Saving Seafood

Sushi stress: Fishermen not catching many baby eels

April 11, 2017 — The chilly rivers of Maine are causing trouble in the world of sushi.

The state’s brief, annual season for baby eels is off to a slow start because of a cold spring that has prevented the fish from running in rivers.

The baby eels, called elvers, are an important piece of the worldwide sushi supply chain. They’re sold to Asian aquaculture companies — sometimes for more than $2,000 per pound — that raise them to maturity and use them as food.

“Everything is slow,” said state Rep. Henry Bear, who represents members of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians who fish for elvers. “But we’re hopeful.”

Maine has the only significant fishery for elvers in the country, and fishermen are limited to a quota of a little less than 10,000 pounds (4,500 kilograms) per year.

The season started March 22, and state records say fishermen have only caught about 1,050 pounds (475 kilograms), so far. They have until June 7 to try to catch the entire allotment, which means they are well behind pace.

The average temperature for March in the Portland area this year was 28.8 degrees. The normal average is 33.5 degrees.

Fishermen said they are confident the season will pick up, as some warm weather is forecast for Monday and the rest of the week in southern Maine. Fishermen catch the elvers in rivers and streams with nets, and sell them to dealers. So far, they’re selling for $1,487 per pound at docks, state records say.

Elvers are a major fishery in Maine, and fishermen’s ability to reach quota fluctuates year to year. They reached quota in 2014, fell far short in 2015, and just about reached it last year. Early spring weather, which can be hard to predict in Maine, has emerged as a deciding factor in whether fishermen will reach quota.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Is this year’s bluefish run a sign of climate change?

April 10, 2017 — It’s been about a month now since an unprecedented run of bluefish started bringing smiles to the faces of local anglers, and the bait and tackle shop owners selling them gear.

“I’ve been in business here for 23 years, and I’ve never seen a spring run of bluefish like this,” said Joe Morris at Lewes Harbour Marina. “I keep thinking tomorrow they will be gone, but they’re still here. A boat went off the point of Cape Henlopen yesterday and caught them.” That was Tuesday this week.

Morris said this year’s run of bluefish has been great for the tackle business. “They’ll eat everything, so we’ve been selling lots of steel leaders [to combat the sharp teeth and strong jaws of the blues], spoons, bucktails … and other guys have been wading the flats out by the fishing pier, and they’re using flies and poppers.” Not only have the blues been numerous and steady, this year’s run is also notable because they have gone way up into Indian River and Bay as well as into the shallow waters inside Cape Henlopen and on up the Broadkill River. “They follow the menhaden, and then they start eating anything else that’s available.” Morris has been cleaning lots of bluefish and talks to others who do the same. They’re finding menhaden in the bellies of the blues as well as small trout, perch and shad.

And while everyone who likes to fish is happy with the run, many are asking the same question: Why this year like never before?

The most frequent fingers point toward an abundance of menhaden – known locally as bunker – moving up the beach and into the mouth of Delaware Bay.

Read the full story at the Cape Gazette

“Sacred Cod” Tells of Fishery and Way of Life in Peril

April 3, 2017 — New England’s iconic cod fishery has hit an all-time low. Scientists point the finger at a combination of fishing and climate change. Many fishermen reject that assessment and blame their woes on regulators. A new documentary film, Sacred Cod, tells the story of two populations in crisis – the cod, and the fishermen who’ve built a way of life around them.

Cod fishing is what brought the first Europeans to New England, and the commercial fishery is the oldest in the nation. Hundreds of years of fishing pressure has brought cod populations in southern New England and the Gulf of Maine to record low levels. Federal fishery biologists have estimated that the reproductively active population is just 3-4 percent of what would be needed for a healthy, sustainable fishery.

That hasn’t improved in the past few years, despite fishing restrictions that amount to a virtual closure of the fishery. Scientists say climate change is a likely culprit. Rising water temperatures affect reproductive success, reducing the number of eggs a female produces and also reducing survival of young codfish. Scientists are also seeing changes in the base of the food chain that may be linked to climate change.

