Saving Seafood

ROB MOIR: The Monument Watch and How Trump Took the Bait to Strengthen Protections of Atlantic Ocean Realm

June 16, 2020 — The trap had been set up by boisterous environmental groups arguing with fishermen. Not seeing the forest for the trees, or rather the school for the fish, President Trump stepped squarely into it. He opened the Northeast Canyons and Seamount Marine National Monument to commercial fishing while strengthening protections of the ocean park area.

Deeply unfair, it’s a terrible thing, said the president addressing fishermen in Bangor. A representative of the Maine Lobstermen’s Union said he was “a little disappointed” so much time was spent on a monument that “has nothing to do with Maine.” The monument is 140 miles Southeast of Nantucket. Of greater interest are the millions of dollars lost in lobster exports due to the China tariffs. A hardship they hold Trump responsible for.

Lobstermen sued the government while continuing to work the resource. Just when the window for lobstering by the fourteen vessels was closing, Trump decreed they may continue. He maintained the status quo. The actually taking of fish is directed by the National Marine Fisheries Service with advice from the fishery councils. The quotas for catching fish or lobsters did not change, just the rhetoric.

Trump spared the NE Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument the damage he inflicted on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Here, Trump took away from native American tribal nations, the twin buttes of sacred lands packed with ancestral Pueblo artifacts. He made these lands available, for a price, to cattle, mining, oil and gas drilling. The monument was broken into two parts. Bears Ears National Monument was reduced by 85%, down from 1.35-million acres. Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument was reduced to nearly half the size, down from 1.88-million acres. The resulting monuments now have a combined area of 201,876 acres. This is a reduction of 85% of monument acres.

Read the full opinion piece at Medium

China unlikely to consider lowering of lobster tariffs, despite Trump’s threat

June 11, 2020 — On Friday, 5 June, at a meeting with commercial lobstermen from the U.S. state of Maine, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on imported Chinese and European Union goods if they did not eliminate their tariffs on U.S. lobsters.

At the meeting, Trump appointed U.S. Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro the task of identifying additional Chinese and European products to hit with tariffs as a means of pressuring Beijing to eliminate all tariffs on American lobsters.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Judge: NOAA Violated Endangered Species Act By Allowing Lobster Traps That Threaten Right Whales

April 10, 2020 — A federal judge ruled Thursday that federal fisheries regulators are illegally allowing lobster traps that pose a threat to the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

U.S. District Judge James Boasburg says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration violated the Endangered Species Act by authorizing the lobster fishery without appropriate attention to its impact on the whales.

Specifically, he faults the feds for failing to produce an assessment of the potential that whales will be entangled in lobster trap rope and face injury and death.

Read the full story at Maine Public

University of New England Shares NSF Grant on Lobsters and Climate Change

April 7, 2020 — A study on how warming ocean water impacts the early life stages of lobster will bring together two undergraduate colleges, a premier research institution, and a state agency.

The University of New England applied for the $860,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and intends to share it with Hood College in Maryland, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, and the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Coronavirus outbreak is sinking lobster prices, reports claim

March 13, 2020 — Bring in the dancing lobsters, and get ‘em while they’re hot.

The ongoing coronavirus outbreak is drowning Chinese demand for American lobster, reportedly plunging market prices to record lows.

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, lobster prices in the U.S. have hit their lowest in at least four years, Bloomberg reports. China is one of the biggest export destinations for live lobster, where the delicacy is “a sign of wealth and status” among the middle class, as well as a popular choice for Lunar New Year celebrations and weddings as a “symbol of good fortune,” according to The New York Times.

However, no one is quite indulging like they used to during widespread lockdowns and the continued outbreak. Travel restrictions, too, have effectively canceled the once-frequent charter flights of the crustaceans from the U.S. and Canada to the Asian nation.

Read the full story at Fox News

Mysterious Lobster Deaths In Cape Cod Raise Climate Change Concern

October 24, 2019 — Last month, lobstermen in Cape Cod Bay hauled up something disturbing. In one section of the bay, all of their traps were full of dead lobsters. Research biologists went to work trying to solve the mystery, and what they found suggests we may see more of this as the climate changes.

