Saving Seafood

Slower Lobster Season Means High Prices, Worried Fishermen

November 7, 2019 — A drop in the catch of lobsters off Maine has customers paying more and fishermen concerned about the future.

Maine’s harvest of lobsters was about 40% off last year’s pace through September, and while October and November tend to be months of heavy lobster catch, wholesale prices have soared amid the slower supply. Live 1.25-pound lobsters were wholesaling for nearly $10 per pound in the New England market Nov. 1, an increase of nearly 20 percent from a year ago.

The drag in catch has also contributed to an uptick in price at some retail fish markets. Some stores in Maine, which is the center of the U.S. lobster industry, are selling lobsters for $12 per pound. That is about 10% more than a year ago.

The price of lobster is impacted by numerous factors, including foreign demand, beyond just the size of the catch. But such a precipitous drop in supply is bound to create “tremendous upward price pressure,” said John Sackton, an industry analyst and publisher of SeafoodNews.com.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Hundreds of scientists gather in Portland to address climate change in the Gulf of Maine

November 5, 2019 — Several hundred scientists, conservationists and government leaders from New England and the Canadian Maritimes are gathering in Portland to discuss the rapid ecological changes in the Gulf of Maine and how the region should respond.

The Gulf of Maine 2050 International Symposium will focus on the science of sea level rise, ocean acidification and warming ocean waters, as well as how those climate-related changes will affect the regional economy, environment and population over the next three decades.

“Preparing for 2050 is a major challenge, but it is one that we won’t face alone,” said Theresa Torrent of the Maine Department of Marine Resources Maine Coastal Program and the state’s coordinator on the international Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment. “The purpose of Gulf of Maine 2050 is to activate the talents of people around the Gulf of Maine and build a safe and productive future.”

The conference – hosted by the Gulf of Maine Council, the Portland-based Gulf of Maine Research Institute and the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews, New Brunswick – comes at a time when New England’s waters and forests are already experiencing dramatic changes.

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald

Global Warming Is Already Destroying New England’s Fisheries

November 5, 2019 — To wake up in the Northeastern United States—as California blazes and Japan digs itself out of typhoon damage—is to experience an uneasy gratitude for all that is not burning, battered or underwater. Seven years out from Superstorm Sandy, we know not to get cocky, but there’s a relief in being able to worry about work and more pedestrian finances instead of evacuation plans, or ordering the right kind of smoke mask. It’s a small luxury in climate-didn’t-come-for-me-today compartmentalization.

But deep down, we know better. And if the national discussion hasn’t moved to climate change in the Northeast yet, it soon will. The effects are already profound—they just happen to be underwater.

Fourth-generation fisherman Al Cottone holds no illusions of being spared climate impacts in 2019.  He captains one of the 15 fishing boats still active in the waters around Gloucester, Massachusetts. Not a decade ago, there were 50. To fish in the Gulf of Maine—the ocean inlet spanning from Cape Cod up to the southern tip of Nova Scotia—is to navigate one of the fastest-warming bodies of water on the planet. “It’s not something you see with your naked eye,” Cottone told me. “But fish are definitely reacting differently, and I’m attributing it to climate change. We’re seeing them in deeper water—they’re trying to get the right temperature at depth.”

Read the full story at The New Republic

Decrease in Maine lobster catches this season raises concerns

October 31, 2019 — Early numbers show Maine’s lobster catch has declined as much as 40 percent this year; equaling roughly 50 million pounds.

State officials calculated these results using data gathered from September 2018 to September 2019. However, there are still a few months worth of data from lobster landings left out of these results.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources says that some locations had an uptick in catches after September, but as the season wraps up, lobstermen have reported that the pickings this year were substantially reduced.

Gene Robinson, a lobster captain off of Chebeague Island, has been fishing in Maine for the past 50 years.

“It was a wet, cold spring and the lobsters just never showed up,” said Robinson.

The cold spring may have stalled the shedding process in the early summer months when lobsters move toward the coast.

Read the full story at WCVB

Lobster processor expands into new markets thanks to high pressure processing machine

October 31, 2019 — Stonington, Maine, U.S.A.-based seafood processor Greenhead Lobster has upgraded its operations with a new Hiperbaric high pressure processing (HPP) machine.

