Saving Seafood

RICHARD NELSON: Maine lobstermen know the threat posed by climate change. Now is the time to act.

December 13th, 2016 — I rose the other morning and began my preparations to head out on the water from Friendship Harbor to take up the my last load of lobster traps. My thoughts turned from from closing out my season to chuckling over my selection of boots for the day. My dear wife had made a special trip to the attic a month and a half ago to bring down my insulated winter boots, and I became aware of the fact that, with temperatures again climbing to the mid-40s, they would remain unworn this year.

Many of the thoughts and decisions fishermen make are based on conditions in the environment in which we work. This is certainly not something new. Maine’s lobster industry, which is dependent on a healthy ocean and an abundant resource of lobsters, has a long established heritage of conservation. Our good management decisions of the past include throwing back both the large breed stock lobsters and small lobsters, putting escape vents in traps and returning egg bearing female lobsters into the water, marking them to ensure they are protected through future molts. We saw the need to set trap limits and become a limited access fishery, all the while remaining a small-boat, owner-operated fleet.

Although these choices have helped create a fishery that is flourishing while others are not, we face environmental challenges that are beyond local control and more complex than our marine management system can address.

Read the full op-ed at the Bangor Daily News 

Wanted: Lobstermen willing to try out life vests

November 28th, 2016 — The Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety is asking New England lobstermen to help design a life jacket they would actually wear every day.

It could be a matter of life or death.

Researchers will visit Maine docks this winter to recruit fishermen to try out different kinds of personal flotation devices, or PFDs, for a month to determine which designs work best for daily use aboard a lobster boat. The lobstermen will be paid to test the life vest, and can keep it for their own use once they are done.

“This isn’t about making lobstermen wear anything, telling them what to do or regulating anything,” said principal investigator Julie Sorensen of the Northeast Center. “It’s about making PFDs comfortable enough that fishermen want to wear them.”

Statistics suggest it will be a hard sell, but well worth it.

In a study published this year, the Northeast Center found only 16 percent of lobstermen reported using a personal flotation device on the job, even though they know the risk of drowning. Falls overboard are the leading cause of workplace fatalities for New England lobstermen, accounting for 16 out of 29 on-the-job deaths from 2000 to 2015, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

None of the lobstermen who died from a fall overboard was wearing a life jacket, records show.

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald 

Commercial fishing ends at marine monument

November 14th, 2016 — As of Monday, virtually all commercial fishing will be banned from the newly created Marine National Monument that includes the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts off the coast of southern New England.

The closure includes more than 4,900 square miles of ocean, or about the same area as the state of Connecticut, about 130 miles east-southeast of Cape Cod.

The Northeast Canyons represent 941 square miles of that total, while the protection afforded the Seamounts stretches over 3,972 square miles.

 Currently, only lobster and red crab fishing are exempted from the closure. Those fisheries are grandfathered in for seven years before they also will be excluded and the area wholly shut off to commercial fishing.

The closure, widely criticized by fishing stakeholders as an end-run around the established national fishery management system, is a product of President Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act on Sept. 15 to create the new Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.

The process, as it has in coastal communities around the country, pitted commercial fishing interests and other fishing stakeholders against environmentalists and conservationists in a contentious struggle over wide swaths of the nation’s oceans.

Some history:

In August, in a victory for environmentalists and conservationists, Obama ended a roiling debate by more than quadrupling the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument to 582,578 square miles in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, establishing the largest protected area on the planet.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times 

Where do female lobsters release their eggs?

November 10th, 2016 — The decline of the American lobster population from the southern edge of its range in Long Island Sound stands in stark contrast to to the explosion in the number of landed lobsters in the colder Gulf of Maine waters the past few years.

Scientists are wondering what is going on with the important fishery, particularly as greenhouse gas emissions are blamed for a warming of ocean water. Are lobsters heading to colder water to hatch their young?

A study just funded by the Wildlife Heritage Foundation of New Hampshire will look at the issue off the Isles of Shoals, next summer. Starting next June, eight to 14 egg-bearing lobsters will receive hydroaccoustic tags and be tracked as they carry eggs and hatch them. The study will be off the Isles of Shoals.

Joshua Carloni, biologist in the marine division of New Hampshire Fish and Game, said it has been traditionally thought that female lobsters move to warmer water with their eggs in spring and release them there. But a 2012 study suggested they are moving to deeper water to hatch their eggs.

“Why that is we don’t know,”said Carloni. “We believe, historically this is what they have done, but it have not documented. The implications with warming water are known.” This study could possibly provide “concrete evidence that lobsters are moving to deep water once their eggs begin to hatch.”

Read the full story at WMUR 9 

Rebound seen for popular lobster bait fishery

November 9th, 2016 — Commercial fishermen can breathe a sigh a relief, as interstate fishing regulators say that the population of menhaden, a fish only topped by herring as the most popular type of bait for Maine’s lobster industry, continues to be healthy.

According to the Associated Press, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is reporting that menhaden fishery isn’t experiencing overfishing and continues to reproduce at a healthy rate. Atlantic Menhaden Board Chairman Robert Ballou added that the healthy population levels will give regulators a chance to reevaluate how to manage the fishery, which is typically worth more than $100 million annually, the AP reported.