Many fishermen reject this assessment, though, and say fishing restrictions are unnecessary. They contend that there are plenty of cod to be caught, if you just know where to look.

Read the full story at WCAI

Pacific Region Cooperating To Address Ocean Acidification

March 28, 2017 — APIA, Samoa — If the land is well and the sea is well, the people will thrive.

This adage is relevant now more than ever as climate change is encroaching on our shores.

Leaders from around the Pacific have joined in to tackle the issue of climate change specifically focusing on ocean acidification.

Last week, was the opening of the New Zealand Pacific Partnership on Ocean Acidification (P.P.O.A) project and the Tokelau Project Inception Workshop at Taumeasina Island Resort.

The New Zealand Pacific Partnership on Ocean Acidification (P.P.O.A) project is a collaborative effort between the Secretariat  of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the university of the South Pacific, and the Pacific Community which aims to build resilience to ocean acidification in Pacific Island communities and ecosystems, with financial support form the NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Government of Monaco.

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

Maine fishermen see warning signs in lobster surge

March 23, 2017 — After Maine’s lobster industry set sales records for a second straight year, area fishermen are enjoying the boom while the water is warm.

Literally.

Rising sea temperatures are benefiting Maine’s iconic crustacean, leading to an increase in population while other marine species, such as soft-shell crabs, have suffered a decline, according to fishermen who spoke at a March 16 Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association panel.

But the factors for today’s success may portend tomorrow’s economic and cultural disaster, according to some area fishermen.

“We’re going to start going down when it gets warmer,” Maine Lobstermen’s Association President Dave Cousens told the audience at the Frontier Cafe.

Cousens was joined by MCFA President Gerry Cushing, of Port Clyde; Chebeague Island fisherman Alex Todd, and lobsterman Steve Train of Long Island.

Between July and October 2016, Cousens said, the ocean temperature was 60 degrees where he fishes in South Thomaston – a rise of three degrees since he began hauling traps three decades ago.

If temperatures rise three more degrees, he said, “lobster larvae will not survive. That’s what we’re facing.”

Last year, Maine fishermen hauled a record $130 million pounds of lobster, and the industry saw its value rocket $30 million, according to the Department of Marine Resources.

But the panelists warned the boom will be temporary.

“You don’t have to look too far south to see what’s coming,” Cousens said, noting the sharp demise of lobster populations off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Long Island, New York.

“That line’s just moving north,” Scott Moody, owner of Moody’s Seafood in Cundy’s Harbor, agreed the next day over the phone.

Moody, a fourth-generation lobsterman, fished in Harpswell for 30 years before starting his wholesale business, which includes five retail locations along Maine’s coast.

He buys directly from lobstermen and shellfish harvesters, and sells their product mostly to a distributor in Boston.

“In shellfish, we’ve seen a big turn,” Moody said last week. “I used to buy about $1 million in soft-shell (clams) in the Harpswell location,” at 337 Cundy’s Harbor Road.

“Since the climate change, I’m doing ($750,000) in hard-shell and only $250,000 in soft-shell,” he said.

Years ago, waiting to unload at his Boston distributor, “I’d be sitting behind five or six trucks of soft-shell clams,” he recalled. “They started to disappear. Then I’ve see guys bringing in hard-shell.”

He explained how warming waters increased the number of predators, such as Japanese green crabs, that can smash a clam’s soft shell.

Read the full story at The Forecaster

Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find

March 16, 2017 — The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.

But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.

Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef’s most visited areas of color and life.

“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, director of a government-funded center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature. “In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead.”

Read the full story at the New York Times

Maine Fishermen Set Lobster Record for Seventh Straight Year

March 6, 2017 — For the seventh year in a row, Maine lobstermen have set a record for the value of their lobster catch.

Maine lobsters were worth a little more than $533 million at the docks in 2016, exceeding the previous year’s record by more than $30 million, Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher said Friday.

