Saving Seafood

Acidic ocean could soon cost us lots of crabs

January 18, 2017 — Dungeness crab fisheries on the West Coast—valued at about $220 million annually—may face a strong downturn over the next 50 years.

The acidification of the ocean expected as seawater absorbs increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will reverberate through the West Coast’s marine food web in unexpected ways, say researchers.

Dungeness crabs, for example, will likely suffer as their food sources decline. But pteropods and copepods, tiny marine organisms with shells that are vulnerable to acidification, will likely experience only a slight overall decline because they are prolific enough to offset much of the impact, finds the study published in Global Change Biology.

Marine mammals and seabirds are less likely to be affected by ocean acidification, the study found.

“What stands out is that some groups you’d expect to do poorly don’t necessarily do so badly—that’s probably the most important takeaway here,” says Kristin Marshall, lead author of the study who pursued the research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington and NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center. “This is a testament in part to the system’s resilience to these projected impacts. That’s sort of the silver lining of what we found.”

Read the full story at Futurity

Warming Oceans Could Make These Seafood Favorites Toxic

January 12, 2017 — In recent years, scientists have warned that climate change could have a disastrous effect on the ocean’s ecosystems as the world’s waters get warmer. But now, a new study suggests that widespread die offs of ocean-going species isn’t the only thing that warmer waters could cause: It might also make some seafood favorites too toxic to eat.

Chances are, most people haven’t heard of domoic acid, but it’s something that could be making more headlines soon enough. That’s because it’s a neurotoxin that can build up in sea creatures that are popular on the dinner table, like Dungeness crab, mussels, clams and anchovies, Clare Leschin-Hoar reports for NPR. And, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warmer waters lead to algae blooms that can cause elevated levels of this toxin in many of the ocean’s critters.

“When water’s unusually warm off our coast, it’s because the circulation and patterns in the atmosphere has changed, bringing warm water from elsewhere—and this is happening at the same time that we also see high domoic acid in shellfish. It has a very strong mechanistic connection,” Morgaine McKibben, study author and Oregon State University doctoral student tells Kavya Balaraman for Scientific American.

Domoic acid is produced by some kinds of algae, in particular one called pseudo-nitzschia. These microorganisms are the basis of the underwater food chain and thrive in warm waters, but can build up in sea life, causing serious health issues for humans and animals alike. As Leschin-Hoar explains, domoic acid first became known as a health threat in 1987, when an outbreak in Canada killed three people and sickened more than 100 with symptoms including vomiting, diarrhea and cramps. In serious cases, domoic acid poisoning can even cause seizures, numbing and memory loss.

Since then, officials have monitored domoic acid levels along the western North American coastline—and it’s been steadily rising over time. McKibben’s study looked at more than two decades worth of data gathered in the region and found a strong correlation between rising water temperatures and rising domoic acid levels, Stephanie Bucklin reports for LiveScience.

These elevated levels of domoic acid are already starting to affect the seafood business. In 2015, officials shut down Dungeness crab fisheries from Alaska to California for several months because of high domoic acid content, Balaraman reports, and similar shutdowns were enacted in 2016. This left the seafood industry in Washington state $9 million in the hole. To make matters worse, the toxin can linger in fisheries for as long as a year.

Read the full story at Smithsonian

CALIFORNIA: Whither the crab? Monterey Bay pulls empty pots

January 9, 2017 — SANTA CRUZ , Calif — As a labor strike continues to dry dock their colleagues to the north, many Monterey Bay Dungeness crab fishers are pulling predominantly empty pots, despite letting them soak for as much as two weeks.

“You run a whole string and pull a bunch of blanks, you’re going to start getting eggy,” said Justin Barry, 38, a crewmember on the commercial crabber Five Stars, which is docked at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor. “The whole thing’s belly up. We’re trying to convince our captain not to call it a season at this point.”

To make matters worse, the market price of Dungeness crab remains relatively low — from $3 to $3.25 a pound — despite the crustacean’s scarcity.

“There’s just not a whole lot of crab to buy right now,” said Hans Haveman, co-owner of H&H Fish. “We were paying as much as $5 a pound around New Year’s. I’m not even sure what I’d pay if someone brought me crab right now. I’d have to think about that.”

Vincent Pham, 40, owns two crab boats in the Santa Cruz Harbor, both named Five Stars. This week, he looked out at the wind chop whipping the ocean outside the harbor mouth.

“It’s not cheap to go out and pull empty crab pots,” said Pham. “You have to know when to say when.”

