Saving Seafood

Changes in Gulf of Maine may endanger lucrative fish stocks, experts say

July 8 2022 — Scientists have known the Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly, but new research suggests it’s also getting saltier, more acidic and increasingly stratified — raising concerns for its fish stocks.

The dramatic shifts in the gulf’s biochemistry are raising questions about the future of a region that has historically produced some of the world’s richest fish stocks — from cod to lobsters — and has built billion-dollar industries around them.

“We found that primary productivity, the rate at which the phytoplankton is fixing carbon in the ocean, has dropped to about a third of what it was in the early 2000s,” Barney Balch, a biological oceanographer and senior researcher at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, told UPI. “That really raised alarm bells with us.”

According to Balch, decreases in primary productivity — the carbon fixing — may affect life in the gulf from phytoplankton all the way up the food chain, including fish that humans eat.

For more than 20 years, Balch and his research partners have been helping NASA calibrate and validate ocean surface temperature data collected by the agency’s polar-orbit satellites.

Many researchers have pointed to the Gulf of Maine as one of the world’s most rapidly warming bodies of water, but Balch’s paper, published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, is one of first to showcase the full scope of the gulf’s regime change.

While it’s not yet clear how these changes will impact the region’s ecosystems, data collected by Balch’s team suggest the base of the marine food web in the gulf is in the midst of a transformation.

Over the last 30 years, warming has mostly proven a boon to lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, especially in places, like the Penobscot Bay and the Bay of Fundy, that were historically on the chillier side of a lobster’s comfort zone.

And though Balch isn’t privy to the data being collected by Wahle and his research partners, he says it’s not a stretch to hypothesize that declines in diatoms, a primary source of nutrients for copepods, are likely to have ripple effects up the food chain — ripple effects that will ultimately impact the lobsters and some number of other fisheries.

Read the full story at UPI

Federal court rules fisheries officials didn’t do enough to protect right whales from lobster gear

July 8, 2022 — A federal court on Friday ruled in favor of environmental groups that had filed a lawsuit against the government and the Maine Lobstermen’s Association claiming federal fisheries officials had failed to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from potentially fatal entanglements in lobster fishing gear, records show.

A judge ruled that NOAA Fisheries had violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act when it issued a May 2021 biological opinion and a September 2021 final rule because officials had not done enough to reduce the lobster fishery’s threat to right whales, the plaintiffs in the suit said in a statement.

The lawsuit was filed in 2018 by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Conservation Law Foundation, and Defenders of Wildlife.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Maine lobster industry could receive nearly $14 million in federal aid

July 5, 2022 — Maine’s lobster industry could receive most of the $14 million the federal government is allocating to help lobstermen comply with new rules that are intended to save the critically endangered right whale from extinction.

If approved by Congress, the $14 million will be doled out to states through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to cover costs incurred by the fishing industry to comply with the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan. Costs may include gear modification, configuration and marking, both in federal and state waters.

Maine is expected to receive the lion’s share of the money, since the state is home to the vast majority of the American lobster fleet. Maine lobstermen already received more than $17 million in federal aid in March as part of a $1.5 trillion omnibus funding package.

It was not clear Friday how the proposed federal funding might be allocated among Maine’s 4,500 to 5,000 licensed lobstermen.

The funding has been included in the House of Representatives’ Commerce, Justice, and Science Fiscal Year 2023 Appropriations bill. The House Appropriations Committee approved the bill Friday. From there, it will be voted on by the full House.

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald

Whale activists file objection to Gulf of Maine lobster fishery certification

July 1, 2022 — Conservation groups formally objected to a recent recommendation by MRAG Americas that the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery be recertified to the Marine Stewardship Council standard.

The Gulf of Maine lobster fishery, which covers U.S. landings of the North American lobster was first certified to the MSC standard in 2016, and its current certificate expires on June 30. MRAG Americas has recommended that the certification continue, but groups including Animal Welfare Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Natural Resources Defense Council claim the fishery no longer meets the standards due to complications related to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

“If the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery was certified as sustainable at this time, consumers of MSC-certified lobster could be unknowingly hastening the demise of one of our most emblematic and endangered species,” said Francine Kershaw, senior scientist with NRDC, in a prepared statement. “There could not be a more blatant way to further erode consumer confidence in MSC as a certifying body.”

