Saving Seafood

Series of Coral Protection Hearings Planned for New England

May 1, 2017 — Federal fishery managers will hold a host of public hearings in New England and New York about a plan to protect corals in key East Coast fishing areas.

The New England Fishery Management Council is hosting seven public hearings about alternatives it is considering about the protection of corals in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.

The hearings will take place from May 22 to 25 in Montauk, New York; Narragansett, Rhode Island; New Bedford, Massachusetts; Gloucester, Massachusetts; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and Ellsworth, Maine.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CapeCod.com

MELISSA WATERMAN: Marine Matters: A Feeling of Relief Down East

April 27, 2017 — Well, they did it. At its April 17 meeting in Connecticut the New England Fisheries Management Council reaffirmed the economically vital place that lobster fishing has in this state by exempting lobstermen from restrictions that may flow from the council’s Omnibus Deep Sea Coral Amendment.

The decision qualifies as a Big Deal. The council has been considering ways to protect deep-sea corals found within the Gulf of Maine and along the continental shelf for several years. Protecting a living creature that is not a fish is new ground for the council, which draws its regulatory authority from the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. But revisions to the act in 2006 gave the council “discretionary authority” to protect deep-sea corals in New England. Thus, creation of the Omnibus Amendment, the provisions of which will be applied to all of the council’s 28 fisheries management plans.

The amendment identifies four coral areas in the Gulf of Maine as well as several canyons south of Georges Bank for protection. Two Gulf of Maine sites are places where Maine lobstermen set their traps — Outer Schoodic Ridge and Mt. Desert Rock.

You and I would look at the two locations and say, “Hmmmmm. Water.” Lobstermen, on the other hand, look at the water and envision what lies beneath it, the rocky seabed on which lots of lobsters live in their individual burrows.

So, when the council stated last year that it was considering closing those two areas to all bottom-tending gear, Down East lobstermen took notice. Such closures would mean no fishing for lobster or red crab, another commercially valuable species. In January, the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) asked the council to specifically exempt lobster fishing from possible closed-area restrictions. The council replied that it was too early in the amendment process to exempt any fishery. It asked, instead, for more information about the economic value of these two areas.

Read the full opinion piece at The Free Press

MAINE: Decline in Prized Worms Threatens Way of Life

April 27, 2017 — Dan Harrington makes his living unearthing marine worms by hacking away at mudflats with a tool that resembles the business end of an old steel rake.

He’s fine with the freezing weather, the pungent aromas and the occasional nip from an angry crab, but his latest problem is the big one — the worms just aren’t there like they used to be.

“A bad day is zero worms,” said Harrington, a second-generation worm raker. “A bad day is when you try out five, six different spots and don’t even make enough money to replenish the gas that you put in your tank.”

Harrington’s struggle, and that of his fellow wormers, has reverberations around the world. A mysterious drop in the harvest of two of the most popular worms for sport fishermen is proving expensive for anglers, perilous for bait shop owners and a threat to a way of life in Maine.

Maine harvesters are by far the U.S.’s largest suppliers of sandworms and bloodworms, twisty, fat critters that can grow longer than a foot and have teeth that inflict a painful bite. Wormers dig the wriggling creatures out of coastal muck so they can be sold to fishermen worldwide.

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

Despite recovery, humpback whales still suffer from ship strikes

April 27, 2017 — Decades after most countries retired their harpoons, whales still face threats from fishermen, ships, and coastal pollution. But one species that seemed to have overcome these challenges was Megaptera novaeangliae, better known as the humpback whale.

Heavily hunted by the early 20th century, an international whaling moratorium and protection under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) gave humpbacks the breathing space they needed to recover.

From 1986 to 2008, the whales’ numbers rose to 60,000 worldwide, and their status on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” improved from “Endangered” to “Least Concern.” By last September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that nine of the 14 distinct humpback populations no longer warranted ESA protection. Last year, one was even spotted in the Hudson River.

But a study published Tuesday in the journal Marine Mammal Science puts an asterisk on this progress. Close to shore, ship collisions threaten several species of whales, and these strikes may be greatly underreported for one humpback population in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Christian Science Monitor

Conservation group boosts alewife restoration efforts

April 25, 2017 — If Maine’s once enormous population of alewives is ever to be restored, it will take the continuing efforts of a dedicated group of volunteers.

That was the message last week to more than a dozen people concerned with the health of the alewife runs in Surry, Penobscot and Orland from Brett Ciccotelli, a fisheries biologist with the Downeast Salmon Federation.

Ciccotelli spoke at a meeting at The Gatherings in Surry aimed at increasing the number of volunteer monitors who will count alewives as they return to Downeast streams in the coming week.

Ciccotelli talked about the importance of the alewife to the Maine ecosystem and briefly reviewed how Maine has managed the alewife resource in recent years.

He also explained how the Downeast Salmon Federation was collecting data with an eye to increasing the number of the small river herring that make a successful journey from the sea to their freshwater spawning grounds each spring and then return to the sea again in fall.

Anadromous alewives return from the ocean each spring to travel up Maine’s rivers and streams to lay their eggs in lakes and ponds. Schools of tiny young fish migrate out at summer’s end, to spend some time in the estuary and the ocean maturing, before returning three to four years later to the river they were born in to start the cycle again.

