Saving Seafood

Maine Voices: We need more awareness of mental health stresses on Maine’s fishermen

December 20, 2021 — Farmers and fishermen both rely on the weather to determine their schedules. One prays for rain, the other for clear skies and calm seas. Both wake up before the rooster crows and go to bed thinking about another full day of work ahead. They have similar concerns: regulations, development, finances, labor and their families.

Other parallels that can be drawn include the generational nature of the work; intrinsic family and community culture, and legacies of land, boats or buoys. Both industries are grappling with climate change: Farmers are stewards of the land; fishermen are stewards of the sea.

Farming and fishing are two industries that are historically comprised of men, and in the past decade, the median age of both has increased (around 57). While there has been increasing attention on the mental health impacts and suicide risk factors for farmers, little research is focused on the specific mental health challenges of fishermen. Because of the similarities in work factors and demographics, research on the suicide risk for farmers may inform risks for fishermen.

Read the full opinion piece at The Portland Press Herald

A Maine clam could help fishermen as climate change pushes out other species

December 20, 2021 — Some commercially fished species in Maine have seen their numbers decline in recent years due to climate change, but one of the state’s clam fisheries is growing and could help provide another way for fishermen to earn a living.

Northern quahogs, also known as hard clams, are among a handful of fisheries including Maine oysters — most of which are grown at sea farms — seaweed, and baby eels whose harvest volumes and values have increased over the past decade. Meanwhile, others including northern shrimp, softshell clams — and even the state’s still dominant lobster fishery — have shrunk.

For Mark Cota, a Topsham fisherman who grew up in Harpswell, the money in quahogs (pronounced “ko-hogs”) has been good enough that this year he started harvesting them full-time.

“I’ve done it for like four years,” Cota, 33, said Friday, chatting on the phone while raking for the clams on the tidal New Meadows River, which separates the towns of Brunswick and West Bath. “The price is right, and I’m getting good at it.”

Read the full story at The Bangor Daily News

Lobstering, climate change, and Maine. Read 7 takeaways from our ‘Lobster Trap’ series

December 17, 2021 — In “The lobster trap,” The Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald zoomed in on a small island central to Maine’s signature industry, smack dab in the crosshairs of global climate change. Reporters immersed themselves in the lives of local lobstermen reckoning with change and struggling to plot a path into the future.

Below are seven key takeaways from the series:

1. The forces that sparked a lobster boom, and brought unprecedented prosperity to Maine lobstermen, can also take it all away.

The American lobster thrives in chilly waters between 54 and 64 degrees, but can stay healthy up to 68 degrees. Long-term exposure to anything hotter spells serious trouble, like respiratory and immune system failure.

As ocean temperatures rise, the epicenter of the lobster population is shifting north to cooler waters. Right now, the thermal sweet spot is off midcoast Maine, where Vinalhaven and Stonington lobstermen fish.

But scientists warn the good times won’t last: As warming continues, they predict the catch will decline by half within 30 years.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

New England shrimp fishery to stay shuttered as waters warm

December 17, 2021 — New England’s commercial shrimp fishery will remain shut down because of concerns about the health of the crustacean’s population amid warming ocean temperatures.

The cold-water shrimp were once a winter delicacy in Maine and beyond, but the fishing industry has been shut down since 2013. A board of the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted on Friday to keep the fishery shuttered for at least three more years.

The shrimp prefer cold water and their population health is imperiled by the warming of the ocean off New England. The Gulf of Maine, in particular, is warming faster than most of the world’s ocean.

Study finds aquaculture production vulnerable to climate change

December 16, 2021 — Unchecked global warming could reduce global aquaculture production by as much as 16 percent by 2090, a new study from the University of British Columbia Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries shows.

Marine aquaculture, or mariculture, could double its output by 2050, from a current 30 million metric tons (MT) per year live-weight to 74 million MT, but UBC’s researchers modeled that estimate against climate change scenarios and found climate change to be a more serious threat to the industry than expected.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

The Lobster Trap

December 14, 2021 — A hard rain falls all around Johnny McCarthy, beading across the sprawling deck of his brand-new lobster boat, as he steers around the hidden threat of Folly Ledge through an ink-black night and into his home port.

His journey this midsummer night is momentous: a maiden voyage on the boat he’s always dreamed of, from the boatyard where her hull took final shape to the harbor where their fates will be made together.

You’d never know it to meet McCarthy – an unassuming, soft-spoken man who goes to work in a T-shirt and waterproof oilskins – but he is, at 32, among the most successful lobstermen in a place where lobster is king. On this remote and rocky island, 15 miles offshore, virtually everyone from the grocery clerk to the family doctor traces their living back to the tanks full of lobster that these boats haul into port each day.

The Gulf of Maine has been kind to McCarthy and his neighbors. The vast expanse, which stretches from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is one of the fastest warming ocean territories on the planet – and, for 30 years, that trend worked in Vinalhaven’s favor, turning the waters that surround the island into a near-perfect nursery for lobster. It is now the state’s second-richest port, and hard-working men and women like McCarthy have joined Maine’s one-percenters, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in a state where the average worker earns about $32,000.