The good news about the menhaden population comes on the heels of Maine’s menhaden fishery being closed by regulators for a week and a half in August, following reports that the annual landings quota for Maine, Rhode Island and New York, had been exceeded.

Read the full story at Mainebiz

Lobster board tackles fishery issues

November 3, 2016 — BAR HARBOR, Maine — No new policy affecting local lobstermen was handed down from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s lobster board from its meeting here last week, but the group discussed future options for trip reporting, crab bycatch and improving the lobster stock in southern New England.

The board relies on data from dealer and harvester reporting to make management decisions. “The technical committee highlighted data deficiencies in federal waters,” lobster fishery management plan (FMP) coordinator Megan Ware said.

Most state fishery departments conduct their own lobster surveys, such as Maine’s settlement survey, ventless trap survey and sea sampling program. But offshore waters are an increasingly important part of the fishery, and they’re outside the scope of those programs.

“States are collecting a variety of this information, but it’s not uniform,” Ware said.

The board’s lobster reporting working group presented short, medium and long-term goals to improve data collection. Current rules require 100 percent dealer reporting and at least 10 percent active harvester reporting.

The working group said that 10 percent includes recreational fishermen and recommended switching to only commercial harvesters. They would need 30 percent of active harvesters reporting to have statistically valid information. It also would be helpful to managers if they had data about trap hauls, soak time and gear configuration.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

Why It’s Harder Than You’d Think to Serve Local Seafood in California

November 1, 2016 — In a nation where 90 percent of the seafood consumed is imported from foreign countries, Mitch’s Seafood in San Diego is rarity. The menu is mostly made up of a fish from local fishermen and, with the exception of clams and mussels, everything is wild-caught.

“We get as much from Southern California as we can; and then being right here on the border and having a personal experience with Baja California, I consider [fish from there] local, too,” Mitch Conniff, the owner, says.

On an October evening, the menu might feature big eye tuna, calamari, halibut, swordfish, and cabrilla from San Diego. Conniff usually sources from half a dozen fishermen in San Diego, many of whom are his close friends and relatives. White shrimp comes from Mazatlan in Mexico and gold spot bass hails from San Carlos in California. Spiny lobster caught in California—95 percent of which is typically exported to China—is on the menu as well.

It’s a diverse catch that is surprisingly affordable, considering how the prices of certain species of local California seafood have been made insanely expensive because of Chinese demand.

Last year, the California spiny lobster retailed close to $30 a pound. That is an astronomical figure compared to the retail price of Maine lobster, which was around $9 a pound for wholesale. Maine lobster accounts for 90 percent of the United States lobster market.

Read the full story at VICE

Fishing managers to meet with industry on lobster plan

October 31st, 2016 — Fishing managers will reach out to the members of the fishing industry before seeking public comment on a proposal to rebuild the southern New England lobster population, an interstate panel has decided.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission determined Thursday it was best to take the additional step before possibly releasing the plan to the public in February. The commission has been working on fishing management measures to preserve the lobsters.

Scientists have said southern New England lobsters are in decline while the species is thriving north of Cape Ann and off the coast of Maine. They have cited factors such as warmer temperatures in some ocean waters.

Lobsters remain readily available to consumers in New England and elsewhere despite the drop.

Management measures detailed in the proposal include strategies such as seasonal closures, reducing the number of lobster traps and changes to the minimum and maximum harvesting sizes of lobsters. How significant the changes will be would be determined at a later date.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Times 

Fishing managers to meet with industry on lobster plan

October 28th, 2016 — Fishing managers will reach out to the members of the fishing industry before seeking public comment on a proposal to rebuild the southern New England lobster population, an interstate panel decided on Thursday.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission determined it was best to take the additional step before possibly releasing the plan to the public in February. The commission has been working on fishing management measures to preserve the lobsters.

Scientists have said southern New England lobsters are in decline while the species is thriving off the coast of Maine. They have cited factors such as warmer temperatures in some ocean waters.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Boston Globe 

How a national craze caused lobster prices to boil over

October 26th, 2016 — Your next fresh lobster dinner, drizzled in butter and lemon, might crack your budget.

Restaurants are having to fork over more money this year to get their hands on prized Maine lobsters, and that means your dinner bill could soar to $60 a plate. Blame robust demand.

The coast-to-coast craze of lobster roll food trucks has made lobster more affordable, and abroad the appetite for the crustaceans is growing as well, experts say.

“The demand for this product now is really unprecedented,” said Annie Tselikis, marketing director for Maine Coast Co., a live lobster wholesaler based in York, Maine. She spoke Monday just before boarding a flight for a seafood trade show in South Korea, a major customer of North American lobsters along with China and others.

Live lobster prices on a wholesale basis reached $8.50 for a 1.25-pound hard-shell lobster in August, the highest level in a decade, according to Urner Barry, a leading seafood price tracker and a partner in Seafood News.

You’d have to go back to 2008 for the last time lobsters were even above $5 for this time of year, said John Sackton, editor and publisher of Seafood News. Since that time they’ve fluctuated between $3.90 and $4.85 until this year when they’re up again over $7.

“Lobster demand usually follows the stock market and general economy,” said Bob Bayer, director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine. “When the economy is good, lobster demand is good.”

Read the full story at CNBC