Alewives play an important role in the food web, serving as a forage species that feeds small mammals, birds and larger fish. The decline in the alewife population, Ciccotelli said, “probably contributes to the loss of groundfish” such as cod and haddock in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

2016 fishing review highlights monitors —human and electronic

April 24, 2017 — NOAA’s Greater Atlantic Regional Office released its annual year in review for 2016 and nowhere does it mention the ever-churning debate over Gulf of Maine cod and the yawning divide between scientists’ data and the primary-source observations of fishermen.

For the most part, the report is a four-color chronicle of what officials at Gloucester-based GARFO — which manages the nation’s federal fisheries from the Gulf of Maine south to Cape Hatteras and west to the Great Lakes — consider the agency’s most tangible accomplishments in 2016.

Still, the review gives some insight into some of the agency’s management priorities and policy areas where it may marshal its resources in the future.

It specifically mentions the office’s work in drafting a recovery plan for endangered Atlantic salmon and a five-year action plan for the species. It highlights its work with commercial groundfishermen — many of them from Gloucester — on potential changes to the small-mesh whiting fishery.

The report also highlights the agency’s transfer of the cost of of at-sea monitoring to permit holders.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Boats may be hitting whales in Gulf of Maine more often, study suggests

April 24, 2017 — A group of marine scientists says collisions of whales and boats off the New England coast may be more common than previously thought.

The scientists focused on the humpback whale population in the southern Gulf of Maine, a body of water off Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. They found that almost 15 percent of the whales, which come to New England to feed every spring, had injuries or scarring consistent with at least one vessel strike.

The researchers, who published their findings in the March issue of the journal Marine Mammal Science, said the work shows that the occurrence of such strikes is most likely underestimated. They also said their own figure is likely low because it does not account for whales that are killed in ship strikes.

“Vessel strikes are a significant risk to both whales and to boaters,” said Alex Hill, the lead author of the study, who is a scientist with the conservation group Whale and Dolphin Conservation in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “Long-term studies can help us figure out if our outreach programs to boaters are effective, what kind of management actions are needed and help to assess the health of the population.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

Fishery management council OKs lobstering in deep coral

April 20, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — The New England Fishery Management Council has given preliminary approval to a plan to protect corals in the Gulf of Maine and on the Continental Slope south of Georges Bank from the ravages of commercial fishing but exempted the Maine lobster fishery from a proposed ban on the use of fishing gear that would affect the sea floor.

On Tuesday, April 18, by a reported vote of 14-1, the council adopted a preferred alternative plan under its proposed Omnibus Coral Protection Amendment for the inshore Gulf of Maine that would prohibit both trawls and dredges, but not lobster traps and pots, within both the Schoodic Ridge and Mount Desert Rock areas.

According to a statement released Wednesday afternoon, council members recognized the potentially devastating economic impact of preventing the lobster fishery from working within those inshore areas and acknowledged that shifts in effort to other locations could be problematic.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

No shrimp today: Maine’s waters are warming and it’s costing fishermen money

April 20, 2017 — David Goethel wishes he could retire.

At 63, he’s been fishing off the Gulf of Maine for over 34 years. Shrimp used to be plentiful there. Back in 2000, Goethel remembers seeing 100 commercial boats out in the harbor. Now, he’s just one of a handful of local fisherman struggling to make a living.

“There was life on the docks, there were people working,” lifelong fisherman Arnold Gamage, 64, agrees. “Now, it looks like a ghost town.”

Maine’s fishing industry has been declining for years due to factors like overfishing and increased regulation, but there’s another culprit eating away at profits: Maine’s ocean waters are warming — and it’s killing northern shrimp.

Goethel, Gamage and other fishermen used to look forward to shrimping as a way to augment their income in the cold New England winters.

“Now, I see a lot of those same people, they’ve got 4-wheel trucks and they’re trying to plow snow to take in some kind of income,” Goethel says.

Regulators at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission banned commercial shrimping in 2014. The goal was to give northern shrimp a chance to repopulate. While the ban has helped, regulators are still worried about the species’ survival.

Read the full story at WGNO

Regulators to allow lobster fishing in Gulf of Maine coral canyons

April 19, 2017 — New England regulators have voted to allow lobster fishing in proposed deep-sea coral protection zones, including two heavily fished areas in Down East Maine.

The New England Fisheries Management Council voted 14-1 to ban most fishing in the canyons and plateaus where slow-growing, cold-water coral gardens flourish in the dark waters of the Gulf of Maine.

But pleas from Maine lobster fishermen who say a trap ban in fertile fishing grounds off Mount Desert Rock and Outer Schoodic Ridge would cost them millions helped sway an initially resistant council to grant a lobstering exemption.

Fishermen also said closing these areas would have led to more traps, and fishing lines, being dropped in nearby waters traveled by endangered right whales, which can suffer injuries or die if they become entangled in lobster fishing lines.

Opponents, including environmentalists and some who fish for other species that would not get an exemption in the coral zones, have argued it is not fair to give lobstermen “a pass” because their traps damage coral, too, even if not as bad as trawl nets.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald