Saving Seafood

Black sea bass gobbling up lobsters

March 12, 2019 — Black sea bass, a saltwater fish taken commercially and recreationally in Massachusetts, have increased in number throughout southern New England waters and rattled the lobster industry with their wolfish appetites.

“They feed aggressively,” Rutgers University marine biologist Olaf Jensen said. “They’re not picky eaters. If it’s the right size and it’s alive, they’ll eat it.”

The young of New England’s iconic crustacean fall into the right size category. “Black sea bass love little lobsters,” Michael Armstrong, assistant director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said.

That’s of deep concern to Beth Casoni, president of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, who says lobster traps are being pillaged by these fish. They are often hauled up with the bass inside the traps, alongside lobsters they couldn’t fit in their mouths, she said. Even more concerning to Casoni is their alleged habit of picking off undersize lobsters tossed overboard by lobstermen.

Read the full story at The Martha’s Vineyard Times 

MSC delivers a pinch to Canada’s snow crab fishery

March 6, 2019 — Canada’s snow crab fishery is looking ahead at another year without its Marine Stewardship Council certification, but the real risk may be at the hands of the ecolabel.

Last March, the MSC scrambled to suspend its certification of Eastern Canada’s snow crab fishery after a high rate of right whale entanglements and deaths traced back to the fishery in 2017.

What happened next was a little surprising — the lack of a label didn’t have much effect on prices. Despite a buoyant market, Canada’s fixed-gear fleets as well as federal and provincial managers set about on an international mission to work with their neighbors to the south who have long been fighting the good fight to reduce right whale interactions.

Maine’s lobster fishery has been at the forefront of gear innovations to coexist with right whale migratory and feeding patterns. Ten years ago, the fleet made an expensive conversion to sinking groundline instead of using floating rope between pots on a trawl. But the population of an estimated 411 right whales has been expanding its territory into Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, where regulations haven’t been as robust.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Gulf of Maine Research Institute receives $790K grant to study impact of warming ocean on key species

March 6, 2019 — The National Science Foundation awarded the Gulf of Maine Research Institute a $789,659 grant to examine the impact of a warming climate on growth and population patterns in cod and lobster in the Gulf of Maine.

The study will also document marine habitat shifts across the northwest Atlantic caused by rising temperatures, according to a March 4 news release issued jointly by the offices of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Angus King, I-Maine.

The funding will aid the institute in its work to better understand and mitigate the impacts of changing ocean conditions on Maine communities, marine ecosystems and economy, King and Collins said in the release.

The grant was awarded through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

Read the full story at Mainebiz

 

Atlantic Lobster Board Moves Toward Reducing Rope In Effort To Save Right Whales

February 6, 2019 — A consortium of Atlantic states fisheries managers is calling for broad changes to the gear lobstermen use, in an effort to reduce risks posed to the endangered North Atlantic right whale and to ward off potential federal action that could be even more challenging for the industry.

There are roughly 410 right whales left in the world, and they are at risk of potentially fatal entanglements with vertical rope lines lobstermen and other marine harvesters use to position and haul their traps. At a meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council in Virginia, its lobster board voted unanimously to set in motion the process that could lead to major changes in the East Coast’s lobster industry.

“I don’t want NOAA making decisions on what this lobster fishery is going to look like in the future,” says Patrick Keliher, commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources for Maine, home to the country’s dominant lobster fishery, which landed some 110 million pounds of lobster in 2017 worth more than $450 million at the dock.

Keliher says that the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration is developing a “biological opinion” that could include a formal “jeopardy” finding for the right whales, which under the federal Endangered Species Act could lead to severe restrictions on the state’s harvest.

