Saving Seafood

Gulf of Maine’s cold-craving species forced to retreat to deeper waters

October 27, 2015 — For 178 years, dams stood across the Penobscot River here, obstructing salmon and other river-run fish from reaching the watershed’s vast spawning grounds, which extend all the way to the Quebec border.

Now, two years after the dam’s removal, the salmon’s proponents fear the fish face a more fearsome threat: a warming sea.

In recent years, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, and climate change models project average sea surface temperatures here to increase by another 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2065, a development that could extirpate Atlantic salmon and other cold-loving species, many of which already find Maine at the southern edge of their ranges.

“We’re all for taking down the dams and all the things that are going on to restore habitat, but how much are they looking at the evidence?” asks Gerhard Pohle of the Huntsman Marine Science Center in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, co-author of a study predicting how the changes are likely to affect 33 commercial species over the next 75 years. “Distribution of salmon in the Gulf of Maine would be such that there wouldn’t be many left at all.”

The warming gulf is already presenting challenges to many of its cold-loving denizens. Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Services, or NMFS, have recorded the steady retreat of a range of commercially or ecologically important fish species away from the Maine coast and into deep water in the southwestern part of the gulf, where bottom water temperatures are cooler.

The retreat, which intensified over the past decade, includes cod, pollock, plaice, and winter and yellowtail flounder. Other native species that once ranged south of Long Island – lobster, sand lance and red hake – have stopped doing so, presumably because the water there is now too warm.

“You can imagine that when you have species at the southern end of their ranges, they will be really sensitive to these changes,” says Michael Fogarty, chief of the Ecosystem Assessment Program at the NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “They will either shift distribution or their survival rates might change.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Big changes are occurring in one of the fastest-warming spots on Earth

October 25, 2015 — Sandwiched on a narrow sandbar between Yarmouth’s harbor and the open Gulf of Maine, the fishermen of Yarmouth Bar have long struggled to keep the sea at bay.

Nineteenth-century storms threatened to sweep the whole place away, leaving Yarmouth proper’s harbor more open to the elements, prompting the province to build a granite cribwork across the quarter-mile bar, behind which the hamlet’s fishing fleet docks. Global warming has brought rising seas, a two-story-high rock wall to fight them and the hamlet’s designation as one of the communities in the province most threatened by climate change.

Now, snaking around the snout of Nova Scotia and into the Gulf of Maine is a new, unseen threat to Yarmouth Bar and hundreds of coastal communities in Maine, eastern New England and the Maritimes: currents fueling the rapid warming of the sea.

The Gulf of Maine – which extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and includes the Bay of Fundy, the offshore fishing banks, and the entire coast of Maine – has been warming rapidly as the deep-water currents that feed it have shifted. Since 2004 the gulf has warmed faster than anyplace else on the planet, except for an area northeast of Japan, and during the “Northwest Atlantic Ocean heat wave” of 2012 average water temperatures hit the highest level in the 150 years that humans have been recording them.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Canadian government hinders scientists from talking about climate change

October 25, 2015 — Half of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem lies in Canada, where much of the water feeding the gulf and affecting its temperature comes from.

Getting information about scientific research relevant to the future of the ecosystem isn’t easy, however, because of the outgoing Canadian government’s controversial policies that have prevented government scientists from speaking freely with journalists, and sometimes from speaking at all.

While researching this six-part series on climate change in the gulf, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram was repeatedly blocked from speaking to Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientists by communications officers based in Halifax.

Multiple attempts to speak with a researcher based at the St. Andrews Biological Station here about temperature-driven changes in marine species distribution were blocked, even though scientific colleagues both inside and outside the institution said his work was relevant to the questions at hand. “Nobody is willing to talk about this topic at this time,” a DFO spokesman said in a voice-mail message.

Multiple requests to speak to John Loder, director of DFO’s Centre for Ocean Model Development and Application at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography near Halifax, about new sea surface temperature forecasts for the gulf were also denied by department spokespeople, who would only provide written answers to written questions about earlier results from 2013.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

NASA commits $6.5M to Gulf of Maine Research Institute for climate change education

October 21, 2015 — The Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland is receiving a $6.5 million grant from NASA to create a new educational program focused on science knowledge and problem-solving related to climate change.

The grant will allow the nonprofit organization to upgrade the technical infrastructure at its Sam L. Cohen Center for Interactive Learning in Portland to deliver the new educational content to the 10,000 Maine 5th and 6th graders who visit each year, GMRI announced Tuesday. The organization will also making the educational programing web-accessible to visitors in other science centers and classrooms in Maine and nationwide.

