Saving Seafood

Conservation Law Foundation petitions to halt Northeast cod fishing

February 14, 2020 — Charging that New England fishery regulators are dominated by “deference to short-term economic interests,” the Conservation Law Foundation on Thursday filed a petition with the Department of Commerce seeking a halt to all directed fishing for Atlantic cod.

No fishing should be allowed until the New England Fishery Management Council and NMFS meet their legal obligation to end overfishing and rebuild the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod stocks, the Boston-based environmental group says. Those steps should include 100 percent at-sea monitoring, area closures to protect spawning locations and habitat, and requiring selective groundfish gear, such as haddock separator trawls, the petition says.

The foundation wants a prohibition on directed commercial and recreational fishing using large area closures “once a stock’s incidental catch limit is caught.” The petition also calls for reducing “the incidental catch rate annually consistent with the current acceptable biological catch control rule until overfishing at sea is ended.”

 “Our regional managers have lost control of and abandoned the cod fishery,” said Peter Shelley, the foundation’s senior counsel, in announcing the petition.

“After decades of reckless decision-making, Atlantic cod populations are now in crisis,” said Shelley. “To give this iconic species a chance at survival and recovery, the federal government must take the strongest possible action today and temporarily prohibit further cod fishing.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Atlantic Marine Monument Withstands Federal Appeals Court Challenge

December 30, 2019 — A federal appeals court has ruled that President Barack Obama acted within his authority when he created the country’s first Atlantic marine monument off the coast of New England in 2016.

“The fishermen have had the ocean all to themselves for centuries.” says Peter Shelley, senior council for the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston.

Shelley says the lawsuit challenging the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, and the presidential authority that created it, failed to acknowledge other “values” such as conservation and preservation as powers granted in the Antiquities Act of 1906.

Shelley says the appeals decision is good news for a very delicate region of the Atlantic Ocean.

“But it’s also good news for other areas of great scientific interest that need to be protected from the destructive effects of fishing and oil and gas drilling and other sorts of development activities,” he says.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Court Upholds Creation of National Monument in Atlantic

December 27, 2019 — A federal appeals court on Friday upheld former President Barack Obama’s designation of a federally protected conservation area in the Atlantic Ocean, a move that commercial fishermen oppose.

Fishing groups sued over the creation of Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a 5,000-square-mile (8,000-square-kilometer) area that contains fragile deep sea corals and vulnerable species of marine life. The monument was established in 2016.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last year, and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the decision Friday.

The appeals panel brushed aside arguments that federal law governing monuments applies only to land, not oceans; that the area of the ocean is not “controlled” by the federal government; that it is not compatible with National Marine Sanctuaries Act; and that it is not the “smallest area compatible” with management goals.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Maine Lobstermen Skeptical Of Proposal To Tie ‘Whale-Safe’ Seafood Label To Use Of New Fishing Gear

December 17, 2019 — A movement is emerging among conservation groups to create a “whale-safe” seal of approval for lobster caught with new types of gear designed to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales. But it could be a tough sell in Maine, where some say the iconic fishery is already sustainable.

A specific “whale-friendly” or even “whale-safe” brand would likely apply to lobster harvested from traps with weak, breakaway rope or remote-controlled “ropeless” gear systems.

Scientists and conservationists say such gear changes, while still in the developmental stage, could reduce or even eliminate the risk that whales will be injured or killed by entanglements.

“That’s really important, that fishermen willing to test this gear, and certainly those fishermen fishing with ropeless gear should be rewarded,” says Erica Fuller, a lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation, one of several organizations suing the federal government for stronger protections of the roughly 400 North Atlantic right whales remaining on the planet.

Read the full story at Maine Public

D.C. court rules fisheries remain closed to help right whales

November 5, 2019 — For all the work going into North Atlantic right whale conservation in Georgia and Florida ahead of another calving season, a political and legal battle continues where the whales live and feed most of the year — off the coast of New England. Thursday, a federal district judge ruled two lobster fisheries can remain closed to protect the lives of right whales moving through the area.

The case began nearly two years ago as a set of environmental groups — the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation, Defenders of Wildlife and the Humane Society of the United States — filed a complaint against the federal government because they disputed the finding of “no jeopardy” to right whales in the lobster fisheries, despite the finding that an average of 3.25 right whales a year would die through gillnet fishing operations.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, is working on new rules that NMFS states will provide additional protections to North Atlantic right whales in lobster fisheries, and that the rulemaking should be complete by around the middle of 2020. As such, the agency filed a motion to stay the case, which Judge James Boasberg denied.

