Saving Seafood

Chesapeake Bay health improves in 2015

May 18, 2016 — The overall health of Chesapeake Bay improved in 2015, according to scientists at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The largest estuary in the nation scored a C (53%) in 2015, one of the three highest scores since 1986. Only 1992 and 2002 scored as high or higher, both years of major sustained droughts.

“We’d expect to see improvements after a drought year because nutrients aren’t being washed into the Bay, fueling algae blooms and poor water quality,” said Bill Dennison, Vice President for Science Applications at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “However, in 2015 stream flow was below normal, but nowhere near the drought conditions in 1992 and 2002. Thus, the high score for 2015 indicates that we’re making progress reducing what’s coming off the land.”

The overall score for the Chesapeake Bay Health Index for 2015 was 53%, compared with 50% in 2014 and 45% in 2013. There were strong improvements in many regions throughout the Bay, such as the Choptank River, Upper Eastern Shore, Lower Western Shore, and the Rappahannock River. There were no regions that had lower scores in 2015 compared to 2014. Improvements could be related to a number of factors, including several years of moderate weather, sewage treatment upgrades, use of winter cover crops by farmers, and reductions in atmospheric nitrogen deposition.

Read the full story at Science Daily

Hatchery Is Breeding Better Oysters To Boost North Carolina Aquaculture

May 16, 2016 — To feed a hungry world, it’s no longer enough to catch wild seafood. Many fisheries are in decline because of overfishing, environmental stresses or both, and human demand for protein has never been greater. That means aquaculture has to be a growing part of the world’s food supply. Here in North Carolina, it’s also an essential component in growing the economies of our coastal communities.

A case in point is the state’s oyster fishery, which once supplied much of the East Coast, but now can’t even meet demand from within North Carolina. Our state is working hard to emulate our neighbors to the north, who through state-sponsored shellfish research hatcheries have bred a better oyster, able to thrive in Chesapeake Bay and other Virginia waters.

In 2011, North Carolina began supporting a hatchery, right here on the CREST Research Park in Wilmington. UNC Wilmington faculty researchers and student workers are using selective breeding techniques, supplemented by some high-tech genetic research, to develop new strains of oysters to suit our state’s waters. The hatchery is also working with scallops, which are more challenging to grow but more lucrative to sell, as well as sunray Venus clams. But oysters are its primary product.

A recent comparison of oyster cultivation in North Carolina and Virginia, conducted by the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center, showed that in 2005, the two states were roughly even, each producing roughly a quarter-million dollars’ worth of farmed oysters. But while Virginia’s production exploded, reaching almost $10 million in just seven years, our state’s aquaculture operations barely doubled their output.

Read the full story at Wilmington Biz

Aquarium program offers food for thought on eating sustainably

May 4, 2016 — For decades, the National Aquarium has entertained millions of visitors while also teaching them about the need to conserve aquatic resources. The Baltimore institution has rescued marine animals off the coast of Ocean City, built floating wetlands to help clean the Inner Harbor’s water and featured Chesapeake Bay creatures in its tanks and exhibits.

But the aquarium was nearly silent on the subject of seafood consumption. The dark, serpentine halls told the story of precious resources being overfished. But that story didn’t have an ending — a solution for how to stem the decline. It had no programs to guide visitors on where to buy local fish caught sustainably, or how a customer could even understand what that meant.

That’s starting to change. A year ago, the aquarium hired its first director of sustainable seafood: T. J. Tate, who built a sustainable seafood program in the Gulf of Mexico. Tate is bringing together chefs, watermen and others in the seafood industry to talk about catching, raising, buying and eating locally caught fish, crustaceans and shellfish.

It is increasingly part of the story told by aquariums everywhere, at a time when overfishing is rampant worldwide while customers often overlook local products. Even fish that customers think is sustainable comes from far away — farm-raised salmon from Norway, or wild varieties from Alaska — and those distances have ramifications for air and water quality, too.  Visitors often ask what they should eat, and the aquarium wanted to find an engaging way to guide them.

“Telling the local seafood story in an integrated fashion — I mean the sustainable aquaculture supply and wild supply — is one of the most important things we can do to get people connected to oceans and the Bay,” said Eric Schwaab, who hired Tate when he was chief conservation officer at the aquarium. “There’s no better place to do that than Baltimore.”

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Susquehanna River: Deal reached on fish, eel passage at Conowingo Dam

May 3, 2016 — Exelon Corp. has pledged in a deal announced last Monday to work to enhance spawning fish passage at Conowingo Dam over the next 50 years, seeking to revive the Susquehanna River’s meager stocks of American shad and river herring.

The Chicago-based company and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said they had reached agreement to improve at least one of two fish lifts at Conowingo and meanwhile start trucking migratory shad and river herring upriver past it and three other dams in Pennsylvania.

The agreement comes after years of negotiations between the company and wildlife agencies and conservation groups, which were seeking to revive the once-legendary spawning runs of shad and herring. The number of returning fish each spring has been trending downward since the 1980s, and wildlife agencies and conservationists wanted Exelon to make potentially costly upgrades to fish lifts there as a condition of renewing its federal license to operate the hydroelectric facility.

