Saving Seafood

The Eel Deal: This D.C. Restaurant Serves Up Eel From The Chesapeake

September 14, 2018 — Eels are misunderstood. They’re slimy, and look like snakes—which makes it hard for some people to stomach the thought of eating one. But eel season is ramping up at one D.C. restaurant, where the chef serves eels caught in the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite appearances, eels are fish. They breathe through gills and move using two long fins—one down their back, another along their bellies. The two fins meet to form a tail.

At seafood restaurant The Salt Line, chef Kyle Bailey is happy to offer eel to his customers.

“They’re available and I want that because I don’t see them anywhere else in town, and I would love to be the restaurant that has something that nobody else has,” Bailey says.

Bailey’s eels are provided by Dock-to-Dish, a restaurant-supported fishery program in the Washington region. It allows chefs to trace the fish they get back to the dock they came from.

From Kent Island To The Salt Line

The source of Bailey’s eels is Troy Wilkins, one of a couple dozen Maryland watermen who fish for the elusive, yet abundant creatures on a regular basis.

On a recent day, Wilkins sails near Kent Island in the Chesapeake. From the deck of his fishing boat, the Misty Tango, he reels in two-foot-long, cylindrical eel pots one by one.

Several pots come up nearly full. Roughly a dozen greenish-brown eels writhe around inside the pots before he dumps them into a holding tank. Some eels are big, about four or five pounds. Others are much smaller.

Read the full story at DCist

 

Virginia gets a year to comply with menhaden limits or face moratorium

September 10, 2018 — East Coast fishery managers have decided to give Virginia until next year to adopt regulations that limit catches of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay rather than seek an immediate moratorium on harvests.

Conservation groups and the fishing industry have been engaged in a long-running battle over how many menhaden can be caught without ecological consequences.

Humans don’t eat menhaden, but the small, oily fish are a critical food for a host of marine life from whales to striped bass. While the overall stock is considered healthy, conservationists have argued that such evaluations do not account for its role as forage for fish, birds and marine mammals.

Last fall, forage fish advocates persuaded the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to slash the maximum allowable harvest in the Bay — where much of the East Coast harvest takes place — from 87,216 metric tons to 51,000 metric tons a year, even as it increased the total allowable coastwide catch.

But the action angered Omega Protein, which operates a facility in Reedville, VA, that “reduces” large amounts of menhaden caught by its fishing fleet into other products, such as fish oil supplements and animal feed. Omega is by far the largest harvester of menhaden in the Chesapeake and the entire East Coast. The company has not exceeded the new limit for Bay waters in years because it has drawn more of its catch from the Atlantic, but officials said the lower number restricts their future options and has no scientific basis.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

 

Bountiful Bunker? Advocates Clash with Big Fish Oil in New York Harbor

September 10, 2018 — Advocacy groups are sounding the alarm on Virginia-based fishing fleets coming into the New York bight to harvest menhaden — a bait fish better known as “bunker” — but NOAA Fisheries says the species is not at risk of overfishing.

The boats work for Omega Protein, a company based in Reedville, Virginia, that runs the largest menhaden fishing operation on the east coast.

Menhaden are abundant now, but they’d been severely overfished in the past and advocacy groups like Menhaden Defenders and Gotham Whale are concerned about that happening again — especially since whales have returned to New York City waters. The cetaceans feed on menhaden, and fewer fish could mean fewer whale sightings, they say.

Advocates also worry about by-catch. The boats use huge purse seines that round up millions of fish at a time, and there’s concern that dolphins and other marine life could get caught up.

In a press release, Omega Protein charged that advocates are making “false statements” about their fleet, noting that there’s currently no concern about bunker overfishing and that their operations are completely legal. The company turns menhaden into commodities for fish oil supplements, dog food, fish meal, and other products.

Jennifer Goebel, a spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries, confirmed that there’s no current threat of overfishing for menhaden.

“There has been concern over the years from certain environmental groups regarding localized depletion in Chesapeake Bay, but studies have not found any evidence that localized depletion is occurring,” she said in an email. “The coastwide assessment shows the Atlantic menhaden stock is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.”

