Saving Seafood

Your love for fresh oysters can help the planet

July 27, 2021 — We drop anchor and I learn the trick to the perfect shuck—gently work the knife into the back hinge—and slurp the freshest oyster I’ve ever tasted. The mollusk was harvested minutes earlier from the lineup of floating cages beside our boat in this secluded section of Maine’s Casco Bay.

“There’s a freshwater spring off Upper Goose Island that drains out right into the farm and cuts the salinity, so our oyster is much more bright and balanced, with a light cucumber finish,” says Cameron Barner, an oyster farm owner with an advanced degree in aquaculture, and my tour guide for the afternoon. “If you go upriver or eat bottom-planted oysters, you get a more minerally umami flavor.”

Oyster farm tours, like this one led by Love Point Oysters, and self-guided bi-valve trails are cropping up throughout the United States. COVID-19 stalled the trend but with travel restrictions loosening, oyster enthusiasts are once again back on track. Along the Maine Oyster Trail, which re-launched in June, tasting tourists can earn swag by “checking in” at various experiences and sites along the trail, including Love Point. Other trails can be found in Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington, the country’s largest producer of aquaculture.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Concert at sea will raise money for Maine’s lobster industry

July 29, 2020 — An organization that supports fishermen is holding a socially distanced concert on the sea to raise money for Maine’s lobster industry.

Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation is holding the concert on the waters of Casco Bay on Aug. 2. The band Turd Pollock is volunteering to play the show from a float on the water.

Boaters are invited to drop anchor on the southeast side of Chebeague Island, organizers said. The event will also be live streamed on Facebook from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Friends of Casco Bay will add data stations to get a clearer picture of quickly changing waters

November 18, 2019 — Researchers for Friends of Casco Bay plan to add two round-the-clock water-quality monitoring stations to better track temperature, acidity and potential marine “stressors” in a busy corner of the fast-changing Gulf of Maine.

After roughly 30 years of manually collecting and testing water samples once a month, Friends of Casco Bay launched the nonprofit’s first “continuous monitoring station” near Cousins Island in Yarmouth in 2016.

The station has collected hourly data on water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and other environmental conditions as the organization sought to build upon the “snapshot” of monthly data that was clearly showing changes in Casco Bay.

“It wasn’t enough to go out once a month. We needed to start documenting the changes we’ve been seeing,” said Mike Doan, the research associate at Friends of Casco Bay who has collected much of that data for the past two decades. “We realized we didn’t have the frequency of data to really track change. If you want to get serious about documenting change, you need frequent data.”

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald

Waters off the coast of Maine vulnerable to changing climate

September 16, 2019 — From the one-lane bridge over the Little River at low water, you can see men hunched over the mudflats, hundreds of yards from shore, flipping the sea bottom with their pitchfork-like hoes to reveal the clams hiding there.

The clams, the basis of livelihood for generations of diggers from Cape Porpoise to Lubec, are back, at least for now, their numbers slowly recovering from a climate-driven disaster that will almost certainly strike again.

Six years ago, after the Gulf of Maine warmed to unprecedented levels, green crabs flooded over these northern embayments of Casco Bay like a plague of locusts, tearing away seagrass meadows, pockmarking salt marshes with their burrows, and devouring most every mussel and soft-shell clam in their path.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine Proposes To Keep Scallop Season Mostly Status Quo

September 10, 2019 — Maine is considering a scallop fishing season that would allow fishermen to harvest levels of the shellfish similar to last year.

The state’s scallop season takes place in the winter and spring and provides some of the most valuable seafood in Maine. The Maine Department of Marine Resources says daily possession limits would remain the same as last season.

The state is also seeking to close some areas along the coast to allow the scallop population to rebuild. That includes eastern Casco Bay and Upper Sheepscot River.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Maine Public

A large algae bloom has been spotted off Maine’s coast

August 29, 2019 — State officials are monitoring a large algae bloom in Casco Bay that stretches from around Chebeague Island to Phippsburg.

Kohl Kanwit, director of the Maine Department of Marine Resources’ Bureau of Public Health, said Karenia mikimotoi is a nuisance species that turns the water rusty brown and can have a foul smell. But she said it has no effect on human health and safety, either by swimming or eating seafood caught in the water.

Kanwit said if the bloom gets large enough, it can harm marine organisms.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Petition seeks moratorium on large aquaculture leases

March 22, 2019 — Save Maquoit Bay, a group formed to address issues with aquaculture, and lobstermen from around the state have submitted a petition to the Department of Marine Resources requesting an immediate moratorium on aquaculture leases greater than 10 acres in size.