The company’s license to operate Conowingo expired in 2014, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has extended the permit while the parties — including Maryland —attempt to hash out their differences. An even more contentious issue involves what Exelon may have to do about the buildup of nutrient-laden sediment in the dam’s reservoir, which studies have shown could complicated efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay’s water quality.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Alaska’s $10 Million Cut to its Fisheries Budget Expected to Ripple Across the Commercial Industry

April 26, 2016 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The $10 million cut to Alaska’s fishery budget for the 2017 fiscal year is expected to have widespread ramifications for the state’s commercial industry.  Last year’s budget cuts resulted in 109 fishery projects getting axed. Now another 65 are on the cut list for the upcoming fiscal year that begins on July 1. The slimmer budget means resources are more limited for fishery stock surveys and scientific research in addition to other fishery management needs.  “With cuts of that magnitude, everything is on the table,” said Scott Kelley, director of the Commercial Fisheries Division at the Dept. of Fish and Game.

We ran an opinion piece from D.B. Pleschner, the Executive Director of the California Wetfish Producers, that points to the recent scientific evidence that suggests West Coast sardine stocks are actually rebuilding. Pleschner writes how recent recruitment reports show the fishery’s young fish stocks are trending very close to how they looked prior to the 2007 population peak.  She also discusses how these scientific findings have gained little attention from the media and NGOS, who have instead blamed overfishing and lack of management for the stock’s declines.

In other news, China added lobster, crab and coldwater shrimp imports to a list of E-commerce items that are eligible for expedited cross-border clearance and lower taxes. The list an effort by China to reduce the cross-border tax paid by consumers, and to close a loophole that allowed parcel shipments to avoid taxes when resold, for instance, when they are imported by wholesalers.

Vietnam expects a 12 percent hike in exported shrimp revenues to push its overall earnings in seafood shipments past $7 billion this year. Shrimp is on track to account for about half of this year’s earnings.

Finally, Vinh Hoan will debut a line of untreated, premium pangasius fillets to the market at its booth number 5-553 during the Seafood Expo Global in Brussels this week. “People today want more natural food options with minimal processing and our untreated Premium Pangasius fillets provide that along with a delicious dining experience,” said Nguyen Ngo Vi Tam, Vinh Hoan Sales and Marketing Director. “With Vinh Hoan’s long-established commitment to sustainable practices, it just makes sense we would lead the way with this untreated option.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

New York Times spotlights perils faced by Atlantic scallop fleet

April 18, 2016 – In an April 15 story, the New York Times described in detail the challenges faced at sea by members of the limited access scallop fleet. The story covered the rescue of the Carolina Queen III, which ran aground off the Rockaways Feb. 25, during a storm with waves cresting as high as 14 feet. The following is an excerpt from the story:

Scallop fishing may not conjure up the derring-do of those catching crabs in the icy waters of the Bering Strait or the exploits of long-line tuna fisherman chronicled on shows like “The Deadliest Catch.” But the most dangerous fishing grounds in America remain those off the Northeast Coast — more dangerous than the Bering Sea, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From 2000 to 2009, the years covered by the agency’s data, 504 people died while fishing at sea and 124 of them were in the Northeast.

The scallop industry had the second-highest rate of fatalities: 425 deaths per 100,000 workers. Among all workers in the United States over the same period, according to the C.D.C., there were four deaths per 100,000 workers. The size of the crew and the time at sea contribute to the dangers.

Drew Minkiewicz, a lawyer who represents the Fisheries Survival Fund, said that since 2010, the number of vessels permitted to fish for scallops has been limited, and with fewer unregistered ships at sea, there have been fewer accidents.

The Atlantic sea scallop — Placopecten magellanicus — has been popular since the 1950s, when Norwegian immigrants first scoured the seas south of New Bedford, Mass. The supply could swing between scarcity and plenty, but in the 1980s huge algae blooms known as brown tides appeared several years in a row and threatened to destroy the scallops’ ecosystem on the East Coast. Even after those tides passed, the industry almost did itself in by overfishing. Only after regulations were passed in the 1990s and the industry banded together with the scientific community to improve fishing techniques did the fisheries rebound.

Now, scalloping along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to North Carolina is among the most lucrative fishing in the world. In 2014, the catch was estimated to be worth more than $424 million.

The industry operates under strict guidelines, many aimed at ensuring sustainability of the fisheries. To fish some areas with known scallop beds, a permit is needed, and the haul is capped. Open-sea fishing, on the other hand, is restricted only by the annual 32-days-at-sea limit.

The clock is always ticking.

“We get so few days to go out, we have to find every efficiency to maximize our days at sea,” said Joe Gilbert, who owns Empire Fisheries and, as captain of a boat called the Rigulus, is part of the tight-knit scalloping community.