Many recreational crabbers have already pulled the plug.

Read the full story at the Santa Cruz Sentinel 

CALIFORNIA: Domoic Acid Delays Dungeness Crab Season For Much Of North Coast

November 28th, 2016 — A 120-mile stretch of the Northern California coastline will not open for the commercial Dungeness crab season next week, putting North Coast crabbers in an economic bind again.

From Point Reyes south, the season is open and the crab is relatively plentiful. But with the neurotoxin domoic acid being found in crabs between Point Reyes and Eureka, that season will not open on December 1st.

It’s bad news for crabber Aaron Newman President of the Humboldt Co. Fishermen’s Marketing Association, who took a pass on the Bay Area season which opened on the 15th.

“I would only make a decision to go down there if I knew the crab quality was good. So I’d go down there and fish for a week and come back home and then fish at home,” Newman told KCBS. “But this year, I decided not to go down there because there was some question about this domoic acid issue. Now it turns out also in Oregon.”

Newman said on top of new crabbing restrictions, the weather along the North Coast has been as dangerous as he can recall in many years.

“It’s a scary winter, looks like a very scary winter for me,” Newman said.

Read the full story at CBS San Francisco 

Warm Pacific Ocean ‘blob’ facilitated vast toxic algae bloom

September 30, 2016 –SEATTLE — A new study finds that unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures helped cause a massive bloom of toxic algae last year that closed lucrative fisheries from California to British Columbia and disrupted marine life from seabirds to sea lions.

Scientists linked the large patch of warm ocean water, nicknamed the “blob,” to the vast ribbon of toxic algae that flourished in 2015 and produced record-breaking levels of a neurotoxin that is harmful to people, fish and marine life.

The outbreak of the toxin domoic acid, the largest ever recorded on the West Coast, closed razor clam seasons in Washington and Oregon and delayed lucrative Dungeness crab fisheries along the coast. High levels were also detected in many stranded marine mammals.

“We’re not surprised now having looked at the data, but our study is the first to demonstrate that linkage,” said Ryan McCabe, lead author and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean. “It’s the first question that everyone was asking.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WSBT

Paying Crab Fishers to Save Whales

September 28, 2016 — For years, California Dungeness crab fishers wanted to haul lost and abandoned crabbing gear out of the sea to keep it from entangling and killing whales but were forbidden by law to retrieve the free-floating lines, wire traps, and buoys, which are considered private property.

Now, with whale entanglements soaring, a bill signed Friday by Gov. Jerry Brown not only rewards fishers for clearing away the hazardous debris but pays for it by making owners of derelict gear buy back their equipment from the state.

The Whale Protection and Crab Gear Retrieval Act was introduced by state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and approved overwhelmingly by both houses of the legislature. It was backed by a diverse coalition of groups, including Earthjustice, the Golden Gate Fishermen’s Association, and SeaWorld.

Under the new law, which takes effect next year, Dungeness crab fishers can receive a permit to collect lost or abandoned traps after the crab season has closed. They will be paid an as-yet-unspecified bounty for each trap turned in.

Taxpayers will not foot the bill. Instead, owners of the drifting gear will pay fines based on the value of their equipment, typically several hundred dollars for a trap and its lines. Failure to buy back their gear will result in revocation of their vessel permit for the following season. Abandoned or lost gear can be traced to the owner through an identification number attached to each trap.

Read the full story at takepart

Studies Focus on Acidic Ocean Impact on Dungeness Crabs

September 23, 2016 — Millions of pounds of Dungeness crab are pulled from Pacific Northwest waters each year in a more than century-old ritual for commercial and recreational fishermen.

But as marine waters absorb more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, federal scientists are worried that the ocean’s changing chemistry may threaten the sweet-flavored crustaceans.

So scientists with the NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center are exposing tiny crab larvae to acidic seawater in laboratory experiments to understand how ocean acidification might affect one of the West Coast’s most lucrative fisheries.

Research published this year found that Dungeness crab eggs and larvae collected from Puget Sound and exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide — which increases ocean acidity — grew more slowly and larvae were more likely to die than those in less corrosive seawater.

Now, researchers are taking the experiments a step further to study how the crabs respond to multiple stressors during various growth stages. They also plan to analyze the sublethal effects: Even if the crabs don’t die, are they affected in physiological or other ways by ocean acidification?

“They’re so economically and ecologically important here on the West Coast,” said Paul McElhany, a research ecologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center north of Seattle, who is leading the current experiments.

