Saving Seafood

Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation July 2015 Newsletter

July 16, 2015 — The Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF) is a non‐proit, private research foundation founded and directed by members of the commercial fishing industry and other support businesses based in Rhode Island. Its primary mission is to support teams of scientists and ishing industry members working together collaboratively on research and data collection projects important to the ishing industry in the southern New England region.

MESSAGE CORNER:

Welcome to the third edition of the CFRF newsletter. This edition is dedicated to reporting on the major projects the CFRF staff and Board members have been directly engaged in during the past couple of years. They highlight our dedication to engaging in strate- gic projects important to the fishing industry based here in the southern New England region. They range from research fleets, to better utilization of an underutilized species, to forward looking conservation engineering initiatives, to assessing potential impacts on fisheries resources from offshore wind development, and are all centered on providing opportunities for members of our industry to work collaboratively with fisheries managers and scientists. Thank you to all of you who have participated in these projects, and to those who continue to support this foundation and maintain an interest in its work.

Read the full newsletter from the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation

 

North Carolina Researcher Aims To Bolster Black Sea Bass Fishery

July 14, 2015 — Black sea bass are making a comeback in North Carolina after the species was overfished a decade ago.  We visit the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City where they’re using ear bones from hundreds of black sea bass to learn which habitats along our coast best support the fishery.

The commercial fishing industry is an economic engine for the state. $369 million of economic impact was generated by commercial fishing in 2013, according to the Department of Marine Fisheries.  One of the many species caught off the coast is black sea bass.  You may have had it at a fancy restaurant coated in herb butter and served with a wedge of lemon.  Also known as blackfish or old humpback, black sea bass grow to 24 inches and 6 pounds, and they can be found in inshore and offshore waters.  At the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, graduate student Ian Kroll is involved in research with black sea bass and what types of habitat are best suited for the fish.

“If we can find out what habitats produce the best quality fish and maybe the quickest amount of time, there kind of leads to that impetus to conserve these habitats.”

The black sea bass fishery was identified as overfished in 2005.  But in the last decade, their numbers have bounced back, due to more stringent regulatory standards.

“In 2014, commercially, there was over 500,000 lbs of black sea bass, and that equals about $1.4 million going to the economy.  And, just looking at it on the South Atlantic scale, that’s over half the black sea bass caught in the South Atlantic comes from North Carolina.”

Read the full story at Public Radio East

 

Lessons for Alaska: Oregon Shellfish Hatchery Tackles Ocean Acidification

July 13, 2015 — A recent NOAA study pegged 2040 as the date for the potential end of Alaskan shellfish hatcheries. That is, unless serious mitigation efforts are put in place to combat ocean acidification. Last week we reported on the research, done at the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery in Seward. Now, we’ll take a look at what a hatchery on the Oregon coast is doing to deal with these harmful changes in ocean chemistry.

The Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery is located in the small town of Tillamook, Oregon.

“This hatchery was started by Lee Hanson,” says Sue Cudd, who owns the hatchery now. “It was really the first shellfish hatchery that was commercial in operation. It started in 1978.”

She studied biology in school, worked for an oyster company for a while, and then came on with Lee Hanson to learn about the hatchery world. From the 1970s until 2006, there were natural ups and downs, but overall, things ran relatively smoothly.

“Then all of a sudden, in about 2006, we started seeing some pretty major problems. Then from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008, we couldn’t produce larvae anymore,” says Cudd.

Inside the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery – Photo courtesy of ceoas.oregonstate.edu

For a year and a half, they tried to produce. Even when they did manage to get some larvae, they wouldn’t survive and develop. It was a financial nightmare for the business.

“We lose money really fast because the production cost is the same without having any production. So, it was tough,” says Cudd. “We got help from some customers. The oyster growers association [helped] and one of our state senators got us some community development money, so we had time to be able to try to solve this problem. Without that, I don’t know what would have happened because we just lost money so fast.”

Read the full story and listen to the audio at Alaska Public Media

 

NEW JERSEY: Shellfish mother lode found off Cape May

LOWER TOWNSHIP, N.J. (Press of Atlantic City) — July 10, 2015 — It may be fortunate that nobody has asked Dvora Hart to count the Atlantic sea scallops recently captured by camera images off the New Jersey coast.

Hart, a mathematical biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, knows numbers. She could count that high. The problem: It would take awhile.

“Ten billion is my best guess. It’s probably conservative and it’s very preliminary,” said Hart.

It’s being called one of the biggest scallop sets ever recorded, eclipsing one in 2003 fishermen harvested for years. The estimate of 10 billion is only for the most concentrated area, scallop grounds called the Elephant Trunk just southeast of Cape May covering more than 1,500 square nautical miles. The set actually extends as far north as Long Island and Block Island and as far south as the Delmarva Peninsula. Hart is still working on the overall numbers.