At the heart of the issue is the reoccurring fight over the lobster industry’s impact on right whales – something the MSC has been involved with once before. In August 2020, the MSC suspended the certification of the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery after a federal court found it was in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

The suspension has since been lifted, and the lobster industry is also under new standards implemented by NOAA Fisheries to comply with Endangered Species Act. Despite the new rules, the NGOs claim that the fishery is still relying on insufficient protection measures and that it is still posing a threat to right whales.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

NGOs object to MSC recertification for Gulf of Maine lobster

June 28, 2022 — Conservation groups have formally objected to a recent recommendation by MRAG Americas that the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery be recertified to the Marine Stewardship Council standard.

The Gulf of Maine lobster fishery, which covers U.S. landings of the North American lobster (Homarus americanus) was first certified to the MSC standard in 2016, and its current certificate expires on 30 June, 2022. MRAG Americas has recommended that the certification continue, but groups including Animal Welfare Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Natural Resources Defense Council claim the fishery no longer meets the standards due to complications related to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Study says whales adapting to climate change; so too must mariners and fishermen

June 15, 2022 — A review of 20 years of data tracking the highly endangered north Atlantic right whale shows the population has shifted its feeding and migration patterns significantly, as sea temperatures in the Gulf of Maine warm with climate change.

The findings show that government-enforced protections for right whales – already requiring restrictions on vessel speed limits and fishermen’s lobster and fish trap lines and buoys – will need to be adjusted as the whales shift their movements and habitats.

After two decades of warming waters in the Gulf of Maine, right whales – a population now estimated at just 336 animals at risk from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear – are relying much more on Cape Cod Bay as their food supply has changed.

“The time of year when we are most likely to see right and humpback whales in Cape Cod Bay has changed considerably, and right whales are using the habitat much more heavily than they did 20 years ago,” said Dan Pendleton, a research scientist at the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, in a summary issued by the aquarium. Pendleton is lead author of the study and its team of whale scientists in the U.S. and Canada.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

One man caught 62 out-of-season lobsters. Another tried to hide some in his shorts, cops say

June 14, 2022 — Florida spiny lobster season is about two months away, but the draw of the tasty crustaceans was simply too hard to resist for two men who were arrested in separate state fish and wildlife police busts over the weekend in the Keys, according to reports.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers were watching one of the men, Rafael Larduet Carrion, as the 43-year-old snorkeled just off shore from Duck Key on Saturday. The eight-month recreational and commercial spiny lobster season doesn’t start until Aug. 6, but FWC investigators say they saw Carrion catching them in addition to separating the tails from the carapace in the water — which is illegal.

All harvested lobsters must be brought to shore whole, per Florida law.

Read the full story at the Miami Herald

 

Scientists see long-term hope for Maine’s lobster fishery despite warming waters

June 13, 2022 — Dire predictions about the effects of global warming on Maine’s lobster population may be exaggerated and underestimate the potential that conservation measures have to preserve the fishery into the future.

Rapid warming in the Gulf of Maine and the collapse of lobster fisheries in southern New England have fueled predictions that lobsters will likely move north out of Maine waters in the coming decades. But ongoing research at the University of Maine is revealing a more optimistic long-term view of the Maine lobster fishery.

The UMaine scientists are now projecting that temperatures in Gulf of Maine will likely remain within lobsters’ comfort zone because of the gulf’s unique oceanographic features, though changing ocean currents are harder to predict. The researchers cautioned that the dynamics of global warming are complex and make it difficult to project far into the future with certainty.

Ocean stratification – where water of different densities separates into distinct layers – is keeping the bottom temperatures colder on the Gulf of Maine’s western side, the scientists say, while strong tidal mixing in the eastern gulf and the Bay of Fundy helps moderate the water temperature there during the summer. Because Maine waters have historically been so cold, they say, even a couple of degrees of warming should keep Maine’s bottom waters below 68 degrees, the temperature at which lobsters begin to show signs of stress, according to the Atlantic States Fisheries Management Council.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

New federal regulations on lobster fishing in effect, aimed at protecting endangered whale species

June 9, 2022 — Statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show less than 350 endangered North Atlantic Right Whales still exist. The new regulations that went into effect for fishermen on May 1 aim to help those numbers increase.

Besides closures – which dictate specific areas in federal and state waters where fishermen cannot fish during certain times of the year due to whale activity – it also includes the need for using weak rope that breaks on contact.

Fishermen also have to mark gear so if it does get wrapped around a whale, it can be identified.

“This is actually weak rope, but I actually have to have a one-foot green mark on it,” Rob Martin said. Martin has been lobster fishing in these waters off Cape Cod in Massachusetts for more than four decades.

He said changing the rope and following the new regulations takes time.

“It’s a lot of man-hours to do,” Martin said.

Read the full story at ABC 7 Denver