Saving Seafood

Monkfish are indeed fine as quota stays the same in 2018

May 4, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Michelle Wolf is right — the monkfish really are fine.

Federal fishing regulators are allowing fishermen to harvest the same amount of the ugly fish this year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration allowed fishermen to catch about 33.8 million pounds of monkfish last year, and says the fishery’s sustainable enough that the number will hold in 2018.

They’re sought by fishermen from Maine to North Carolina and can be less expensive at markets than popular fish such as cod and flounder. Some industry members want to grow interest in monkfish.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Raleigh News & Observer

 

NOAA Fisheries Sets 2018-2020 Catch Limits for Groundfish Stocks and Announces Other Management Measures for the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan

May 1, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Through Framework 57, we have set catch limits for 20 groundfish stocks for the 2018-2020 fishing years (May 1, 2018-April 30, 2020), including the 3 stocks managed jointly with Canada.

Framework 57 increases quotas for 11 stocks compared to 2017, including: Georges Bank cod (139%), Gulf of Maine cod (41%), and Gulf of Maine haddock (190%). Quotas are decreasing for nine stocks, including Southern New England yellowtail flounder (-75%) and Gulf of Maine winter flounder (-45%).

We expect increases in the quotas for Gulf of Maine cod, Gulf of Maine haddock, and Georges Bank cod to provide additional economic revenue and flexibility to the commercial groundfish industry. Overall, we expect the measures in Framework 57 to generate $9 million in additional gross revenues this fishing year compared to last year.

Framework 57 also:

  • Revises the way common pool quotas are split between trimesters for six stocks.
  • Modifies the Atlantic halibut accountability measures.
  • Changes the trigger for the scallop fishery’s accountability measure for the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic yellowtail flounder stock to when total catch exceeds the overall catch limit.
  • Revises the southern windowpane flounder accountability measure for the summer flounder, scup, and skate fisheries.
  • Sets a Georges Bank cod catch target of 138 mt for the recreational fishery and grants the Regional Administrator authority to set recreational measures for 2018 and 2019 to prevent the catch target from being exceeded. A separate rule implements new Georges Bank cod recreational measures.

Read the final rule as filed in the Federal Register and the permit holder bulletin on our website.

 

Northern Cod Fisheries Improvement Project to Aid in Understanding of Stock Components

April 24, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A Northern Cod Fisheries Improvement Project (FIP) will help researchers understand Northern Cod stock components and their movement along the slope of the continental shelf, as well as their inshore offshore migration patterns.

The project is being led by the Groundfish Allocation Council (GEAC) and the Association of Seafood Producers (ASP) in an effort to “enable more effective stock assessment modeling and management measures to control fishing mortality.” Acoustic receivers will be dropped in waters off Eastern Canada and acoustic tags will be placed on Northern cod.

“This is crucial work, and an important piece in addressing longstanding scientific questions around the Northern cod resource,” said FIP co-chairs Derek Butler, Executive Director of ASP, and Bruce Chapman, President of GEAC.

Government scientists, as well as academia from Memorial University, Dalhousie University, the Ocean Tracking Network, and the Ocean Frontier Institute, andindustry reps from Icewater Seafoods and Ocean Choice International of Canada, and Davigel Inc. of France, sat in on a scientific workshop for the research program. The group came up with a final deployment plan for the acoustic tags and receivers.

Industry stakeholders reported on the progress at their third annual FIP Working Group meeting in Brussels.

This story was originally published by Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.

 

Matching grants open for sustainable groundfish projects

April 17, 2018 — The New England groundish fishery is one of the priority targets of a new grants program by the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation to promote innovation in sustainable fisheries. through “effective participation by fishermen and fishing communities.”

The Fisheries Innovation Fund program, funded by NOAA and three private foundations, is set to award up to $950,000 nationally. Most of the grants are anticipated to fall within the range of $50,000 to $100,000.

The program, however, noted that priority for funding will be given to projects in one of four local fisheries — New England groundfish, West Coast groundfish, Gulf of Mexico reef fish and Gulf of Alaska halibut and groundfish.

