Saving Seafood

Overfishing assessment may lead Virginia to ban recreational fishing for striped bass

April 8, 2019 — The Virginia Marine Resources Commission is considering banning recreational fishing for trophy-sized striped bass this spring in the state’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay, its coastal waters and Potomac River tributaries because of indications that the species has been overfished.

Striped bass, locally called rockfish, are among the most popular species with regional saltwater anglers. Hundreds of charter captains and thousands of recreational fishermen target the fish throughout the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay region.

In Virginia’s spring trophy season, which is set to run May 1 through June 15, anglers are allowed one striped bass 36 inches or longer per day.

The commission is scheduled to take up the proposed ban at its April 23 meeting, with a proposed effective date for the emergency regulation of April 29. The rationale for the moratorium is an expected final determination in May by the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board that the large, mostly female rockfish that do most of the spawning are being overfished.

A preliminary assessment delivered to that board showed the estimated overall fishing mortality exceeded the established standard in 2017. Additionally, female spawning stock biomass (the estimated total weight of all spawning-size females) was 151 million pounds, significantly below the 202 million pound threshold.

Read the full story at The Free Lance-Star

Chesapeake Bay Shows Signs Of Health, Despite Historic Rains And Climate Change

April 3, 2019 — There’s good news for the Chesapeake Bay this year. Underwater grasses are at the highest level on record — an important sign of water quality. Blue crabs are being harvested at a sustainable level — meaning there are enough to feed hungry Marylanders while still leaving plenty in the water to reproduce. More than a million acres of land in the Chesapeake watershed have been permanently protected from development since 2010 — preventing the polluted runoff associated with building houses, roads and shopping centers.

The latest barometer of the Chesapeake’s health, released today, shows that by many indicators, the bay is on track to reach restoration goals. Those goals were set by a 2014 agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency and the six states (plus D.C.!) that make up the watershed. The region is supposed to meet the goals by 2025.

“Over the last year, we’ve seen records broken,” said Dana Aunkst, director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program, which released the annual report. He cited the record 100,000-acres-plus of underwater grasses in the bay — the most, since records began 30 years ago. He also pointed to data showing overall water quality at its highest level recorded.

But by some metrics there is a long ways to go toward full restoration, according to the report. Plus, there are factors working against bay restoration. Top among them: climate change. For the first time, the bay barometer report includes a section on climate.

Read the full story at WAMU

 

Maryland legislators increase protection for oyster sanctuaries in 5 Bay tributaries

April 1, 2019 — Oyster sanctuaries in five Chesapeake Bay tributaries selected by Maryland for large-scale restoration projects will get an extra level of protection from commercial harvest under legislation approved in Annapolis this week.

Maryland lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill that requires legislative approval to alter the sanctuaries where major reef restoration work is either completed, under way or planned. It now goes to Gov. Larry Hogan.

The bill, backed by the General Assembly’s leadership and by environmental groups, passed the Senate by a vote of 32 to 14. The House had approved it nearly two weeks earlier, 98 to 40.

Alison Prost, Maryland executive director for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, issued a statement hailing its passage.

“This legislation is crucial to the recovery of Maryland’s oyster population,” she said, adding that the bivalves are the foundation of the Bay ecosystem. They filter the water, and the reefs they build with their shells provide habitat for fish, crabs and other aquatic creatures.

As part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, Maryland pledged nearly five years ago to restore oyster populations in five of its Bay tributaries by 2025. Restoration is essentially complete in Harris Creek and in various stages of construction or planning in the other four — the Tred Avon, Little Choptank, St. Mary’s and Manokin rivers.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

MARYLAND: How can we save oysters if we harvest them faster than they reproduce?

March 27, 2019 — This year’s Maryland General Assembly session marks a critical juncture for Chesapeake Bay oysters. Policies under debate in the halls of the legislature will chart the course for oysters’ next 100 years. Now is the time to make the changes necessary to protect the oyster.

Before the session, the bad news arrived. In November, the state released the first comprehensive stock assessment of Maryland oysters. It found that the bivalves’ population had declined by half since 1999 — from about 600 million adult oysters to the current population of 300 million. The population decline is bad for both the Bay’s ecology and for the watermen who depend on the wild harvest to make their living.

The oyster’s significant decline is a symptom of a long history of overharvesting, disease and pollution in the Bay. The current population of oysters in Maryland’s portion of the Bay is less than 10 percent of the number of oysters harvested each year before 1900, according to the stock assessment.

While we can’t expect to re-create the natural state of the Bay before significant human intervention, Maryland can’t continue with business as usual. To reduce Bay pollutants, create more habitat for fish species and preserve the oyster for future generations, we must put Maryland on a path toward oyster recovery.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Seismic surveying proposal in Atlantic raises Bay concerns

March 25, 2019 — The Atlantic Ocean is staring down the barrel of an air gun, and its blast could reverberate into the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite outcry from coastal communities and most East Coast states, the Trump administration is moving forward with allowing five companies to perform seismic surveys offshore from Delaware Bay to central Florida.

Environmental groups and many marine scientists fear that the tests’ loud, repeated blasts, which are used to detect oil and gas deposits deep beneath the ocean floor, could upend an underwater ecosystem that relies on sound for communication.

“The ocean is an acoustic world,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s marine mammal protection program. “Whales, fish and many other species depend on sound to survive. The extensive blasting that the Trump administration has authorized would undermine marine life on an enormous scale.”