The petition has 189 signatures, 39 more than required to open rulemaking around aquaculture leases, according to a news release.

The petition comes in the wake of an application by Mere Point Oyster Co. for a 40-acre lease in the bay, which is in the north end of Casco Bay, in between Freeport and Brunswick. The application, for a 10-year lease, is to cultivate Eastern oysters, bay scallops and sea scallops.

Mere Point Oyster Co. is owned by Dan Devereaux and Doug Niven.

Supporters of the petition spoke about it at a Tuesday news conference at the State House.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Generations of Maine fishermen keep shuckin’ in the cold

February 22, 2019 — The salt water of Casco Bay is in Alex Todd’s blood.

“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he said as he headed out off Chebeague Island with the sun just starting to peak above the horizon.

His boat, the Jacob & Joshua, named after his sons are out on these waters year-round.

Todd’s 17-year-old son Joshua was spending his February school vacation out on the boat fishing for scallops.

Joshua and sternman Levi Gloden pulled in shellfish in subzero temperatures as ice started to build up on the deck.

“It’s harder on them than it is on me,” Alex Todd said.

As the boat’s captain, Todd careful picks locations to drag the ocean floor for the prized shellfish, all from the comfort of the heated cabin where he sips his morning coffee.

“Every once in a while I’ll open the door and say, ‘Now do you think I should take a shirt off or? You know what I’m getting a little hot,’” Todd said. “I get a kick out of it but they don’t see the humor as much.”

That sense of humor is what keeps the crew going through the harsh winter months.

With every catch, Joshua and Levi alternate jobs, then sort and measure every shellfish by hand and throwing them in baskets.

Read the full story at News Center Maine

Farmed Scallops are Coming to a Plate Near You

September 11, 2018 — Bangs Island Mussels’ farm manager Jon Gorman heads out on Casco Bay, off of Portland, Maine, in a blue and white fishing boat named Le Cozze (Italian for mussels). He motors past one of the rafts where the company is growing mussels and on to a more unusual venture: Bangs Island’s new sea scallop farm.

Gorman cuts the engine and drops the anchor, under the watchful eyes of harbor seals lounging on a nearby island. Scallops need cold, nutrient-dense water to grow, and Maine’s protected bays provide the ideal environment.

Cranking a winch, Gorman and his crew pull up a taut, algae-covered rope from the depths of Casco Bay’s gray water. Leaning over the side, they haul out a lantern net, a long, box-shaped structure that serves as a scallop nursery, onto the deck. Gorman reaches into one of the lantern net’s 10 compartments and pulls out a handful of golden-brown scallop shells, about the size of old-fashioned silver dollars.

Eyeballing them, he looks pleased. When his measurement confirms they’re 65 millimeters across, Gorman nods. “These are ready for ear hanging,” he says.

Gently dropping the lantern net back in the water, the crew motors further out, where 2,000 larger scallops are hanging on 26 longlines. The crew hauls up a line with dozens of larger scallops, hanging in pairs by their “ears,” the flat wings that fan out from the base of the shell. The animals that emerge from the water are lively; they’re snapping and gurgling, coated with algae and a smattering of barnacles.

Gorman measures again. These scallops are on target for harvest in the fall, which means that Bangs Island Mussels will be one of the first companies to bring a mature, environmentally friendly, farmed sea scallop to market in the U.S.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Mainers look to farms to boost scallops, a wild staple

August 27, 2018 — Scallops are among the most valuable and beloved seafood items in the U.S., and a group of Maine firms thinks farming them might be a way of keeping up with increasing demand.

The Atlantic sea scallop is a New England mainstay, but unlike oysters and mussels, they’re almost exclusively harvested from the wild on the East Coast. A loose consortium of aquaculture businesses off the Maine coast is looking to change that by making scallop farming a viable option here. It’s one of the first serious attempts to farm Atlantic sea scallops in the United States.

One of the groups, Bangs Island Mussels of Portland, is using the largest amount of Japanese scallop farming equipment ever used by an American scallop farm. The Japanese have farmed scallops for decades, and Bangs Island hopes to learn from their example, said Matthew Moretti, the company’s co-owner.

Bangs Island began growing scallops at its farm in Casco Bay three years ago, and could have a few thousand scallops to market as soon as this fall, Moretti said. Maine scallops sometimes sell for $25 per pound, but the fishery only takes place in the winter, and farming represents a chance to bring the product to customers year round, he said.

“Scallops are higher value, and there’s a traditional fishery here,” he said. “It would be great to expand it.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Sioux City Journal