Read and listen to the full story at Maine Public

 

‘Lobster-Whale Work Group’ Faces Complicated Balancing Act As It Works To Protect Right Whales

February 1, 2019 — Fisheries’ managers in the Atlantic states are considering a more proactive approach to regulating the lobster industry in order to reduce risks it may pose for the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Under pressure from lawsuits and the requirements of the federal Endangered Species Act, the federal government is closely reviewing the health of the right whale population, which is hovering around 410 animals. The result could be the imposition of new gear and other restrictions to reduce the risk of whale entanglement with the rope lobstermen use to position and haul their traps.

That process was slowed by the recent government shutdown and, in the meantime, a new “Lobster-Whale Work Group,” made up of state officials in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, has proposed a slate of possible actions with the dual goals of protecting the whales and the “viability and culture of the lobster fishery.”

“We’re doing everything we can to appease the people who think it may be us,” says Stephen Train, a lobsterman in Long Island, Maine.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Feds: US fishermen had good year aided by lobsters, scallops

December 14, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — U.S. commercial fishing generated more than $144 billion in sales in 2016, buoyed by growth in key species such as sea scallops and American lobsters, the federal government reported on Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the total of $144.3 billion in sales from commercial fishing in 2016 was up about $100 million from the previous year. The agency released the figure as part of its annual Fisheries Economics of the United States report, one of two reports about the health of fisheries that came out on Thursday.

The economics report states that the industry was boosted by growth in value of some economically critical species, also including shrimp, but other big-money species such as Alaska pollock and pacific salmon were down from the previous year.

The report shows U.S. fisheries holding steady, and continuing to play a critical role in the economies of states from Maine to California, said Ned Cyr, director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

Ocean Shock: Lobster’s Great Migration Sets Up Boom and Bust

October 31, 2018 — STONINGTON, Maine — This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

A lobster tattoo covers Drew Eaton’s left forearm, its pincers snapping at dock lines connecting it to the American flag on his upper arm. The tattoo is about three-quarters done, but the 27-year-old is too busy with his new boat to finish it.

Eaton knows what people here in Stonington have been saying about how much the boat cost him.

“I’ve heard rumors all over town. Small town, everyone talks,” he says. “I’ve heard a million, two million.”

By the time he was in the third grade, Eaton was already lobstering here on Deer Isle in Downeast Maine. By the time he was in the eighth grade, he’d bought his first boat, a 20-footer, from a family friend. The latest one, a 46-footer built over the winter at a nearby boatyard, is his fourth.

Standing on the seawall after hauling lobster traps for about 12 hours on a foggy day this August, he says he’s making plenty of money to cover the boat loan. He’s unloaded 17 crates, each carrying 90 pounds of lobster, for a total haul of nearly $5,500. It’s a pretty typical day for him.

Eaton belongs to a new generation of Maine lobstermen that’s riding high, for now, on a sweet spot of climate change. Two generations ago, the entire New England coast had a thriving lobster industry. Today, lobster catches have collapsed in southern New England, and the only state with a significant harvest is north in Maine, where the seafood practically synonymous with the state has exploded.

The thriving crustaceans have created a kind of nautical gold rush, with some young lobstermen making well into six figures a year. But it’s a boom with a bust already written in its wake, and the lobstermen of the younger generation may well pay the highest price. Not only have they heavily mortgaged themselves with pricey custom boats in the rush for quick profits, they’ll also bear the brunt of climate change — not to mention the possible collapse of the lobstering industry in Maine as the creatures flourish ever northward.

Shifts by 85 percent of species

In the U.S. North Atlantic, fisheries data show that at least 85 percent of the nearly 70 federally tracked species have shifted north or deeper, or both, in recent years when compared with the norm over the past half-century. And the most dramatic of species shifts have occurred in the last 10 or 15 years.

Just in the last decade, for example, black sea bass have migrated up the East Coast into southern New England and are caught in the same traps that once caught lobsters. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, only 50 percent of lobster caught in the United States came from Maine. That started to shift in the 2000s, and this decade, nearly 85 percent of all lobster landings are in Maine.