In preparation for the Carolina Queen’s voyage, the crew would have spent days getting ready, buying $3,000 in groceries, loading more than 20,000 pounds of ice and prepping the equipment on the twin-dredge vessel.

The vessel steamed north from the Chesapeake Bay, traveling 15 hours to reach the coast off New Jersey, where the crew would probably have started fishing. Then the work would begin.

It is pretty standard for a crew to work eight hours on and take four hours off, but in reality it often is more like nine hours on and three off. If you are a good sleeper, you are lucky to get two hours’ shut-eye before heading back on deck.

The huge tows scouring the ocean bed for scallops dredge for about 50 minutes and are then hauled up, their catch dumped on deck before the tows are reset and plunged back into the water, a process that can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

While the dredge did its work, the crew on duty on the Carolina Queen sorted through the muddy mix of rocks and sand and other flotsam on the ship’s deck, looking for the wavy round shells of the scallops.

“The biggest danger is handling the gear on deck,” Mr. Gilbert said. “It is very heavy gear on a pitching deck, and you get a lot of injured feet, injured hands.”

Once the scallops are sorted, according to industry regulations, they must be shucked by hand.

The crew spends hours opening the shells and slicing out the abductor muscle of the mollusks — the fat, tasty morsel that winds up on plates at a restaurants like Oceana in Midtown Manhattan, where a plate of sea scallops à la plancha costs as much as $33.

A single boat can haul 4,000 pounds in a day.

Read the full story at the New York Times

VIRGINIA: Rediscovering a taste for Chesapeake scallops

April 18, 2016 — The Croxton cousins want to do for the Chesapeake Bay scallop what they helped do for its oyster: bring it back from the brink with bivalve farming and some savvy marketing.

That was the idea behind an event last night where the co-owners of Rappahannock Oyster Co. offered an early taste of the Bay scallops they hope to grow into a new commercial product. After successfully cultivating a small crop of the scallops, which take up to six months to become bite-size, Ryan and Travis Croxton hope to begin selling the shellfish at their four restaurants and elsewhere in the fall.

“They’ve been extinct (in the Bay) since 1933,” Travis Croxton said at the event. “We just found that out a couple years ago and thought—we love scallops, we love the Chesapeake Bay, let’s reintroduce them.”

The work they heard about was that of scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who have been quietly restoring a small Bay scallops population at their Gloucester Point facility since the late 1990s.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Chesapeake Blue Crab Population Grows 35 Percent

April 14, 2016 — The results of a survey of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population suggest a good summer for local crabs.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources says its annual dredge survey in Maryland and Virginia shows there are more than 550 million blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, the fourth highest level in two decades.

That number is a 35 percent increase in the crab population compared with last year, which was a 38 percent increase over 2014’s results.

See the full story at NBC Washington

MARYLAND: Oyster study bill advances despite watermen objections

April 5, 2016 — State fisheries managers use science-backed information to determine how many striped bass, blue crabs and menhaden can be caught each season without damaging the overall health of each species.

But not the Chesapeake Bay’s oysters.

A bill passed by the Maryland Senate and pending before the House would require University of Maryland scientists to establish harvest limits that ensure a sustainable catch for years to come. Representatives of the seafood industry are branding the measure as costly and unnecessary.

The bill’s supporters, however, say Maryland’s oyster population is being overfished, pointing to estimates that it is 1 percent of its historic size.

“We’ve learned the hard way that nature, especially with these oysters, is not inexhaustible,” said Bill Goldsborough, a fisheries scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “So this attitude, this disregard for science, led to the depletion of this valuable resource and the unstable boom-and-bust pattern of fishery that we see today.”

Maryland’s oyster haul plummeted from an all-time high of 15 million bushels in the 1880s to 26,000 bushels in 2004. After surpassing 100,000 for several years, the total harvest rocketed above 300,000 in 2013 and 2014. Researchers attribute the jump to hearty reproduction in 2010 and 2012.

The size of oyster catch this season, which officially ended Thursday, is expected to be lower again, reflecting poorer reproduction in subsequent years.

Read the full story at Delmarva Now

Maryland Wants to Take shells for oyster project from prime fishing reef

MARYLAND – March 22, 2016 — Seeking to counter a shortage of oyster habitat in the Chesapeake Bay, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is renewing a controversial bid to dredge old shells that have built up over centuries from an ancient reef southeast of Baltimore. Reviving a plan abandoned in 2009, the DNR has applied to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a permit to take 5 million bushels of shells from Man-O-War shoal just beyond the mouth of the Patapsco River. Ultimately, though, the state wants to barge away 30 million bushels, or about a third of the 456-acre reef.

The shells are needed to replace or augment oyster reefs worn down by harvesting and buried under an accumulation of silt, the DNR said. State officials said they would use much of the dredged shell in future large-scale, restoration projects. Some would also go to help the public fishery, though and to assist oyster farmers growing bivalves on leased plots of the Bay and its tributaries.

But the DNR’s request is drawing flak from conservationists, fishermen and even some watermen who might benefit.

Read the full story at ODU Magazine.