December 22, 2015 — Virginia Delegate Barry D. Knight once again has introduced legislation that would put the regulation of menhaden into the hands of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission instead of the General Assembly.
Menhaden is the only species of fish swimming in Virginia’s saltwaters that isn’t regulated by the VMRC.
December 7, 2015 — The Chesapeake Bay may be the best-studied estuary in the world, but a group of scientists attending a recent workshop were surprised about how little they knew about what predatory fish eat.
After all, menhaden — dubbed by some as the “most important fish in the sea” would also be the “most important” fish in the Bay, right?
Apparently not. That honor, were one species to be singled out, might belong to the tiny bay anchovy — a fish that rarely grows more than 3–4 inches in length and typically doesn’t live longer than a year.
“They’re the most abundant fish in the Bay,” said Ed Houde, a fisheries scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who helped organize the workshop. “They’re really important in the Bay’s food web.”
An analysis of 12 years of Baywide diet information for five major predators prepared for the workshop found that bay anchovy was a significant portion of the diet for four of those species. Menhaden was important for only one, striped bass, and even for them, bay anchovy were more important.
“Menhaden came out not as high on the list as people thought it was going to be,” Houde said. “It was an important prey, but it certainly wasn’t in the top three or four.”
Even more significantly, the analysis showed that the Bay’s food web is less of a fish-eat-fish world than popularly thought, even among many scientists. A host of unheralded species, from worms to clams to crustaceans, are major food sources for the Chesapeake’s predatory fish.
Read the full story at Bay Journal
November 12, 2015 — REEDVILLE, Va. – Small business owners along the Chesapeake Bay are concerned that commercial fishing by Omega Protein is hurting their livelihood. Both rely on catching menhaden, a small bony fish that is valuable to Omega for its oil and bone meal, as well as for bait to charter boat captains and crabbers.
Omega has fished for menhaden out of Reedville since the 1870’s. It hauls in millions of them each weekday during a fishing season that is quota-based and runs roughly from May to November.
10 On Your Side visited the Reedville operation and spoke with several employees about the company’s importance to the community. We also met with a charter boat captain who is convinced that Omega’s large hauls are hurting his business along with hundreds of others – marinas, crabbers, tackles shops, etc.
“Used to be these creeks would just be chocked full of menhaden flipping all over the surface,” said Chris Newsome, owner of Bay Fly Fishing in Gloucester. Newsome’s charter clients fish for striped bass, bluefish, speckled trout and redfish, and they feed on menhaden. “They’ve definitely become a lot harder to find over the years.”
November 12, 2015 — The following was released by the NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement:
In an effort to ensure the healthy population of the striped bass in the Mid-Atlantic region, NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) is raising awareness of the federal regulations governing striped bass in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and increasing targeted enforcement efforts to protect the species from illegal poaching activities.
“Right now, the striped bass are beginning to migrate south from the northern states,” said Lt. Wynn Carney, OLE supervisory enforcement officer. “The striped bass will follow the bait south near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and in spring they will begin making their way up our streams and rivers to lay eggs.”
According to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, overfishing and poor environmental conditions lead to the collapse of the Atlantic striped bass fishery in the 1980s.
In order to ensure the sustainability of the species, the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act, found in Title 50 of the Code of Federal Regulations part 697.7, was promulgated. Thus, during the months of November through February, NOAA Office of Law Enforcement is joining state and federal marine law enforcement organizations in supporting a focused enforcement effort, targeting vessels retaining and fishing for striped bass in the EEZ. Marine law enforcement officers, including OLE and the U.S. Coast Guard, in the Mid-Atlantic will be ticketing fishermen who violate these regulations and who target striped bass within the EEZ.
“I am excited about the Mid-Atlantic States conducting a focused enforcement effort,” said Carney. “It’s significant that we’re working together toward a common goal.”
For maximum enforcement, officers will be conducting at-sea, aerial, and dock-side inspections.
For more information, call your local OLE field office or visit http://www.asmfc.org/species/atlantic-striped-bass.
November 2, 2015 — NANJEMOY, Md. — Hidden beneath the waters of the Potomac River are dozens of sunken ships known as a “ghost fleet” that sailed from the Revolutionary War to after World War I, and now, thanks to the Chesapeake Conservancy, the public can experience these underwater ships and the unique ecosystem that has grown around them from their desktops.
The conservancy has teamed up with Terrain360, a Richmond, Virginia, company, to take panoramic shots of Mallows Bay and the more than 100 shipwrecks located there, piecing them together to create a virtual tour of the bay that you can find here.
The bay, tucked along the shores of the Potomac River in Charles County, Maryland, is home to the largest collection of historic shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere. But the sunken ships have also created a marine habitat full of fish, birds and other wildlife, which the conservancy hopes to protect.
Visitors to the bay will spot an engine rising from the mist. Trees growing from the hull of a sunken ship seem to form an island that’s shaped like a ship. And the rusty hull of another ship can be seen rising above the waterline further out from the shore. Nearby is a menhaden fishing boat dating to the 1940s that was used during World War II.
