Delaware Bay Archives - Saving Seafood

Oyster Farmers Who Feared Going Broke Brace for a ‘Bonkers’ Summer

June 14, 2021 — A year ago, oyster growers who farm New Jersey’s marshy coastal inlets and tidal flats were fighting for survival.

Restaurants were shut down by the pandemic, and the oysters they had nurtured for two years were growing past their prime. The pricey seafood that should have been sold in raw bars or served at weddings was instead submerged in cages and racks in Barnegat and Delaware Bays, crowding out a younger crop of oysters.

“When Covid hit, that market disappeared,” said Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a nonprofit dedicated to the study and conservation of marine life and habitats.

Unable to pay for boat fuel or the following year’s seed, some small aquaculture farmers in New York and New Jersey, struggling to revitalize what was once the country’s pre-eminent oyster market, braced for the worst.

But a year later, against long odds, the industry is poised for a summertime boom.

Read the full story at The New York Times

‘E-ZPass for fish.’ What tracking sturgeon can tell us about this fragile species – and Delaware Bay

May 11, 2021 — This spring marks a decade since New Jersey’s Bureau of Marine Fisheries first deployed acoustic receivers to track the migratory patterns of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon in the Delaware Bay. For the researchers tasked with monitoring this fragile, prehistoric fish species, the past 10 years have been an exercise in hope — and occasional surprise.

“There are signs that the population has started a slow recovery,” said Brian Neilan, a senior fisheries biologist who leads the monitoring program for the bureau. “At least relative to the numbers when the [Atlantic coastwide] fishing moratorium on sturgeon went into effect in 1998.”

In mid-March, Neilan and his team deployed 19 acoustic receivers throughout the New Jersey side of the bay, from Cape May to Egg Island Point, in Cumberland County. The receivers pick up frequencies pinged from sturgeon and other fish implanted with radio tags that are similar to the microchips used for household pets. “It’s like E-ZPass for fish,” said Neilan.

On April 12, the first dataset was pulled from the receivers. Of the over 600 detections recorded, 66 came from just five sturgeon. “Those numbers are pretty on par for what we see during March and early April,” Neilan said. “May is typically when we get the most detections, because that’s when the sturgeon are using the bay the most, to go up to their spawning grounds in the river and then come back down and back out into the ocean.”

Like other depleted, culturally significant fish species in the Delaware Estuary, sturgeon are anadromous, meaning they spawn in fresh water, where they remain for the first couple years of their life before migrating to the ocean.

Read the full story at the New Jersey Spotlight

NJDEP Proposes Changes to Marine Management, Seeks Public Input

March 10, 2021 — The state Department of Environmental Protection is seeking comments on proposed new rules regulating crab and lobster management, marine fisheries and fishery management in New Jersey. Written comments can be electronically filed until April 30 or submitted via the regular mail.

“The department is proposing to reduce the number of commercial crab pot/trot line licenses and crab dredge licenses for both the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic coast due to a reduction in the number of actively harvesting license holders,” according to the March 1 DEP bulletin on the proposed rule change.

Under the proposal, a licensee could transfer licenses to any person, based upon the number of available licenses.

Read the full story at The Sand Paper

As water temperatures rise, Rutgers scientists breed tougher shellfish

February 23, 2021 — Over the last half-century, global sea surface temperatures have been on the rise, but in the last decade they have increased at an accelerated rate.

New Jersey’s coastal waters, both along the Atlantic Coast and Delaware Bay, have been no exception. More alarming, recent research indicates that sea surface temperatures in the Northeast are warming two to three times faster than the global average. For instance, in 2012, water temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic reached the highest levels ever seen in over 150 years of recorded observations.

This rapid increase in water temperature is already influencing New Jersey’s marine species. Breeding habits, ranges and growth rates are adjusting as the environment in which they have evolved to thrive has changed at an unnatural pace. For the commercial fishermen and women whose livelihoods depend on the state’s fishery, particularly those who are only just beginning to experiment with shellfish aquaculture, warmer waters mean higher operational risk.

A new study from the Rutgers University Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, which has been monitoring New Jersey’s shellfish stocks for more than a century, is working to combat the impacts of climate change by selectively breeding bay scallops and surf clams that can grow faster and tolerate higher water temperatures.

Read the full story at NJ Spotlight News

ASMFC Horseshoe Crab Board Sets 2021 Specifications for Horseshoe Crabs of Delaware Bay Origin

October 21, 2020 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Horseshoe Crab Management Board approved the harvest specifications for horseshoe crabs of Delaware Bay origin. Under the Adaptive Resource Management (ARM) Framework, the Board set a harvest limit of 500,000 Delaware Bay male horseshoe crabs and zero female horseshoe crabs for the 2020 season. Based on the allocation mechanism established in Addendum VII, the following quotas were set for the States of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland and the Commonwealth of Virginia, which harvest horseshoe crabs of Delaware Bay origin:

For more information, please contact Caitlin Starks, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at 703.842.0740 orcstarks@asmfc.org.

