Saving Seafood

The Baltimore Sun is wrong about Maryland’s oyster rules

September 30, 2019 — Recently, the Editorial Board of The Baltimore Sun weighed in on the issue of oyster management in the Chesapeake Bay, simultaneously insulting the hard-working men and women of the seafood industry and suggesting that the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is unwilling to protect the oyster (“Dwindling supply of Maryland oysters requires stronger response,” Sept. 17). As chairman of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, I take issue with both of these positions and several others blithely laid out for the members of Maryland’s General Assembly to devour with their oyster shooters and clam strips.

It does nothing to represent our side, the side that’s busy trying to make a living ensuring city folks have fresh, local seafood for their fundraising fêtes. For the record, DNR did not “cave” to watermen and seafood processors. They worked with stakeholders from the legislative, scientific, academic, seafood, business and nonprofit community to arrive at a plan to act now to use a multi-pronged strategy to increase the biomass of our iconic bivalve. We proposed several ways to reduce harvest pressure, one of many stressors to the oyster population, as did others. Ultimately, DNR came up with a plan for the coming season that left no one 100% satisfied. It’s called compromise. They are using an adaptive management strategy that will allow them to monitor scientifically what is working and what’s not and then modify their approach until they’ve arrived at a suite of actions that increase the oyster population.

Read the full story at The Baltimore Sun

U.S. senators propose grant program to help restore Chesapeake Bay habitats

September 30, 2019 — Maryland’s U.S. senators and colleagues from across the Chesapeake Bay watershed introduced a bill Friday to create a federal grant program for projects focused on restoring the bay’s fish and wildlife habitats.

The Chesapeake WILD Act aims to replicate a similar program that provides $5 million annually for such projects in the Delaware River basin. The legislation would create a funding stream for work to restore wetlands, improve stream water quality, and plant trees and other vegetation.

If the grant program is approved, Congress would have to allocate money for it in the appropriations process for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is part of the Department of the Interior.

Read the full story at The Baltimore Sun

Senate Appropriations Committee Approves Oyster Restoration Funding In Chesapeake Bay

September 17, 2019 — The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved legislation for the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster restoration funding.

“A thriving oyster population is crucial to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and in turn, to the health of Maryland’s Bay economy,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Appropriations and Budget Committees. “These funds will ultimately support critical efforts to sustain our oyster population and preserve the Bay. I will keep working in Congress to fight for the investments necessary to protect the Bay, its wildlife, and the businesses Marylanders have built around it.”

Officials said the funding will aim toward rebuilding a healthy oyster population in Maryland.

Included within the legislation were provisions to provide $20 million to the Army Corps of Engineers for multistate ecosystem restoration programs for projects involving oysters in the Bay, provide an additional $70 million to the Army Corps Work Plan for project construction.

Read the full story at WJZ

VIRGINIA: A trip with the lone company chasing menhaden in a 140-year tradition on the Chesapeake Bay

September 16, 2019 — The second set went fast — the 150,000 menhaden in the net not as “heavy” — that is, as frisky swimmers — as the fish in the Cockrells Creek’s first haul, farther down along the York Spit Channel a half hour earlier.

As the boat’s giant vacuum hose gathered in the last flopping menhaden, the spotter plane pilot circling overhead said they should drop everything and move off to port where another 150,000 fish were schooling. So the men on the Cockrells Creek’s two 40-foot “purse boats” hastened away — still tied together with ropes and a giant 1,500-foot-long purse seine net, half on one boat, half on the other.

It didn’t go as fast the rest of the day in Virginia’s 140-year old menhaden fishery, these days shrunken to one company with eight vessels operating out of a tiny port in one of the most rural corners of the state.

It’s an industry that once made the village of Reedville one of the most prosperous in the state — big, brightly-painted three-story Victorian mansions, bedecked with gingerbread woodwork under their generous shade trees line Main Street in testimony to those long gone days.