She added that Omega Protein “follow[s] the schools and right now, if those schools are off New York, that’s where an industry vessel could be fishing.”

Read the full story at New York Media Boat

 

MARYLAND: Maligned cownose ray could be vulnerable to overfishing, study suggests

August 30, 2018 — Chesapeake Bay watermen have long viewed the cownose ray as a pest, preying on a vulnerable oyster population. Their contempt even inspired tournaments of bow-wielding ray hunters — a practice the state has banned, at least temporarily.

But new research backs up concerns that the winged creatures could themselves be susceptible to overfishing, an outcome that some scientists fear could harm the bay’s health.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., tracked a group of rays over two years. The rays, they found in research published last week in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, spend their winters around Cape Canaveral, Fla., then migrate north in the spring to the same rivers where researchers initially found them — perhaps the rivers and creeks where they were born.

The finding could be valuable as Maryland fishery regulators develop the state’s first plan to manage the cownose ray population, balancing the concerns of the seafood industry with the limited data available on the rays’ place in the Chesapeake ecosystem.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Our Coast’s History: NC’s Oyster War

August 29, 2018 — Late January 1891, the steamer Vesper, rented from the Wilmington Steamship Co. and mounted with a well-used howitzer and caisson borrowed from the state of Virginia, left Elizabeth City with militiamen of the Pasquotank Rifles. Their mission: To enforce “An Act to Promote and Protect the Oyster Interests of the State” that had been passed barely a week earlier.

After three years of growing tension between North Carolina oystermen and vessels drifting down from Chesapeake Bay to harvest oysters in Pamlico and Roanoke sounds, North Carolina’s legislature had acted, creating a list of draconian restrictions on the harvest that prohibited dredging and allowed only in-state residents to gather oysters.

Tasked with telling the oyster poachers — mostly from Maryland — of the new law, as conflicts go, the North Carolina oyster war wasn’t much of a war, the rhetoric far outstripping the action.

“As she (the Vesper) proceeds on the return trip if any dredgers are found continuing to ravish the oyster beds they will be arrested, even if their boats have to be blown out of the water and their crews killed,” the Wilmington Weekly Star wrote.

In the end, the Vesper made one arrest, with other boats heeding the warning and leaving North Carolina waters.

Although short-lived and bloodless, what occurred on the water was but a part of an intersection of changing priorities in northeastern North Carolina.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online 

 

Bay scientists: Offshore oil drilling would put Chesapeake Bay at risk

August 21, 2018 — After the Trump administration proposed allowing oil and gas exploration off the East Coast in January, the debate has largely focused on the potential harm to the Atlantic Ocean’s water quality and marine life.

That is, after all, where any new oil rigs would sprout if the administration has its way.

But what about impacts to the Chesapeake Bay? Could the United State’s largest estuary — the subject of a federal and multi-state program centered on reducing nutrient and sediment pollution — be at risk?

Yes, say some of the Bay’s top scientists.

“I don’t think there are any places in the world where they have developed oil and gas where they have been able to avoid spills,” said Carl Hershner, director of the Center for Coastal Resources Management at the Virginia Institute for Marine Science.

Read the full story at The Bay Journal

VIRGINIA: A fishy tale

August 9, 2018 — Where else to look for a fish tale about politics than Shad Plank, eh?

Consider, then a casual comment from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s menhaden board discussion this week.

You know, one of Rhode Island’s commissioners mused, as the board wrapped up discussion about whether or not to start down the road of shutting down Virginia’s menhaden fishery, Atlantic herring could come into play here.

Well, if that isn’t enough to make you sit up in your seat. It did for Shad Plank, anyway.

Here’s why. The commission groups 15 states from Maine to Florida to manage onshore fisheries (within three miles of the shore), making sure nobody’s taking too many fishies from sea.

Some species do better than others, and sometimes they do better in some parts of the coast than others. And while nobody on the commission wants to drive any species into oblivion, many find it hard not to think about their fishermen — commercial and recreational — and their desire to harvest the sea’s bounty.

