Saving Seafood

Under threat of lawsuit, Maine lobstermen say Canada is failing to protect right whales

November 1, 2017 — A record number of right whale killings this summer has put environmental groups on the offensive, potentially leading to stricter regulations for Maine lobstermen, even as most of the animals turn up dead in Canadian waters.

A group of environmental organizations has notified federal officials they intend to sue if regulatory agencies fail to better protect the endangered species, following what’s believed to be one of the deadliest summers for North Atlantic right whales in centuries.

Maine lobstermen fear that a lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service could result in more costly restrictions on how they fish, even though none of the 16 right whale deaths have been directly linked to the American lobster fishery. Twelve of the whale deaths occurred in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, where that country’s snow crab fishery has been cited by experts as a likely factor in several of the deaths.

The remaining four were found off Cape Cod.

With this year’s deaths, the total population of North Atlantic right whales is estimated at fewer than 450.

Early this month, the four environmental organizations sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Chris Oliver, head of the federal fisheries service, saying that federal regulators are violating the Endangered Species Act by not doing more to protect North Atlantic right whales. The groups specifically called on regulators to determine whether additional restrictions should be placed on the American lobster fishery in order to prevent whales from getting entangled in lobster gear.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Right whale deaths raise concern for species’ survival

October 24, 2017 — CAPE COD, Mass. — The discovery Monday of another dead North Atlantic right whale off Cape Cod escalated the already fevered concern among Canadian and U.S. marine scientists and fishery managers on the imperiled state of the highly endangered species.

The discovery of the severely decomposed whale brings the 2017 death count to at least 16, with the majority of the mortalities — attributed exclusively by researchers to ship strikes and gear entanglements — occurring in Canadian waters.

Four of the right whale deaths have occurred off the coast of Massachusetts.

“Our research and data have shown us that ship-strike or entanglement are the only definitive cause of death,” said Mike Asaro, NOAA Fisheries’ Gloucester-based marine mammal and sea turtle branch chief for the Atlantic region. “There’s nothing else we’re aware of.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times 

Right whale deaths called ‘apocalyptic’

October 23, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, MASS. — Whale scholars, lobstermen, conservationists and government officials converged Sunday in Nova Scotia to save right whales.

“Everybody is running out of adjectives,” Defenders of Wildlife attorney Jane Davenport said of the death of 12 North Atlantic right whales since June in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and another three off the U.S., totaling 3 percent of the total population. “It’s apocalyptic. It really is.”

At the annual North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium meeting in Halifax, right whale researchers released their latest population tally of 451 for 2016, typically counted with a year’s lag. But it’s easy to see where next year’s number is headed given the 15 known deaths and only five known births, said consortium chairman Mark Baumgartner, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist.

“2017 will be another year of decline,” Baumgartner said.

In early October, the Defenders of Wildlife and three other conservation groups sent a 60-day notice of intent to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service for failure to protect North Atlantic right whales from fishing gear entanglement, believed by researchers to be one of two primary right whale killers, along with ship strikes.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times

Endangered right whales seeing catastrophic die-off in New England, Canadian waters

The deaths of dozens of whales may be the result of a migration to less-protected areas because of lack of food in the Gulf of Maine.

August 15, 2017 — The North Atlantic right whale, the world’s second most endangered marine mammal, is having a catastrophic year in the waters off New England and Atlantic Canada, and scientists from Maine to Newfoundland are scrambling to figure out why.

At least a dozen right whales have been found dead this summer in the worst die-off researchers have recorded, a disastrous development for a species with a worldwide population of about 500.

“Just imagine you put 500 dollars in the bank, and every time you put five in, the bank takes 15 out,” says Moira Brown, a right whale researcher with the New England Aquarium who is based in Campobello Island, New Brunswick. “This is a species that has not been doing well, even before we had all the dead whales this summer.”

Canadian authorities have documented 12 dead whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence since June 7, though it’s possible that two carcasses that weren’t recovered after their initial sighting were counted twice. Two more of the rare, slow-moving whales were found dead off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, bringing this summer’s mortality to between 12 and 14 whales, more than 3 percent of their total population.

Humans appear to have been the immediate cause of at least some of the deaths. Necropsy results have been issued for just four of the whales found off Canada, showing one had become entangled in snow crab fishing gear and three were apparently struck by ships.