The grants will require 100 percent matching funds from recipients. The NFWF said in its announcement that eligible recipients include non-profits, state government agencies, municipal governments, educational institutions and individual businesses.

To date, according to NFWF spokesman Rob Blumenthal, the Fisheries Innovation Fund “has awarded grants totaling over $20.3 million to 127 projects across 26 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

Those awards generated more than $22.5 million in matching funds from recipients “for a total conservation impact of $42.8 million.”

The three foundations joining NOAA in providing the overall funding include two with strong ties to environmental and conservation groups — the Kingfisher Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation — as well as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of Palo Alto, California, started by the founder of Intel.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Regulators to discuss monitor costs in northeast cod fishery

April 16, 2018 — MYSTIC, Conn. — Commercial fishing managers will consider the subject of who pays for at-sea monitoring that is needed to craft regulations about the industry.

The cost of monitoring in the New England cod fishery has been a source of controversy in recent years. The federal government shifted the cost to fishermen a couple of years ago.

The New England Fishery Management Council is expected to take up the issue of industry-funded monitoring Thursday at a meeting in Mystic.

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

 

Decline found in Canada’s cod stocks no surprise to scientists

April 10, 2018 — Newspaper headlines in Eastern Canada are reporting northern cod stocks have suffered a significant and surprising decline.

A recent Department of Fisheries, Oceans and Coast Guard (DFO) report revealed cod stocks in the Labrador to Avalon Peninsula dropped 30 percent in 2017 over estimates on the 2015 population.

The decline is significant, scientists studying the fishery agree, but they find fault with reports calling the situation a surprise. It was pretty much predicted by experts, according to Sherrylynn Rowe, a research scientist with the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystems Research at Memorial University in St. John’s.

“Last year, when it became evident that the recent burst of cod productivity had started to slow, my colleague George Rose and I wrote a paper in the journal Nature where we urged the Canadian government not to act on proposals for increased fishery access because we were of the opinion that ramping up the fishery in the face of declining productivity stood to derail the come back that we have seen of late,” Rowe said. “Unfortunately, shortly after that article was published, policymakers opted for a management plan that essentially ignored our pleas, and those by DFO’s own scientists which encouraged keeping removals to the lowest possible levels. Instead, they went ahead and changed the management plan in such a way that allowed removals in 2017 to amount to about three times what they were in 2015.”

This increased the reported catch to 13,000 metric tons in 2017.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Fishermen, Environmentalists: Fight Over Monitors Not Over

April 6, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Commercial fishermen and environmental groups agree that a longstanding dispute over the future of at-sea monitoring is far from over, despite recent funding help from Congress.

The monitors are on-board workers who collect data to help inform fishing regulations. The federal government moved the cost of paying for them to fishermen in some Northeast fisheries in 2016.

Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said last month that a budget bill finalized by Congressional leaders included about $10 million to pay for the monitors. That means fishermen of valuable New England species such as cod, haddock and sole won’t have to pay for the monitors this year.

But fishing groups, and the environmentalists who watch them, say the government and industry need to work together on a long-term solution to make paying for monitoring sustainable. Fishermen say they can’t afford the cost themselves, as it can add around $700 per day to the cost of fishing.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at US News

 

Alaska: Salmon harvests, halibut prices take sharp turn down

April 5, 2018 — Alaska is expecting a reduced salmon harvest this year, setting up a trifecta of falling fish revenues for Alaska fishermen, coastal communities and state coffers.

Coming on the heels of an 80 percent crash of cod stocks in the Gulf of Alaska and a 10 percent decline in halibut catches, state fishery managers are projecting a 2018 salmon harvest at 149 million fish, down 34 percent from last season.

The shortfall stems from lower forecasts for returning pink salmon. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is forecasting a humpie harvest of just 70 million fish, down by more than half from last summer.

For sockeye salmon, a statewide catch of about 52 million is down 1.8 million fish from 2017, which was the fifth-largest red salmon harvest since 1970.

