Saving Seafood

North Carolina flounder season to remain open this fall as court challenge of new rules proceeds

October 17th, 2016 — A court injunction has stopped a planned closure of North Carolina’s flounder season that was set to begin this weekend.

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries announced this week that the state will not close the flounder season on Oct. 16 as was planned due to a temporary injunction issued putting several new regulations for the southern flounder fishery on hold.

The season remains open for commercial and recreational fishermen.

The recreational hook-and-line and gig fisheries continue with the current 15-inch minimum size limit and six-fish bag limit.

The season also remains open for the anchored, large-mesh gill net fisheries but the December commercial closure for the flounder season will still take place as in previous years, the division said.

The halt to the season closure is the result of legal action taken by representatives of the commercial fishing industry over last year’s action by the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission.

The North Carolina Fisheries Association, a New Bern-based trade association representing commercial fishermen, announced that commercial fishermen have joined with several coastal counties in filing a legal complaint against the state over the process used in adopting new regulations for the southern flounder fishery.

Read the full story at the Jacksonville Daily News

On the Verge of Extinction, a Chinese Fishing Village Resists

September 26, 2016 — YUMINGZUI VILLAGE, China — On a moonless night, when there was nothing in the air except the smell of rotting seaweed and the songs of drunken fishermen, Wang Xinfeng sneaked onto a boat by the dock and sailed into the darkness.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Mr. Wang, 53, made a living combing the Yellow Sea for flounder, herring, fat greenling and yellow croaker. But now the government, hoping to limit environmental damage and encourage villagers to find new jobs, had banned fishing during the summer.

Mr. Wang, desperate to pay medical bills, had taken to venturing into the water at night to avoid detection.

“I was raised at sea — this is my home,” he said. “Even if it’s a rough life, I have to fish.”

For centuries, residents of Yumingzui, a village of 562 people in the eastern province of Shandong, enjoyed a quiet life by the ocean, harvesting enough fish, sea cucumbers and abalone to support a prosperous seafood trade. While nearby villages fell victim to tourism and development, Yumingzui persevered, clinging to ancient fishing rites and homes made of seaweed.

Read the full story at The New York Times

NORTH CAROLINA: Suit in the works over flounder

September 22, 2016 — BEAUFORT, N.C. — Carteret County will join fisheries groups in fighting the state Marine Fisheries Commission’s southern flounder supplement changes to reduce catch, which local fishermen say will kill the flounder industry here and cause a ripple effect in other local economic sectors.

“I fished for a living, I know what the implications would’ve meant for my family if you’d have taken half of my income from the fall,” Commissioner Jonathan Robinson told the county board. “It means somebody’s not going to have Christmas. It means somebody’s going to have to decide whether to be cold this winter or have something to eat.”

On his recommendation, county commissioners unanimously agreed to a resolution supporting a potential lawsuit from state and regional fishermen’s associations, primarily the N.C. Fisheries Association, against the MFC during their Monday meeting in the administration building.

Consideration of the complaint follows the November 2015 adoption of a supplement to southern flounder management regulations, a process which critics say circumvented standard amendment procedures after stopgap reassurances in the form of stock assessments failed to pass peer review.

Read the full story at the Carteret County News-Times

Flounders’ Eyes Face Skyward. How Do They See the Ocean Floor?

August 15, 2016 — For flatfishes, you’d think things would always be looking up.

These quick-change artists have eyes on top of their heads, yet marvelously mimic the surfaces they sit on. This prompted Clayton Louis Ferrara to ask Weird Animal Question of the Week: “If flatfish have eyes on the top of their heads, how do they see what’s going on on the ocean floor?”

Flatfish, found all over the world, range from the angelfin whiff, which is about three inches (eight centimeters) to the Pacific halibut, which can get up to around nine feet (three meters) long. This fish group includes species familiar to seafood lovers—not only halibut, but flounder, sole, and turbot.

