Saving Seafood

Study says ocean oscillation changes reduced shellfish landings

November 6, 2018 — For years, Maine shellfish harvesters have been complaining that there are fewer softshell clams while arguing that the diggers who go out on the mud flats aren’t the cause of the problem.

A recent study by researchers from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources backs them up on both counts.

According to Clyde L. MacKenzie Jr. of NOAA and Mitchell Tarnowski from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, between 1980 and 2010, documented landings of the four most commercially important inshore bivalve mollusks along the Northeast coast — eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams and northern bay scallops — dropped by 85 percent.

The principal cause, they say, was warming ocean temperatures associated with a shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation which resulted in damaged shellfish habitat and increased predation from Maine to North Carolina.

“My first response is that the article confirms what I have been seeing with soft-shell clams over at least the last decade or so,” Brian Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine Machias and director of research at the Downeast Institute on Great Wass Island, said last week.

The North Atlantic Oscillation is a fluctuation of atmospheric pressure over the North Atlantic that affects both the weather and the climate along the East Coast, especially in winter and early spring.

According to NOAA, shifts in the oscillation can affect the timing of a species’ reproduction and growth, the availability of microscopic organisms for food and predator-prey relationships.

Over a period of several years, MacKenzie and Tarnowski interviewed shellfish wardens and harvesters along the New England coast, as well as examining landings records and other research in an effort to determine the “true causes” of the precipitous drop in shellfish landings.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

NOAA recommends Maine fisheries research projects for $1.5M in funding

June 8, 2017 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recommended over $1.5 million in Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program funding for six fisheries research projects in Maine.

The goal of the Saltonstall-Kennedy program is to fund projects that address the needs of fishing communities, optimize economic benefits by building and maintaining sustainable fisheries and increase other opportunities to keep working waterfronts viable.

The program has recommended the following projects for funding; final approval is pending:

  • Downeast Institute for Applied Marine Research and Education, $278,000: Demonstrating aquaculture technologies designed to increase the supply, quality and diversification of domestic seafood: Field experiments with cultured arctic surf clams.
  • Gulf of Maine Research Institute, $288,888: Addressing the issue of “Choke” species in a changing climate.
  • Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association Lobster, $141,092: Migration and growth: Continuation and expansion of 2015 tagging effort on Georges Bank and in the Gulf of Maine.
  • Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, $298,932: A ‘Halo’ for shellfish aquaculture: Discovering the phytoremediation potential of farmed kelp.
  • University of Maine, $299,623: Evaluating the life history and stock structure of yellowfin tuna in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.
  • University of Maine, $275,308: Assessing the potential for sustainability of fishing-dependent communities in coastal Maine in the face of environmental and socioeconomic change.

In a news release announcing the NOAA’s recommendations, U.S Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, characterized the projects as “key to the future of the Gulf of Maine and the thousands of Mainers who make their living from it.”

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Clammers feeling the pinch as green crabs threaten another harvest

May 22, 2017 — Clammers face a shrinking harvest again this year after predator green crabs survived the mild winter, but one scientist may have an answer – aquaculture.

The second mild winter in a row means Maine’s tidal flats will likely be overrun by large, ravenous invasive green crabs this summer.

That’s bad news for the state’s already weakened soft-shell clam industry. One green crab can consume 40 half-inch clams a day and will dig 6 inches to find clams to eat. In 2016, clam landings fell 21 percent, from 9.3 million to 7.3 million pounds, the lowest total reported since 1991, according to the state Department of Marine Resources.

Some of the landings decline was undoubtedly a result of an unusual bloom of toxic algae that forced a monthlong shellfishing ban along about a third of Maine’s coastline last fall. But researcher Sara Randall of the Downeast Institute in Beals notes that a review of clam landings in towns with traditionally high numbers south of the Deer Isle-Stonington closure line found that 19 out of 24 towns, or 79 percent, had harvested fewer clams.

For example, from 2015 to 2016, landings fell 35 percent in Harpswell, 87 percent in Yarmouth and 21 percent in Scarborough. In Freeport, a town on the front line of the effort to combat the green crab invasion, landings decreased 17 percent despite efforts by municipal officials, clammers and researchers like Randall, among others, to use protective measures such as nets and other tools to ward off the green crabs.

The mild winter may only make matters worse. Clammers had hoped for a cold winter so the deep freeze and ice would kill off a lot of the crabs, allowing the clam seed still found in high numbers in Maine waters a chance to settle in the tidal flats and grow, forming those telltale tiny holes that tell clammers a harvest awaits them under the mud.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald