Saving Seafood

JOHN SACKTON: Media’s Rampant ‘Fisheries Are Going Extinct’ Claim Finally has Serious Rebuttal from Scientists

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Editor’s View] by John Sackton — Nov 3, 2015 — The following headline came across our newsfeed this morning “Some South China Sea fish ‘close to extinction'”, courtesy of Agence France Presse.

The report was based on a quote from Rashid Sumaila, director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit of the University of British Columbia.

“The South China Sea is… under threat from various sources. We need to do something,” said Sumaila.

“The most scary thing is the level of decline we have seen over the years. Some species (are facing) technically extinction or depletion,” Sumaila, who headed the study, told a press conference in Hong Kong. 

Having not seen the paper, it is not possible to evaluate his statements. But they are readily taken up because they feed into a media narrative that has proved very hard to change: fisheries around the world are dying because of human greed and overfishing.  This narrative has been central to NGO campaigns focused on fisheries. 

For many years, there was no organized response, and especially no way for journalists to get accurate scientific information. If they were fed a quote, such as “90% of the worlds stocks were unsustainably harvested” as appeared in Newsweek this summer, or that fish is ‘aquatic bushmeat’ comparable to eating monkeys and rhinoceros, as was said by Sylvia Earle, they have no way to evaluate its truthfulness. No wonder that seafood seems so controversial.

A group of scientists has come together through Ray Hilborn and his colleagues at the University of Washington, that is finally providing real-time commentary and rebuttal – i.e. pointing out the basic science – which in many cases does not support these media stories. 

Our companion story today by Peggy Parker has more detail on Hilborn’s rebuttal to Newsweek, where he said one article ‘may set a record for factual errors’.

The idea is not to simply point out poor science and unsupported conclusions, but to encourage media to use their website cfooduw.org, as a resource whenever they see a scientific claim about fisheries.

For example, just in the past few days, scientists from around the world have posted comments on a range of global topics.

Hilborn pointed out, and the Newsweek editors accepted, a correction that not 90%, but 28.8% of fish stocks were estimated as overfished. Would they have run the story if they had not been pitched intitally that 90% of fish stocks have collapsed?

Steve Cadrin of the University of Massachusetts comments on recent articles about cod in both New England and Newfoundland.  He says “The lesson from both of these papers is that rebuilding the stocks to historical levels depends both on fisheries management … and on the return of favorable environmental conditions.” 

“Stock assessment models are simplifications of a much more complex reality. Stock assessments typically assume that components of productivity (survival from natural mortality, reproductive rates, growth) are relatively constant. These assumptions may be reasonable for relatively stable ecosystems. However, considering the extreme climate change experienced in the Gulf of Maine, such assumptions need to be re-considered.  Alternative approaches to science and management are needed to help preserve the fishing communities that rely on Gulf of Maine cod.” 

Two tuna scientists collaborate on a story in response to the charge by Greenpeace that John West is breaking its sustainable tuna pledge by buying fish caught with FADs.

FADs are a type of fishing gear (radio monitored fish aggregating devices) that have become very widely used for pelagic tuna. The two scientists, Laurent Dagorn and Gala Moreno, point out in a comment and a recent paper the important issues with FADs are 1) quantifying, with scientific data, how big that impact actually is, 2) determining if the impact is acceptable for the amount and diversity of fish caught, 3) comparing it with the impact of other fishing gears, and 4) implementing measures to reduce an impact if it is too high for the ecosystem, taking into account all fishing impacts. 

This provides a real road map for a discussion of FADs and how they should or should not be used, in contrast to the campaign claims that they are simply destructive types of fishing gear.  Dagorn and Moreno point out that all food production (including organic farming) involves making choices about modifying ecosystems, and tuna fishing should not be considered in isolation, but in how it meets the goal of providing food for global populations.

Aggregating and making this kind of fisheries science easily accessible is one of the most concrete actions that has been taken in years to counteract the misinformation that so many of us in the industry experience every day. 

It is an effort that deserves wholehearted support, including publicizing the resource to local writers and editors. Please visit their website at cfooduw.org.

This opinion piece originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

Pacific cod eating seabirds, study shows

November 9, 2015 — You could call it revenge on the birds.