Through customization of the new content from GMRI’s educational program, LabVenture!, the programming will allow students to investigate how climate change is affecting their local region and the rest of the world. The five-year grant, which will begin Nov. 1, will be shared with national science education partners.

Work at GMRI will begin immediately, and new programming content is expected to be available for the 2018-2019 school year.

Read the full story at Maine Biz

MAINE: Lobster season proves successful

October 20, 2015 — Maine’s 2015 lobster season is experiencing a boom this year, which according to biologists, stems from factors such as careful fishery management, dropping populations of predators like cod fish, and warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

Experts in the field also point to the fact that lobstering is regulated by a number of federal laws, and that Maine fisheries and governments cooperate with the help of the University of Maine Lobster Institute.

In addition, lobstermen also take an active part in conservation by marking egg-bearing female lobsters, Smithonian.com reported.

Another factor benefitting the industry has been the growth in supply. Exports of the state’s lobsters to China grew from almost nothing five years ago to around 2.7 million pounds last year, with South Korea and Hong Kong showing similarly large increases, according to WISERTrade, which tracks exports.

Read the full story at FIS World News

 

 

MAINE: Pembroke company seeks to make Washington County the ‘clam capital of Maine’

October 19, 2015 — It’s a crisp sunny morning in early October in the Washington County town of Pembroke and Tim Sheehan walks briskly across an empty parking lot to greet me. He’d been expecting good news about clam flats in northwestern Cobscook Bay being reopened, but instead of a parking lot full of diggers delivering clams to Gulf of Maine Inc., the seafood business on Route 1 he co-owns with his wife, Amy, there’s just a quiet sunlit absence.

The flats had been closed for almost a week after an historic rainfall on Sept. 30 forced Maine’s Department of Marine Resources to close the entire coast to shellfish harvesting. Even though he knows the closures are a temporary and necessary precaution — until water quality testing determines there’s no longer a risk of runoff pollution contaminating soft shell clams and mussels in the tidal flats — it’s still hard for Sheehan to accept another blank day on his company’s ledgers.

“I’m a dealer, our business depends on clams,” he says.

He’s not alone in that frustration on this bright Tuesday morning. By mid-morning, a dozen or more clammers had sent text messages asking Sheehan if the flats were open yet. Others had pulled up to his seafood warehouse in pickup trucks — some more than once as the sun advanced towards high noon — wondering the same thing.

“Still no word,” Sheehan tells them. Weathered faces nod impassively. They’ve been through this drill before. A full-time clammer, Kittery or Pembroke no difference, is always waiting for something — the tides to change, DMR closures to lift, prices to go up and tiny seed clams to grow to harvestable sizes.

By his own admission, patience doesn’t come easily to Sheehan, who says by nature he’s driven to solve problems. It’s been a hallmark of the wholesale seafood business he and his wife created three years ago, when they realized the scientific specimen business they incorporated in 2002 — whose sales had plummeted with the recession — wasn’t coming back fast enough to keep them in Washington County.

Read the full story at Maine Biz

 

Maine’s Lobster Boom Continues, Feeding Expanding Market

October 17, 2015 — As Maine’s 2015 lobster season heads for the homestretch, the iconic New England fishery continues to show surprising signs of strength while it feeds a growing market.

Mainers appear to be pulling large numbers of lobsters from the waters off their shores, continuing a long winning streak.

Marine experts point to a few likely factors behind the boom: careful fishery management; dropping populations of predators, such as cod fish; and warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

Meanwhile, strong demand for lobster is surfacing in an array of places, from China, whose residents have a growing taste for lobster, to McDonald’s Corp. , which offered a fast-food lobster roll sold in New England this summer. Prices for the clawed crustaceans are up from last year, according to market experts and people connected to Maine’s fishing industry.

In 2014, lobstermen harvested about 124.4 million pounds of lobster from the water fetching an average of $3.70 a pound, according to the state’s Department of Marine Resources. The total catch was shy of an all-time record set in 2013, though the average price rose nearly 28%.

Read the full story and watch the video from The Wall Street Journal

MAINE: Lobstermen Cry ‘Foul’ Over Proposed Searsport Harbor Dredging

October 15, 2015 — The state of Maine has long been synonymous with deep forested tracts of wilderness stretching from its western boundary with the Connecticut lakes in far northern New Hampshire, up to its northern border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. The state has long been associated with pristine springs, rivers and lakes, the habitat of its signature majestic large antlered moose – and all the while conjuring up images of the ubiquitous Poland Spring water bottle.

