There is no argument that the North Atlantic Right Whale is in dire straits. Dr. Mark Baumgartner, a biologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, gave a compelling presentation on “The Plight of the Right Whale” this past Tuesday evening, Jan. 23, at the Vineyard Gazette office. Since it was advertised, it was well attended.

One point of interest was that the right whales were making a healthy comeback, a two-decade period of modest annual growth; the population rebounded from 270 living whales in 1992 to 483 in 2010. From 2010, the numbers began to decline rapidly, with 2017 being a particularly devastating year, a loss of 17 whales. Dr. Baumgartner stressed the main focus was on whale entanglements with snow crab and lobster gear, and the urgent measures needed to be taken immediately within the fishery. Massachusetts fishermen are leading the way with break away links at the base of surface buoys (to 600lbs in 2001), sink rope (mandated in 2003), gear reductions and seasonal gear restrictions in Cape Cod Bay. He also touched on ship strikes as being a cause of death. However, the Marine Mammal Commission stated on their website, “other potential threats include spills of hazardous substances from ships or other sources, and noise from ships and industrial activities.”

But what Dr. Baumgartner could not explain was the scarcity of food that these leviathans need to feed on and their low birth rate. He showed the audience slides on the Calanus finmarchicus, known as copepods and remarked that this type plankton, sought after by these whales, are basically comprised of fat, or as Dr. Baumgartner called them “buttersticks.” Each adult whale needs to consume between 1,000-2,000 a day to remain healthy. The birth rate has dropped 40 percent from 2010-2016 and all five calves that were born in 2017 were to older mothers. “Since about 2011, we’re not seeing those sub-adults and juveniles in Florida and the question is, well, where are they?” asks Jim Hain, senior scientist at Associated Scientist at Woods Hole. Scott Kraus, a marine mammalogist from the New England Aquarium in Boston says, “Females are having young just every 9 years or more, compared with every 3 years in the 1980’s.”

Perhaps the decline is linked to the environmental disaster on April 20, 2010, the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. From April 20, 2010, to July 15, 2010, more than 200 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf followed by another one million gallons of Corexit, a dispersant mixture of solvents and surfactants that break down the oil into tiny droplets. It is documented that for 3 months, marine microorganisms have ingested these toxins, which are carried along the Gulf Stream, a strong underwater current that flows through the Gulf of Mexico, skirts around Florida, flowing between Cuba and up the Eastern seaboard. Since the right whale gives birth off the coasts of Georgia and Florida, could these toxic chemicals be part of their decline?  “The chemicals in the oil product that move up through the food web are a great concern for us,” said Teri Rowles, coordinator of NOAA’s marine-mammal health and stranding response program. It is also documented that female mammals including humans who have been in contact with these toxins have suffered from irregular menstrual cycles, infertility, miscarriages and stillborns, along with premature aging and other debilitating side effects. John Pierce Wise Sr., co-author of the 2014 study and head of the Wise laboratory of Environment and Genetic Toxicology at the University of Southern Maine says, “To put it simply, after a sudden insult like an oil spill, once it’s over, it takes a long time for the population effects to fully show themselves.” This same article states “research has shown that the calves of other baleen whales (other than Bryde’s whale) may be particularly vulnerable to toxins that build in their tissues.”

A letter dated Aug. 17, 2017, from the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General in “Reference for information and comments of the 2019-2024 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program,” refers to the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its “harm to coastal communities and marine environment” and “long ranging impacts on marine mammals. The impacts on sea turtles could span the Atlantic.” The letter also states, “from 2010 through September 2016, there were 43 significant oil spills.”

In an article dated Dec. 5, 2017, ecologist Peter Corkeron of NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Center in Woods Hole at the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium’s annual meeting, “They’re (female right whales) dying too young, and they’re not having calves often enough.” This study found the females are struggling to reproduce. Dr. Baumgartner is the president of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium.

Read the full letter at the Martha’s Vineyard-Times 

 

Officials ask fishing vessels to slow down for right whales

January 29, 2018 — Federal officials are asking large commercial fishing vessels to slow down after nearly two dozen North Atlantic right whales were spotted in the waters off Nantucket.

The Boston Globe reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement Friday saying a voluntary speed restriction zone has been established 30 nautical miles south of Nantucket. It says 22 right whales have been seen in that area.

Mariners are asked to go around the area or to pass through it at 10 knots or less. The request remains in effect through Feb. 5.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WITF

 

Study: Maine’s lobster population will drop but fishery ‘not doomed’

January 26, 2018 — The lobster population in the Gulf of Maine could decline by nearly two-thirds by 2050, according to a scientific study released this week.

