Saving Seafood

Crabbers Applaud Bipartisan Effort to Combat Illegal Fishing

November 9, 2015 — The following was released by the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers:

The Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers (ABSC) applaud the Obama Administration and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle for their bipartisan effort to combat Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU), or “pirate” fishing. Late last week President Obama signed into law H.R. 774, the “Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing Enforcement Act.”

Originally introduced in the House by Representatives Bordallo (D-GU) and Young (R-AK) and championed in the Senate by Senators Murkowski (R-AK), Sullivan (R-AK), and Schatz (D-HI), this vital legislation will help “level the playing field” for America’s commercial fishermen who often face stiff market competition with illegally harvested seafood products. This legislation complements other ongoing efforts to prevent illegal seafood from entering US ports.

The legislation also allows the US to continue its leadership on the issue of pirate fishing at the international level through formal ratification and implementation of the Port State Measures Agreement. The Agreement is the first global instrument specifically designed to address the issue and calls upon signatory nations to effectively police their ports and prevent illegally harvested seafood products from entering into commerce.

These efforts are particularly relevant for crabbers and coastal communities in Alaska. For nearly two decades the Alaskan crab industry has been the “poster child” of what can happen to law-abiding fishermen when their markets are flooded with illegal product. According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, Administration officials estimate that illegal Russian crab has cost Alaskan crabbers $560 million since 2000. This translates to millions of dollars in lost tax revenue to Alaskan coastal communities.

While crab poaching in Russia has declined over the past few years, recent comments by the Russian Association of Crab Catchers indicate the very high likelihood that poaching will resume on a larger scale in the coming year as a result of reduced legal quotas in the Russian Far East. As such, passage of this legislation is particularly timely and welcomed by Alaskan crabbers.

Read a PDF of the release

Toxin Taints Crabs and Kills Sea Mammals, Scientists Warn

November 4, 2015 — The authorities in California are advising people to avoid consumption of crabs contaminated by a natural toxin that has spread throughout the marine ecosystem off the West Coast, killing sea mammals and poisoning various other species.

Kathi A. Lefebvre, the lead research biologist at the Wildlife Algal Toxin Research and Response Network, said on Wednesday that her organization had examined about 250 animals stranded on the West Coast and had found domoic acid, a toxic chemical produced by a species of algae, in 36 animals of several species.

“We’re seeing much higher contamination in the marine food web this year in this huge geographic expanse than in the past,” Ms. Lefebvre said.

She said that the toxin had never before been found in animals stranded in Washington or Oregon, and that there were most likely greater numbers of contaminated marine mammals not being found by humans.

The California Department of Public Health recently advised people to avoid consumption of certain species of crabs because of potential toxicity. Razor clam fisheries in Washington have been closed throughout the summer for the same reason.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the California department said that “recent test results” indicated dangerous levels of domoic acid in Dungeness and rock crabs caught in California waters between Oregon and Santa Barbara, Calif.

Read the full story at The New York Times

All for one and one for all? Grant will see if fishermen should band together

November 3, 2015 — In recent years, the Pacific Ocean’s fish and crab have been divvied out through quotas and permits — making it hard for new fishermen to start business.

Al Malchow, a fisherman based out of Ilwaco, said the papers needed aren’t only hard to find, they’re expensive.

“There was a time that all we had to do was unrope the boat, catch fish, and come back and sell it,” Malchow said.

Small-time boats could build their business by catching as much as possible each season. But the race was dangerous. Boats were on the water no matter the conditions and areas were sometimes overfished.

Quotas and permits designating how much each boat could catch made fishing safer. But now, a fishing operation has to have equipment, a boat and — for roughly the same price — the right paperwork.

The Port of Ilwaco is investigating a way to help local fishermen access quotas and permits at lower costs.

In September, the port received roughly $50,000 from the Fisheries Innovation Fund to see if the Ilwaco community would benefit from a community fishing association. The association would buy fishing permits and quotas to lease to residential boats.

Malchow said if an association were to come to Ilwaco, it could put that stack of paperwork within reach of people looking to start a business or expand.

He said the absence of local permits can drive local fishermen to offload in Oregon. Some boats have quotas that are too small, which cut them off at the beginning of the season leaving people out of work. Some quotas are too large compared to the boat’s equipment, which cuts earnings down and reduces what was available in local markets.

“If I weren’t fourth generation with a boat in the port, I couldn’t afford this job,” he said.

Read the full story at Chinook Observer

 

Development at historic D.C. fish market drives wedge between businesses

October 31, 2015 — On a cool Saturday morning, Sunny White was where he has spent most of the past 45 years, at the fish market on Washington’s Southwest Waterfront, selling crabs to anyone he could persuade to buy.

“Hey, King! What you looking for?” White barked at a stranger in a Los Angeles Kings cap, pushing a crab at the man and his girlfriend before they could slip around the corner to check his competitor’s prices.