Crab larvae are valuable food for small salmon and forage fish like herring that are eaten by salmon. Dungeness crabs are also the top revenue-fetching fishery in Washington and Oregon. In 2014, nearly $200 million worth of crabs were harvested along the West Coast.

Read the full story at ABC News

Tough Seasons for California Crabbers

August 31, 2016 — The recent crab season in California was abysmal, to say the least.

Epic neurotoxin levels found in Dungeness and rock crabs forced state officials to close fisheries for months instead of weeks, crippling one of the state’s most lucrative fishing industries and leaving fishermen in California’s Northern and Central coasts unable to make a living.

Boats loaded with new fishing gear and crab pots sat in harbors such as Bodega Bay and Monterey. Boat owners have had to lay off crewmembers, who left to find work elsewhere or collect unemployment.

In Crescent City, a small Northern California town of fewer than 8,000 people, the community has been hosting fundraisers to help struggling crabbers. The city has one of the largest landings for Dungeness crab.

Angel Cincotta, who owns the Alioto-Lazio Fish Company on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf with her two sisters, told an NBC Bay Area affiliate that they have had to assuage customers’ concerns about the product they were selling.

“Crabs are currently coming out of Washington and Alaska, out of certified clean waters, so they’re safe to eat,” she told NBC.

The neurotoxin also affected rock crab season in Santa Barbara, one of the state’s biggest ports for rock crab fishing. The rock crab season, which runs all year, was delayed for months in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

“Thousands of Californians are dependent on healthy a crab fishery, and this year we have faced a disaster,” said State Sen. Mike McGuire, chairman of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture. “Our magnificent and iconic crab fishery has gone from abundant to scarcity. And after a lousy salmon season, our fishery boats sit idle. Crabbers are struggling to make ends meet.”

Read the full story at Fishermen’s News

MASSACHUSETTS: Found a tagged crab? You could win $1,000

August 23, 2016 — Atlantic lobstermen and fishing regulators are tagging Jonah crabs in an effort to learn more about their migration patterns and growth.

Jonahs have been growing in value and volume of catch in recent years. They are used as food, sometimes to substitute for the popular and more expensive Dungeness crab.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association are tagging the crabs. They ask residents who find a crab with an orange or green tag marked with “AOLA” to record when and where the crustacean was found and report the data to Heidi Henninger at 774-251-9454 or heidi@offshorelobster.org.

Organizers of the effort say every report of a tag will qualify the crab finder to a raffle entry. Prizes will range up to $1,000.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Consider the Crab: The year California’s Dungeness crab industry almost cracked apart (but didn’t)

July 28, 2016 — Lori French, the daughter-in-law of a crab fisherman, the wife of another, and the mother of a third, placed two large bowls on a table. The one labeled “California” sat empty. The other, reading “Oregon,” was filled to the brim with bright-lavender-and-orange Dungeness crabs. It was early February, the night before the annual hearing of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture at the state capitol, and French, who’s the president of a nonprofit called Central Coast Women for Fisheries, had organized a banquet that was part festive crab feed, part bare-knuckled lobbying effort.

For the benefit of her attendees, who included elected officials, bureaucrats, scientists, and fishermen and their families, she had shipped hundreds of pounds of Dungeness down from Oregon, where, unlike in California, the annual crab season was already under way. She believed that state officials were being too cautious in prohibiting commercial crabbing due to an outbreak of toxic domoic acid, an embargo that had decimated the fortunes of some 1,800 crab-fishing captains and crews in California. Domoic acid, she pointed out, had neither killed nor caused a reported sickening of anyone so far this year. Washington State had let commercial fishermen on the water. Why not reopen the waters in California?

It wouldn’t be that easy. The California Department of Public Health requires scientists to confirm two consecutive clean tests for potentially harmful toxins in locally caught crabs. Since the fall, at least one of every two tests had reported unacceptably high levels of domoic acid, which can poison all kinds of sea life and can sicken and potentially kill humans. By the time I caught up with French again in mid-March, several weeks after the banquet, the state’s crabbers were still out of luck. One recent test had come back clear, French told me over the phone. With one more clean bill of health, her husband and hundreds of other fishermen working the coastline from Santa Barbara up to Crescent City would have been able to drop pots and catch crabs. But when the subsequent test results came back, they weren’t good: A crab had been found with domoic acid levels in its organs at 38 parts per million, 8 above the cutoff level. French was devastated: “Our last bit of hope was just jerked away,” she said.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle