Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: Anglers, you have the floor

January 21, 2016 — North Jersey anglers are a passionate bunch.

During the course of a year, I’m always getting questions about why certain things are done regarding everything from regulations to stocking. Folks aren’t shy about sharing what they think, especially when they have thoughts about what could be done better.

And while I enjoy listening, there’s a much better sounding board available. The best part is that this venue gives you a chance to really make a difference.

The state Division of Fish and Wildlife will be hosting another public forum to discuss freshwater fisheries research, management and recreational angling at 10 a.m. Jan. 30 at the Hackettstown State Fish Hatchery in Warren County.

These forums are aimed at improving communication with the angling public and to solicit public input in shaping freshwater fisheries in the future. These events are a perfect opportunity for all freshwater anglers to learn about the state’s existing programs and to share their views and recommendations.

This isn’t just a show. The goal is to make fishing in New Jersey the best it can be, and the people in charge are open to all ideas.

Read the full story at NewJersey.com

 

To Save Its Salmon, California Calls in the Fish Matchmaker

January 15, 2016 — HORNBROOK, Calif. — On a frigid morning in a small metal-sided building, a team of specialists prepared to orchestrate an elaborate breeding routine. The work would be wet and messy, so they wore waders. Their tools included egg trays and a rubber mallet, which they used to brain a fertile female coho salmon, now hanging dead on a hook.

Diana Chesney, a biologist, studied a piece of paper with a matrix of numbers, each one denoting a male salmon and potential match for the female coho.

“This is the bible,” she said of the matrix. “It’s what Carlos says.”

John Carlos Garza, a geneticist based a day’s drive south in Santa Cruz, has become a key figure in California’s effort to preserve its decimated salmon stocks. Using the latest genetic techniques, he and his team decide which individual fish should be bred together. At several major state conservation hatcheries, like the coho program here at Iron Gate, no two salmon are spawned until after Dr. Garza gives counsel — a “salmon mating service,” he jokingly calls it.

His painstaking work is the latest man-made solution to help fix a man-made problem that is about 150 years old: dams, logging, mining, farming, fishing and other industries have so fractured and polluted the river system that salmon can no longer migrate and thrive. In fact, today, owing to the battered habitat, virtually all salmon in California are raised in hatcheries.

Traditionally, the practice entailed killing fertile salmon and hand-mixing eggs and male milt, or sperm, then raising the offspring packed in containers or pools. When they were old enough to fend for themselves, they were released to rivers or sometimes trucked or ferried to release points to find the ocean on their own, a practice that gave them a necessary transition before they hit saltwater and a semblance of the quintessential salmon experience of migrating to the sea and back. To that end, they eventually swam back to hatcheries, where they became the next breeders in the cycle.

While hatcheries have helped propagate the species, they have also created new problems. The salmon they produce can be inbred and less hardy through domestication, hurting their chances for surviving and thriving in the wild.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Auto-aquaculture? Conference in Woods Hole explores possible uses for robots and automation to reduce costs

January 12, 2016 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Yogesh Girdhar wowed the room with a video of what looked like a small shoebox awkwardly paddling underwater.

What Girdhar, a post-doctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, called a “curious robot” had none of the cachet of the sleek autonomously operated torpedoes, high-tech miniaturized laboratories, or parasite-zapping lasers that had already been displayed at a conference held Monday at the institution’s Quissett Campus to explore the role of robots and automation in aquaculture.

But his clumsy looking creation filled a need in the minds of many at the conference. As it paddled along, its software played the favorite childhood learning game — one of these things is not like the others — picking out a small coral head sticking up from the sand and zeroing in on it. The program, Girdhar said, would help a free-swimming vehicle, patrolling inside a fish cage far out to sea, recognize and investigate anomalies such as dead fish, a hole in the net, even evidence of disease. It could then notify its owners that something was wrong, prompting additional investigation.

It’s the kind of innovation conference organizers hope will make offshore aquaculture more cost effective.

“Open-ocean aquaculture is a high-cost way of producing fish that hasn’t really taken hold yet,” said Hauke Kite-Powell, a WHOI researcher in marine policy. “The challenge is to make it cost-competitive with near-shore aquaculture.”

With the world population projected to climb from 7 billion in 2011 to 9 billion by 2040, the demand for food, especially protein, will also soar. A diminishing water supply, droughts and less arable land are squeezing agriculture and land-based meat production.