Anything was better than losing a customer to Jesse Taylor Seafood, owned by the Evans clan, otherwise known as White’s chief rival in the hurly-burly of peddling crabs.

“If you haven’t sold it in the first minute,” White said, reciting his own first law of fish market survival, “you’re not getting nothing.”

After four decades in the market’s trenches on Maine Avenue SW, White, 67, and his brother Billy, 60, owners of several business there, including ­Captain White Seafood City, are long accustomed to the open-air, over-the-counter hustle that has drawn customers since the early 1800s.

Slashing prices, shouting salesmen, loudspeakers and bullhorns — the Whites and Evanses have, over the years, tried whatever it takes to beat one another.

Yet their rivalry has grown more acrimonious as a developer seeking to transform the waterfront into another luxury Shangri-La has targeted two of the Whites’ businesses for eviction while forging an alliance with the Evanses.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Congress cracks down on seafood fraud

October 28, 2015 — Local watermen of the Chesapeake Bay have come under attack from knowingly imported and mislabeled foreign seafood. Consumers are also at risk because safety standards for seafood in other countries of origin differ from those in the United States. “Consumers should protect themselves with knowledge about these issues and get to know local seafood companies they can trust,” said Paula Jasinski, executive director of Chesapeake Environmental Communications.

Crabbers from Virginia’s Blue Crab Industry Panel highlighted this significant problem for their industry several years ago.

Read the full story at Northern Neck News

 

Invasive species exploit a warming Gulf of Maine, sometimes with destructive results

October 28, 2015 — Until two years ago, if you had walked down to the shore of Maquoit Bay at low tide, you would have seen a meadow of eelgrass stretching nearly as far as the eye could see across the exposed seafloor. Here near the head of the bay, the sea grass stretched for two miles to the opposite shore, creating a vast nursery for the shellfish and forage species of Casco Bay, of which Maquoit is a part.

Now there’s only mud.

Green crabs took over the bay in the late fall of 2012 and the spring and summer of 2013, tearing up the eelgrass in their pursuit of prey and devouring almost every clam and mussel from here to Yarmouth. Fueled by record high water temperatures in 2012 and a mild winter in 2013, the green crab population grew so huge that the mudflats of Casco Bay became cratered with their burrowing, and much of the Maquoit and adjacent Middle Bay bottom turned into a lunar landscape.

Eelgrass coverage in Maquoit Bay fell by 83 percent. With nothing rooted to the bottom, the seawater turned far muddier, making life hard on any plants or baby clams that tried to recolonize the bay.

“We were astounded,” says Hilary Neckles of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, who linked the destruction to the green crabs. “The ecological ramifications really reverberate throughout the ecosystem, because sea grass is the preferred habitat of so many fish and shellfish species.”

Over the past decade, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, allowing warm-water intruders to gain a toehold and earlier invaders such as the green crab to take over. Coupled with declines of the cold-loving species that have dominated the gulf for thousands of years, the ecological effects of even more gradual long-term warming are expected to be serious, even as precise forecasting remains beyond the state of scientific knowledge.

Scientists say the 2012 “ocean heat wave” was an unusual event, and that the 10-year accelerated warming trend is likely part of an oceanographic cycle and unlikely to continue. But the gulf has been consistently warming for more than 30 years, and long-term forecasts project average sea surface temperatures in our region could reach 2012-like levels by mid-century. The events of 2012 and the nearly as warm year that followed likely provide a preview of things to come, of a gulf radically transformed, with major implications for life on the Maine coast.

Genevieve MacDonald, who fishes for lobster out of Stonington, was standing on the dock at Isle au Haut one morning that summer, looked in the water, and couldn’t believe her eyes. There, swimming around the harbor like mackerel, were dozens and dozens of longfin squid, temperate creatures rarely seen in the chill waters of eastern Maine. “If you had a cast net you could have brought in a whole basket full of squid,” she recalls.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Former Dutch Harbor Fisheries Observer Keith Davis Missing At Sea Off Peru

October 26, 2015 — With crab season under way in the Bering Sea, some 70 crab boats are bobbing around Alaska’s Bristol Bay and the Aleutian Islands. About a dozen of those boats have a fisheries observer on board. The observers keep tabs on what the boats haul up from the deep.

Keith Davis was supposed to be one of those observers, but he went missing in September while working on a boat off the coast of South America. KUCB’s John Ryan reports.

TRANSCRIPT

Davis has been a fisheries observer for more than 15 years. His employer says he was planning to return to Dutch Harbor this winter to do more observing work.

But Davis vanished while working on a transshipment vessel about 500 miles off the coast of Peru. He disappeared one afternoon while a boat was offloading tuna to the Taiwanese ship that he was working on. The ship sailed under the flag of Panama.

The Panamanian government, the U.S. Coast Guard and the FBI are investigating his disappearance. Davis’s friends suspect foul play.

Goodman: “Absolutely do.  For a number of reasons.”