McCarthy’s decision to invest in a new $650,000 boat – a gleaming, green-hulled fiberglass beast, 45 feet long and the envy of every captain in Vinalhaven’s 200-boat fleet – was a vote of confidence that the good times would continue. At least it was when he made the down payment three years ago.

That was before the coast of Maine became a front line in the battle over climate change.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Protests and Prayers

December 14, 2021 — When she heard the news, in the middle of her shift selling tickets at the ferry terminal, Cathy Watt broke down in tears.

The U.S. government had just ordered the unprecedented closure of a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean off Maine’s coast to traditional lobster fishing for four months a year, starting in October. It was the latest in a chain of crushing repercussions linked back to climate change: Warming oceans have hastened an endangered whale’s journey to the brink of extinction, and now Maine fishermen would pay the price.

Watt worried about her lobsterman son, a 30-year-old father of three who had just bought a new house. She nervously twisted her wedding band on her finger as she thought of her husband, a 48-year-old lobsterman and church deacon who counseled other fishermen through tough times — more of which, she feared, lay just ahead.

“It’s not like we can just go down to the next office building and find some new career that will take care of our family,” Watt said as she gestured toward Main Street, home to two dozen island businesses, many of which shut down in winter.

Flustered by the depth of her emotion, she wiped tears away and struggled to compose herself: for her young granddaughter, there beside her in the tiny ticket office with its smell of must and brine, and for the next customer in line.

At stake she felt was the future of their island, and the whole Maine coast.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

One of Connecticut’s last lobstermen sticks with it, despite his near empty hauls

December 14, 2021 — For the better part of a half century, the waters of Long Island Sound allowed Michael Grimshaw a good living. Now, he’s holding fast to a dwindling hope that the ocean’s bottom still has something — anything — to give.

Grimshaw is believed to be the last full-time commercial lobsterman in Connecticut — still plying a fishery that was once thick with boats and rich with opportunity.

His youngest son preparing bait and his elderly, former mother-in-law readying claw bands, Grimshaw, 65, prodded his aging boat into the choppy harbor late one summer morning, well after most fishermen have put to sea.

Suited up in his wet gear, he was soon hauling up traps from the dark waters, one after another. Out of 10 traps, he snared some spider crabs and a few pogies. None contained a lobster.

“It’s embarrassing — terrible, really,” said Grimshaw, who continues to raise hundreds of traps a week, even though he claims to have retired. “I used to be the big dog; now, I’m the puppy.”

During his glory days in the late 1990s, when he competed with hundreds of other commercial lobstermen in the area for a multimillion-dollar annual catch, his traps used to bring up as much as a few thousand pounds a day of the coveted crustaceans. A good day now amounts to maybe 50 pounds.

The main culprit? Climate change.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

The U.S. South Atlantic Marine Ecosystem: An Ecosystem In Transition

December 13, 2021 — Today, NOAA released the first U.S. South Atlantic Ecosystem Status Report. This report gives an overview of the current status and long-term trends of key marine ecosystem indicators. Some of the trends it examines are:

  • Sea surface temperature
  • Ocean acidification
  • Gulf Stream dynamics
  • Status of fish communities and harvested stocks
  • Trends in protected species
  • Recreational fishing pressure

This report provides a look at the ecosystem as a whole, rather than its individual parts. This helps resource managers, such as the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, scientists, and other partners understand how the ecosystem is connected and is changing. The report provides a holistic assessment of the ecosystem that can be used to inform management and policy decisions.

“Having one place for scientific information on the entire marine ecosystem is crucial to enhancing our understanding of how the ecosystem functions and may be changing over time,” said Kevin Craig, Research Fishery Biologist at NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center. “This is needed to effectively manage the many resources the ecosystem provides, including support for economically valuable fisheries. We all need to see the whole picture, not just one piece.”

Read the full story from NOAA Fisheries

Heat, no food, deadly weather: Climate change kills seabirds

December 2, 2021 — The warming of the planet is taking a deadly toll on seabirds that are suffering population declines from starvation, inability to reproduce, heat waves and extreme weather.

Climate-related losses have hit albatrosses off the Hawaiian islands, northern gannets near the British Isles and puffins off the Maine coast. Some birds are less able to build nests and raise young as sea levels rise, while others are unable to find fish to eat as the ocean heats up, researchers have found.

Common murres and Cassin’s auklets that live off the West Coast have also died in large numbers from conditions scientists directly tied to global warming.

With less food, rising seas that encroach on islands where birds roost and increasingly frequent hurricanes that wipe away nests, many seabirds have been producing fewer chicks, researchers say.

And tern species that live off New England have died during increasing rain and hailstorms scientists link to climate change. Some species, including endangered roseate terns, also can’t fledge chicks because more frequent severe weather kills their young, said Linda Welch, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Read the full story from the Associated Press