The company is using the 420i Hiperbaric model for extracting lobster meat from shells at its recently opened production facility in Bucksport, Maine, it confirmed in a press release. The machine also works to fortify Greenhead Lobster’s food safety procedures, inactivating harmful foodborne bacteria and extending shelf-life.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Study shows psychological distress felt by US skippers after cod collapse

October 31, 2019 — Dramatic reductions in Atlantic cod catch limits in the US Gulf of Maine have taken a psychological toll as much as a financial one on New England’s fishing captains, reports a six-year study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a repeated cross-sectional survey, researchers at Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts, led by Steven Scyphers, an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences, said they found that 62% of the captains they studied self-reported “severe or moderate psychological distress one year after the crisis began and patterns that persisted for five years,” according to an abstract of the study, titled “Chronic social disruption following a systemic fishery failure”.

“Distress was most severe among individuals without income diversity and those with dependents in the household,” the researchers added.

It was in December of 2011, five days before Christmas, that cod fishermen in the Gulf of Maine received a letter from regulatory officials telling them that new assessments showed the New England cod stocks were not going to recover by 2014, as had previously been expected, recounts a university magazine article about the study. Catch limits were then decreased by more than 95% over the next four years.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

‘A Whole New Industry’: N.H. To Work With Neighboring States On Offshore Wind in Gulf of Maine

October 25, 2019 — New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts will work together on large-scale offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine. Stakeholders from the three states met today in Manchester talk about the possibilities and obstacles for that new industry.

The event was hosted by the Environmental Business Council of New England at the state headquarters of Eversource, which is developing several large offshore wind projects elsewhere in the Northeast.

Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the state’s Department of Business and Economic Affairs, said at the meeting that he thinks Northern New England could add tens of thousands of jobs building these offshore turbine farms, and the transmission infrastructure to bring their power on-shore.

“This is not just a project. This is not just an individual, ‘we’re going to find a site and put a couple of turbines up,’” Caswell says. “This is the establishment of, really, a whole new industry.”

Read the full story at New Hampshire Public Radio

New Maine Proposal to Protect Whales, Spare Lobster Fishing

October 17, 2019 — Maine fishery regulators are unveiling a new right whale protection plan they feel will satisfy federal requirements while also preserving the state’s lobster fishery.

A federal team has called for a reduction of the vertical lobster trap lines in the Gulf of Maine to reduce risk to the whales, which number about 400. Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher says his department’s new proposal would remove 25 percent of the lines beyond an exemption line for inshore fishermen.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

New tool enables Nova Scotia lobster fishery to address impacts of climate change

October 15, 2019 — U.S. and Canadian researchers have developed a tool that incorporates projected changes in ocean climate onto a geographic fishery management area. Now fishermen, resource managers, and policy-makers can use it to plan for the future sustainability of the lobster fishery in Nova Scotia and Canadian waters of the Gulf of Maine.

“Climate change has socio- on coastal communities and the seafood market, but integrating that information into planning and decision-making has been a challenge,” said Vincent Saba, a fishery biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and a co-author of the study. “Ocean warming is leading to an accelerated redistribution of marine species. Knowing how animals will shift distribution, and what to do about shifts across management borders both regional and international, will be critical to planning on how to adapt to those changes.”

American  is Canada’s most valuable fishery, contributing 44 percent of the total commercial value of all fisheries in Atlantic Canada in 2016. Lobster landings have been trending upward in recent decades, and many small rural communities in Atlantic Canada rely heavily on lobster for their economic well-being. Changing climate could have a significant impact on the fishery and on those communities.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Fishing rules don’t match industry realities, advocates say

October 11, 2019 — The federal government on Wednesday released data showing that cod stocks in the area remain overfished and are not on target to be rebuilt by 2024. NOAA Fisheries also reported that “overfishing is occurring” among an already-depleted Gulf of Maine Atlantic cod population.

“Abundance is very low, not the way it used to be, so that’s obviously of great concern to us,” Division of Marine Fisheries Director David Pierce told the News Service after participating in “seafood day” activities Thursday to recognize the contributions of the fishing sector and the 90,000 jobs in the seafood industry.

Pierce said he had not yet reviewed the latest federal assessment, but said an industry-based survey and one in the works at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will also influence cod quotas for 2021 and 2022.

“It’s a very important assessment. A lot hinges on it,” Pierce said. “The health of the Gulf of Maine groundfish fishery is very dependent on the health of that Gulf of Maine cod stock.”

Calling the report “concerning,” Sen. Bruce Tarr, who represents the fishing port city of Gloucester, told the News Service, “I’m still reading through the details but I think it points to the fact that we should be doing things differently than we are today.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times