When the fishermen first started pulling up traps full of dead lobsters, their first call was to Beth Casoni of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association.

“As you can imagine, they were concerned — greatly concerned — because they didn’t know how they died or why they died,” Casoni said.

Over the next five days or so, she got more calls about dead animals in the traps.

“And it wasn’t just lobsters,” she said. “It was skate and flounder and ling, which is an eel.”

Casoni called the state Division of Marine Fisheries, which sent divers out to take a look at the seafloor in the area.

“The fishermen were fearful that there would have been a mass die-off and the bottom would be littered with carnage,” Casoni said. “And the division was happy to report that they did not see any mass die-off in the area.”

Read the full story at WGBH

FLORIDA: Commercial lobster boats can have undersized lobster onboard. But not this many, police said

October 11, 2019 — A Keys fisherman was jailed Wednesday after police said his commercial boat, called “That’s Right,” had more undersized lobsters than he was allowed to keep on his boat temporarily.

Kent Alexander Quinn Downs, 33, of Marathon, was arrested on a felony charge of destroying evidence, and misdemeanor charges of interference with an officer and 11 counts of possession of undersized lobster.

Quinn Downs on Thursday remained at the Marathon jail without bond. He has a court date set for Oct. 24.

At about 1:45 p.m., a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Officer Joshua Peters was patrolling the East Bahia Honda Channel off Big Pine Key and stopped the lobster boat for a marine inspection.

Read the full story at The Miami Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: Lobsters, fish fall victim to low oxygen levels in Cape Cod Bay

October 4, 2019 — Two weeks ago, lobstermen working off Scorton Creek started seeing something they had never experienced. Lobsters, in fact everything in their traps, were coming up dead.

Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries senior biologist Robert Glenn started fielding phone calls from puzzled fishermen Sept. 23. The fishermen were worried there might be something in the water that was killing the lobsters, fish, shellfish, even sea worms.

It turns out, it was something missing from the water: oxygen.

For the past two weeks, division researchers and scientists from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown have boarded vessels and taken water samples, gathered temperature data at various depths and measured the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Preliminary results from testing on dozens of dead lobsters found nothing toxic in the water that could have killed them, and the focus was on a phenomenon that occurs every year — low oxygen in the layer of water along the ocean bottom, Glenn said.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Truro lobsterman says rules to protect right whales costly to his business

September 30, 2019 — Cheryl Souza is ending her lobster sales after October.

But third-generation lobsterman Billy Souza, as it turns out, is considering quitting as well.

“It’s all the whale issues,” Souza said. Unlike the lobstering in the days of Souza’s grandfather, Frank Souza, and his father, William Souza, the current generation fishing off Cape Cod is under an intense and unique scrutiny. That scrutiny is directly linked to the increasing focus by federal and state regulators on imperiled North Atlantic right whales, which are dying or suffering debilitating injuries due to entanglement in fishing rope.

“We have the whale watch boats here, and we have the Division of Marine Fisheries that does flyovers all the time,” said Souza, 66. “The whales could get entangled anywhere in the world, but there’s so many eyes on them here it looks like we’re the bad guys and we’re not.” On any given early spring day, at least two to three right whale research vessels can be found in Cape Cod Bay, where the whales feed through May and then migrate northward to Canadian waters.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

MAINE: Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve gets grant for lobster research

September 13, 2019 — The Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve will receive about $250,000 over two years to study how warming coastal waters are affecting lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, the National Sea Grant Office has announced.

The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most waters around the world.

Since lobsters thrive in cold water, this warming trend has raised concerns about the future of the Gulf’s lobster fishery. Southern New England has already seen dramatic declines in lobster counts and the fishery there is in jeopardy.

“Lobsters prefer cold water and will move to deeper, offshore areas to find it,” said Jason Goldstein, research director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. “We plan to discover how the inshore and offshore movements of female lobsters are affected by warming waters, and whether their young can settle and grow in shallow nursery habitats as coastal waters become warmer.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald