April 12, 2021 — The Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation (AFDF) is cancelling the rescheduled Symphony of Seafood events planned for this spring due to “ongoing health and safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization said in a press release.
Preparation efforts for the next installment of the event are planned to resume later this year, with the call for product to be released in August 2021.
April 9, 2021 — The Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine will host a talk about how alternative seafood networks can support resilient fishing communities from 3–4 p.m. on Monday, April 19.
Global seafood trade is at an all-time high, with an estimated 36 percent of seafood worldwide traded across international borders at a value of $148 billion. In the U.S., 71 percent of the seafood consumed is imported. The benefits of this trade, however, are not evenly distributed and often disadvantage rural communities, small- and mid-sized harvesters and low-income nations.
In this talk, “A Fishy Tail About Our Food System,” Joshua Stoll will describe the recent emergence of alternative seafood networks in North America and their role in supporting resilient fishing communities, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. He will also discuss ongoing work to better integrate seafood into local food systems.
April 9, 2021 — The following was released by the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation:
The Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation (AFDF), organizer of the Alaska Symphony of Seafood (Symphony), announces the cancellation of the rescheduled Symphony events planned for Spring 2021 due to ongoing health and safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The annual Symphony event is planned to resume with the Call for Product to be released in August 2021.
The Symphony is an exciting platform that encourages companies to invest in product development, helps promote those new products and competitively positions Alaska Seafood in national and global markets. Product development is critically important to the Alaska Seafood industry. Innovative new products enable the industry to remain competitive and relevant to consumers.
Before making the decision to cancel the Symphony events, AFDF polled industry partners and participants, and the results were clear that COVID-19 has hindered the industry’s ability to produce new value-added products or participate in large events. Without healthy participation by industry, the benefits of an in-person or virtual event are limited. Additionally, Diversified Communications recently announced the cancellation of the 2021 Seafood Expo North America (SENA), originally rescheduled for July 11-13 in Boston. SENA is the central event at which AFDF promotes the winning products of the Symphony each year. AFDF will continue to feature Symphony winners at SENA, including entrance in the Seafood Excellence Awards, when the in-person SENA resumes in March 2022.
AFDF will continue to monitor the COVID-19 health crisis and will provide updates to industry and partners on the 2021-2022 competition and events. Additionally, AFDF will explore exciting new opportunities throughout the year to promote past Symphony winners, as a part of the effort to expand the reach and positive impact of the annual competition.
Thank You to Sponsors
AFDF would like to recognize and thank our sponsors from last year. Major sponsors include Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, Lineage Logistics, Trident Seafoods, Marine Stewardship Council, Northwest Fisheries Association, Alaska Air Cargo, At-Sea Processors Association and the United Fishermen of Alaska. See here for a complete list of sponsors.
About the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation
Founded in 1978, AFDF is dedicated to identifying common opportunities in the Alaska seafood industry and developing efficient, sustainable outcomes that provide benefits to the economy, environment and communities. For more information, visit www.afdf.org.
April 8, 2021 — Oregon’s pink shrimp fishery is opening with an inventory surplus and extreme market uncertainty resulting from pandemic-related restaurant closures.
Oregon is home to the world’s largest pink shrimp fishery, with a 30-year average annual harvest of around 30 million pounds. The small shrimp – also known as cocktail shrimp or salad shrimp – have traditionally been sold to the foodservice market.
April 8, 2021 — The following was released by the International Science Council:
Travel and economic slowdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic combined to put the brakes on shipping, seafloor exploration, and many other human activities in the ocean, creating a unique moment to begin a time-series study of the impacts of sound on marine life.
A community of scientists has identified more than 200 non-military ocean hydrophones worldwide and hopes to make the most of the unprecedented opportunity to pool their recorded data into the 2020 quiet ocean assessment and to help monitor the ocean soundscape long into the future. They aim for a total of 500 hydrophones capturing the signals of whales and other marine life while assessing the racket levels of human activity.
Combined with other sea life monitoring tools and methods such as animal tagging, the work will help reveal the extent to which noise in “the Anthropocene seas” impacts ocean species.
Sound travels far in the ocean, and a hydrophone can pick up low-frequency signals from hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away. The highest concentrations of non-military hydrophones are along the North American coasts — Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic — Hawaii, Europe, and Antarctica, with some scattered through the Asia-Pacific region.
For over a century, navies have used sound to reveal submarines and underwater mines and for other national security purposes. Marine animals likewise use sound and natural sonar to navigate and communicate across the ocean.
But the effects of human-generated ocean sounds on marine life remain poorly understood.
“Measuring variability and change in ambient, or background, ocean sound over time forms the basis for characterizing marine ‘soundscapes,'” says collaborator Peter L. Tyack, Professor of Marine Mammal Biology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
“Assessing the risks of underwater sound for marine life requires understanding what sound levels cause harmful effects and where in the ocean vulnerable animals may be exposed to sound exceeding these levels. Sparse, sporadic deployment of hydrophones and obstacles to integrating the measurements that are made have narrowly limited what we confidently know.”
