March 23, 2020 — U.K. supermarket chains can for the first time work together and will be allowed to share distribution networks, stock level data, staff, and other important resources after the government temporarily relaxed elements of competition law to enable food to reach stores during the coronavirus crisis.
Drivers’ hours have also been relaxed to enable retailers to get more food to outlets, while plastic bag charges for online purchases have been stopped to speed up deliveries.
May 14, 2018 — The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone is bigger than ever. Recent surveys put it at an enormous 8,776 square miles, large enough to cover New Jersey.
But another massive zone of low dissolved oxygen confirmed recently in the Arabian Sea is seven times larger. At 63,000 square miles — the size of Florida — it ranks as the world’s largest.
Scientists from the University of East Anglia of Norwich, England measured the dead zone, which sits in the Gulf of Oman south of Iran, with underwater robots. The area had been suspected of hosting a massive dead zone, but roving bands of pirates and the region’s volatile geopolitics made research difficult. The torpedo-shaped robots were able to slip in and do the measurements with ease, but they came back with very bad news.
“The Arabian Sea is the largest and thickest dead zone in the world,” said Bastien Queste, a marine biochemist and the study’s lead author. “But until now, no one really knew how bad the situation was because of piracy and conflicts in the area have made it too dangerous to collect data.”
Waters depleted of oxygen turn fish away and suffocate anything that can’t escape, including plants and slow-moving crabs and other shellfish.
“Of course all fish, marine plants and other animals need oxygen, so they can’t survive there,” Queste said. “It’s a real environmental problem with dire consequences for humans, too.”
In the Gulf of Mexico, the growing dead zone has had a big impact on commercial fisheries. Shrimp are harder to find and the oxygen-starved crustaceans are slow to grow, producing a smaller shrimp that fetches lower prices.
Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune
August 7, 2017 — NEWQUAY, England — Fisherman Phil Trebilcock is tired of being told there are not enough fish in the sea.
“On the east coast of Cornwall there are fish swimming up the beaches but they’re not allowed to catch them,” he said, hauling pots of spider crabs out of a choppy Celtic Sea recently. “They should take more advice from the fishermen, and less from the scientists.”
Trebilcock is bridling against European Union quotas that dictate how much fish British vessels can land — in some cases prompting fishermen to dump dead fish back into the water if they have caught more than they are allocated.
And that’s not all. The fisherman ticked off his grievances with the EU regulations: quotas, too much paperwork and too many foreign boats chasing fish in British waters.
So it is no surprise that last year Trebilcock joined 52 percent of the voting public to chose to leave the EU, or “Brexit.”
The country fishing industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of Britain’s GDP but has nevertheless become a symbol of resistance to what many believe are onerous and damaging EU regulations. So as negotiations between the U.K. and EU ramp up in the coming months, one of the many sticking points will be around shared waters.
In spite of the iconic place that fishermen have within the Brexit camp, the industry is actually divided. While many of those who do the catching are cheering the move, a good number of those who process the catch are fretting over the upcoming divorce.
“We have more to lose from Brexit than to gain from it, definitely,” said Julian Harvey, a partner at W. Harvey and Sons, a shellfish wholesaler and processor in Cornwall on the southwest coast of England.
May 3, 2017 — New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell and about 20 civic, business, and academic representatives spent the first full day of their wind-focused trade visit to England Tuesday in Grimbsy, the largest fishing port in the world in the 1950s — which gives the New Bedford group food for thought.
New Bedford has landed the highest dollar-value catch in the United States for 16 years running. But in Grimsby and England at large, the fishing industry declined sharply in the 20th century following a period known as the “Cod Wars,” when Iceland asserted territorial authority over waters where English vessels were fishing.
Thus, as SouthCoast leaders learn from Grimsby about its success in offshore wind, they also have their minds on fishing, and how the two industries can coexist.
Around 5:45 a.m., some of the New Bedford group left their hotel for the Grimsby Fish Auction. Grimsby still handles about 70 percent of all the fish processed in the United Kingdom, according to Neil Mello, Mitchell’s chief of staff.
Among the auction visitors was John F. Quinn, a former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who now chairs the New England Fisheries Management Council. Asked if he could see evidence that offshore wind is compatible with the fishing industry, he said, “most certainly.”
April 6, 2017 — Mayor Jon Mitchell later this month will lead a trade mission to two cities on the British east coast to see what it looks like when the wind energy sector of the economy takes off the way New Bedford hopes it will here.
About 20 people from SouthCoast are expected to be on the four-day trip to Hull and Grimsby, England, both on the Humber River and close to the English Channel and the North Sea.
Kingston on Hull, usually shortened to Hull, is a city of 257,710 people where the construction of wind turbines is an industry that has grown by leaps and bounds.
Nearby Grimsby, population of about 90,000, with an emphasis on installation and maintenance, has a history with uncanny parallels to the story of New Bedford, according to a scouting report by Paul Vigeant, president of the New Bedford Wind Energy, who visited there in January with a small contingent.
What they found was a region of England that is saturated with wind energy development. It is a place that New Bedford would eventually like to resemble, with hundreds of millions of dollars of wind power investment.
Grimsby once looked a lot like New Bedford. It had a thriving whaling industry, transitioning to fish, where it became the world’s largest fishing port for a time in the mid-20th century.
March 7, 2017 — Shaped like a torpedo and about as swift, squids are jet-propelled underwater predators. Together with their nimble brethren, the octopus and cuttlefish, they make for an agile invertebrate armada.
But that was not always the case. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of the tentacled trio were slow, heavily armored creatures, like the coil-shelled ammonites and the cone-shelled belemnites.
Alastair Tanner, a doctoral student at University of Bristol in England, wanted to better understand why those cephalopods lost their shells. But though both ammonites and the belemnites have left behind rich fossil records, their shell-less descendants have not.
So Mr. Tanner conducted a genetic analysis of 26 present day cephalopods, including the vampire squid, the golden cuttlefish and the southern blue-ringed octopus.
December 27, 2016 — Maine’s largest city will host an international forum about scallops next year.
The event is called the International Pectinid Workshop and it is taking place in Portland from April 19 to 25. The event attracts scientists, students and seafood industry representatives from all over the world and has taken place biennially since 1976.
The organizers of the conference say its main goal is to bring stakeholders in scallops together to network and share research and practices. The event’s committee includes representatives from countries including Norway, England, Ireland, Chile and Australia.