By far, most of the sockeyes will come from Bristol Bay’s nine river systems where a projected harvest of 37.5 million would be down by more than a million, but still well above the 10- and 20-year averages for the Bay.

Alaska’s chum salmon catch last year of 25 million also was the largest haul since 1970. This year’s statewide catch is expected to produce 21 million chums, down by nearly four million.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

The Turning Tides of New England Fisheries

April 5, 2018 — Andrew Applegate’s family has been in the fishing business since his ancestors moved from Cranbury, New Jersey, to the Sandy Hook area around 100 years ago. Along with some commercial fishing, Applegate’s father ran a couple of large party fishing boats out of Atlantic City, and through the decades the family caught whatever was available. But now, Applegate is part of a New England fishing community forced to depend on fast-changing marine species they’ve never seen in the region before, and give up on others that are dying out.

The Gulf of Maine has witnessed its cod stocks collapse but its lobster population explode. To the south, in contrast to their current success north of Cape Cod, lobsters have suffered shell-wasting disease and poor productivity down into the Mid-Atlantic. And black sea bass is being found in northern New England when 20 years ago that would’ve been unheard of, says Michael Pentony, regional head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Greater Atlantic fisheries division. In the face of such changes, those involved in fisheries management are trying to prepare for a murky future. Reliable and more timely data paired with flexible regulations could, they hope, allow those in the business to adapt as fisheries change in the coming years.

These changes are forcing some to disregard historical knowledge gathered in logbooks by generations of fishermen who recorded where to catch certain fish at certain times of the year, says Ben Martens, the executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.

“Now you just have to throw those out. They don’t work anymore. And every year is completely different from the year before,” Martens says. “Sometimes we have water that’s too warm; this year we had cooler water. We’re seeing a lot more turbulence in what’s happening in our planning and in our business stability.”

Read the full story at Ozy

Don Cuddy: Proposed Magnuson Stevens changes are reasonable

April 2, 2018 — I am wondering how much commercial fishermen know about acting? At a guess I’d say probably as much, or as little, as most actors know about commercial fishing, even award-winning ones. This thought arose following the recent appearance in these pages of an opinion piece on fishery management by a member of the acting profession in an attempt to wield political influence.

The thespian in question is also an Oceana board member, a well-funded environmental group antithetical to America’s oldest industry. This group has been known to advance claims which fail to resonate with real scientists. One particularly misleading report ‘Wasted Catch,’ launched by Oceana on a credulous public in 2014, drew a letter of censure from all eight of our nation’s regional Fishery Management Councils. Among other things the letter stated:

“While we acknowledge that there are no laws requiring Oceana reports to accurately represent the best available scientific information or to undergo peer review, to do so would be in the best interest of all involved parties. This is why we suggest that you retract the report until it is reviewed and corrected.” http://www.mafmc.org/newsfeed/wasted-catch

The Magnuson Stevens Act which governs fisheries in federal waters requires reauthorization and it is currently under review. Changes proposed in a bill now before Congress were denounced by this Oceana advocate as “counter factual, anti-science, anti-conservation.”

The frothy plea to our congressman is for maintenance of the status quo in fishery management. And the argument carries weight because it comes from a well-known actor? Well sir, Nature isn’t listening. And the modest proposals in H.R 200, intended to remove some of the onerous provisions burdening our fishermen, have generated a predictable response from environmentalists who dismiss realities which do not fit their agenda. Change is needed.

The act as written, for example, calls for rebuilding all stocks to maximum sustainable yield simultaneously and imposes timeline to achieve that. I called my friend Dave Goethel for his take on that. “That ignores Nature. It’s a biological impossibility,” he said. “Something will always be overfished. The reason haddock are up and cod are down now is because they occupy the same ecological niche.”

Dave is a working commercial fisherman with a degree in marine biology who served two terms on the New England Fishery Management Council. He doesn’t act but he has been fishing for 50 years. Fishermen, he said, are simply hoping to introduce a little flexibility on these rigid rebuilding timelines which were imposed more or less arbitrarily when the act was written.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times