The whales deaths have prompted Canadian officials to impose emergency restrictionson shipping and snow crab fishermen in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence – the vast body of water bounded by New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador and eastern Quebec – and an urgent effort by researchers to figure out what happened.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Tenth right whale found dead: ‘This population can’t sustain another hit’

August 3, 2017 — The first North Atlantic right whale to turn up dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a 10-year-old male, back on June 7. Researchers had spotted it just six weeks earlier in Cape Cod Bay, looking healthy.

Another was a vital 11-year-old female that might have added at least five to 10 calves to the dwindling population.

Among the others: Two whales at least 17 and 37 years old, according to the New England Aquarium, which catalogues them through their distinctive white markings.

The 10th and most recent carcass of the critically endangered species found in the gulf was reported Tuesday, a horrendous die-off not seen since the docile, curious creatures were hunted for their oily blubber in the 1800s.

The federal Department of Fisheries said the “unprecedented number of right whale deaths is very concerning.”

It’s estimated there are only about 500 North Atlantic right whales still living, and Jerry Conway of the Canadian Whale Institute in Campobello, N.B., said the losses are disastrous for an already vulnerable species.

“We feel there is tremendous urgency,” he said Wednesday in an interview. “This has had catastrophic ramifications on the right whale population, this number of whales being killed when we only know of three calves being born this year.

“It certainly indicates a rapid decline in the population.”

Read the full story at the Times Colonist

US bars people from disentangling whales after Canadian’s death

July 13, 2017 — U.S. officials are temporarily barring anyone from approaching an entangled whale after a Canadian fisherman was killed trying to free one in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Joe Howlett, a fisherman from Campobello, was struck by a North Atlantic right whale on July 10, moments after he and other responders had freed it from fishing gear near Shippagan, New Brunswick, on the province’s northeast coast.

“Because ensuring the safety of responders is of paramount importance, NOAA Fisheries is suspending all large whale entanglement response activities nationally until further notice, in order to review our own emergency response protocols in light of this event,” said Chris Oliver, assistant administrator for the fisheries division of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Marine mammals are protected under federal law, which means it is illegal to harass or harm them. Exceptions are made for properly trained people who are pre-approved by NOAA to respond to entanglements or strandings. By suspending entanglement responses, NOAA temporarily is banning anyone from approaching or trying to free an entangled whale.

Disentanglement efforts have been intense this past month in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is ringed by five Canadian provinces, as seven North Atlantic right whales have been found dead in the gulf over the past several weeks. The causes of death for each one have not been determined. Researchers estimate that the critically endangered species has a population of only roughly 500 individual whales.

NOAA Fisheries and its partner agencies will continue to respond to all other reported stranding of marine mammals in distress, but Oliver emphasized that those efforts are technically challenging and should be attempted only by trained experts.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

GLOUCESTER TIMES: Saving a species in danger

July 11, 2017 — The revival of the right whale should be one of America’s great conservation success stories, standing alongside the grey wolf, the American bison and the bald eagle.

Once hunted to the edge of extinction, the right whale made strong strides toward recovery in recent decades, in large part due to conservation efforts. Today there are thought to be about 500 of the mammals swimming in Atlantic waters.

Recent events, however, show just how tenuous the species’ hold on survival really is, and make clear the need for continued, innovative conservation efforts. A new effort to educate recreational and competitive sailors about the dangers of vessel strikes is a step in the right direction.

Six right whales were found dead in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, late last month. Early evidence suggests two of the whales died after being struck by boats, and one after becoming entangled in lost or discarded fishing gear.

Meanwhile, fewer right whale calves have been born in recent years.

“Including the right whale killed by a ship strike in Cape Cod this past April, we have now lost seven right whales in a year where only five calves were born,” said Regina Asmutis-Silva, executive director of the Plymouth-based research and advocacy group Whale and Dolphin Conservation. “Only 20 years ago, over 500 (vaquita whales) swam in the Gulf of California but today only 30 remain because of human impacts. Where will the right whales be in 20 years if we do not make meaningful changes that reduce their threats of ship strikes and entanglements?”

Massachusetts researchers, who warned the species was in trouble last year, remain concerned.