Read the full story at The Brunswick News

MPA, invasive species advisory panels killed by Trump lacked commercial fishing voice

October 2, 2019 — The US commercial fishing industry isn’t likely to shed many tears over the recent news that the president Donald Trump administration is disbanding two federal advisory boards focused on maintaining marine protected areas (MPAs) and battling invasive species, Bob Vanasse, the founder of industry advocacy group Saving Seafood, told Undercurrent News.

The panels were improperly constituted, including many representatives from ocean conservation groups and even the recreational fishing industry but none from commercial harvesters, he said.

The government will no longer fund the Marine Protected Areas Federal Advisory Committee run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the Department of the Interior’s (DOI’s) Invasive Species Advisory Committee, the two agencies confirmed on Tuesday. Both panels have been in operation for more than a decade.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

River Herring May Be Added to Endangered Species List

June 14, 2019 — A decision to add two species of river herring to the federal endangered species list is due from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) later this month, and it could have significant implications for southeastern New England.

Alewives and blueback herring, collectively called river herring, were once abundant in rivers and nearshore waters from Canada to South Carolina, but dams, climate change, and overfishing have contributed to their decline by as much as 98 percent.

“Historically, they used all the big and small rivers on the entire Atlantic Seaboard,” said Erica Fuller, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation, who has been advocating for increased management of the species for years. “They were the fish that fed the settlers; they were everywhere. There’s even a story of General Washington feeding the troops with alewives.”

But, she added, the species have been at historic lows for decades.

Read the full story at EcoRI

Lobstering industry objecting to ‘unfair closure’

May 9, 2019 — Lobstering industry members plan to gather in Plymouth on Thursday to speak out against what they see as the unfair closure of lobstering in the waters south of Scituate.

Industry representatives on the South Shore say they have worked to implement fishing techniques to protect right whales but say their efforts have been ignored by regulators in favor of blanket policies. They plan to make the case that there have been no whale entanglements in certain parts of Cape Cod Bay.

In late April, the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team recommended measures that could protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

New Fishing Rights in Gulf of Maine Upheld by Judge

April 17, 2019 — A federal judge upheld a rule Monday that opens up a portion of the western Gulf of Maine to commercial and recreational fishing for the first time.

The Conservation Law Foundation had challenged the rule last year, claiming the National Marine Fisheries Service wrongly prioritized economic considerations over its conservation duty when it reduced the protected area in that portion of the Gulf by about 25%.

While the rule offered habitat protection in the eastern Gulf of Maine for the first time, the conservation group said the agency and the New England Regional Council should have closed more of the Gulf to fishing.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found Monday, however, that the rule passes muster.

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service 

MASSACHUSETTS: Nantucket fisherman: ‘Nothing good’ about offshore wind farm

March 8, 2019 — The only part of Vineyard Wind’s proposed offshore wind farm in Nantucket waters is an undersea cable running from the turbines 14 miles southwest of the island through the Muskeget Channel to Covell’s Beach in Centerville.

But fisherman Dan Pronk is worried that the impact the 84 turbines would have on the underwater ecosystem and the fishing industry is tremendous.

“There’s nothing good about it,” he said.

Pronk has fished for lobsters, crab, squid and other fish around the island for the past 33 years. Fourteen miles to the southwest, where Vineyard Wind has leased federal waters for its wind farm, he sets up strings of lobster traps running east to west, spaced a half-mile apart.

Pronk is a fixed-gear fisherman, meaning his equipment stays in the water, as opposed to mobile-gear fishermen, who trail their nets behind their boats to catch fish. Most of Pronk’s gear is set up around the Vineyard Wind site, where he usually finds a good number of lobsters, he said.

“There’s no question that the lobsters, the shellfish, they’re all going to leave,” he said about the repetitive noise from pile-driving 84 turbine anchors 160 feet into the sea floor. “It’s going to essentially be like setting off atomic bombs in the ocean.”

The only time there would not be any construction on the turbines or the cable would be from Jan. 1 to April 30, after Vineyard Wind, in an agreement with the National Wildlife Federation and the Conservation Law Foundation, agreed to halt operations in order to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale during its yearly migration from southern waters.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times