All flatfish have eyes on the end of stalks, so they pop out of the head “kind of like the eyes we saw in cartoons—ba-boing!” says George Burgess of the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Read the full story at National Geographic

‘Sea change:’ NOAA to shift fish surveys to commercial boats

August 3, 2016 — In what one advocate called “a potential sea change” for the commercial fishing industry, NOAA Fisheries announced intentions Tuesday to shift all or part of long-controversial stock surveys from its Bigelow research vessel to commercial boats, saying a transition over the next five years could bring “greater shared confidence” in survey results.

“We have to learn to work better with the (commercial fishing) industry — we have to open up better lines of communication,” Dr. Bill Karp, director of NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, said of the transition.

How fish stocks are measured has been one of the biggest points of contention for years between governmental regulators and commercial fishermen, as survey results affect seasonal catch limits, quotas for various species and more. The latest questions about NOAA’s Henry R. Bigelow research ship arose this spring, for example, when maintenance problems delayed NOAA’s spring survey from April to June.

Don Cuddy, program director for the Center for Sustainable Fisheries in New Bedford, said fishermen also have felt the Bigelow is unable to accurately count “flatfish,” such as yellowtail flounder, because of the type of gear it tows.

“Yellowtail flounder are critical to the scallop industry as well as the groundfish,” Cuddy said, explaining that low quotas for yellowtail can force scallopers to prematurely stop operations, if they incidentally snag too many yellowtail as a bycatch.

Cuddy said enabling commercial boats to participate in NOAA surveys — and placing government scientists on the same boats as fishermen — could help “close the credibility gap” that has long surrounded survey results.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: State fisheries survey underway in Gulf of Maine

July 18, 2016 — SCITUATE, Mass. — Over the past seven years, Kevin Norton watched the number of commercial groundfish vessels working out of his home port drop precipitously from 17 in 2009, to just four today.

“If not for the (federal fisheries) disaster money, there’d be no one left,” Norton said about fishermen who catch New England’s most familiar species like cod, haddock and flounder.

On July 11, Norton stood at the wooden wheel of Miss Emily, his 55-foot dragger. He was the only groundfisherman leaving from Scituate Harbor that day. He said he’d be tied up at the dock like the other three if he hadn’t been selected by the state to help Division of Marine Fisheries scientists conduct eight months of scientific research.

“All of our lives depend on this (the scientific data used to set fishing quotas),” he said. “That’s why this survey is so important.”

Massachusetts received more than $21 million in federal fisheries disaster aid, most of which was distributed to fishermen. But the state kept some for research projects, including $400,000 for an eight month Industry-Based Survey of random tows throughout the Gulf of Maine, from Cape Cod Bay up to Portland, Maine, focusing on cod, but counting and cataloging the fish and other species they catch.

“Science is the key to getting it right,” said Matthew Beaton, the state secretary of Energy and the Environment. Beaton and state Department of Fish and Game Commissioner George Peterson were on board the Miss Emily July 11 and helped sort the catch.

The state survey is part of Gov. Charlie Baker’s promise to help fishermen answer some of the key questions plaguing fishery management, Beaton said. Fishermen contend they are seeing a lot of cod in the Gulf of Maine, but their observations don’t match NOAA stock assessments that show historically low populations. The disconnect, fishermen say, results from the federal government using a vessel and net that have had trouble catching cod and performing surveys in the wrong places at the wrong time of year.

While it catches and documents all species it encounters, the state survey was designed to evaluate the status of Gulf of Maine cod, said principal investigator and DMF fisheries biologist William Hoffman. Its timing — April to July and October to January — mirrors peak spawning times for this cod stock. Similar surveys were done from 2003 to 2007 and, with the summer work now complete, Hoffman said they have found fewer cod in the places they previously sampled and didn’t find any major aggregations in deep water areas.

“We really need to do this for at least three years before we can draw any solid conclusions,” Hoffman cautioned. “But right now, surveying at the same time, in the same area, (as the previous survey) we’re seeing less fish.”

The trip on July 11 netted just one cod.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Scientists to meet with public about overfished flounder

July 11, 2016 — FALMOUTH, Mass. — Scientists will meet with fishermen and the public about the future of a flounder species that regulators say suffers from overfishing.

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole will hold the meeting at 10 a.m. July 26 to talk about witch flounder, a popular food fish caught off New England. Federal regulators say the witch flounder is overfished.