Interest in American lobsters has skyrocketed in Asia, especially China, in recent years, aiding the value of the crustaceans, which remain popular with Americans on summer vacation and Europeans at Christmas.

At the same time, U.S. lobster fishermen have been catching more lobsters. Maine also set a record for volume in 2016, with state fishermen catching nearly 131 million pounds of lobster last year. That surpassed the previous record of nearly 128 million in 2013.

Conservative management of the lobster fishery has allowed the fishery to thrive in recent years, regulators said. Scientists have said warming oceans might also play a role, as the center of the lobster population appears to be moving north as waters warm. The catch off of Rhode Island and Connecticut has plummeted as Maine’s has soared.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

Ocean waters off Southeast coast are acidifying faster than anyone expected and threatening marine life

March 6, 2017 — Gray’s Reef is a run of small ridges in the ocean off northern Georgia that looks like a Western rock canyon underwater. It’s swarmed by a stunning diversity of more than 300 different kinds of marine creatures and fish. And it’s more threatened than any one expected. The entire Southeast coast is.

The ocean water there is acidifying — becoming more corrosive, more poisonous — even faster than the air above it, where the acid is supposed to be coming from. There must be other sources. Finding them could be key to protecting marine life and a multi-million fishing industry and food source.

That in a nutshell is why the newly formed Southeast Ocean and Coastal Acidification Network met in Charleston this week to work out priorities for monitoring and research.

Its goal is to pull together “the state of the science” as it applies to the Southeast, bring in commercial anglers and other interests for their in-the-field observations, then develop plans to prevent the sort of ecosystem collapse that occurred on the West Coast with shellfish, according to organizer Debra Hernandez in an earlier story.

Read the full story at The Post and Courier

California faces another bleak salmon-fishing season, a holdover from the drought

March 6, 2017 — California salmon anglers are looking at another bleak fishing season, despite the remarkably wet winter – a lingering impact from the state’s five-year drought.

This week, state and federal fisheries regulators released their estimates for the numbers of adult fall-run Chinook salmon swimming off California’s coast. The news was even more grim than the drought-weakened numbers of fish last year.

An estimated 54,200 adult fall-run Chinook salmon reared in the Klamath River are swimming off the Pacific Coast – among the lowest number on record and down from 142,000 in 2016. Of the adult fish reared in the Sacramento River and its tributaries, biologists estimate there are 230,700 in the Pacific Ocean – 70,000 fewer than last year.

The reason for the declines? The adult fish set to return to Central Valley rivers to spawn were hatched two to four years ago, during the peak of California’s record-breaking drought when river and ocean conditions were abysmal.

Salmon from the Sacramento and Klamath river systems account for the vast majority of salmon caught by anglers in California’s rivers and along the coast. They’re considered critical to the state’s commercial and recreational salmon industries, which account for an estimated $1.4 billion in annual economic activity.

Researchers: Where are all the right whales?

February 24, 2017 — MELBOURNE, Fla. — Maybe the right whales are all just in the wrong place at the wrong time this year.

Where spotters typically see 20 newborn North Atlantic right whales, this winter only three have been born, the lowest number of newborns since only one was born in 2000.

Three dozen or more adult and baby right whales usually pass through Florida and Georgia waters during the winter calving season, which runs mid-November to mid-April. This year, only seven whales have been documented.

“Not only is it the fewest number of calves, but it’s also the fewest number of individuals seen,” said Phil Hamilton, a research scientist at New England Aquarium, which monitors right whales.

Scientists suspect a warmer North Atlantic, driven in part by climate change, might be disrupting the density of animal plankton that the whales need to feed, increasing the time it takes for females to bulk up for pregnancy and forcing the whales to scatter in search of food.

“A lot of people are doing a lot of head scratching,” Julie Albert, who monitors right whales for the nonprofit Marine Resources Council, said of this winter’s whale migration.

Read the full story from Florida Today at NorthJersey.com