Saving Seafood

Interior secretary visits Mass. to review marine monument

June 19, 2017 — Editor’s Note: At the request of the Department of the Interior, Saving Seafood’s National Coalition for Fishing Communities helped facilitate a meeting between Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and over 20 representatives of the commercial fishing industry. The meeting also included staff members from the offices of Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI):

Capping off a four-day New England tour, US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke visited Boston Friday to meet with local scientists and fishermen in his review of the East Coast’s only — and highly controversial — marine monument.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, located approximately 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, covers more than 4,000 square miles. It includes three underwater canyons and four seamounts — mountains rising from the ocean floor —housing dozens of deep-sea corals and several species of endangered whales.

Former president Barack Obama proclaimed the area the country’s first marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean in September 2016. The Antiquities Act, signed into law in 1906 by national parks champion Theodore Roosevelt, grants presidents unilateral authority to establish national monuments on federal land.

But now, under President Trump, the fate of the underwater zone is in doubt.

Trump signed an executive order in April directing Zinke to review all national monuments designated over the past 21 years, calling the practice of using executive authority to designate such monuments an “abusive practice.”

Zinke met with scientists from the New England Aquarium and the Massachusetts marine monument’s superintendent from the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the morning, before heading to a roundtable with local fishermen.

“Right now, I’m in the information collection stage, so everything is on the table,” Zinke said.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Sharks should be happy about new Google Earth survey of seal populations

June 14, 2017 — Gray seals are booming. They’ve flocked to coastal Massachusetts, where hunters once killed the animals wholesale — a dead seal’s nose could fetch a $5 reward in the 1960s.

Twenty years ago, there were about 2,000 seals near Cape Cod and Nantucket. A new estimate, published Wednesday in the journal Bioscience, suggests there are now as many as 50,000.

‘‘We should be celebrating the recovery of gray seals as a conservation success,’’ said David Johnston, an author of the study and marine biologist at Duke University .

Where seals go, sharks often follow. Great white sightings in Cape Cod increased from 80 in 2014 to 147 in 2016. Johnston said the shark spike may be linked to the seals. ‘‘One of our tagged animals was killed by a white shark,’’ he said.

Maine and Massachusetts once placed bounties on seals because fishermen feared they would gobble up valuable fish such as cod. (There is little evidence that seals actually compete with fishermen, Johnston said.) The century-long bounty hunt claimed up to 135,000 animals.

The seals bounced back after 1972’s Marine Mammal Protection Act outlawed the killings. ‘‘I’m a firm believer if you just stop doing bad things to wildlife they will recover,’’ Johnston said. The seals’ recovery raised a question infrequently asked in conservation: What happens after success?

‘‘We haven’t done a great job of preparing people,’’ he said, ‘‘that they would be back again.’’

Part of that means quantifying the success. In 2011, a National Marine Fisheries Service aerial survey estimated 15,000 seals swam in southeastern Massachusetts waters.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

At U.N., Brett Tolley Touts Small-Scale Fisheries

June 14, 2017 — Fisheries activist Brett Tolley of Chatham has told many people about the plight of small-scale fishermen like his father, who left the industry because he couldn’t compete with big corporate interests. Last week, he told that story to world leaders in a special forum at the United Nations in New York.

A proud member of a fourth-generation fishing family, Tolley works as a community organizer and policy advocate for the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, which lobbies for healthy fisheries and fishing communities. Last week, at the invitation of the Slow Food International Network, Tolley testified as part of a panel at the U.N. Ocean Conference.

In contrast with fast food, Slow Food represents traditional and regional cuisine from local plants, livestock and seafood.

“It’s good, clean and fair food for all,” Tolley said. The movement was born around the same time as the agricultural crisis in the 1980s, acknowledging that high-volume, low-cost industrial farms were destroying small family farms and the communities they supported.

“The industrial food system is not working,” Tolley said. Mega-farms not only cause social problems, but they don’t actually achieve the goal of providing healthier food for the masses, he added. Intense industrial farming can also leave tracts of land unusable because of pesticides and other environmental threats. With small-scale farmers, “they inherently care about the health of the land,” Tolley said. The parallels between agriculture and commercial fishing are clear, with small-scale day boat fishermen battling against large corporations to stay profitable.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Chronicle

Fishing group wants people to eat more dogfish, skates

June 1, 2017 — A Cape Cod commercial fishing group is promoting an effort to get more consumers to eat locally caught dogfish and skates in restaurants.