While many marine birds are well known for their skills at diving into the sea to pluck out fishy meals, there is now solid evidence that some Pacific cod have turned the tables on the avian species.

The practice came to light a few years ago when seafood workers in Dutch Harbor noticed that some of the cod they were processing came with extra features — partially digested birds in the fish stomachs.

Scientists from the Alaska SeaLife Center and University of Alaska have now examined remains of 74 birds collected from cod stomachs in 2011 and have some findings described in a study published online in the journal Marine Ornithology.

The bird remains come from cod caught in the Aleutian Islands region, off Cape Sarichef in Unimak Pass, using trawl and pot gear. The fish were processed at the UniSea plant in Dutch Harbor; the plant froze the bird remains and sent them to the scientists for analysis.

There have been other known cases of big fish eating small seabirds elsewhere in the world, the new study says, and past surveys by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have turned up, in very rare instances, bits of birds inside cod. In one case, a NOAA researcher found a murre foot in a cod stomach.

But the evidence from Dutch Harbor appears to be the first documentation of Pacific cod making a practice of eating birds, said study co-author Tuula Hollmen, science director at the SeaLife Center and an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News

 

Climate change fuels cod collapse

November 3, 2015 — The strongest link yet between climate change and the collapse of New England’s cod fish stunningly confirms how global emissions fuel regional calamities. The problems can no longer be contained by fishery council catch limits. They now demand worldwide greenhouse gas solutions.

A team of scientists, including those from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine, and the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, found that average surface water temperature in the Gulf of Maine rose four degrees between 2004 and 2013. Temperatures in the gulf have risen faster than in 99 percent of all sea waters, with record warmth recorded in 2012.

Four degrees is trivial to humans, who can shed sweaters or seek shade. But for a cold-blooded fish at the southern edge of its breeding range, unable to turn on the AC against the northward shift of the Gulf Stream, four degrees is a sauna. Less cod larvae survive in warmer water, possibly because their cold-water zooplankton food is also less available. Surviving cod then seek deeper, colder water, where more voracious predators await to compound their mortality.

The study, published last week in the journal Science, helps explain why cod stocks have not rebounded under draconian federal catch limits. Adding in the negative impact of warmer water, researchers found that fishing mortality was far too high to rebuild stocks even when fishermen did not exceed quotas.

Read the full story at Boston Globe

A fisherman’s doubt, and his love of the sea

November 3, 2015 — He is up before the dawn, and, a creature of steady habits, he heads for the seashore.

It’s dark when Frank Mirarchi jumps into his black pickup truck, and dark still when he reaches Scituate Harbor. He parks on the town pier and stares at the ocean. But his 55-foot stern dragger is no longer moored there.

Actually, the boat is there. But it’s no longer his. It was renamed last June after he sold it — a poignant punctuation point to Mirarchi’s half-century career as a commercial fisherman.

“I’m down here every morning to watch the boats go out,’’ he told me Monday as we sat on a bench overlooking the dazzling harbor and under an unseasonably warm autumn sun. “I did it for 52 years. And I still love it.’’

I first met Mirarchi in early January when the harbor was icy and fat flakes of snow gently fell as if one of those snow globes had been softly shaken.

He is the son of a scientist and is something of a self-taught scientist himself. When I suggested Governor Charlie Baker would do well to pick his brain and appoint him to an ad hoc group looking into the travails of the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine, the new governor took my advice. And soon Mirarchi was shaking hands with Baker on Beacon Hill.

When the latest news arrived last week about the depths of the cod collapse, the numbers were so alarming that I instantly thought of Frank and those like him who found their livelihood at sea.

Read the full story at Boston Globe

EU looks into reports of fake fish labeling in Brussels

November 3, 2015 — BRUSSELS (AP) – The European Union is looking into reports that cheap seafood is often mislabeled as choice fish in some of the Belgian capital’s fine restaurants and even in EU cafeterias.

The Oceana environmental group said Tuesday it found that 31.8 percent of seafood it tested in and around EU institutions in Brussels was a different fish than what was labeled on the menu. In the cafeterias of the EU, which sets fishery policies for the 28-nation bloc, the total amount of falsely labeled fish stood at 38 percent.

“We take this very seriously,” EU spokesman Alexander Winterstein said of the report.