In 2011, concerned experts began developing the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE), launched in 2015 with the International Quiet Ocean Experiment Science Plan. Among their goals: create a time series of measurements of ambient sound in many ocean locations to reveal variability and changes in intensity and other properties of sound at a range of frequencies.
The plan also included designating 2022 “the Year of the Quiet Ocean.”
Due to COVID-19, however, “the oceans are unlikely to be as quiet as during April 2020 for many decades to come,” says project originator Jesse Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.
“The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unanticipated event that reduced sound levels more than we dreamed possible based on voluntary sound reductions. IQOE will consider 2020 the Year of the Quiet Ocean and is focusing project resources to encourage study of changes in sound levels and effects on organisms that occurred in 2020, based on observations from hundreds of hydrophones deployed by the worldwide ocean acoustics community in 2019-2021.”
With IQOE encouragement, the number of civilian hydrophones operating in North America, Europe, and elsewhere for research and operational purposes has increased dramatically. With these, IQOE and the ocean sound research community can shed needed light on humans’ influences on marine life and ecosystems.
The existing hydrophone network covers shallow coastal and shelf areas most influenced by local changes in human activity. It also includes deep stations that can measure the effects of low-frequency sound sources over large open ocean areas.
Of the 231 non-military hydrophones identified to February 2021, several have agreed to their geographic coordinates and other metadata being shown on the IQOE website (https://www.iqoe.org/systems), with organizers hoping to attract many more contributors.
Of the hydrophones identified, most are in US and Canadian waters, with increasing numbers elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Meanwhile, more acoustic instrumentation and measurements are clearly needed across the Southern Hemisphere.
The researchers are working to create a global data repository with contributors using standardized methods, tools and depths to measure and document ocean soundscapes and effects on the distribution and behavior of vocalizing animals.
As part of the effort to create a global time-series, new software under development by a team of researchers across the country and led by the University of New Hampshire (MANTA) will soon help standardize ocean sound recording data from collaborators, facilitating its comparability, pooling and visualization (From April 8, the new MANTA software will be available at https://bit.ly/3cVNUox)
As well, an Open Portal to Underwater Sound (OPUS) is being tested at Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, to promote the use of acoustic data collected worldwide, providing easy access to MANTA-processed data.
Meanwhile, scientists over the past decade have developed powerful methods to estimate the distribution and abundance of vocalizing animals using passive acoustic monitoring.
“Integrating data on animal behavior on soundscapes can reveal long-term effects of changes in ocean sound,” says Jennifer Miksis-Olds, Director of the Center for Acoustics Research and Education, University of New Hampshire.
The fledgling hydrophone network will continue contributing to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a worldwide collaboration of observing assets monitoring currents, temperature, sea level, chemical pollution, litter, and other concerns.
“To observe a return to normal conditions as the pandemic subsides, the intensive acoustic monitoring by many existing hydrophones must continue at least through 2021,” says Edward R. Urban Jr, IQOE Project Manager, of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research.
Comparable unintended opportunities for maritime study are rare and important in modern history. They include the start (1945) and stop (1980) of above-ground nuclear testing, creating traces of carbon and tritium the movements and decay of which have provided major insights into ocean physics, chemistry, and biology.
As well, the terrorist attacks in New York City and Arlington, Va., on 11 September 2001, caused the cancellation of hundreds of civilian airline flights allowing scientists to study the effects of jet contrails (or their absence) on weather patterns.
Those attacks also led to a shipping slowdown and ocean noise reduction, prompting biologists to study stress hormone levels in endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy. With their 2001 data, research revealed higher September stress hormone levels over the next four years as the whales prepared to migrate to warmer southern waters where they calve, suggesting that the industrialized ocean causes chronic stress of animals.
Precious chance
Seldom has there been such a chance to collect quiet ocean data in the Anthropocene Seas. COVID-19 drastically decreased shipping, tourism and recreation, fishing and aquaculture, energy exploration and extraction, naval and coast guard exercises, offshore construction, and port and channel dredging.
Data graphed by JP Morgan reveals the impact of COVID in several categories of commercial activity. If true also of maritime activity as suspected, it suggests a relatively short-lived quiet ocean due to COVID — late March to mid-May, 2020.
Says Jesse Ausubel: “Let’s learn from the COVID pause to help achieve safer operations for shipping industries, offshore energy operators, navies, and other users of the ocean.”
“We are on the way to timely, reliable, easily understood maps of ocean soundscapes, including the exceptional period of April 2020 when the COVID virus gave marine animals a brief break from human clatter.”
The end of that break is clear from recent news, he notes, pointing to this from California in mid-March, for example: Port of Long Beach Sets 110-Year Record in February.
Concludes Mr. Ausubel: “We invite parties in a position to help to join this global effort on the variability and trends of ocean sound and the effects of sound on marine life. The shocking global effect of COVID-19 on human additions of noise to the oceans can spur maturation of regular monitoring of the soundscape of our seas.”