Last year, the commission cut its cap on the catch of menhaden from Chesapeake Bay by more than 40 percent. Not complying with this cap — and the General Assembly declined to enact it into law — could lead the commission to say we’re out of compliance and then ask the federal government to do something about it.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

 

VIRGINIA: Menhaden landings pacing below disputed cap

August 8, 2018 — Chesapeake Bay landings of menhaden are coming in at a pace well below a controversial cap imposed by an interstate fisheries commission, Virginia Marine Resources Commissioner Steven Bowman said.

As of the end of June, landings for the so-called reduction fishery came in at 24,000 metric tons, Bowman told the management board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) this week.

He said that meant landings this year would almost certainly come in below the 51,000-ton cap the interstate commission imposed last year — a cut of more than 40 percent that the General Assembly balked at adopting.

Bowman, joined by Maryland’s director of fisheries, asked the board to hold off declaring that Virginia was not in compliance with the cap because the General Assembly had not written the 51,000-ton limit into state law.

That finding, if adopted by the commission and accepted by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, could shut down the menhaden fishery, which employs about 300 people working on Omega Protein’s fishing boats and its processing plant in Reedville, on the Northern Neck. While the cap applies only to menhaden caught by the big “purse seine” vessels Omega operates to catch fish to be processed for oil and fish meal, board members said a finding of noncompliance could shut down the bait fishery, in which smaller operators use a different technique to catch fish used by crabbers and in commercial fin-fisheries

Instead, Bowman and Blazer proposed that the commission find Virginia out of compliance if landings this year actually exceeded 51,000 tons.

That effort failed, but the board decided to delay until February acting on an alternative declaring Virginia out of compliance.

Omega spokesman Ben Landry said he believed the menhaden board’s decision to delay acting reflected commissioners’ new-found concern, underlined by NOAA’s Lynch, about the scientific basis for the cap.

“We have no intention of blowing past the 51,000,” he said. “But it’s an artificial number … our concern is flexibility; if there are storms out in the ocean, we’d like to be able to come into the bay.”

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Are Chesapeake Bay dolphins eating all the fish?

July 18, 2018 — Rockfish are a Chesapeake Bay delicacy pursued heavily by commercial and recreational fishermen alike.

But many say it’s been a poor year on the Bay and now a growing number are beginning to question whether an apparently increasing population of dolphins in the Bay might be to blame.

Researchers who have been tracking dolphins in increasing numbers said they don’t have any answers.

“We don’t have information to confirm one way or the other if there is any impact,” say Greg Bortz, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Many commercial watermen said dolphins are chasing and eating valuable game species like rockfish, but there are many other environmental factors that are impacting the health of the Bay this season.

“We’ve had a lot of weather that isn’t normal,” said commercial fisherman Andy Mattes III, who noted heavy rains this spring and high temperatures this summer.

Mattes said low oxygen in much of the bay cause by polluted runoff is a major problem. He said blaming dolphins is too simplistic.

Read the full story at WUSA 9

After July Fourth crab feasts, an uncertain season for Maryland seafood industry

July 6, 2018 — Most summer mornings, Bunky Chance leaves his dock on Grace Creek before sunrise, in the hope of catching the crabs as they begin stirring for breakfast.

But on this steamy, still day, it’s too hot for many Chesapeake Bay crabs to bother grabbing at the chunks of clams Chance dangles in the Choptank River as bait. He’s back from his crabbing spots by 1 p.m.

It’s unfortunate timing, because the picnic-table delicacy is rarely as valuable as it becomes this week, when demand surges to supply crab feasts from Baltimore to Ocean City.

That’s especially worrisome this season, as uncertainty hangs over the next four months. Many Eastern Shore seafood processing businesses have been hamstrung, if not shut down, by a shortage of visas for the foreign guest workers on whom they have come to rely. Demand for steamed crabs typically starts to fall off after this week, and by late summer and early fall, those crab-picking businesses are some of the only buyers watermen can find for their harvest.

Watermen are used to slow periods, challenging weather conditions, and even shortages of the workers who pick the crabs. But the visa shortage has the entire Chesapeake seafood industry apprehensive that this season could present challenges more severe than they have yet seen.

Read the full story at the Baltimore Sun