The NRDC joined several environmental groups in a federal lawsuit filed in South Carolina in December, challenging the administration’s approval of the seismic surveys a month earlier. On Feb. 20, the conservation groups asked the judge in the case to block the seismic tests from going forward while the litigation is pending. The National Marine Fisheries Service decision allows the companies to “incidentally harass” marine mammals during the tests.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

As High-Tide Flooding Worsens, More Pollution Is Washing to the Sea

March 15, 2019 — As high-tide flooding worsened in Norfolk, Virginia in recent years, Margaret Mulholland, a biological oceanographer at Old Dominion University, started to think about the debris she saw in the waters that flowed back into Chesapeake Bay. Tipped-over garbage cans. Tossed-away hamburgers. Oil. Dirty diapers. Pet waste.

“This water is coming up on the landscape and taking everything back into the river with it,” says Mulholland, a professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences. “I was thinking how no one is counting this stuff (as runoff pollution). It drove me nuts.”

Nuts enough that she decided to sample those waters. That’s why on a recent Saturday morning she was steering her Chevy Bolt EV toward a narrow, flooded ribbon of Norfolk’s 51st Street at high tide. Marsh grasses bordered an inlet of the Lafayette River on one side of the street. A line of houses set back from the street rose on the other. Soon she came upon an overturned trash can, its contents underwater. A few feet away was a box. She opened it, and inside was a toilet. “Oh, this is good,” she said, pulling out her phone for a photo.

It’s an apt metaphor for her pioneering research project, which she has dubbed Measure the Muck.

With global sea levels steadily rising — already up 8 inches in the past century and now increasing at an average of 1.3 inches per decade — the incidence of high-tide “sunny day” or “blue sky” flooding is on the rise, especially along the U.S. East Coast. Those flooding events now routinely wash over sections of cities, and when the waters recede they take with them an excess of nutrients and a toxic mix of pollutants that flows into rivers, bays, and oceans.

Read the full story at Yale Environment 360

Whales are dying along East Coast—and scientists are racing to understand why

March 14, 2019 — On a blustery winter afternoon off the coast of Virginia Beach, people are pressing forward on the bow of the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center’s whale watching boat as a dorsal fin breaks the surface. Cameras click in staccato for a second or two before the humpback whale dives to feed again.

The relatively small dorsal fin belies the humpback’s size. Calves weigh about a ton. Adults can grow heavier than a yellow school bus loaded with kindergarten students. Few things that swim in the sea can break their bones.

A mile to the north, however, by the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, a massive cargo ship is pushing south toward the whales. On this Saturday in late January, these humpbacks are swimming in traffic in the shipping channel that leads vessels to and from some of America’s busiest ports. These shipping vessels are one of the few true physical threats to humpback whales.

“Those big ships, they’re churning up the water and the fish are coming through and that’s what the whales are going for,” says Mark Sedaca, captain of the 65-foot Atlantic Explorer on this whale watching trip.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Trump administration makes another bid to slash Chesapeake cleanup funds

March 14, 2019 — The Trump administration has once again called for deep cuts in federal funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, despite failing twice before to convince Congress to approve similar proposals.

The Trump administration has proposed slashing funds for the Chesapeake Bay restoration. Congress has rejected similar proposals for the past two years.

The move, announced Monday, drew immediate criticism from environmentalists and vows from lawmakers to maintain or even increase spending on the long-running restoration effort.

The fiscal year 2020 budget released by the White House would provide $7.3 million to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the Chesapeake Bay Program. That represents a 90 percent reduction from this year’s funding level of $73 million.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal 

MARYLAND: Larry Hogan presses Trump administration for visas for crab pickers

March 14, 2019 — Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Thursday pressed Trump administration officials to grant more work visas to immigrants, arguing seasonal laborers are a pillar of the Chesapeake Bay’s seafood industry.

Hogan, a moderate Republican weighing a 2020 primary challenge to President Trump, wrote to Cabinet secretaries that continuing to cap the seasonal visas that have been used by hundreds of migrant crab pickers for decades “could permanently damage Maryland’s seafood industry, causing . . . iconic family businesses to close and having a devastating impact on jobs in our state.”

In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, Hogan argued that each of the roughly 500 seasonal crab pickers who used to migrate to Maryland’s Eastern Shore generates 2.5 jobs for U.S. citizens. He cited a University of Maryland study and said the loss of those jobs, in turn, “threaten the livelihoods of commercial crabbers and waterman.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Menhaden Fishery Managers Won’t Pursue Punishment for Virginia

February 11, 2019 — Virginia’s menhaden fishery gets a major victory, as Atlantic fisheries managers decide not to hold the Commonwealth out of compliance with its most recent catch limits.

Back in fall of 2017, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) voted to reduce the maximum allowable harvest on the Chesapeake Bay from 87,216 metric tons to 51,000 metric tons a year.

Virginia’s legislature failed to adopt the reduced catch limits, after the East Coast menhaden fishery’s biggest player, Omega Protein, argued the reduction was unnecessary. Under law, the U.S. Department of Commerce can put an immediate moratorium on a state that doesn’t comply with catch limits.

ASMFC won’t seek a moratorium from the Department of Commerce, announcing it has “indefinitely postponed” action to find Virginia out of compliance. ASMFC explains, the Virginia fishery has stayed within the limits of a precautionary “Bay Cap” that was imposed to protect the small, oily fish as an important link in the Chesapeake Bay food chain.

In a statement, ASMFC writes, “This action is contingent upon the Chesapeake Bay reduction fishery not exceeding the cap. If the cap is exceeded, the Board can reconsider the issue of compliance. In making its decision, the Board took into account the fact that reduction fishery harvest within the Chesapeake Bay has been below the cap level since 2012, including 2018 harvest. “

Read the full story at Chesapeake Bay Magazine