“The big concentration is southern New Jersey, a little north of Cape May, down to Delaware. You start to see them at 35 meters and the highest density is 50 to 60 meters. They drop off at 70 to 80 meters,” said Hart.

NOAA’s underwater camera recorded about 4 million images off the Mid-Atlantic coast earlier this year. Each picture is one square meter of ocean floor and Hart was seeing up to 350 scallops per image. Hart, the chief scallop assessment scientist with NOAA, puts that into perspective.

“Normally we’d see one scallop per square meter, which is actually good recruitment. We had a wide range of more than 100 per square meter and several places where they were on the order of 350 per square meter. This is an extreme event. It’s pretty amazing,” said Hart.

The find is great news for the Port of Cape May, where scallops are still the No. 1 catch but recent East Coast harvest cutbacks, about 20 percent averaged over the last two years, hurt the industry.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

 

Northeast Consortium and NEFMC Announce Funding for New Collaborative Research Projects

NEWBURYPORT, Mass. — July 8, 2015 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The Northeast Consortium, a University of New Hampshire-based institution established in 1999 to foster collaborative research, under contract to the New England Fishery Management Council, announces funding for three new research projects that will focus on spawning groundfish in waters off the New England coast.

Awards totaling over $335,000 will support a mapping study examining the distribution of spawning cod on Georges Bank, an acoustic and trawl survey of winter-spawning cod in Ipswich Bay, an inshore area off the coast of MA, and work on winter flounder spawning activities offshore in the Gulf of Maine.

The result of a supplemental request for proposals issued last February, projects were required to articulate collaborations between commercial fishermen and scientists, and could include, among other approaches, research that enables the Council to improve groundfish spawning protection by increasing the understanding of groundfish spawning activity or aggregations of spawning groundfish.

Here are more project details.

Project Title: Mapping the distribution of Atlantic cod spawning on Georges Bank using fishermen’s ecological knowledge and scientific data
Lead Institution: University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, School for Marine Science and Technology; Co-Principal Investigators: Steven X. Cadrin, Gregory DeCelles, and Douglas Zemeckis

Purpose: To map the spatial and temporal distribution of cod spawning on Georges Bank using existing scientific information and data acquired from interviews with current and retired fishermen who fish for cod on Georges Bank. The information is needed to better understand cod population structure and essential fish habitat in this region.

Project Title: Synoptic acoustic and trawl survey of winter-spawning cod in Ipswich Bay, western Gulf of Maine Lead Institution: Gulf of Maine Research Institute; Project Leader: Graham Sherwood
Purpose: To expand our knowledge of the winter-spawning component of Atlantic cod by conducting a synoptic acoustic and trawl survey of Ipswich Bay. Improved knowledge of spawning dynamics in this area will lead to more fine-scale (in both time and space) management options.

Project Title: Identifying offshore spawning grounds of Gulf of Maine winter flounder
Lead Institution: University of New Hampshire; Project Leader: Elizabeth A. Fairchild
Purpose: To determine where winter flounder in the Gulf of Maine are spawning offshore and when, by studying their populations during the spawning season at offshore sites identified by commercial fishermen as locations where large numbers of adult winter flounder are seen during the spawning season.

 NEC/NEFMC – Cooperative Research Projects Funded 

These awards represent a continuation of the 2014 partnership established between the Consortium (NEC) and the Council. The NEC has representation from four research institutions: the University of New Hampshire, University of Maine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with Dr. Chris Glass at the University of New Hampshire, in the lead as its Director.

The Council is a group of 18 fishery officials that includes representatives from each New England coastal state, the federal government, and appointees from the region, all of whom are charged with managing the groundfish complex (cod, haddock, pollock and several species of flounder), in addition to other regional fish stocks. Funding collaborative research is fully consistent with its interest in understanding and improving this resource.

Read the release here

 

Gender-bending fish under Rutgers microscope

July 7, 2015 — We’ll say this for the sea bass: It’s sure good at keeping its options open.

If it surveys the mating landscape and fails to see enough prospects, it simply switches gender.

Problem solved.

This ability bodes well for New Jersey’s commercial and recreational fishing industry, for it offers natural protection from over-fishing, says one Rutgers researcher.

A fish may begin life as a female, only to switch to male if that looks like it will improve its chances of reproduction. Smaller males, called “sneaker males,” may impersonate females so they can fertilize eggs on the sly without attracting hostile attention from other males.

“The relative benefit of being male or female changes throughout their lives,” said Olaf Jensen of Rutgers’ department of marine and coastal science.

But until lately, no one has really known how often sea bass switch genders, or when that switch typically takes place.

