Saving Seafood

Maine Shuts Down 2 Scallop Fishing Areas

January 3, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Maine fishing regulators are shutting down a pair of scallop fishing areas to protect the health of the population.

Scallops are one of the most valuable marine resources in Maine on a per-pound basis. The Maine Department of Marine Resources says it’s closing Hussey Sound in Casco Bay and Rogue Island Harbor as of Jan. 1.

Casco Bay is in the state’s southern scalloping zone while Rogue Island Harbor is in the zone that includes mid-coast and Downeast Maine.

Maine scallops were worth nearly $13 per pound at the dock in 2017. That is the highest figure in history. The scallops are a popular premium seafood product with markets and restaurants.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

 

With clams under siege, Maine’s Casco Bay is seeing an oyster boom

May 27, 2017 — Two years ago, Dave Hunter floated 200,000 tiny seed oysters in 4-millimeter mesh bags off Snow Island in Quahog Bay.

A full-time Brunswick firefighter, Hunter also worked as caretaker for the island, which had just been purchased by Patrick and Mary Scanlan — and Pat Scanlan wanted to dig some clams.

“Just a few clams out front, but he couldn’t because the bay would be closed each summer because boats would come in [and degrade the water],” Hunter said. “He said, ‘what do we do?’”

One mid-May afternoon, Hunter sped across the calm waters of Quahog Bay and around behind Snow Island before slowing his boat and hauling up a mesh bag full of those same oysters, now about 2½ inches long.

“A ‘cocktail’ might be a two-chew,” he said, pointing to a smaller oyster. “A ‘select’ might be a four-chew.”

Hunter scrubbed them with a brush, then shucked them and passed them around the salty-sweet oysters.

Since that first year, when Scanlan established the Quahog Bay Conservancy and began cleaning up the bay, about 70,000 of the original 200,000 Snow Island Oysters have been sold and shipped as far away as Chicago and Texas. Last year the oyster farmers started another 100,000 seed, and plan to start another 100,000 in July.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

MAINE: South Portland considers pier improvements to support anticipated aquaculture boom

January 30, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — It’s not easy to find the Portland Street Pier, but it’s there, right off Front Street, wedged among the Sunset Marina, the Saltwater Grille restaurant and a couple of massive green fuel tanks owned by the Portland Pipe Line Corp.

There’s no sign trumpeting its location, even though it’s one of South Portland’s prime waterfront assets. The weathered gray structure at the edge of Portland Harbor is empty and icy quiet this time of year, when the docks have been pulled from the water and the nine lobstermen who use the facility from spring through fall keep their fishing boats elsewhere.

City officials are trying to change that. They’re taking steps to improve and expand the long-neglected municipal pier in the hope of turning it into an incubator for aquaculture enterprises in Casco Bay. To prove that they’re heading in the right direction, they point to the ongoing development of about 10 new aquaculture leases in the region, which could double the number of commercial operations growing mussels, oysters, scallops or seaweed in the nutrient-rich waters off Maine’s largest metropolitan center.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

‘Couldn’t Get Any Fresher’ — Maine’s Scallop Industry Looks to Grow Market

January 25, 2017 — It’s scallop season in Maine. Fishermen here have hauled in over 450,000 pounds of the tender delicacy in each of the last three years, but the state produces only a tiny fraction of the entire U.S. sea scallop harvest. So to grow a market for its own brand of inshore scallops, the Maine industry is trying to sell one particular quality that sets it apart.

Just offshore from the Cousins Island town dock in Casco Bay, Alex Todd and his crew, Levi Gloden and Edward Lefebvre, are shelling scallops on Todd’s boat, the Jacob and Joshua.

“We get rid of the stomach and the mantle and all that. And just put the abductor muscle in the bucket,” Todd says.

He is one of more than 600 licensed scallop fishermen in Maine, of which about 450 are active. He has been harvesting scallops for almost 30 years, and chairs the Scallop Advisory Council, a panel that makes recommendations about the fishery.

In Maine, a few dozen fishermen dive underwater in scuba gear to harvest scallops by hand, but the majority of scallops in the state are harvested by draggers, like Todd.

“We tow the dredge — we call it drag, the federal government calls it a scallop dredge — across the bottom. There’s chains on it that tickle the top and the bottom and flip the scallops into the link bag, which we tow a couple hundred yards behind the boat depending on the depth of the water. And after say, 15 minutes, we haul it back, see how many scallops are in it. Dump it out, start over,” he says.

On a good day, like today, Todd hits his quota of 135 pounds of meat, or 3 buckets.

“And yesterday we got ‘em a little quicker. But it’s still early. It’s still good — we’re happy,” he says.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Rift over sustainability leads to cancellation of Maine Seaweed Festival

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — The Maine Seaweed Festival is a dream day for New England’s natural food lovers, who spend the day munching on seaweed granola and schmoozing with kelp harvesters at a daylong party astride sun-splashed Casco Bay.

But this year, it’s not happening, and a rift between the event’s organizers and some seaweed harvesters is the reason why. The planners of the popular festival, located in the country’s biggest seaweed state, said they are canceling the event this year over concerns about lack of sustainability.

Organizer Hillary Krapf, who runs a seaweed products and education company called Moon And Tide, said Maine’s seaweed industry has been besieged by a “Gold Rush mentality” that threatens sustainability as seaweed grows in popularity. New players are getting involved in Maine seaweed farming before there is anywhere near the infrastructure needed to sustainably process and sell it, she said.

“I would like to see more regulation and accountability. We can feel good about what we are promoting and make sure we are doing right by the ocean and its resources,” she said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD: Warming Atlantic bodes poorly for lobster industry

May 13, 2016 — It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see one possible future for the Maine lobster industry. All it takes is a look south.

