Saving Seafood

Will Maine lobster crash like cod? Only close ocean monitoring will tell

November 2, 2015 — There was a mix of news about the Gulf of Maine last week. First, there were dire warnings about the role of rising ocean temperatures in the demise of cod in the North Atlantic. Then came what sounded like good news — Maine has surpassed Massachusetts to become the state with the second most lucrative seafood landings in the country. Finally, on Friday, federal regulators announced they would close the Gulf of Maine herring fishery this month.

All of these stories are interrelated and point to the need for much more research to gain better understanding about what is happening in the Atlantic Ocean and why. With better knowledge about how changing ocean conditions affect different species, regulators can more effectively target rules to protect them and the fishermen who make a living catching them.

The virtual disappearance of cod from the waters off New England is not news. But a new report, published in the journal Science, concludes that rising ocean temperatures played a much larger role in the decline than initially thought. The study’s lead author, Andrew Pershing, is a scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.

In the simplest sense, regulators decide how many tons of a species can be taken from the ocean based on assessments of that species’ population. The problem with cod management, Pershing’s report concludes, is that regulators didn’t fully grasp the severity of the ocean temperature increase and what it meant for the legendary groundfish. As a result, regulators allowed fishermen to catch too many cod.

“Failure to recognize the impact of warming on cod contributed to overfishing,” the report said. “Recovery of this fishery depends on sound management, but the size of the stock depends on future temperature conditions. The experience in the Gulf of Maine highlights the need to incorporate environmental factors into resource management.”

This is especially true in the gulf, which is warming faster than 99.9 percent of the world’s oceans. Most troubling, beginning in 2004, the rate of warming in the Gulf of Maine increased more than seven-fold, the report says. Because of this rapid warming, regulatory limits on cod fishing didn’t work because cod did not reproduce and grow as expected.

This isn’t an academic problem. As the cod population declined, regulators imposed quotas that allowed fishermen to catch less. When the population didn’t rebound, regulators tightened the quotas, adding to the economic hardship for fishing communities.

Read the full editorial at Bangor Daily News

ASMFC American Lobster Board Initiates Addendum to Jonah Crab FMP

November 2, 2015 — ST. AUGUSTINE, Fl. – The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s American Lobster Management Board initiated Addendum I to the Jonah Crab Fishery Management Plan (FMP) to consider changes the incidental bycatch limit for non-trap gear. The FMP currently prescribes a 200 crabs per calendar day/500 crabs per trip incidental bycatch limit; however, concerns were expressed over the appropriateness of these limits. Data submitted by the New England Fishery Management Council and NOAA Fisheries illustrated while 97-99% of trips from 2010 through 2014 have been within the current limit, there were a number of trips above the limit. Furthermore, current bycatch landings are sufficiently low, accounting for approximately 1% of total landings.

Given a goal of the Jonah Crab FMP is to prevent expansion of the fishery while including all current participants, the Board has initiated an addendum to consider altering the incidental bycatch limit with options to increase the  limit to 1000 crabs per trip or eliminate the bycatch limit for non-trap gear. Draft Addendum I will be presented to the Board in February. If approved, the Board would release the Draft Addendum for public comment and will consider final approval of the addendum at the Commission’s Spring Meeting in May. For more information, please contact Megan Ware, FMP Coordinator, at mware@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.

Maine business owners explore challenges, opportunities of climate change

October 30, 2015 — SOUTH PORTLAND — Several Maine business owners said Friday that adapting to climate change doesn’t have to be costly and, in many cases, can help a company’s finances as well as the environment.

Climate change presents considerable challenges but also potential opportunities to Maine businesses and communities, many of which are witnessing the impacts of a changing ocean environment before their counterparts elsewhere around the country. That was a key theme of a forum co-sponsored Friday by the South Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“Ultimately, this has to make economic sense,” U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said via Skype because early-morning budget votes in Washington prevented his return to Maine. “We can’t depend on everybody simply being good guys or nice men and women. It has to work in terms of a return on investment.”

Laying out the challenges facing Maine due to a changing climate, King and Gulf of Maine Research Institute President and CEO Don Perkins discussed how lobster and other fish species are already changing their habits as the Gulf of Maine warms. A recent six-part Portland Press Herald series explored the ecological and economic implications of the fact that the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than almost every part of the oceans around the globe during the past decade.

“It’s real and it has very sobering implications for our fishing industry, obviously,” said Perkins, whose staff at GMRI recently co-authored a scientific study showing cod populations were not recovering because of warming Gulf of Maine waters. “Once you get over agonizing about that – and it is cause for agony – the fact is that we’re dealing with that problem a decade or a few decades earlier than many other ocean regions. And as a result, there is a huge opportunity in this state to figure out how to understand a changing system.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

Feds: Maine beats Massachusetts for fisheries landings value

October 30, 2015 — A 23 percent increase in the value of the country’s 2014 total lobster landings has made Maine the second-most lucrative state for commercial marine fisheries behind Alaska, according to federal officials.