These days, menhaden are at the center of an obscure, if fiercely fought, political battle over who should catch them where, and whether the Omega Proteins fleet that still sails from Reedville is harvesting too many from the Bay. Among the reasons for that concern: Menhaden are an important food source for striped bass.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Omega Protein signals intention to exceed Chesapeake Bay menhaden cap

September 13, 2019 — Omega Protein, which recently attained MSC certification for the Atlantic menhaden fishery, has signaled it will likely exceed a cap for the species in the Chesapeake Bay.

The cap was initially suggested by the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission (ASMFC) in 2006, and was modified in 2012 to a 87,216 metric ton (MT) quota. However, in 2017, the ASMFC recommended cutting the cap by over 40 percent to 51,000 MT, a decision that Omega Protein objected to.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Maryland proposes 30% cut in commercial oyster harvest

September 11, 2019 — Acting to curtail overfishing, Maryland natural resources officials proposed new oyster harvest restrictions Monday night that they said could reduce commercial landings by about 30% in the upcoming season.

The proposed cutbacks, which include shortening the wild harvest season, reducing the maximum daily catch and closing some reefs in the Upper Chesapeake Bay, are aimed at making the declining oyster fishery sustainable in eight to 10 years, according to officials with the Department of Natural Resources.

“We need to start trending in the right direction,’’ DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio said.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Options to rebuild oyster population in Maryland draw criticism

August 30, 2019 — Maryland watermen face potential cutbacks in their wild Chesapeake Bay oyster harvest starting this fall, as the state eyes new regulations aimed at eventually making the troubled fishery sustainable. But critics question whether the state is serious about ending overharvesting, and lawmakers could order a do-over.

Officials with the Department of Natural Resources told their Oyster Advisory Commission in August that they were considering reductions of up to 20% in the daily harvest limits and setting a shorter season, which has traditionally run from Oct. 1 through March 31.

They also suggested they might close some areas of the Bay to wild harvest for the coming season if available data indicates oysters are unusually scarce there or the areas were being heavily overharvested.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Gov. Hogan calls on Pennsylvania to step up Chesapeake cleanup; Pa. would ‘gladly accept’ Md. funds to do that

August 30, 2019 — Ahead of a September meeting of the Chesapeake Bay states, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan again called on Pennsylvania to step up efforts to clean up the estuary and urged the EPA to hold the commonwealth accountable. From Pennsylvania, he got a quick response.

A Pennsylvania official told The Baltimore Sun the state has made “great strides” at reducing water pollution but would “gladly accept” money from “any entity in Maryland” to do more.

“Unlike Maryland, Pennsylvania doesn’t generate millions of dollars from tourism on the Chesapeake Bay and can’t use those resources, at the moment, to improve water quality,” said J.J. Abbott, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. “Pennsylvania is committed to having projects and practices in place by 2025 to attain our goals and meet our requirements in full.”

Read the full story at The Baltimore Sun

New striped bass regulations lower recreational catch in Virginia

August 29, 2019 — The Virginia Marine Resources Commission approved a set of emergency measures Aug. 27 to help protect the struggling striped bass population in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic coast. That includes lowering the number of “keepers” for recreational anglers from two to one fish per day.

The action will reduce the amount of striped bass lost to recreational fishing in Virginia by 24%, said Alex Aspinwall, a data analyst with the state commission.

Charter boat industry leaders said the change will devastate their business for striped bass, also known as rockfish. But the move’s backers said it and the other new measures are needed to keep fishery managers from having to enact the state’s first fishing moratorium on the species since 1990.

Read the full story at Bay Journal

Maryland oysters are having a bad year, and here’s why

August 19, 2019 — People, aside from oyster researchers and farmers, likely won’t feel the impact for at least another 18 months.

But, eventually, everyone will know just how bad a year it has been for Maryland oysters.

Thanks to record levels of persistent rainfall throughout the bay watershed, salinity levels in the Chesapeake Bay have remained perilously low since May 2018. The absence of salt in the bay and its tributaries has been annihilating oyster spat production and oyster growth at hatcheries and farms around the region.

At the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Hatchery, the largest oyster hatchery in the state, the carefully controlled operation is on course to produce hundreds of times fewer larvae this year than it would during a regular season, its manager said. This is bad news both economically and as an indicator of bay health, which data shows has suffered greatly under the deluge.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Baltimore Sun