And why should anyone but a marine biologist care?

Because without understanding what’s happening, state fishing bureaucrats have no firm idea on how to set catch limits for the fishing industry.

Read the full story at NJ.com

The Scallop Scoop: Survey Forecasts A Banner Year In Atlantic

July 1, 2015 — Scallop fishermen off the East Coast could soon see one of their biggest bumper crops ever. A federal survey in waters off Delaware is predicting a boom in the next couple of years for the nation’s most valuable fishery.

Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks for young sea scallops on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This year, when they stuck their camera in the water, they got a huge shock, says Dvora Hart, a research analyst with NOAA’s Fisheries Service.

“We were seeing concentrations of several hundred per square meter, and to give a perspective on that, one per square meter is actually a high concentration,” says Hart.

Hart estimates they saw about 10 billion scallops off Delaware and southern New Jersey alone — probably due to increased spawning at a closed fishing area farther north. The closure of the fishing area gave the scallops more time to spawn — which they do each spring and fall. The larvae floated downstream and became the billions of scallops Hart saw in the mid-Atlantic this year. Closures like this are designed to boost spawning but “some years have more luck than others,” Hart says.

Read the full story at NPR

 

Saltonstall-Kennedy (SK) Proposals Recommended for Funding under the FY14/15 Program

June 29, 2015 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

NOAA Fisheries Chief Eileen Sobeck announced Friday that the agency is recommending funding for 88 marine fisheries research projects via the 2014-2015 Saltonstall-Kennedy (SK) Grant Program. According to the announcement, awards totaling $25 million represent the most significant amount of funding ever granted by NOAA under the decades-old program. The complete list is available at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/mb/financial_services/skhome.htm.

Check here for a detailed list of Greater Atlantic Region (Maine to North Carolina) projects that, according to Regional Administrator John Bullard, comprised 38 percent of the total awards nationwide.

The announcement adds that application approval and funds obligation is not final. Divisions of NOAA and the Department of Commerce, NOAA’s parent agency, must still give final approval for the projects. Successful applicants will receive funding in the near future.

 

NOAA recommends $2.6 million for Massachusetts

June 25, 2015 — WASHINGTON — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that it has recommended a dozen Massachusetts-based marine research programs receive funding this year through the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program.

The 12 projects are among 88 nationwide that have been recommended to receive funding totaling $25 million. The goal of the research is to maximize fishing opportunities and jobs, improve key fisheries observations, increase the quality and quantity of domestic seafood, and improve fishery information from U.S. territories. The Department of Commerce must still sign off on the projects before applicants will receive funding.

Among the Massachusetts research projects recommended for funding are:

– $497,060 for the Coonamessett Farm Foundation to conduct to research projects that seek to improve ecosystem-friendly scallop dredges and research offshore essential fish habitat of southern New England winter flounder;

– $912,079 for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth to conduct four projects that will improve the cost-effectiveness and capacity for observations and maximize fishing opportunities and jobs;

– $774,640 for four New England Aquarium projects related to haddock, skates and cusks, and field test an electric decoy for reducing shark bycatch in longline fishing;

– $96,181 for a Center for Coastal Studies project to reduce bycatch in the sea scallop fishery;

– And, $363,604 for Cape Ann Seafood Exchange to support infrastructure and innovation.

Read the full story from the Worcester Telegram

 

DON CUDDY: If it’s the same, it will never be different

June 23, 2015 — DON CUDDY — We are having a serious problem in New England with the performance of the models used in fishery management. To remedy a situation that, along with some other factors, has led to the current crisis in the groundfish industry, we need new data … and maybe we need new models.

All the researchers will tell you that the existing models have trouble performing well when fish stocks, such as Gulf of Maine cod, Georges Bank cod and Georges Bank yellowtail are low. With healthy stocks, a certain amount of scientific uncertainty can be factored in as a buffer. But with low abundance, the margin for error is very thin, and fishermen and their families pay the price. When catch limits are cut, a small variation can mean the difference between an independent fisherman remaining on the water or being forced out of business.

I had a call last Monday from a producer of the “Today” show in New York. They were looking to profile a day in the life of a New England fisherman. I contacted veteran fisherman Frank Mirarchi, whose opinion pieces will be familiar to readers of The Standard-Times. In fact, his latest one, advocating electronic monitoring of the catch, ran that same day. But Frank told me he just sold his boat and is an ex-fisherman. This is what is happening to the single-boat owner around New England.

Getting better data is a theme familiar to anyone with connections to the fishing industry in New England. It is central to the mission at the Center for Sustainable Fisheries and was the focus of the forum CSF sponsored at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in May.

Read the full opinion piece from The New Bedford Standard-Times