Maine, where 84 percent of all lobster caught nationwide was brought ashore last year, surpassed Massachusetts with help from a 75 cent increase in the national average price lobstermen earned for their catch, according to an annual report released Thursday by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The national average price paid to fishermen for lobster increased from $3.08 in 2013 to $3.83 in 2014, federal officials indicated in the 2014 Fisheries of the United States report.

Read the full story from the Bangor Daily News

Supplemental Materials Now Available for the ASMFC’s 74th Annual Meeting

October 27, 2015 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

Supplemental meeting materials for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s 74th Annual Meeting have been posted at http://www.asmfc.org/home/2015-Annual-Meeting for the following Boards/Sections (click on “Supplemental Material” following each relevant committee header to access information). 

American Lobster Management Board – Report for the Southern New England (SNE) Subcommittee’s October 2nd Meeting; Update on SNE Stock Projections Presented at the Subcommittee Meeting; Relationship Between Fishing Effort and Fishery Exploitation; Incidental Bycatch of Jonah Crab by Non-trap Gear; and Revised Advisory Panel Nominations

Atlantic Herring Section – Issues and Options Under Development and Consideration for Inclusion in Draft Amendment 3; Technical Report on Gonadal-Somatic Index-based Monitoring System for Atlantic Herring Closures; and Advisory Panel Meeting Summary

Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board – Delaware Bay Summer Flounder White Paper; Black Sea Bass Commercial Quotas; and 2015 FMP Reviews for Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass

Executive Committee – Executive Committee Recommended Changes to Commission Documents and Additional Issues for Consideration on Commission Guidance Documents

American Eel Management Board – Public Comment

Winter Flounder Management Board – Northeast Fisheries Science Center Stock Assessment Update on 20 Northeast Groundfish Stocks Through 2014 (This report has been modified to include information on winter flounder stocks only).

Atlantic Menhaden Management Board – Ecological Reference Point Recommendations for Draft Amendment 3 Development; Socioeconomic Study of Menhaden Fisheries – Request for Proposals Update; and Public Comment

Law Enforcement Committee – Revised Agenda

Tautog Management Board – Summary of Submitted Public Comment; Individual/Organization Comments; and Law Enforcement Subcommittee Review on Illegal Tautog Harvest

Spiny Dogfish Management Board – Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council Spiny Dogfish Motions and Selected Alternatives

Horseshoe Crab Management Board – 2015 FMP Review 

South Atlantic State/Federal Fisheries Management Board – 2015 FMP Reviews for Spotted Seatrout and Spanish Mackerel

As a reminder, Board/Section meeting proceedings will be broadcast daily via webinar beginning at 8:00 a.m. on November 2nd, continuing daily until the conclusion of the meeting (expected to be 1:45 p.m.) on November 5th.  The webinar will allow registrants to listen to the proceedings of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s management boards/sections during the Commission’s 74th Annual Meeting, November 2-5, 2015. Registrants will also be able to view presentations and motions as they occur. For a detailed agenda and meeting materials, go to http://www.asmfc.org/home/2015-Annual-Meeting. No comments or questions will be accepted via the webinar. Should technical difficulties arise during the streaming of the broadcast, the boards/sections will continue their deliberations without interruption. We will attempt to resume the broadcast as soon as possible. Board/Section summaries, presentations, and audio files will be available at http://www.asmfc.org/home/2015-Annual-Meeting the week of November 9th.

View a PDF of the Supplemental meeting materials here

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’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 trade groups head to China

October 16, 2015 — The state of Maine, whose biggest exports to China are seafood, especially lobsters, and wood, is sending a trade delegation headed by its governor to China at the end of this month in search of deals for the state’s services industry.

Governor Paul LePage, the Maine International Trade Center (MITC), and the US Commercial Service will be joined by a delegation of about two dozen people from the food, environmental and educational sectors on a week-long trip to East Asia from Oct 24 to Oct 31, where they will visit Shanghai. Then those in the seafood sector will head to Qingdao on China’s east coast for a fishery tradeshow.

China is Maine’s second-largest export market after Canada. Last year’s those exports totaled $183, down from the $247 million in 2012, the last time the state went on a trade mission to the country. As of August 2015, the state’s exports to China totaled $141 million.

Wood products, which include wood pulp-related goods and paper goods, make up the majority of Maine’s exports to China, followed by seafood.

Read the full story from China Daily

Lobster truck business continues to roll

October 16, 2015 — When Sabin Lomac was growing up, lobster bakes were a great way for his family to come together.

Now, years later, the 1999 Scarborough High School graduate is making a living off the Maine crustacean through Cousins Maine Lobster, a Los Angles-based food truck business he started with his cousin Jim Tselikis in spring 2012.

Lomac and Tselikis, a Cape Elizabeth native, started the business after seeing a lack of authentic Maine lobster on the West Coast.

In an effort to provide the best quality possible, Cousins Maine Lobster sends directly from local Gulf of Maine lobstermen. In true New England style, Cousins Maine Lobster also serves whoopie pies, Cape Cod chips, New England clam chowder, red hot dogs, Moxie and other Maine soda, as well as several lobster-based menu items, including the California-inspired lobster taco.

Read the full story from the Scarborough Leader