The southern and “downeastern” end of Maine is composed of miles of sandy beaches that gradually give way to rocky crags, jutting coastline, and hundreds of small rock outcrops and islands dotted with salty old lighthouses. This rocky coastline is the perfect breeding ground for the one sea creature that Maine is famous for, and makes up the heart of the state’s predominant seafood export – that delectable crustacean, the Maine lobster.

It also appears the “typical Maine rocky coastline” is the prime location where these tasty crustaceans are caught and eventually get exported far and wide to consumers’ tables. This is according to the most recent Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report, released last month. Of note, an interesting statistic gleaned from this NOAA study is: “… More than 98 percent of the total GOM (Gulf of Maine) catch has come from inshore NMFS statistical areas.”

This statistic is of great importance as it puts one such lobster breeding-ground right in the crosshairs of an ambitious U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE) and Maine DOT proposed project to dredge and deepen the channel in Searsport – to the tune of approximately $13 million – to allow two Canadian oil companies, Sprague Energy and Irving Oil, to off-load their crude oil at a local terminal at Mack Point.

At issue for these two oil companies is that they would prefer not to wait for a high tide to off-load their cargo at the terminal, and thus save – by their account – approximately $845,000 per year. To accommodate these oil companies, the COE would risk jeopardizing prime lobster breeding-grounds in western Penobscot Bay, by dumping approximately 1 million cubic yards of dredge spoils from the Searsport channel in areas of Penobscot Bay containing numerous pockmarks created by methane venting.

Read the full story at Triple Pundit

 

The enigma behind America’s freak, 20-year lobster boom

October 6, 2015 — Drizzled in butter or slathered in mayo—or heaped atop 100% all-natural Angus beef, perhaps? The question of how you like your lobster roll is no longer the sole province of foodies, coastal New Englanders, and people who summer in Maine. American lobster has gone mainstream, launching food trucks from Georgia to Oregon, and debuting on menus at McDonald’s and Shake Shack.

Unlike almost anything else that gets eaten on a bun, Maine lobster is wild-caught—which typically makes seafood pricier. So how has lobster gone from luxury eat to food-truck treat?

The reason boils down to plentiful supply, plain and simple. In fact, the state’s lobster business is the only fishery on the planet that has endured for more than a century and yet produces more volume and value than ever before. And not just slightly more. Last year, Maine fishermen hauled ashore 124 million pounds of lobsters, six times more than what they’d caught in 1984. The $456 million in value those landings totaled was nearly 20% higher than any other year in history, in real terms. These days, around 85% of American lobster caught in the US is landed in Maine—more than ever before.

Even more remarkable than sheer volume, though, is that this sudden sixfold surge has no clear explanation. A rise in sea temperatures, which has sped up lobster growth and opened up new coastal habitats for baby lobsters, is one likely reason. Another is that by plundering cod and other big fish in the Gulf of Maine, we’ve thinned out the predators that long kept lobster numbers in check. Both are strong hypotheses, yet no one’s sure we really understand what’s going on.

Read the full story at Quartz

RON SMOLOWITZ: Marine Monument Plan Subverts Public Input

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — October 8, 2015 — The following letter from Ron Smolowitz, of the Coonamessett Farm Foundation, was published today in the Cape Cod Times.

Your recent editorial endorsing a new Atlantic marine national monument (“A fitting tribute,” Sept. 27) misses the main reason a large and growing number of fishermen, coastal residents and public officials are so opposed to the proposal: It undermines the democratic process and threatens the future of public input in the management of public resources.

For many fishermen, this is not primarily an economic issue. Parts of the areas under consideration, particularly Cashes Ledge in the Gulf of Maine, have been closed to most forms of fishing for over a decade, and will remain closed under Omnibus Habitat Amendment 2, recently approved by the New England Fishery Management Council. Fishermen recognize the value of reasonable protections for these areas.

Rather, there is broad opposition to a marine monument because this proposal – and the precedent it sets – threatens the open and public process that has so far successfully preserved these areas. A national monument designation would mean that unilateral, one-time executive action will replace public input from a diverse variety of interests – including scientists, fishermen, regulators, and environmentalists – that has played an essential role in promoting conservation and successful management. This process works and needs to be respected.

Read the letter from Ron Smolowitz to the Cape Cod Times here