The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is supporting “Pier to Plate” by working with more than 20 restaurants and markets on Cape Cod to get dogfish and skates to customers.

The alliance says commercial harvest of the two fish is high, but nearly all of the catch goes to Europe and Asia. Spiny dogfish are caught from Maine to North Carolina on the East Coast, and the catch grew from less than 4 million pounds in 2005 to nearly 19 million pounds in 2015.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Fishermen hoping to reel in Obama-era conservation

May 31, 2017 — New England fishermen are looking for a seat at the table as the Trump administration mulls whether to make any adjustments to an Obama-era marine monument off Cape Cod that has drawn criticism for the potential impact on the fishing industry.

“The monument was put in place with probably less than full input by the fisheries’ people,” New England Fishery Management Council Chairman Dr. John Quinn said. “In reviewing it, we should be included in this process.”

Quinn is one of eight signatories of a letter drafted earlier this month and sent to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross Jr. asking the Trump administration to consult with the nation’s eight regional fishery management councils before taking any action.

Trump signed an executive order last month calling for a review of national monument designations made under the Antiquities Act since Jan. 1, 1996. The order, dated May 1, calls for an interim report to the president within 45 days and a final report within 120 days.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, created by former President Barack Obama last September, protects an area roughly the size of Connecticut 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod.

Read the full story at the Boston Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: Great White Shark Numbers Increasing On Cape Cod

May 26, 2017 — We’re getting close to that time of year, when the great white sharks make their annual visit to the waters of Cape Cod. Cape Cod is the only known aggregating site for white sharks in the North Atlantic.

According to the latest study by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the number of great white sharks vacationing there appears to be rising. That’s a public safety issue for towns, according to the state’s top shark expert.

Guest

Gregory Skomal, program manager and senior marine fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. His research group tweets @a_whiteshark.

Interview Highlights

On their survey of the numbers of great white sharks

“We are right in the middle of a 5-year population study … what I can tell you … is how many individuals we’ve tabulated year for the last couple of years. In 2016 for example, we identified 147 individual white sharks along the Eastern shoreline of Cape Cod. The year prior to that, it was 141 and the year prior to that in 2014, it was about 80. So we’re seeing that subtle increase from year to year. And as tempted as I am to say that it’s actually an increase in the population size, it’s more likely a shift in the distribution of sharks in response to the growing seal population.”

On how the seals are attracting sharks

“Most people don’t realize the interesting history of the seal populations on the Northeastern coast of the U.S. They had been all but drive to extinction a couple of hundred years ago. And now, with protection that was put in place in the early 1970s, we’ve seen the slow growth in the population that has now resulted in literally tens of thousands of seals along our coastline. And that has drawn the attention of one of their predators, the white shark.”

Read and listen to the full story at WBUR

Out at sea, under the watchful eyes of cameras, fishermen work as the government monitors catch

May 16, 2017 — Chris Brown has grown used to the five video cameras that record every move he and his two crew members make aboard the Proud Mary.

Since installing the equipment in January on the 45-foot otter trawler, whenever Brown steams out of Galilee in search of flounder and other groundfish in the Atlantic Ocean waters off Rhode Island, the electronic monitoring system kicks on.

And as Brown engages the boat’s hydraulics to haul in its nets, the cameras track everything he and his crew catch, all the fish they keep and all the fish they discard over the side.

The cameras may seem intrusive, but then Brown has an easy answer when asked about them.

“I’d much rather have a camera overhead than an observer under foot,” he said.

Brown is one of three Rhode Island fishermen who have signed on to a program that is testing out electronic surveillance as an alternative to human monitors that the federal government requires to be on board one in every seven fishing trips in the Northeast in an effort to stamp out overfishing.

The new program being led by The Nature Conservancy offers the potential for closer observation of commercial fishing, enhancing compliance with quotas and deterring misreporting.

Its supporters say it also provides more accurate data that will lead to better science and better regulations, all with the aim of supporting a fishing industry that is sustainable for years to come.