Unfortunately, the one resource people once believed was limitless, wild fish, has proven to be all too finite. Mismanagement, overfishing, climate change and other factors have depleted fish stocks worldwide.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Times

Lawsuit: NOAA prioritized recreational snapper

December 31, 2015 — Twenty-six fishermen, fish markets and industry groups have again sued the US government alleging that regulators are allowing recreational fisherman to deplete scarce red snapper stocks in the Gulf of Mexico.

The lawsuit, filed against commerce secretary Penny Pritzker, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) comes in the wake previous litigation that has seen the commercial fishing industry succeed in challenging regulators’ red snapper management policies.

Previously, courts ruled that regulators did not have enough enforcement measures in place to ensure that recreational fishermen did not exceed their total allowable catch (TAC) of red snapper, a species under strict management because it is considered to be “overfished.”

The lack of adequate controls on recreational fishing violated provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and prompted regulators to develop new measures for recreational fishing. However, in the lawsuit filed Dec. 28, commercial fishermen argue that a new regulatory proposal to “reallocate” a portion of future red snapper TAC from recreational to commercial use violates existing federal law.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Dr. Ray Hilborn Responds to NPR: Not All Global Fish Stocks in Decline

December 22, 2015 — In a commentary published by CFOOD, Dr. Ray Hilborn, Professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington and author of the book Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know, addresses claims made by a recent NPR story that global fish stocks are in decline. According to Dr. Hilborn,the opposite is true for many important global fisheries: stocks in Europe, the United States, Russia, and Japan are actually increasing, while stocks in Australia and parts of Canada remain stable.

Fish Stocks Are Declining Worldwide, And Climate Change Is On The Hook.

This is the title of a recent NPR posting — again perpetuating a myth that most fish stocks are declining.

Let’s look at the basic question: are fish stocks declining? We know a lot about the status of fish stocks in some parts of the world, and very little about the trends in others. We have good data for most developed countries and the major high seas tuna fisheries. These data are assembled and compiled in the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment database, available to the public at www.ramlegacy.org. This database contains trends in abundance for fish stocks comprising about 40% of the global fish catch and includes the majority of stocks from Europe, North America, Japan, Russia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Major fisheries of the world that are not in the data base are primarily in S. and SE Asia.

Read the full commentary from Dr. Ray Hilborn at CFOOD

Maine DMR closes Gouldsboro Bay and other areas to scallop fishing

December 14, 2015 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — The Maine scallop fishing season opened on Dec. 1 and, less than two weeks later, Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher closed it down in large areas of Downeast waters.

Last week, DMR announced that, as of Sunday, scallop fishing in Gouldsboro and Dyer bays in Hancock County and Wohoa Bay, the Jonesport Reach and the department’s Inner Machias Rotational Area, all in Washington County, are done for this season. According to DMR, Keliher shut the fishery down in those areas “in order to protect Maine’s scallop resource due to the risk of unusual damage and imminent depletion.”

At a meeting in Ellsworth just days before the season opened, DMR Resource Coordinator Trisha Cheney warned that scallop populations throughout the state were extremely low. While the department agreed to industry requests to set the fishing season (except in Cobscook Bay) at 70 days, Cheney said, it was likely that fishing in some areas would be closed after only a few days of fishing.

The closure was announced after just seven days of fishing. (In most areas, fishing is allowed only four days per week, Monday through Thursday.)

With the scallop resource still in poor condition, DMR is worried that continued harvesting in the closed areas could deplete the stock in those locales beyond its ability to recover.

“Continued harvesting may damage sublegal scallops that could be caught during subsequent fishing seasons, as well as reducing the broodstock essential to a recovery,” the department wrote in an explanation of the adoption of the emergency closure rule.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

The West Coast Groundfish Recovery: The Best Fish News You Haven’t Heard Yet

December 16, 2015 — Monterey, California, used to be an epicenter in the West Coast commercial fishing industry. But these days the city’s waterfront is full of restaurants serving shrimp and tilapia imported from China. And it’s not the only place doing so.

Many small ports around the United States have fallen into disrepair as more Americans consume imported, often farmed seafood. But there’s also an evolution taking place in commercial fishing in some small port towns that might just bring them back to life.