Lynn Goodman is a fisheries observer and a friend of Keith Davis.

Goodman: “I met Keith in our Dutch Harbor bunkhouse while we were both observing on crab boats.”

She says Davis was exceptionally safety conscious and there’s no way he would have been on board a ship without a life jacket, let alone just fall off unnoticed.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at KUCB

 

Countries take action against fish pirates

October 23, 2015 — Fish pirates are coming under fire as more countries band together to stop them from pilfering the world’s oceans.

So called Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing accounts for one-fifth of global catches, according to the Global Ocean Commission, valued at $10 to $25 billion each year.

Last month, at the Intergovernmental Consultative Committee meeting held in Portland, Ore., the United States and Russia signed a bilateral agreement to combat IUU fishing. The pact, which has strong support from the Pacific Northwest/Alaska regions as well as environmental groups, aims to improve coordination among the multiple government agencies in both countries to combat IUU fishing.

That will mean a big break for Bering Sea king crab — the poster child for being whacked by a pirate fishery.

For decades, Alaska crabbers have competed against king crab illegally caught by Russian fleets. Direct losses to Bering Sea crabbers are estimated at $600 million since 2000, according to an analysis by the Juneau-based McDowell Group.

Based on the weights of Russian crab purchased by global buyers versus official Russian harvest figures, pirated king crab totaled nearly 100 million pounds in 2013, accounting for 40 percent of the world market.

Mark Gleason, executive director of the trade group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, was thrilled with the U.S./Russia agreement.

“The fact that there has been a formal acknowledgement between the U.S. and Russia that illegal fishing is a problem, and it is an issue that is worthy of cooperation between our two countries – it is unprecedented, and a very welcome change,” Gleason said, adding that it is hard to put a number on Alaska’s fishing losses from the criminal activity.

Read the full story at The Arctic Sounder

NEW YORK: Woman Among the Baymen

October 23, 2015 — “Clam Power” read the T-shirt on the sturdy woman carrying gear from her pickup to her no-frills work boat tied to a ramshackle dock in Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island.

The woman, Flo Sharkey, 72, works full time on the bay, and on Wednesday morning, she and her son, Paul Sharkey, 36, a bayman himself, loaded rakes, hip waders and bushel baskets into the boat and headed out through Swan Creek into the open bay.

People who make their living on these waters are known as baymen, and it’s a dwindling profession. A woman doing it for a living is nearly unheard-of.

Ms. Sharkey said she knew of no other baywomen. Her sister and mother could hold their own on the water but elected not to make it their life’s work.

Ms. Sharkey has often kept side jobs — these days, she moonlights as a school custodian — but clamming has been her mainstay on the Great South Bay, just off Fire Island.

“Years ago, this was the most productive bay in the country, except for the Chesapeake, for crabs, clams and fish,” Ms. Sharkey said as the boat bounded across the shimmering flat water toward a shallow spot. “But then came the brown tide, the road runoff and fertilizer off people’s lawns.”

With those factors affecting the abundance and health of the clams, much of the bay is now off limits for shellfishing. Weaker market prices and the ever-rising cost of living are other reasons that there were a mere two other clam boats off in the distance, compared with the hundreds that would have been seen years back.

Read the full story at The New York Times

MAINE: Catching Jonah – Could an overlooked crab break Maine’s lobster dependence?

October 20, 2015 — Tina Gray of Deer Isle recalls when picking and selling crabmeat was a prevalent cottage industry along the Maine coast. She and other lobstermen’s wives routinely picked and packaged crab meat at their kitchen sinks, she said, but many got out of the trade years ago when new federal rules for seafood processing went into place.

Gray, who’s going on 33 years picking crab meat for a living, remains one of just a few in her area who keep up with the work. She bills herself as “ The Crab Lady.”

“I remember back when I started, there was like 300 people on this island that used to pick [crabmeat] in their homes,” Gray said, picking crab while standing at a work table in a small processing building outside her house. “Now I think there’s a total of maybe eight [processing] licenses on Deer Island and Stonington.”

Crabs, once a more prominent staple among the various marine fisheries in Maine, have always played second fiddle to lobster in the state’s clawed crustacean seafood industry. But the market divide between Maine lobster and crab has grown more acute over the past dozen years. The volume of Maine’s lobster catch has soared to all-time highs while landings for all crab species have declined to their lowest point since the early 1980s.

That trend stands in sharp contrast to southern New England, where lobster catches have dropped off considerably, but harvests for one type of crab — the large-clawed Jonah crab — have more than quintupled since the 1990s.

The disparity raises questions: Could crab landings rebound in Maine? If so, can they climb back up enough to help offset Maine fishermen’s overwhelming dependence on lobster, which scientists and other officials say could have disastrous consequences if the fishery goes bust?

Lobstermen mainly catch crab as a byproduct, hauling them up in their traps as incidental income. Maine does not issue separate licenses for crab and lobster, with the exception of the recently approved green crab license.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News