Saving Seafood

Why some fish are ‘junk,’ others are protected. California study points to past racism

August 30, 2021 — Andrew Rypel grew up fishing on Wisconsin’s pristine lakes and rivers. With just a worm on his hook, he caught suckers, gar, sunfish and other native fish he never saw in his game fishing magazines.

From a young age, Rypel loved all the fish species and it surprised him that others paid little attention to the native fish in his area. He noticed there were stricter fishing restrictions on game fish, like walleye and trout, than the native species. With no bag limits on many of his favorite native species, people could harvest as many as they pleased.

“I learned that there were all these different types of species,” Rypel said. “Most of the fishing community focused on these select game fish species.”

Anglers even told young Rypel to throw the less desirable native fish up on the bank after they were caught, as they were supposedly a “problem for the ecosystem” and took resources away from highly valued game species.

Rypel always found this perspective backward. Native fish are essential for healthy aquatic environments. And in the midst of the world’s climate crisis, protecting these native species is more critical than ever.

Read the full story at The Sacramento Bee

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester Mayoral candidates talk housing, blue economy, and respect

August 30, 2021 — With the blue economy being essential to the city’s legacy and future, candidates provided insight on how they would strike a balance between the competing interests of fishermen, development, wildlife, preservation and recreation.

“To say that the fishing industry is dead could not be further from the truth,” Harvey said, explaining that fish processing is one of the city’s largest employers as far as he knows.

Harvey said the mayor’s job is to use his or her soap box to pressure Congress for intelligent regulations and to lure more boats to Gloucester.

As his grandparents came to Gloucester from Sicily to fish, Verga knows the importance of the waterfront.

“It is something that is not going away,” he said. “It is not dead, it is different than from what it once was.”

Verga emphasized that Gloucester should be looking at employment opportunities on the waterfront other than fishing, such as lobstering.

“Gloucester has struggled with its blue economy for many, many years,” Russell said. “Unfortunately, there are two competing faces here in the city and we need to be unified.”

This means, as he said, that downtown and the harbor and the fisheries can coexist.

“We need to protect the heritage that we have in the harbor and we need to invest in working with downtown so we can coexist,” Russell said.

Romeo Theken said that everyone has been coexisting for years.

“We are almost 400 years old,” she said, explaining that tourists want to see a working waterfront.

In addition to listing the multiple ocean-front specific companies that work in collaboration with the rest of the city, Romeo Theken noted that she had reinvigorated the city fisheries commission.

She added that fishermen are environmentalists.

Pollard, who has a commercial fishing license and fishes part-time, would like to see additional dockage implemented in the city.

Sclafani said that “if you were to make the fatal mistake of rezoning the Gloucester fishing industry’s infrastructure, that infrastructure would just disappear.”

He added that the future of fishing is fish farms.

“I looked at a female lobster that has thousand a little babies under her,” he said. “If you could separate them, 30,000 from birth, pretty sure you could feed the world with lobster.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

DANA CONNORS: Does aquaculture fit with Maine’s economic, environmental future? A thorough review will find out.

August 27, 2021 — Sustainability is a word we hear a lot in Maine’s business community. Whether in regards to economic, environmental or corporate practices, our companies are striving to meet the needs of the present, while charting their long-term growth. Ultimately, those that prioritize and meet this responsibility will be best positioned to grow our economy and move our State forward.

In light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, this work takes on a new urgency. The headline alone stating that “Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying” should be enough to make us all step up to the plate and reimagine our future.

Combating climate change will require citizens, government and business to work together. Maine businesses play a vital role in creating innovative solutions to protect our planet. A challenge of this magnitude requires collaboration, not confrontation, to advance the best ideas and policies. Together, we can forge solutions that improve our environment and grow our economy — leaving the world better for generations to come.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News

‘No easy answers’ WHOI building project designed for sea-level rise

August 26, 2021 — The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is one of the leading organizations focused on ocean research, exploration and education. Its vessels roam the world’s oceans, their researchers explore the deepest oceanic canyons and the shallows of a salt marsh.

For an institution that has experienced, researched and documented the impacts of climate change on the ocean, it follows that when it contemplated building a new $100 million dock and waterfront support facilities, WHOI would incorporate sea-level rise into their planning.

“This is critical infrastructure to what we do,” said Rob Munier, WHOI vice president for marine facilities and operations. “Others can contemplate alternatives, including retreat (from the waterfront), but we have to be there. It’s part of our ability to do our mission.”

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Fishery agencies seeking stakeholder input on climate change impacts and concerns

August 26, 2021 — In 2020, a Cape Cod Canal fisherman wrote a letter about the need for federal laws to address shifting fish stocks and maintain sustainable levels amid climate change.

In 2019, a researcher concluded that climate variation and warming waters in the Gulf of Maine contributed to a decline in New England fishing jobs from 1996 to 2017.

In 2021, a Massachusetts fisheries analyst and consultant said researchers are seeing changes they haven’t seen before and are trying to determine the exact causation as it relates to climate change. Over the years, the analyst said they have seen a change in the distribution, productivity, spawning and mortality of fish species.

Such concerns are about to be closely considered under a new federal initiative that will draw representatives of every coastal state from Maine to Florida to strategically plan for future fisheries management amid climate change. The East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Initiative is a multiyear effort that will culminate in the creation of a few likely scenarios that will inform future decision-making by regional fishery councils.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fishers Struggle as Fish Head for the Poles

August 26, 2021 — As climate change raises the ocean’s temperature, some fish species are moving poleward to cooler waters. In the United States, as elsewhere, commercial fishers are trying to adapt. But as a new study of trawler communities along the US east coast documents, fishers’ efforts to adjust are being constrained by a regulatory environment that isn’t adapting with them.