Warming water temperatures, the result of man-made climate change, have for decades been the primary factor in pushing the lobster population farther and farther north, first decimating the industry off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, then off Cape Cod.

And even though the industry has been booming in Maine, with record landings the last three years, the focal point of the catch has changed through the years, from Casco Bay to Penobscot Bay and, now, Down East, a signal of its vulnerability to change.

One of the state’s iconic industries, indispensable to and inseparable from so many communities, is being disrupted. The question is: How far will it go?

Fortunately, regulators are watching.

TAKING NOTICE

The Maine Department of Marine Resources will soon award contracts for studies exploring not only the full economic impact of the lobster industry, on which there is surprisingly little data, but also the impact of warming ocean temperatures on lobster biology and the ocean ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full editorial at the Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Mild winter heats up efforts to protect Casco Bay’s clams

May 2, 2016 — Soft-shell clams are a summer tradition around Casco Bay, both for the tourists and residents who love steamers and for the clam diggers who turn long, backbreaking hours on the mud flats into cold, hard cash.

But an infestation of invasive green crabs ravaged juvenile clam stocks in the past four years, adding to ecological changes, competition for coastal access and other pressures facing the state’s second most valuable fishery. Clam landings in the Casco Bay communities of Freeport, Harpswell and Brunswick, some of the state’s leading clam producers, plummeted to historic lows in 2015, and the scarcity of soft-shell clams contributed to all-time high prices.

While some shellfish managers say clam populations have rebounded thanks to a few cold winters that killed off green crabs, harvesters are anxious that the mild winter this year could produce a resurgence of green crabs and throw the fragile industry into a tailspin.

Those fears have clam diggers and scientists stepping up efforts to defend clam beds with boxes and nets. And they are fueling calls for a sea change in the management of soft-shell clams by leasing clam beds so that clammers can better protect the resource from predators.

Some are sounding alarms that without human intervention, the resource faces total collapse.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like people are just going to be able to go out and dig clams like they have without the protection element,” said Sara Randall, a Freeport researcher working with clammers in that town.

Others worry about an overreaction. Although most agree that active management and conservation efforts will be required in the future, not all believe the industry is facing a doomsday.

“We realize there is a bunch going on, but we don’t see it as the end of wild harvest,” said Darcie Couture, a marine scientist working with Harpswell clammers.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine Shutting Down Scallop Grounds For The Season

Maine (March 21, 2016) — Maine fishing regulators are shutting down a host of areas where fishermen harvest the state’s valuable scallops.

The scalloping grounds will close for the year on Sunday. The scalloping season began in December and is scheduled to close for the year next month. The scallops tend to become more difficult to find in stores as the state closes down fishing areas.

The closing areas include the Inner Machias Area, Wohoa/Western Bay, Gouldsboro/Dyer Bay, Upper Blue Hill Bay/Union River, the Inner Jericho Bay Area and Eggemoggin Reach/Southeast Harbor Rotational Area. Casco Bay will be closed to dragging, but not diving for scallops.

Scallop-rich Cobscook Bay is also scheduled to full close for the year by March 25.

Maine scallops were worth about $5.75 million last year.

Watch the full story from the Associated Press at WABI TV 5

Invasive species exploit a warming Gulf of Maine, sometimes with destructive results

October 28, 2015 — Until two years ago, if you had walked down to the shore of Maquoit Bay at low tide, you would have seen a meadow of eelgrass stretching nearly as far as the eye could see across the exposed seafloor. Here near the head of the bay, the sea grass stretched for two miles to the opposite shore, creating a vast nursery for the shellfish and forage species of Casco Bay, of which Maquoit is a part.

Now there’s only mud.

Green crabs took over the bay in the late fall of 2012 and the spring and summer of 2013, tearing up the eelgrass in their pursuit of prey and devouring almost every clam and mussel from here to Yarmouth. Fueled by record high water temperatures in 2012 and a mild winter in 2013, the green crab population grew so huge that the mudflats of Casco Bay became cratered with their burrowing, and much of the Maquoit and adjacent Middle Bay bottom turned into a lunar landscape.

Eelgrass coverage in Maquoit Bay fell by 83 percent. With nothing rooted to the bottom, the seawater turned far muddier, making life hard on any plants or baby clams that tried to recolonize the bay.

“We were astounded,” says Hilary Neckles of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, who linked the destruction to the green crabs. “The ecological ramifications really reverberate throughout the ecosystem, because sea grass is the preferred habitat of so many fish and shellfish species.”

Over the past decade, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, allowing warm-water intruders to gain a toehold and earlier invaders such as the green crab to take over. Coupled with declines of the cold-loving species that have dominated the gulf for thousands of years, the ecological effects of even more gradual long-term warming are expected to be serious, even as precise forecasting remains beyond the state of scientific knowledge.

Scientists say the 2012 “ocean heat wave” was an unusual event, and that the 10-year accelerated warming trend is likely part of an oceanographic cycle and unlikely to continue. But the gulf has been consistently warming for more than 30 years, and long-term forecasts project average sea surface temperatures in our region could reach 2012-like levels by mid-century. The events of 2012 and the nearly as warm year that followed likely provide a preview of things to come, of a gulf radically transformed, with major implications for life on the Maine coast.

Genevieve MacDonald, who fishes for lobster out of Stonington, was standing on the dock at Isle au Haut one morning that summer, looked in the water, and couldn’t believe her eyes. There, swimming around the harbor like mackerel, were dozens and dozens of longfin squid, temperate creatures rarely seen in the chill waters of eastern Maine. “If you had a cast net you could have brought in a whole basket full of squid,” she recalls.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald