Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Thousands of dead fish clogged a New York canal. Why?

November 16, 2016 — Residents of Hampton Bays, N.Y., awoke Monday morning to find their local canal clogged with tens of thousands of silvery, dead fish. The bodies were packed together so tightly that it looked as though you could walk across them, one man told the local news channel News12. The air was thick with their noxious smell.

This was a classic fish kill — a massive die-off that occurs when too many fish are in a body of water with too little oxygen. Under ordinary circumstances, fish extract oxygen that has been dissolved in water as it filters through their gills. When the amount of dissolved oxygen is insufficient, the fish become hypoxic — they suffocate and die.

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation issued a statement saying the closing of locks at Shinnecock Canal early Monday inadvertently trapped a large school of Atlantic menhaden — small silvery fish also known as bunker — in the canal. The school of normally saltwater fish had probably been chased into the canal by predators.

“They chased them in here, but unfortunately the locks are closed so it’s just a dead end, they can’t get out,” Chris Paparo, a lab manager at Stony Brook University Marine Sciences Center, told the New York Daily News. “And with the sheer number of fish in here, it just sucks the oxygen out of the water and they suffocate.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

NEW JERSEY: Are humans causing the fish die offs?

August 30, 2016 — An increasing number of fish kills like the four that occurred in New Jersey this past week are in the state’s future if officials don’t take steps to improve the water quality, environmentalists warned.

The die-off of more than a million peanut bunker since Aug. 22 along the waterways of Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay in Monmouth County and Great Bay in Ocean County were caused by a lack of sufficient levels of oxygen for the fish to survive. But human activities on land have helped contribute to that oxygen deficiency, said L. Stanton Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership.

Hales, who has studied New Jersey’s waterways for more than two decades, said that while fish kills caused by low dissolved oxygen levels are naturally occurring events, they are now exacerbated by the deteriorating conditions of the state’s waterways.

“These things can happen naturally, but they’re made worse by everything we’re doing (on land),” he said.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has said the fish kills in Monmouth and Ocean counties were caused by too many peanut bunker – a juvenile form of Atlantic menhaden – in water that had too little oxygen because of warm temperatures.

Bob Considine, a spokesman for the DEP, has said the number of Atlantic menhaden has been “extremely high” this year, the highest it has been in a decade off the Atlantic coast.

Data from the past few years shows that spawning of Atlantic menhaden has been high because of favorable conditions, including water temperatures, salinity and food availability for them, said Tina Berger, spokeswoman for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

She said there are about 3 billion pounds of Atlantic menhaden off the Atlantic coast and national fisheries requirements limit the total catch allowed to about 416.5 million pounds a year.

Read the full story at NJ.com

Toxic Fish in Vietnam Idle a Local Industry and Challenge the State

June 8, 2016 — NHAN TRACH, Vietnam — Since a devastating fish kill blighted the waters along 120 miles of coastline in central Vietnam, hundreds of people are believed to have fallen ill from eating poisoned fish. Here in the fishing village of Nhan Trach, the squid that sustain the local economy have virtually disappeared. And a fishing ban has left hundreds of traps sitting unused on the beach and dozens of small fishing boats idle.

“We are so angry,” said Pham Thi Phi, 65, who operates a fishing boat in Nhan Trach with her husband and three grown sons. “If we knew who put the poison in the ocean, we would like to kill them. We really need to have an answer from the government on whether the ocean is totally clean and the fish are safe to eat.”

While the immediate cause appears to have been toxic waste from a nearby steel mill, fury over the episode has exploded into a national issue, posing the biggest challenge to the authoritarian government since a spate of anti-Chinese riots in 2014. Protesters demanding government action have marched in major cities and coastal communities over the past six weeks, escalating what had been a regional environmental dispute into a test of government accountability and transparency.

But two months after the fish started washing up on beaches here, the government has yet to announce the cause of the disaster or identify the toxin that killed marine life and poisoned coastal residents.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Vietnamese Police Break Up Protest Over Fish Deaths

June 6, 2016 — HANOI, Vietnam — Police in Vietnam’s capital have broken up a protest over what critics charge is the government’s delayed response to massive fish deaths which they believe are linked to industrial pollution.

A protester, Le Hoang, said more than 30 people marched peacefully in downtown Hanoi for about 15 minutes on Sunday before most were taken to police stations in two buses. He said they were held for several hours and then released without charge.

Thousands of dead fish began washing ashore along more than 200 kilometers (120 miles) of shoreline in four central provinces in early April. Protesters and state media speculated that a steel complex owned by a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastic Corp. may have been linked to what was an unprecedented environmental disaster for the Southeast Asian country.

The fishing and tourism industries in the provinces have been badly affected by the incident.

Hoang said the protesters held banners and placards reading “No Formosa” and “Sea dead, fish dead and people dead.” The protest Sunday was the latest in a series that are unusual under the tightly controlled Communist regime.

Read the full story at The New York Times