The scientists will answer questions relating to an upcoming assessment of the witch flounder stock. They will also take comments from the public.

The catch of witch flounder has fallen from more than 6.4 million pounds in 2004 to a little more than 1.2 million pounds in 2014. Scientists say that’s still too much because the fish’s reproductive rates have been lower than expected.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Upcoming Witch Flounder Outreach Meeting

July 5, 2016 — The following was released by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center:

NEFSC will be hosting a Witch Flounder outreach session prior to the SARC 62 meeting scheduled later this year.

Outreach topics will include a summary of the 2015 Update, the ABC, and the plan to transition from VPA to ASAP.  Witch Flounder assessment scientists will respond to questions, comments or feedback from interested parties.

Date/Time: Tuesday, July 26th, 2016 from 10:00 a.m. — 12:00 p.m.

Location: S.H. Clark Conference Room, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Woods Hole, MA

Call-In Details: 877-653-6612 (toll-free) or 517-600-4840 (toll charges apply; for international callers)

Participant Code: 8116908

Webinar URL

More information is available here

SUSAN POLLACK: Fishing For Progress: Saying No To ‘No Women On Board’

June 10, 2016 — In 1982, as supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment fought claims that that the proposed amendment to the Constitution would destroy the American family, I confronted an older mythology: Women are bad luck on boats.

I was a young maritime reporter for The East Hampton Star on Eastern Long Island. I loved boats and the sea, and I’d always loved adventure. That summer, I planned to join local fishermen aboard a state-of-the-art Japanese squid ship. This was several years after the United States enacted its 200-mile limit, but before American fishermen had fully developed a squid fishery of their own. In exchange for sharing their technical know-how, the Japanese would be permitted to catch squid in our waters.

I was game.

But as I was readying my boots and gear, I received an unexpected warning from the American sponsors of the U.S-Japan venture: no women on board.

Surely, something must be wrong: I’d spent the previous five years in gurry-soaked oil skins reporting on life at sea on American draggers, lobster boats, bay scallopers, gillnetters, long-liners and clamming rigs. I’d photographed the sun rising over the stern of a dragger hauling its catch of yellowtail and blackback flounders, cod, haddock and scup. I’d spent bone-chilling winter days in an open skiff, culling bay scallops – separating the delicate fan-shaped bivalves from whelks, rocks and seaweed. I’d danced on the boat, not for joy, but to keep warm.

On summer evenings, I’d helped my neighbor lift his gillnets, gingerly plucking out sharp-toothed bluefish and the occasional striper. And I’d finally succeeded in filleting a flounder without mangling the fragile flesh.

Read the full story at WBUR

Fading Fishermen: A Historic Industry Faces A Warming World

June 27, 2016 — SEABROOK, N.H. — The cod isn’t just a fish to David Goethel. It’s his identity, his ticket to middle-class life, his link to a historic industry.

“I paid for my education, my wife’s education, my house, my kids’ education; my slice of America was paid for on cod,” said Goethel, a 30-year veteran of the Atlantic waters that once teemed with New England’s signature fish.

But on a chilly, windy Saturday in April, after 12 hours out in the Gulf of Maine, he has caught exactly two cod, and he feels far removed from the 1990s, when he could catch 2,000 pounds in a day.

His boat, the Ellen Diane, a 44-foot fishing trawler named for his wife, is the only vessel pulling into the Yankee Fishermen’s Cooperative in Seabrook. Fifteen years ago, there might have been a half-dozen. He is carrying crates of silver hake, skates and flounder — all worth less than cod.

One of America’s oldest commercial industries, fishing along the coast of the Northeast still employs hundreds. But every month that goes by, those numbers fall. After centuries of weathering overfishing, pollution, foreign competition and increasing government regulation, the latest challenge is the one that’s doing them in: climate change.

Though no waters are immune to the ravages of climate change, the Gulf of Maine, a dent in the coastline from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, best illustrates the problem. The gulf, where fishermen have for centuries sought lobster, cod and other species that thrived in its cold waters, is now warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, scientists have said.

Read the full story at the Associated Press