September 20, 2019 — The Maine Marine Patrol says it has cited three men for violating laws designed to protect an economically important species of fish.
The laws protect Atlantic herring, a bait fish that has been the subject of deep fishing quota cuts in recent years. The marine patrol says it has charged fishing boat captain Glenn Robbins of Eliot with exceeding the weekly limit of 160,000 pounds of herring and failing to file accurate reports.
September 19, 2019 — It’s often reported that the Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming faster than 99 percent of the largest saltwater bodies on the planet. But scientists will tell you the trend can be volatile. This year, for instance, surface water temperatures in the Gulf have been their coolest since 2008. That may be providing some relief for some of the Gulf’s historic species, but ongoing climate change means that long-term prospects are still uncertain.
Lobsterman Seth Dube fishes 400 traps from his boat, the Alison Nicole, out of Camp Ellis in Saco.
“Off and on most of my life, and my father did it and my grandfather and now me, hopefully my boy,” Dube says.
This has been a good decade for Dube and the rest of Maine’s lobster fleet, with record catches most years since 2010. But this year, the beginning of the big summer harvest – when lobsters molt, shedding their old hard shells to reveal new, soft shells – was slow. Lobstermen and some scientists associate that with cooler water temperatures earlier this year.
September 17, 2019 — All this week, Maine Public – and more than 250 other news outlets all around the world – are reporting stories on climate change as part of the “Covering Climate Now” project. In Maine, scientists say that climate change means hot summers, warm winters, more rain, and less snow, along with a warming gulf of Maine, and that will affect the state’s fisheries, its economy and traditional ways of life.
Professor Ivan Fernandez of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine is one of the authors of the report, “Maine’s Climate Future.” He told Maine Public’s Nora Flaherty that since the findings came out out in 2015, there have been many big changes in the state and globally, including an acceleration in the pace of change.
FERNANDEZ: What we’ve seen in the last five years is, obviously, a continuation – most of the time, evidence of an acceleration of many of the trends for climate change. We’ve also, obviously, lived through a few years where we have hurricanes and fires, and where we’re witnessing the loss of communities and island nations due to these sorts of climate related disasters. And so the I think the public awareness and the mounting evidence of these extreme events has picked up the pace in the last few years.
September 17, 2019 — York, Maine-based company Maine Coast has achieved certification under Safe Quality Food’s (SQF) Food Safety Code for Manufacturing, the North Atlantic lobster distributor announced on 17 September.
The company, which is known for its Lively Lobster, achieved a score of 97 and an “Excellent” status under SQF’s criteria, it confirmed in a press release. Maine Coast sources its lobster from Maine and Canadian fisheries that are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and recognized as producing “Good Alternative” catch by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program.
September 16, 2019 — From the one-lane bridge over the Little River at low water, you can see men hunched over the mudflats, hundreds of yards from shore, flipping the sea bottom with their pitchfork-like hoes to reveal the clams hiding there.
The clams, the basis of livelihood for generations of diggers from Cape Porpoise to Lubec, are back, at least for now, their numbers slowly recovering from a climate-driven disaster that will almost certainly strike again.
Six years ago, after the Gulf of Maine warmed to unprecedented levels, green crabs flooded over these northern embayments of Casco Bay like a plague of locusts, tearing away seagrass meadows, pockmarking salt marshes with their burrows, and devouring most every mussel and soft-shell clam in their path.
September 16, 2019 — When the Maine Lobstermen’s Association informed the National Marine Fisheries Service at the end of August that it was withdrawing its support for the agency’s proposed whale protection rules, it also offered a list of 10 “actions” NMFS should take.
The proposed rules could force lobstermen to remove half their vertical buoy lines from the waters of the Gulf of Maine. The Lobstermen’s Association in its letter offered 10 alternative suggestions “to develop an effective right whale protection program.”
The suggestions, most of which dealt with the way NMFS collected, interpreted or disseminated the data on which it based its proposals, ranged from the general to the extremely specific.
The association called on the fisheries service to “publish a thorough analysis of its own data regarding known sources of entanglement risk to right whales,” and to “conduct a new analysis of the risk reduction target” based on MLA-supplied data and to “reconsider” the risk reduction role in light of what the group described as NMFS’s “flawed assumptions and omission of consideration of risk posed by other U.S. fixed gear fisheries.”
September 13, 2019 — The Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve will receive about $250,000 over two years to study how warming coastal waters are affecting lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, the National Sea Grant Office has announced.
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most waters around the world.
Since lobsters thrive in cold water, this warming trend has raised concerns about the future of the Gulf’s lobster fishery. Southern New England has already seen dramatic declines in lobster counts and the fishery there is in jeopardy.
“Lobsters prefer cold water and will move to deeper, offshore areas to find it,” said Jason Goldstein, research director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. “We plan to discover how the inshore and offshore movements of female lobsters are affected by warming waters, and whether their young can settle and grow in shallow nursery habitats as coastal waters become warmer.”
September 12, 2019 — Commercial fishing of an important species of bait fish is going to be shut down in one of its key areas in New England for about six weeks.
Interstate regulators say the Atlantic herring fishery in the inshore Gulf of Maine is nearing a quota limit and will be subject to restrictions from Sept. 15 to Oct. 31. That means fishermen will not be allowed to bring the fish to land until that date.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at Maine Public
September 11, 2019 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program has awarded $2 million to lobster research projects and a regional lobster extension program.
Seven research projects were chosen through a competitive process that included expert review, according to a news release.
The projects aim to increase understanding of factors such as lobster biology, distribution and socioeconomic issues associated with a steep decline of landings in southern New England, as they pertain to Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine.
Collectively, the projects and the regional extension program are called the Sea Grant American Lobster Initiative.
September 11, 2019 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:
Period 3 Closure
The Area 1A (inshore Gulf of Maine) Atlantic herring fishery is projected to have harvested 92% of the period 3 allocation by Sunday, September 15, 2019. Beginning 12:01 a.m. on September 15, 2019, the Area 1A fishery will move to zero landing days through October 31, 2019, as specified in Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Herring.
Period 4
The states of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts will determine the specifications for period 4 (November and December) of the Atlantic herring fishery during the next Days Out Call in October. A subsequent notice will announce the call information.
For more information, please contact Kirby Rootes-Murdy, Senior Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at krootes-murdy@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.
A copy of this announcement can be found here – http://www.asmfc.org/