Saving Seafood

Exploring ropeless gear for sustainable lobster fishing

October 1, 2024 — On Thursday, August 29, 2024, NOAA Fisheries hosted a webinar looking at the future of ropeless, or pop-up, gear for the New England lobster fishery. NOAA’s Jennifer S. Goebel pointed out that the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team had recommended that large swaths of the Gulf of Maine and waters south of Cape Cod be subject to emergency closures and open to fishing with ropeless gear only.

Goebel noted, however, that the lobster and Jonah crab fisheries are currently in compliance with the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act; “the recommendations from the team were put on hold.” Goebel cited other legislation that calls for innovation in the adoption of gear technology as justification for efforts aimed at developing ropeless gear. “That seems to support the development of ropeless gear,” Goebel said, before outlining a 4-year plan to develop the technology and have final rules in place.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

NOAA proposes protection for 10 giant ocean-dwelling clams

July 26, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries has proposed Endangered Species Act listings for 10 giant clams, saying five of the marine species are in danger of extinction throughout the entirety or a significant portion of their ranges with five others losing habitat at alarming rates.

The clams — which can weigh as much as 500 pounds and have shells as long as 4.5 feet — have been decimated by “pervasive harvest for subsistence and domestic sale, and several periods of short-lived but intensive commercial harvest have severely depleted giant clam populations throughout their respective ranges,” the agency said in a Federal Register notice Thursday.

The proposed rule, which is open for public comment through Oct. 23, arrives eight years after biologist Dwayne Meadows petitioned NOAA to protect the giant clams whose range includes parts of the Pacific and Indian oceans, including Hawaii and the Marshall Islands.

Read the full article at E&E News

Riverkeepers take legal action to save sturgeons

July 22, 2024 — Individuals and group riverkeepers from New Jersey, New York, and Delaware announced that they plan to sue on behalf of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon. They claim that the taking and discarding of sturgeons due to bycatch has drastically caused the species’ decline.

Riverkeepers are privately funded non-governmental advocates who work to protect the public’s right to clean water. According to sources, the groups hope to prevent commercial fisheries from taking or discarding sturgeon as bycatch while out trawling the ocean for striped bass, flounder, and other fish. They claim that bycatch has impeded the recovery of the species specifically in the Hudson River.

The Hudson currently supports the largest population of Atlantic sturgeon along the Atlantic coast, estimated to be between 1000 and 1500 fish. In 2012, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared five distinct population segments of the Atlantic sturgeon endangered and protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Ninth Circuit unsure of court’s efficacy in Alaska killer whale conservation case

July 19, 2024 — The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing how effective its opinion will be in a lawsuit over how Chinook salmon fishing affects Southern Resident killer whales — and judges on Thursday wondered whether the effort would be rendered moot by a pending government agency action.

The Wild Fish Conservancy sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020, accusing the agency of violating the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act in its 2019 Southeast Alaska Biological Opinion and incidental take statement by bypassing public notice and opportunity to comment on the actions.

Alaska and the Alaska Trollers Association, a representative of the commercial fishing industry in the state, intervened as codefendants.

Chinook salmon are the primary food source for Southern Resident killer whales, which were placed on the endangered species list in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones remanded the biological opinion and vacated the portions of it that authorized commercial harvest of Chinook salmon during winter and summer seasons. The ruling would have prevented Southeast Alaskan trollers from fishing for Chinook salmon, but the Ninth Circuit issued a stay, allowing commercial fisheries to continue harvest while the parties appealed.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Conservation groups sue NOAA over tope shark protections

July 11, 2024 — Conservations groups have sued NOAA Fisheries, claiming that the agency has failed to meet the legal deadline for determining whether tope sharks should be protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Defend Them All Foundation first filed a petition to have tope sharks ESA-listed in February 2022. NOAA Fisheries responded with a 90-day preliminary finding acknowledging that the sharks may warrant protections in April of that year, triggering a full investigation due February 2023. The agency has still not issued a determination.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Fishery management council: Lack of consultation shows ‘disrespect’

July 1, 2024 — Members of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council are dismayed over the continued lack of federal government consultation with U.S. territories on the Endangered Species Act, including matters involving green sea turtles, giant clams and oceanic whitetip sharks, the council said in a press release.