October 28, 2015 — Local watermen of the Chesapeake Bay have come under attack from knowingly imported and mislabeled foreign seafood. Consumers are also at risk because safety standards for seafood in other countries of origin differ from those in the United States. “Consumers should protect themselves with knowledge about these issues and get to know local seafood companies they can trust,” said Paula Jasinski, executive director of Chesapeake Environmental Communications.
Crabbers from Virginia’s Blue Crab Industry Panel highlighted this significant problem for their industry several years ago.
Read the full story at Northern Neck News
October 23, 2015 — “Clam Power” read the T-shirt on the sturdy woman carrying gear from her pickup to her no-frills work boat tied to a ramshackle dock in Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island.
The woman, Flo Sharkey, 72, works full time on the bay, and on Wednesday morning, she and her son, Paul Sharkey, 36, a bayman himself, loaded rakes, hip waders and bushel baskets into the boat and headed out through Swan Creek into the open bay.
People who make their living on these waters are known as baymen, and it’s a dwindling profession. A woman doing it for a living is nearly unheard-of.
Ms. Sharkey said she knew of no other baywomen. Her sister and mother could hold their own on the water but elected not to make it their life’s work.
Ms. Sharkey has often kept side jobs — these days, she moonlights as a school custodian — but clamming has been her mainstay on the Great South Bay, just off Fire Island.
“Years ago, this was the most productive bay in the country, except for the Chesapeake, for crabs, clams and fish,” Ms. Sharkey said as the boat bounded across the shimmering flat water toward a shallow spot. “But then came the brown tide, the road runoff and fertilizer off people’s lawns.”
With those factors affecting the abundance and health of the clams, much of the bay is now off limits for shellfishing. Weaker market prices and the ever-rising cost of living are other reasons that there were a mere two other clam boats off in the distance, compared with the hundreds that would have been seen years back.
Read the full story at The New York Times
October 8, 2015 — Watermen dredging the muddy bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries for oysters may not haul in the bounty that some recent years have produced, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources cautions as a new season gets underway.
“We’ve had good harvests the last couple years,” said Chris Judy, the department’s shellfish division director. But “we will no longer enjoy the spotlight on our oysters because other oysters are going to enter the market in a stronger way this year.”
The season kicked off Oct. 1, as it always does, but largely in name only. The same nor’easter that chewed at Delmarva’s beaches and rained out a weekend of activities at the beginning of the month kept most watermen off the water. But they were out in force after the skies cleared.
“It looks like we got the whole state of Maryland working on one bar off Tangier Island,” said Greg Price, a waterman based out of Chance in Somerset County. “I counted 55 boats this morning.”
Those freshly caught oysters are already finding their way into refrigerator cases.
“At first it was a little dreary because of the storm, but we’re booming now,” said Miranda Taylor, manager of Ocean Highway Seafood and Produce in Pocomoke City.
Read the full story at Delmarva Now
October 14, 2015 — The Chesapeake Bay’s waters are warming, in some places more rapidly than the region’s air temperatures, researchers from the University of Maryland say. If unchecked, scientists say, the trend could complicate costly, long-running efforts to restore the ailing estuary, worsen fish-suffocating dead zones and alter the food web on which the bay’s fish and crabs depend.
Drawing on remote sensing by satellites, researchers at Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science found that water temperatures have risen since the 1980s across more than 92 percent of the Chesapeake and its river tributaries. The study appeared in the October issue of the journal Remote Sensing of Environment.
The increase averaged nearly 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, according to Andrew J. Elmore, co-author of the study and a geologist at the center’s Appalachian laboratory in Frostburg.
Baltimore and other parts of the bay showed up as “hot spots,” with warmer water than surrounding areas. Elmore and his co-author, Haiyong Ding, a visiting scholar from China, say the heat anomalies appear to be linked to spreading urbanization and to warm-water discharges from power plants.
“In the case of power generation, we’re deliberately increasing the temperature of water,” Elmore said. “With urbanization, it’s not intentional, but it’s an effect.”
Read the full story at the Baltimore Sun
September 16, 2015 — A group of federal legislators from Virginia and Maryland urged the White House this week to do more to curb the mislabeling of Chesapeake Bay blue crab.
In a letter Monday, U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Rep. Rob Wittman from Virginia and Sen. Barbara Mikulski from Maryland applauded President Barack Obama for launching the Presidential Task Force to Combat Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud earlier this year.
But, they said, its draft recommendations don’t go far enough to protect area watermen from dishonest people willing to import foreign crabmeat and repackage it as Atlantic or Chesapeake Bay blue crab.
Federal agents are investigating allegations that Casey’s Seafood Inc. in Newport News did just that. No charges have been filed in connection with the case, but DNA tests on several of Casey’s Seafood products contained mixtures of Atlantic blue crab and cheaper alternatives native to foreign waters. All of the products were labeled “Product of the USA.”
“This deceptive labeling misleads consumers and threatens the livelihood of the watermen in our states,” reads the letter, which indicates Virginia’s blue crab fishery generates nearly $30 million in total fishing revenue for watermen each year. Maryland’s blue crabs generate over $58 million annually.
Read the full story at The Virginian-Pilot