Oceana said 95 percent of what was labeled Bluefin tuna – a fatty, sublime sushi favorite – was actually a less expensive species, served to make a hefty profit. In 13 percent of the cases, cod was also mislabeled and people sometimes were fed pangasius instead, a freshwater fish farmed in southeast Asia.

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

 

Will Maine lobster crash like cod? Only close ocean monitoring will tell

November 2, 2015 — There was a mix of news about the Gulf of Maine last week. First, there were dire warnings about the role of rising ocean temperatures in the demise of cod in the North Atlantic. Then came what sounded like good news — Maine has surpassed Massachusetts to become the state with the second most lucrative seafood landings in the country. Finally, on Friday, federal regulators announced they would close the Gulf of Maine herring fishery this month.

All of these stories are interrelated and point to the need for much more research to gain better understanding about what is happening in the Atlantic Ocean and why. With better knowledge about how changing ocean conditions affect different species, regulators can more effectively target rules to protect them and the fishermen who make a living catching them.

The virtual disappearance of cod from the waters off New England is not news. But a new report, published in the journal Science, concludes that rising ocean temperatures played a much larger role in the decline than initially thought. The study’s lead author, Andrew Pershing, is a scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.

In the simplest sense, regulators decide how many tons of a species can be taken from the ocean based on assessments of that species’ population. The problem with cod management, Pershing’s report concludes, is that regulators didn’t fully grasp the severity of the ocean temperature increase and what it meant for the legendary groundfish. As a result, regulators allowed fishermen to catch too many cod.

“Failure to recognize the impact of warming on cod contributed to overfishing,” the report said. “Recovery of this fishery depends on sound management, but the size of the stock depends on future temperature conditions. The experience in the Gulf of Maine highlights the need to incorporate environmental factors into resource management.”

This is especially true in the gulf, which is warming faster than 99.9 percent of the world’s oceans. Most troubling, beginning in 2004, the rate of warming in the Gulf of Maine increased more than seven-fold, the report says. Because of this rapid warming, regulatory limits on cod fishing didn’t work because cod did not reproduce and grow as expected.

This isn’t an academic problem. As the cod population declined, regulators imposed quotas that allowed fishermen to catch less. When the population didn’t rebound, regulators tightened the quotas, adding to the economic hardship for fishing communities.

Read the full editorial at Bangor Daily News

Lecturers talk global conservation efforts, decline of fisheries

October 31, 2015 — Artist James Prosek uses fish as inspiration for his work.

Prosek, who has also written 13 books, told stories at a Saturday lecture at SUNY-ESF of when he was 9 years old and trespassing rivers to fish. Though his youth involved catching and releasing 30 fish to take a picture, Prosek said he now prefers to catch one and eat it.

About 100 people attended the most recent installment of the SUNY-ESF Dale L. Travis Public Lecture Series, which focused on the future of fisheries. The lecture, entitled “The Future of Fisheries: Choices, Decisions, and the Role of the Arts,” featured five speakers: Karin Limburg, John Waldman, Prosek, David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes.

During the lecture, Swedish folk music played in the background.

The music tied into Limburg’s discussion about fish hook experiments in Gotland, Sweden. Limburg was the first of five speakers during the lecture, which took place in Marshall Hall on the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry campus.

The talk opened with a traditional  reading and translation by a Haudenosaunee representative. The excerpt concluded with, “Now our minds are one.”

In addition to discussing her fish hook experiments, Limburg spoke in depth about her study of otoliths, which are chronometers in the ear of a fish that show its precise age and chemical makeup.

Read the full story at The Daily Orange

 

Maine business owners explore challenges, opportunities of climate change

October 30, 2015 — SOUTH PORTLAND — Several Maine business owners said Friday that adapting to climate change doesn’t have to be costly and, in many cases, can help a company’s finances as well as the environment.

Climate change presents considerable challenges but also potential opportunities to Maine businesses and communities, many of which are witnessing the impacts of a changing ocean environment before their counterparts elsewhere around the country. That was a key theme of a forum co-sponsored Friday by the South Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“Ultimately, this has to make economic sense,” U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said via Skype because early-morning budget votes in Washington prevented his return to Maine. “We can’t depend on everybody simply being good guys or nice men and women. It has to work in terms of a return on investment.”