As bad as that sounds, scientists and industry representatives say the demise of the most valuable single-species fishery in the country is unlikely.

“It doesn’t mean Maine’s lobster fishery is doomed,” said Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at Gulf of Maine Research Institute and a co-author of the study.

The predicted decline was included in the results of a study conducted by GMRI and other research groups about the effect of conservation measures on lobster fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and off the southern New England coast.

The lobster population could decline between 40 percent and 62 percent over the next 32 years, depending on how much waters continue to warm in the Gulf of Maine, researchers found. The total stock of lobster for the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank is in the neighborhood of 300 million lobsters, according to the most recent stock assessment by Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The study found that lobster conservation measures in Maine aimed at protecting reproductive females and oversize adult lobsters in general, which date back to the early 20th century, have helped amplify the temporary benefit of warming seas to the lobster population in the gulf, which is warming more quickly than 99.9 percent of the world’s oceans.

In comparison, the lack of similar measures in southern New England hurt the lobster population south of Cape Cod now that waters there have become too warm to help support the growth of juvenile lobsters.

“Maintaining measures to preserve large reproductive females can mitigate negative impacts of warming on the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery in future decades,” researchers wrote in the study, which was published Jan. 22 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If the gulf’s lobster population does drop by 40 or even 60 percent over the next 32 years, the decline will be more gradual than the boom that preceded it. At that decrease, the gulf’s average lobster populations would be “similar to those in the early 2000s,” GMRI officials said.

From 1997 through 2008, Maine’s annual harvests fluctuated between 47 million and 75 million pounds. It is only within the past 10 years, since Maine lobstermen harvested 64 million pounds in 2007, that statewide landings have doubled.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

Federal government failing to protect right whales from destruction, lawsuit alleges

January 22, 2018 — The federal government must do more to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from getting tangled up in lobster gear, a leading cause of death for the rapidly declining mammals, a lawsuit filed Wednesday asserts.

A coalition of environmental groups filed the suit in US District Court in Washington, D.C., against officials from the Commerce Department and National Marine Fisheries Service.

According to a 33-page civil complaint, there were only about 455 right whales in 2016, and at least 17 died last year, “pushing the species even closer to the brink of extinction.” Many of the whales have been spotted off Cape Cod.

The complaint says entanglement in commercial fishing gear has been the “primary cause” of right whale deaths in recent years, and the “lobster fishery is a U.S. fishery that frequently entangles right whales.”

In 2014, the complaint states, the fisheries service issued a “biological opinion” finding that the lobster fishery is likely to kill or seriously injure more than three North Atlantic right whales every year, yet the agency also concluded “the fishery is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of North Atlantic right whales.”

The suit alleges the fisheries service “is failing to ensure that its continued authorization, permitting, and management of the American lobster fishery does not jeopardize the continued existence of endangered North Atlantic right whales.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

Cape Cod Times: A landmark fisheries plan

January 15, 2018 — For seafood lovers, there’s nothing better than a lightly battered scallop, freshly harvested from the North Atlantic, and dipped in simmering butter. And now that federal regulators have agreed to open an area east of Nantucket, closed since the 1990s, fishermen could catch as much as $218 million worth of scallops this year, and $313 million over three years. Expect those fried scallop plates to cost less this summer.

The reopening of the sea bed is just one of the many beneficial outcomes of a new fisheries management plan that was nearly 15 years in the making. The landmark set of regulations opens a large swath of the region’s waters to fishing while maintaining other closures to protect vulnerable species. The plan uses science and the latest technology to decide which ocean areas are important for the critical life stages of fish and shellfish species and how to protect them.

Two decades ago, habitat closures were decided based on drawing a line around areas where fish were congregating. Now, with a model that compares the sea bed with the impact of fishing, regulators can make decisions that will help restore and protect fish stocks. The new plan also sets aside research areas to investigate the link between habitat and fish productivity.

“We think these are groundbreaking regulations,” said John Bullard, NOAA’s outgoing regional administrator, who issued the regulations as one of his last acts on the job. “It puts the focus on the quality of the habitat protected — not the quantity, or how many square miles were protected.”

Cape fishermen are pleased with at least two elements of the plan. They cheered the closing of a large part of the Great South Channel that runs between the Cape and Georges Bank because it is essential habitat for spawning cod and other fish species. State and federal surveys have found that the region’s cod population has plummeted by about 80 percent over the past decade. Closing this area will now help ensure the continued survival of species like Atlantic cod, haddock, and flounder for years to come.

Read the full opinion piece at the Cape Cod Times