“There’s a mismatch between what fishermen say they see on the water and what the science says,” said Christopher McGuire, marine program director with The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts. “We’re trying to bridge that gap.”

Electronic monitoring on fishing boats is nothing new. It’s been in use in British Columbia, in Canada, for more than 15 years, was eventually adopted by American fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, and was tested by Cape Cod fishermen as far back as 2005.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

MASSACHUSETTS: Fishermen’s Alliance to Launch Program to Promote Dogfish, Skate

May 16, 2017 — The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is launching a new program Memorial Day weekend to create demand for “under-loved” fish species caught in area waters.

Pier to Plate will see small-boat fishermen give free skate and dogfish throughout the summer to 20 restaurants, a fish market and catering company on the Lower Cape to serve to customers.

“This program is actually giving the fish to the restaurants for the summer to experiment with, play with, and serve to their clients,” said Nancy Civetta, the communications director for the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. “And that way we are hoping to just make them very popular because people will be more familiar with them if they find them on restaurant menus and in fish markets.”

The skate and dogfish, or Cape shark, are caught in abundance off Cape Cod and are mostly shipped overseas to be used in restaurants in Europe and Asia.

The goal of Pier to Plate is to make a consistent supply of these species available locally in an effort to support sustainable fishing on Cape Cod and familiarize residents, visitors and chefs with the fish swimming off the shore.

“We just aren’t landing as much cod and other groundfish as we used to here on Cape Cod,” Civetta said. “It’s a changing ecosystem out there. It’s still full of fish. It’s just different fish than we are used to eating.”

Civetta said the program is receiving support from the restaurant community as the Alliance has met with many around the Lower Cape.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

JOHN PAPPALARDO: Rafael Should be Permanently Banned from Fishing, Redistribution of Quota

May 15, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Carlos Rafael pled guilty to running a massive criminal enterprise that stole from honest fishermen and undermined the fisheries as a whole.  One of his quotes offers a revealing insight into his perspective:

“This is America; anything can happen, with money behind it.”

Let’s put his money to work fixing the fishery he badly damaged.

Carlos Rafael should be banned from commercial fishing forever. The fish quota he owns should be redistributed to all the fishermen he harmed. That’s what existing regulations mandate, that’s what many in the industry believe, and we agree.

But we can demand and expect more. Honest fishermen have not been playing on a level field with the likes of Carlos. We need to make sure they aren’t put in that position again.

To do that, we must invest some of his illegal gains in fishing’s future by improving dockside monitoring, expanding electronic monitoring and increasing fishermen-scientist collaborations to get better fish counts.

We can transform this moment into an opportunity to create the oversight and infrastructure necessary to make honest, long-term success possible for our iconic fishery.

This can happen, and Carlos Rafael’s money should be behind it.

This letter originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission. 

Fishermen, Conservationists Go Head To Head Over East Coast Underwater National Monument

May 9, 2017 — New England fishermen are hoping President Donald Trump will reverse an undersea monument designation they say has cut them off from nearly 5,000 square miles of valuable fishing grounds off the coast of Cape Cod.

Trump last month directed the Department of the Interior to conduct a sweeping review of national monument designations over the last two decades, including the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, which President Barack Obama declared the first undersea national monument in the Atlantic Ocean in September.

The area is a “spectacular landscape” home to a “whole diversity of otherwordly creatures that most people are not familiar with,” said Peter Auster, a senior research scientist at Mystic Aquarium who helped secure the designation and has conducted research in the area. There are undersea canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon and extinct underwater volcanoes “taller than anything east of the Rockies” with a variety of species of fragile coral, he said.

But Joseph Gilbert, owner of Stonington-based Empire Fisheries, said since the designation, “we’ve been pushed to other areas” creating unnecessary competition and pressure as more boats are fishing in a smaller area. Fishermen, who have been using the area for 200 years, Gilbert said, were given just two months to get out.

Obama used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to declare the area a national monument, and that’s what’s at the heart of Gilbert’s objections, he said. Using the Antiquities Act circumvented the New England Fishery Management Council, the normal process for fishery management, and allowed for less input from the industry, Gilbert said.

Read the full story at the Hartford Courant