The research, led by Eva Papaioannou, a marine ecologist with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, looked at trawl fishing communities in 10 ports from North Carolina to Maine, where rising water temperatures have been especially pronounced.

Papaioannou and her colleagues dug into government records and vessel trip reports, examining decades of data about vessel activity patterns, distributions of fish stocks, and fish landings. They compared two periods, 1996 to 2000 and 2011 to 2015, and confirmed that the fish these communities are primarily targeting, fluke and hake, had shifted northward by up to 200 kilometers.

The scientists also interviewed members of these communities to find out how they were responding to their changing fishing grounds. “Fishers are on the water every day, so they see these changes, and they’re incredibly adept at dealing with variability,” says Becca Selden, a biologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and a study co-lead.

The team found that the majority of fishers remained in their traditional grounds, but switched to targeting different, more abundant species. “Most prior work assumed that there wouldn’t actually be species switching,” says Selden. “But this was one of the dominant strategies that we observed.” As the scientists wrote in their study, this desire for “spatial stability” of fishing grounds was both the preferred strategy among all fisher communities surveyed, but also the most sustainable practice for local fish stocks.

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

NOAA Open Invitation: Public Listening Sessions on Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful

August 25, 2021 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:

NOAA invites you to a stakeholder listening session in response to Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful. This preliminary report, released by the White House in May, provides recommendations on how the United States should achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030, as directed by President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crises at Home and Abroad.

NOAA wants to hear from the public at large and all interested stakeholders on how best to achieve the 30-percent goal, based on the principles and recommendations in the report. Below are meeting details for two upcoming listening sessions. You are welcome to share this announcement broadly.

Thursday, August 26: Stakeholder Listening Session
Time: 3:00-5:00 PM ET
Dial in: 888-323-9726, Passcode: 890-4233
Webinar: Join Here on the day of the meeting (Conference number: PWXW2317057, Audience passcode: 8904233)

Monday, September 13: Stakeholder Listening Session
Time: 3:00-5:00 PM ET
Dial in: 800-857-5743, Passcode: 727-5932
Webinar: Join Here on the day of the meeting (Conference number: PWXW2317058, Audience passcode: 7275932)

These calls will be recorded. The webinar is view only—all participants must dial in to the phone number above for audio. If you have any issues accessing the WebEx platform or would like to review the slides before/after the session, you can find the presentation and other resources on NOAA’s webpage for Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful.

MAINE: As gulf waters warm, could quahogs be the next big shellfish product?

August 20, 2021 — A new research project is trying to determine whether a species of hard-shell clam, quahogs, can thrive in enough abundance off Maine’s coast to make for a new business opportunity.

The Brunswick office of Manomet, an environmental research nonprofit headquartered in Plymouth, Mass., is partnering with the University of Maine and the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay to study the presence of quahog DNA in the water column.

Determining the level of DNA is considered useful to understanding to what extent the clams are making themselves at home in the gulf.

The study of DNA in this context is called “eDNA” or “environmental DNA,” Marissa McMahan, a senior fisheries scientist with the Brunswick branch of Manomet, told Mainebiz.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Robotic Floats Provide New Look at Ocean Health and Global Carbon Cycle

August 18, 2021 — Microscopic marine life plays a fundamental role in the health of the ocean and, ultimately, the planet. Just like plants on land, tiny phytoplankton use photosynthesis to consume carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter and oxygen. This biological transformation is known as marine primary productivity.

In a new study in Nature Geoscience this week, MBARI Senior Scientist Ken Johnson and former MBARI postdoctoral fellow Mariana Bif demonstrated how a fleet of robotic floats could revolutionize our understanding of primary productivity in the ocean on a global scale.

Data collected by these floats will allow scientists to more accurately estimate how carbon flows from the atmosphere to the ocean and shed new light on the global carbon cycle. Changes in phytoplankton productivity can have profound consequences, like affecting the ocean’s ability to store carbon and altering ocean food webs. In the face of a changing climate, understanding the ocean’s role in taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it for long periods of time is imperative.

“Based on imperfect computer models, we’ve predicted primary production by marine phytoplankton will decrease in a warmer ocean, but we didn’t have a way to make global-scale measurements to verify models. Now we do,” said MBARI Senior Scientist Ken Johnson.

By converting carbon dioxide into organic matter, phytoplankton not only support oceanic food webs, they are the first step in the ocean’s biological carbon pump.

Phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to build their bodies. Marine organisms eat those phytoplankton, die, and then sink to the deep seafloor. This organic carbon is gradually respired by bacteria into carbon dioxide. Since a lot of this happens at great depths, carbon is kept away from the atmosphere for long periods of time. This process sequesters carbon in deep-sea water masses and sediments and is a crucial component in modeling Earth’s climate now and in the future.

Read the full story at Eco Magazine

Fish councils prepare for climate change

August 16, 2021 — The New England Fishery Management Council is joining other East Coast marine management councils to plan for a future marked by the continuing detrimental impacts of climate change.

The project, called East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning, is a response to the accelerating and debilitating impacts on fish stocks and marine habitats caused by the effects of climate change.

“No one knows for sure what the future holds, but a continuation or acceleration of climate change has the potential to strain our existing fishery management system and alter the way fishermen, scientists, and the public interact with the marine environment,” the NFMC stated. “Scenario planning is a way of exploring how fishery management may need to evolve over the next few decades as climate change becomes a bigger issue.”

The other organizations participating in the initiative are the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, NOAA Fisheries’ Gloucester-based Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

The Northeast Regional Coordinating Council, which consists of leadership from the MAFMC, NEFMC, ASMFC, GARFO, and NEFSC, will be the primary decision-making body for the initiative, with the addition of South Atlantic representatives.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times