“The lack of consultation with the governors of the U.S. territories for federal initiatives shows disrespect – the governors are our leaders, and we look to them for guidance,” Guam Council member Judith Guthertz stated in the release.

She expressed frustration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service not responding to October 2023 letters from U.S. Pacific territorial governors, which requested an extension to the comment period for a proposed designation of green sea turtle critical habitat, the council said in the release.

Read the full article at The Guam Daily Post

NOAA releases draft update to ecosystem-based fisheries management roadmap

June 20, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries is now accepting public comments on its updated ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) roadmap.

NOAA first established an EBFM roadmap in 2016 to provide guidance on the agency’s policy shift toward implementing ecosystem-level planning for the country’s fisheries. The management style involves setting quotas while also considering how an individual species fits into the wider ecosystem, rather than the status of an individual stock.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Biden administration restores blanket protections for threatened species

March 30, 2024 — The Biden administration has restored so-called blanket rule protections for threatened species after the Trump administration in 2019 abolished those rules under the Endangered Species Act.

The blanket rule provides newly listed threatened species that are at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future with the same broad protections as endangered species that are at risk of becoming extinct. The rule avoids the need for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to formulate specific protections for each species that it lists as threatened.

“As species face new and daunting challenges, including climate change, degraded and fragmented habitat, invasive species, and wildlife disease, the Endangered Species Act is more important than ever to conserve and recover imperiled species,” Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement. “These revisions underscore our commitment to using all of the tools available to help halt declines and stabilize populations of the species most at-risk.”

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

NOAA official says coral critical habitat designation to minimize federal action on reef

January 16, 2023 — A NOAA coral reef critical habitat designation in the CNMI would only affect federal actions on and near the waters of the Marianas, according to Lance Smith, a fishery biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Smith met with Variety for a virtual interview on Jan. 12 to discuss a NOAA proposal to designate critical habitat for Acropora globiceps, a type of coral that is “sensitive” to ocean warming, ocean acidification, and coral bleaching, he said.

Smith said a critical habitat designation is established once a species becomes protected under the Endangered Species Act. The critical habitat is a location where the species can thrive.

Read the full article at Marianas Variety 

Most money for endangered species goes to a small number of creatures, leaving others in limbo

January 2, 2024 — Since passage of the Endangered Species Act 50 years ago, more than 1,700 plants, mammals, fish, insects and other species in the U.S. have been listed as threatened or endangered with extinction. Yet federal government data reveals striking disparities in how much money is allocated to save various biological kingdoms.

Of the roughly $1.2 billion a year spent on endangered and threatened species, about half goes toward recovery of just two types of fish: salmon and steelhead trout along the West Coast. Tens of millions of dollars go to other widely known animals including manatees, right whales, grizzly bears and spotted owls.

But the large sums directed toward a handful of species means others have gone neglected, in some cases for decades, as they teeter on potential extinction.

At the bottom of the spending list is the tiny Virginia fringed mountain snail, which had $100 spent on its behalf in 2020, according to the most recent data available. The underground-dwelling snail has been seen only once in the past 35 years, according to government records, yet it remains a step ahead of more than 200 imperiled plants, animals, fish and other creatures that had nothing spent on their behalf.

With climate change increasing threats to organisms around the planet and adding to the number that qualify for protection under the Endangered Species Act, government officials are struggling in many cases to execute recovery actions required under the law.

Some scientists even argue for spending less on costly efforts that may not work and putting the money toward species with less expensive recovery plans that have languished.

“For a tiny fraction of the budget going to spotted owls, we could save whole species of cacti that are less charismatic but have an order of magnitude smaller budget,” said Leah Gerber, a professor of conservation science at Arizona State University.

An Associated Press analysis of 2020 data found fish got 67% of the spending, the majority for several dozen salmon and steelhead populations in California, Oregon and Washington. Mammals were a distant second with 7% of spending and birds had about 5%. Insects received just 0.5% of the money and plants about 2%. Not included in those percentages is money divided among multiple species.

Species drawing no spending at all included stoneflies threatened by climate change in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the stocky California tiger salamander that has lost ground to development and flowering plants such as the scrub lupine around Orlando, Florida, where native habitat has been converted for theme parks.

Read the full article at NBC New York