Additional information:
Eos: Measuring Ambient Ocean Sound During the COVID-19 Pandemic
MANTA: https://bitbucket.org/CLO-BRP/manta-wiki/wiki/Home
JOMOPANS: https://northsearegion.eu/jomopans/news/soundscape-maps-of-north-sea
OPUS: “An Open Portal to Underwater Soundscapes to explore and study sound in the global ocean” https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/53610
and https://opus.aq (TBC)
IQOE publications, including newsletters, available at Products | International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE)(https://bit.ly/3sDTkd9)
TEDxExeter: Changing the soundtrack of the ocean, Steve Simpson, 2019: https://youtu.be/Z8XxAfGBcOo
April 7, 2021 — Fisheries in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and Southeast have experienced success, despite pandemic pressures that began in 2020.
Red snapper are now more plentiful in the Gulf of Mexico, but prices are staying strong as a result of high consumer demand and a let-up in COVID-19 restrictions that slowed sales to restaurants early in 2020.
April 7, 2021 — U.S. Sen. Ed Markey on Tuesday exhorted New Bedford residents to get immunized against COVID-19, as the city’s vaccination rate remains well below the statewide average.
Home from Washington due to the Senate recess, Markey stopped in New Bedford to tour a federally funded vaccination clinic at the McCoy Recreation Center in the West End. The clinic, which is targeting senior citizens, received an extra supply of 1,000 Johnson & Johnson doses this week on top of its usual allotment of 600 Moderna shots.
“New Bedford is a little bit below the state average, so the message to the residents of New Bedford is very clear: we want to get you vaccinated,” Markey said.
Data reviewed by Target 12 shows all four cities in Bristol County are lagging behind the statewide pace of inoculations.
While 35% of all Massachusetts residents were at least partly vaccinated as of April 1, only 21% of New Bedford residents have gotten at least one shot. The rates were also below average in Fall River (22%), Attleboro (25%) and Taunton (25%).
New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said “deep-seated” challenges are driving the comparatively low level of vaccinations in his city. He cited a lack of access to technology in order to make appointments online, language barriers, and jobs with limited flexibility.
April 6, 2021 — A little more than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, we’re learning what worked well with some businesses to help them survive.
For Key Largo Fisheries, it was their website.
“We shipped a lot of stone crabs, fresh fish, Key West pink shrimp, whole tails, whole lobsters,” said Key Largo Fisheries’ Tom Hill.
Keeping the iconic fishery, market, and cafe in the northern Keys up and running had a lot to do with the internet sales.
“We were fortunate in that we were able to start serving people via the web, an awful lot of people looked at our website, taking lots of orders online,” said Hill.
Boxes of Key Largo Fisheries seafood shipped directly to their clients’ doorsteps which helped them expand.
April 6, 2021 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:
The New England Fishery Management Council will hold a three-day meeting by webinar from Tuesday, April 13 through Thursday, April 15, 2021. The public is invited to listen live and provide input during designated opportunities for public comment. The Council still cannot hold a large, in-person meeting due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
PUBLIC COMMENT OPPORTUNITIES: The Council wants to hear from you. Here’s how you can let the Council know what you think.
TIME: 12:00 p.m. start on Tuesday, April 13. Then, 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 14 and 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 15. The webinar will end shortly after the Council adjourns each day.
NOAA LISTENING SESSION ON EXECUTIVE ORDER: At 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 13, NOAA Fisheries will hold a listening session on Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. The discussion will focus on Section 216(c), making fisheries and protected resources more resilient to climate change. NOAA Fisheries will be seeking recommendations and comments from the Council and public on this specific section of the Executive Order during the listening session.
WEBINAR REGISTRATION: Online access to the meeting is available at Listen Live. There is no charge to access the meeting through this webinar.
WEBINAR CALL-IN OPTION: To listen by telephone, dial +1 (562) 247-8422. The access code is 948-987-138. Please be aware that if you dial in, your regular phone charges will apply.
AGENDA: All meeting materials and the agenda are available on the Council’s website at NEFMC April 13-15, 2021 Webinar Meeting. Additional documents will be posted as they become available.
THREE MEETING OUTLOOK: A copy of the New England Council’s Three Meeting Outlook is available HERE.
COUNCIL MEETING QUESTIONS: Anyone with questions prior to or during the Council meeting should contact Janice Plante at (607) 592-4817, jplante@nefmc.org.
April 6, 2021 — The following was released by the National Fisheries Institute:
Diversified Communications continues its long run of connecting the seafood community through innovative events across various platforms. Today, Diversified announced that the next in-person Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America will be held in March, 2022. This comes in response to current COVID venue capacity limits, which prevent the ability to plan and execute the event in July 2021. Diversified looks forward to bringing the seafood community back together March 13-15, 2022 in Boston, MA.
NFI is excited for the return of Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America in 2022. We encourage all NFI members and partners to plan now to meet their peers then.
The pandemic has reminded us that in-person contact is vital to the human spirit in both our personal and business relationships. Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America is an example of what we have missed – and all we are looking forward to in the future. We look forward to seeing you all safely in Boston.