Cities up and down the West Coast once relied heavily on local “groundfish,” such as rockfish, sand dabs, and petrale sole. But the groundfish fishery saw a dramatic decline by 2000, and although many of the fish themselves have come back, the industry hasn’t recovered. Now, a public-private partnership is working to bring access to local fish in small port communities. And it’s a change that could benefit fishermen and women and the environment, and help small port towns rebuild more robust, stable, and diversified economies.

The Dark Days

Guiseppe “Joe” Pennisi, a third generation Monterey fisherman, has been running a boat since he was 18. He saw the West Coast ground fishery begin to grow in 1987 and balloon to hit 11,000 vessels by 2000. That was the year the federal government declared the coast of Oregon, Washington, and California an “economic disaster” due to groundfish stocks collapsing.

At the time, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program moved most species of West Coast groundfish on to their red “Avoid” list, and by 2005, the nonprofits Oceana and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service for failing to protect groundfish.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Cause of Action’s Stephen Schwartz Discusses At-Sea Monitoring Lawsuit on WBSM

December 16, 2015 — WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — Last Saturday, December 12, on the Ken Pittman Show on WBSM in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Cause of Action Counselor Stephen Schwartz, discussed a lawsuit that the organization filed against NOAA for their at-sea monitoring program. During the interview, Mr. Schwartz explained that the federal requirement that fishermen fund at-sea-monitors is overly intrusive and too burdensome for the fishing industry.

“The federal government is making a huge imposition even when top agencies and regional administrators agree that fishermen can’t afford to fund the observers, and more than half of them would go out of business,” he said.

Mr. Schwartz said that most federal observers do not have the same expertise that fishermen do – fishermen who have made their living on New England waters often in inclement conditions – and present a danger to the fishermen by taking up space on the boats, and preventing them from efficiently collecting data on fish stocks.

“If fishermen were left to their own devices, they would actually protect fish stocks and be more productive,” he said.

Mr. Schwartz and Cause of Action are arguing that NOAA does not have the power to require that the industry fund the observer program, and that the principles of constitutional law involved have the potential to restructure fishing industry regulations in order to not place the burden solely on fishermen.

Listen to the interview here

Fish Stocks Are Declining Worldwide, And Climate Change Is On The Hook

December 14, 2015 — For anyone paying attention, it’s no secret there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the oceans right now. We’ve got a monster El Nino looming in the Pacific. Ocean acidification is prompting hand wringing among oyster lovers. Migrating fish populations have caused tensions between countries over fishing rights. And fishermen say they’re seeing unusual patterns in fish stocks they haven’t seen before.

Researchers now have more grim news to add to the mix. An analysis published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the ability of fish populations to reproduce and replenish themselves is declining across the globe.

“This, as far as we know, is the first global-scale study that documents the actual productivity of fish stocks is in decline,” says lead author Gregory L. Britten, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine.

Britten and some fellow researchers looked at data from a global database of 262 commercial fish stocks in dozens of large marine ecosystems across the globe. They say they’ve identified a pattern of decline in juvenile fish (young fish that have not yet reached reproductive age) that is closely tied to a decline in the amount of phytoplankton, or microalgae, in the water.

Read the full story at NPR

 

NOAA Awards Funding for Research Projects to Study Climate Impacts on Fish and Fisheries

December 15, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Seven projects to increase understanding and response to climate-related impacts on living marine resources

Following release of the  NOAA Fisheries Climate Science Strategy, today the agency announced $5 million in new research funding to study the impacts of climate change on fish and fisheries of the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem. The funds, which will be distributed over the next two to three years, will support seven new projects designed to increase our understanding of how climate change can affect fish stocks, fisheries, and the communities that depend on them for their livelihood.

“Warmer coastal and ocean waters and ocean acidification are already affecting our nation’s fisheries,” said NOAA Fisheries chief science advisor Richard Merrick, Ph.D. “NOAA is working to ensure the resilience of healthy, productive fisheries that are essential to U.S. coastal communities. Sustainable fisheries create jobs, stabilize coastal economies, enhance commerce, and help to meet the growing demand for seafood.” 

NOAA Research’s Climate Program Office and NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology funded the projects through a competitive process and include collaborations between NOAA and academic scientists. In addition, these projects support the Administration’s Priority Agenda for Enhancing the Climate Resiliency of America’s Natural Resources.

Six projects support research to understand and respond to climate impacts on fish and fisheries in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem and the seventh will support a workshop focused on ecosystem tipping points in the North Pacific.

More details on the listed projects can be found on the following web pages:

NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology

NOAA Research Climate Program Office