Read the full opinion piece at the Gloucester Times

BP oil disaster might have hurt Bluefin tuna rebuilding, study says

October 3, 2016 — The release of 4 million barrels of oil in the 87 days following the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 occurred just as Atlantic bluefin tuna had returned to the Gulf of Mexico to spawn, and a small but significant percentage of the adult fish and their eggs and larvae were likely exposed to the toxic oil, according to a new study announced Friday (Sept. 30).

The study led by scientists with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Stanford University concludes that the oil cumulatively covered 3.1 million square miles where fish, eggs and larvae were present in the weeks immediately after the accident.

When combined with other stressors affecting this species of tuna — including overfishing and warming seas caused by climate change — the addition of the oil’s impact “may result in significant effects for a population that shows little evidence of rebuilding,” the study published in Nature: Scientific Reports concluded.

The study, funded by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the BP spill required under the federal Oil Pollution Act, made use of computer modeling based on information gathered from 16 years of electronic tagging of 66 tuna that kept track of individual fish locations, temperatures and oscillating diving patterns. The information was compared with satellite observations of the breadth of oil from the spill on the surface of the Gulf to estimate the potential impacts.

Barbara Block, a Stanford professor of marine scientists and expert on Atlantic bluefin tuna, said in a Friday interview that the tagging program took advantage of earlier tagging information that indicated many of the Gulf-spawning tuna migrate back and forth from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Researchers captured adult tuna in Canada and installed the tags. When the fish returned to Canada a year later, the tags dropped off and were collected, and their data was added to a long-term database on fish movements.

The information collected from the tags helped the scientists confirm their theories about the spawning habits of the huge fish, which can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds at maturity, and begin reproducing about 10 years after birth.

Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune

Canadian herring gillnet fishery first in the world to achieve MSC certification

November, 5, 2015 — Toronto, Canada — The following was released by the Marine Stewardship Council: 

The Gulf Nova Scotia Herring Federation and its member associations have achieved the globally-recognized Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification for sustainable fishing. Fall herring from the fishery in Canada`s southern Gulf of St. Lawrence can now be sold with the blue MSC ecolabel indicating it comes from a sustainable, well-managed source. This is the first ever gillnet herring fishery to achieve MSC certification.

”We are delighted to see this important fishery independently assessed and certified as being well managed and environmentally sustainable,” said Federation Chairman and herring fisher Greg Egilsson. “To be the first herring fishery in the world with this gear type to achieve MSC certification is a huge accomplishment and endorsement of the conservation measures championed by the Federation over many years. The broad recognition of the MSC Standard in the seafood supply chain and among consumers in other markets will allow Canadian processors to make further inroads into new markets where herring products are highly sought after. We are also grateful to the Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture for its important support of the assessment.”

”Nova Scotia has a proud history of supplying high quality fish to the world, ” said Nova Scotia’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Minister Keith Colwell. ”Now, with the independent certification of the Marine Stewardship Council, we can enhance our global image with environmentally-conscious consumers and the marketability of our herring.”

While most Fall herring harvesters also engage in other seasonal fisheries like lobster and snow crab, herring plays a vital role in supporting close to 2,000 jobs in as many as 35 processing plants in the southern Gulf region.

Fall herring is one component of a coastal, multi-species fishery that opens for only a very limited period in September and October. In 2015, the 400 eligible fish harvesters landed 5,630 mt of herring worth almost $2.6 million.  It occurs in Herring Fishing Area 16 F situated within the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence specifically in waters off the eastern portion of the Northumberland Strait between the northern shore of Nova Scotia and southeastern shore of Prince Edward Island.

“The MSC is thrilled to welcome Canadian Fall herring into our program,” said Jay Lugar, Program Director for MSC in Canada. “The Gulf of St. Lawrence is home to a rich diversity of species of which many are commercially harvested and a large portion of volume is MSC certified. We are proud to see Fall herring join the ranks of fisheries that are working hard to protect our marine ecosystems and using the MSC certification to signal their accomplishments to the world.”

A staple in European and Asian diets for centuries, herring is a highly versatile  mild-tasting oily fish and can be found in many forms including fresh, frozen, cured, canned, smoked, herring roe, and oil. In Canada, herring roe is an important product and is mostly sold in Japan. Much of the Fall herring is also sold to processors for the smoked herring market in North America and the Caribbean.