Read the full story at VOA News

NOAA scientists admit a gaffe on risk to whales of lobster trap lines

October 29, 2018 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Late last month, the NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center released a “technical memorandum” suggesting that expensive efforts by Maine lobstermen aimed at reducing the risk that endangered North Atlantic right whales and other large whales would become entangled in vertical buoy lines had backfired.

According to the memorandum, issued just before a weeklong meeting of NOAA’s Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team in Providence, R.I., to consider possible changes to the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan, when the industry increased the number of traps trawled together and marked by a single buoy line, lobstermen began using stronger rope. That worsened the entanglement problem.

The memorandum seemed to offer support for calls by some conservation groups for the use of even fewer vertical buoy lines, weaker ropes and the development of a “ropeless fishery” with traps that used a remote device to release a submerged buoy when it was time to raise the gear.

In a letter addressed to NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center Director Jon Hare, Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher blasted the memorandum, expressing “significant concerns about the scientific merit” of the data and research on which it was based.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

 

Whale protection, trawl limits entangle Maine lobstermen

October 10, 2018 — DEER ISLE, Maine — October is a peak month, according to the state Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, for feistiness in Maine’s population of hornets and wasps. Lobstermen too, judging by last week’s meeting of the Zone C Lobster Management Council at Deer Isle-Stonington High School.

The principal irritant is the still-simmering conflict over a rule adopted by DMR at the beginning of August establishing a five-trap maximum trawl limit for a 60-square-mile rectangle centered, more or less, on Mount Desert Rock.

The trawl limit was proposed by the Zone B management council last winter. The problem is that much of the western part of that area is fished by lobstermen based in Zone C — primarily Stonington and Deer Isle — who bitterly opposed adoption of a rule that Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher called “one of the more difficult decisions that I have made.”

Last week, the Zone C council reviewed a proposed rule change that would eliminate the five-trap maximum in a large area west of Mount Desert Rock. While that might improve the situation for some Zone C lobstermen, the underlying problem reflects unhappiness on the part of lobstermen from Zone B, with limited entry for new fishermen, over the number of lobstermen from Zone C who fish across the zone line in waters they fished before the zones were ever established.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

 

What can baby lobsters tell us about the future of Maine’s $1 billion fishery?

October 10, 2018 — The woman sitting on the bench above Peaks Island’s Spar Cove trained her binoculars on Curt Brown’s lobsterboat as it rocked in big swells a half-mile or so offshore. What was she thinking as she saw two men heave what appeared to be two very shallow, very heavy lobster traps onto the gunwale, then shove them into the sea? Did she wonder what they could possibly hope to catch with those stunted little lobster pots? Stunted little lobsters?

Well, yes, sort of. The men were researchers, and they were after baby lobsters, which on that steamy, late-June morning were feathery, newly hatched creatures no bigger than mosquitoes floating somewhere just below the ocean’s surface. As the wire crates sank beneath a bobbing white buoy, Brown plowed the boat forward and called out the location’s coordinates and depth, which University of Maine School of Marine Sciences professor Richard Wahle recorded in a notebook, next to the crate’s tag number. Meanwhile, Wahle’s research associate, Bill Favitta, and grad student Carl Huntsberger lifted two more crates onto the gunwale, readying them for the next drop. The team would repeat the routine 60 times over the next two days as it worked its way offshore to depths of 40 fathoms (or 240 feet).

This is a critical moment for research in Maine’s lobster fishery, which contributes more than $1 billion annually to the state’s economy and generates hundreds of jobs. After more than 30 years of ever-increasing landings — including dramatic, record-breaking surges in the last decade — the catch plunged 16 percent in 2017, and scientists and fishermen are concerned that it may prove to be a grim turning point. “A lot of the work we’re doing is trying to understand how environmental and fishing pressures are influencing trends in the abundance of lobsters, both geographically and over time,” says Wahle. A marine ecologist working at the intersection of fishery science, marine biology, and oceanography, he’s been studying lobsters around the world for 30 years.

Read the full story at Down East Magazine