ERIC BURNLEY: Commercial fishermen do not affect recreational fishing

February 3, 2020 — There is a misconception among some recreational fishermen that commercial fishermen are to blame for all the ills we suffer with a lack of flounder, bluefish, trout, striped bass, or (you name it) . Sorry, Charlie, it just ain’t so.

There was a time when both commercial and recreational fishermen could take as many fish of any size as they wanted, and we did. I have seen coolers full of flounder come off the Point at Cape Hatteras with many of those fish well below 12 inches. Blues stacked up like cordwood at Indian River when the run was on, and trout deck loaded in Delaware Bay. At the same time, commercial fishermen were filling their nets with the same fish until the market value dropped to the point where it became a losing proposition to go after them.

I was a small part of the movement to put limits on both recreational and commercial fishermen here in Delaware and in Virginia. In Delaware, I was on the Delaware Wildlife Federation’s Advisory Council, and we met regularly with state officials to try to bring some order to the fishery. The late Buddy Hurlock and his wife Rose were the driving force behind this movement.

Read the full story at the Cape Gazette

New funding to study microplastic pollution effect on Delaware Bay blue crabs

November 6, 2019 — The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is often held up as the poster child for ocean pollution. And while the collection of trash collecting in the Pacific Ocean certainly deserves attention, researchers at the University of Delaware are concerned about a smaller source of pollution, much smaller.

Through its marine debris program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is giving the university a $325,000 grant to study the impact of microplastics on blue crab populations near the Delaware Bay. Microplastics are defined as pieces of plastic less than five millimeters in length, or smaller than a pencil eraser. According to NOAA, some microplastics are microbeads, fibers or pellets that come from cosmetics or personal care products, for instance. They can also come from larger pieces of plastic that split apart and break down after exposure to the sun.

It’s estimated that there’s about five trillion tons of marine debris in our oceans and plastics are 90% of that, said UD College of Earth, Ocean and Environment Dean Estella Atekwana. “This grant is really timely so we can advance our understanding of what plastics do to our marine ecosystems,” she said.

Read the full story at WHYY

ASMFC Horseshoe Crab Board Sets 2020 Specifications for Horseshoe Crabs of Delaware Bay Origin

October 30, 2019 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Board chose a harvest package based on the Delaware Bay Ecosystem Technical Committee’s and ARM Subcommittee’s recommendation. The ARM Framework, established through Addendum VII, incorporates both shorebird and horseshoe crab abundance levels to set optimized harvest levels for horseshoe crabs of Delaware Bay origin. The horseshoe crab abundance estimate was based on data from the Benthic Trawl Survey conducted by Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech). This survey, which is the primary data source for assessing Delaware Bay horseshoe crab abundance for the past two years, as well as the ongoing benchmark stock assessment, does not have a consistent funding source. However, due to the efforts of three Senators and six Representatives – namely, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), Tom Carper (D-DE), Cory Booker (D-NJ); and Representatives Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Lisa Blunt-Rochester (D-DE), Donald Norcross (D-NJ), Chris Smith (R-NJ), and Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) – and the support of NOAA Fisheries, annual funding for the survey has been provided since 2016. They have also requested that NOAA Fisheries incorporate the survey into the agency’s annual budget.

For more information, please contact Dr. Michael Schmidtke, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at 703.842.0740 or mschmidtke@asmfc.org.

Dead dolphins keep washing up in Delaware. But why?

May 30, 2019 — Twelve dead dolphins have washed up on bay and ocean breaches in Delaware over the last two months.

Among the most recent: A decomposed bottlenose dolphin calf showed up on Memorial Day at Cape Henlopen State Park, and another was found Saturday on the coast in Rehoboth Beach.

What caused many of those deaths remains unclear: Most of the dolphins that washed ashore were largely decomposed by the time officials arrived from the Marine Education, Research and Rehabilitation Institute (MERR) in Lewes.

In an ocean filled with predators and scavengers, as well as the sun beating down on hot days, it can often be a challenge to get good enough tissue and fluid samples to figure out what happened.

“I’m not seeing anything out of the ordinary whatsoever at this point,” said Suzanne Thurman, executive director of MERR. “It’s always note-worthy, but it’s not a spike.”

Read the full story at USA Today

ASMFC Horseshoe Crab Board Approves Benchmark Stock Assessment for Management Use

May 3, 2019 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The 2019 Horseshoe Crab Benchmark Stock Assessment evaluated the stock status of the resource by region, finding populations within the Delaware Bay and Southeast regions remaining consistently neutral and good, respectively, through time. The Northeast region population has changed from poor to neutral, while the status of the New York region population has trended downward from good, to neutral, and now to poor. The Benchmark Assessment was endorsed by the Peer Review Panel and accepted by the Horseshoe Crab Management Board (Board) for management use.

To date, no overfishing or overfished definitions have been adopted for management use. For the assessment, biological reference points were developed for the Delaware Bay region horseshoe crab population although not endorsed by the Peer Review Panel for use in management. However, given the assessment results of low fishing mortality and relatively high abundance, overfishing and an overfished status are unlikely for female horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay region.

Read the full release here