Laying out the challenges facing Maine due to a changing climate, King and Gulf of Maine Research Institute President and CEO Don Perkins discussed how lobster and other fish species are already changing their habits as the Gulf of Maine warms. A recent six-part Portland Press Herald series explored the ecological and economic implications of the fact that the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than almost every part of the oceans around the globe during the past decade.

“It’s real and it has very sobering implications for our fishing industry, obviously,” said Perkins, whose staff at GMRI recently co-authored a scientific study showing cod populations were not recovering because of warming Gulf of Maine waters. “Once you get over agonizing about that – and it is cause for agony – the fact is that we’re dealing with that problem a decade or a few decades earlier than many other ocean regions. And as a result, there is a huge opportunity in this state to figure out how to understand a changing system.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

Fishermen get face-to-face meeting with NOAA official

October 29, 2015 — HAMPTON, N.H. – Fishermen had a rare meeting Saturday with the federal administrator whose agency has put what Granite State fishermen call backbreaking regulations on their industry.

While no promises for action were made by the official — Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association — those who met with her said they appreciated the hour and a half sit-down she gave them at the Ashworth by the Sea Hotel.

Sullivan took notes, asked questions and heard right from the mouths of the fishermen their fears that recent regulations will make New Hampshire the first state to have its groundfishing industry completely wiped out.

“I said (to Sullivan) I felt that I’m very patriotic, I love my country, but I feel my government has completely failed us in New Hampshire and in the fishing industry, and the public process has been non-existent,” said Ellen Goethel, Hampton marine biologist and wife of commercial fisherman David Goethel. Both met with Sullivan, as well as Portsmouth commercial fisherman Erik Anderson, Fish and Game’s Marine Fishery Division Chief Doug Grout, state Sen. Nancy Stiles (R-Hampton) and state Rep. Renny Cushing (D-Hampton).

U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., organized the 4 p.m. meeting. Shaheen contacted the NOAA administrator when she learned Sullivan would be attending a summit at the Ashworth Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24 and 25.

Ellen Goethel said it was important for Sullivan to hear about the economic impact the regulations have had on the fisheries in New Hampshire, supported by information gathered by Grout.

Grout said the gross income for New Hampshire’s groundfishermen was reduced roughly 69 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to analysis provided by NOAA. That’s a bigger impact on groundfishermen income than in any other state, the analysis showed.

Also discussed was the core of the problem for struggling fishermen in New Hampshire – whether the science behind the strict regulations is accurate.

Grout told Sullivan there was an apparent disconnect between what NOAA’s scientists were reporting for cod stock levels and what fishermen are seeing on the water.

Read the full story at Portsmouth Herald

Maine isn’t doing enough to protect the Gulf from the effects of climate change

October 30, 2015 — When the Maine Legislature’s commission on ocean acidification reported its findings – that the state’s fisheries and aquaculture industries were threatened by this baleful byproduct of global warming – officials here were not exactly spurred to action.

Acidification, driven by increased carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and freshwater runoff from extreme rainfall in river basins, has been implicated in failures at oyster hatcheries and mussel farms, and has been shown to weaken clams and other shell-building animals vital to Maine’s fishing and aquaculture industries. But bills introduced in the last session – one each by a Democratic marine scientist and a Republican lobsterman – to implement many of the panel’s findings were withdrawn, one for lack of resources, the other for lack of support from Gov. Paul LePage’s administration.

“I could see the bill wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the governor was going to veto it,” Rep. Mick Devin, a Democrat from Newcastle, says of legislation he sponsored to allow the commission to continue its work for another three years.

Patricia Aho, who was the commissioner of environmental protection until she resigned in August, opposed Devin’s bill, saying the status quo was sufficient. “Since the issues of climate change and ocean acidification are inextricably linked, we think it will be more efficient to consider this issue in the broader context of climate change and adaptation programs,” she said in written testimony to legislators.

Devin’s bill and another one sponsored by Rep. Wayne Parry, a Republican from Arundel, were carried over to the next legislative session. Parry’s bill would have put a bond issue on the ballot that would borrow $3 million to fund several of the expert committee’s recommendations: collecting data, monitoring waterways, and performing tests in coastal waters to better assess the impact of acidification on wildlife and commercial fish species. It was withdrawn after failing to make it to the top of an informal list of bonding priorities drawn up by legislative leaders.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald