Saving Seafood

Maine lobstermen figured out how to make more money off their catches

March 27, 2017 — A lobstermen-only fishing organization has purchased a local lobster wholesale business, extending the reach of its members further down the distribution chain and giving them a greater share of the profit off their catch.

The Maine Lobstering Union, formed in 2013 in the wake of a sharp drop in prices paid to lobstermen by dealers, is buying Seal Point Lobster Co., a wholesale lobster distribution firm owned by the Pettegrow family. The Pettegrows also own the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound restaurant, which is not part of the sale.

A representative for the group declined to disclose the sale price, but according to media reports the MLU is paying $4 million for the business.

Joel Pitcher, an organizer with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said the purchase of the wholesale business is in keeping with the mission of the lobstering group, which is to promote and protect the financial interests of lobstermen. Maine Lobstering Union Local 207 is a chartered chapter of IAM.

“It’s about putting lobstermen in a better position in the value stream on the shore side of the industry that they’ve never had access to,” Pitcher said recently.

The sale came about, Pitcher said, after Warren Pettegrow, who oversees the family businesses, started talked to MLU officials about ways that fishermen could secure a greater stake in the industry’s distribution chain. Attempts Thursday and Friday to contact Warren Pettegrow were unsuccessful.

Read the full story at The Bangor Daily News 

Hearing Set for Southern New England Lobster Plan

March 24, 2017 — Interstate fishing managers will hold a public hearing Thursday night in Buzzards Bay on a plan to try and save Southern New England Lobsters. The stock has dwindled as water temperatures have warmed, leading the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to develop a number of proposals to improve the fishery’s health.

The plan includes changing the legal harvesting size limit, reducing the number of traps allowed in the water and implementing new seasonal closures. A public hearing on the matter begins at 6 p.m. at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CapeCod.com 

Lobster exports to China boom

March 24, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — A trade war with China may be somewhere on the horizon, but the Maine lobster industry is hoping that the horizon is a distant one.

According to the figures published by the National Marine Fisheries Service, in 2016 China imported more than $108 million worth of lobsters from the United States. That’s a reported 14-fold jump from 2010, when lobster imports were about $7.4 million.

More than 80 percent of U.S. lobster imported to China comes from Maine.

The price of lobster was high last year, but so was demand. Published trade figures show that, in 2015, China imported about 13 million pounds of lobster from the United States. Last year, imports of American lobster topped 14 million pounds.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Drop in herring a mystery in Maine as bait price booms

March 13, 2017 — ROCKLAND, Maine — Maine’s booming lobster industry has a big problem involving a little fish.

The state’s iconic lobster fishery is healthy, having set records for volume and value in 2016. But the fishery for herring, a small schooling fish that lobsters love to eat, is another story.

Herring is suddenly the second-most valuable fishery in the state, and Maine’s most valuable species of fish, bringing in $19 million at the docks in 2016. It’s also the most popular bait used in lobster traps, and the climb in value corresponds with demand from the hungry lobster fishery and a drop in catch of herring off of New England.

Scientists and fishermen are trying to figure out why Maine’s Atlantic herring catch — the largest in the nation — has fallen from 103.5 million pounds in 2014 to 77.2 million last year. The per-pound price of the fish at the dock has gone up 56 percent since 2014, and that price is eventually borne by people who buy lobsters.

“The whole dynamic of the fishery has changed,” said Jeff Kaelin, who works in government relations for Lund’s Fisheries, which lands herring in Maine.

Kaelin, and others who work in and study the fishery, thinks climate and the way the government manages herring may have played a role in the decline of catch. Atlantic herring are managed via a quota system, and regulators have slashed the quota by more than 40 percent since the early 2000s.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

MAINE: DMR Seeks Input from Eastern Maine Lobster Harvesters Potentially Impacted by Federal Regulations

March 2, 2017 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

The Maine Department of Marine Resources is seeking information from lobster harvesters in eastern Maine who might be impacted by regulations under consideration by the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) which are designed to protect corals in the Gulf of Maine.

Two of the proposed Gulf of Maine coral protection areas are Outer Schoodic Ridge and southwest of Mount Desert Rock. One of the proposed management options is a total ban on fishing. The Department has proposed to exempt the lobster and crab fisheries in these two coral protection areas.

DMR has already provided information to the NEFMC compiled from dealer and harvester landings reports and industry input that gave an estimate of the economic impact of closing these areas as well as the number of potentially impacted boats and harbors.

In January the NEFMC voted that it was too early in the development of the Draft Amendment to consider an exemption and expressed an interest in more data and analyses of the fisheries in these two areas.

DMR is now seeking to gather more in-depth data that can be used to inform the federal regulations. “Maine’s lobster industry provided valuable data when the federal whale rules were developed, which resulted in much better informed regulations,” said Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher.

“The areas under consideration are very important to Maine’s lobster industry and we are again working closely with industry to ensure that these regulations take into account the full impact of these proposed regulations.”

Harvesters who fish in either or both of these areas, are being asked complete a survey, available on the DMR website here. “The survey results will provide the department and NEFMC with data that can demonstrate the impact that these measures would have on the lobster fishery and the Downeast Maine economy,” said Commissioner Keliher.  

There will be an informational session for industry at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum at the Samoset Resort on Saturday morning, March 4, 2017 at 9 am in the Rockport Room.  Industry is invited to learn more about the proposed closures, the timeline for decision-making, and how to participate in the process.

Sen. Whitehouse Mentions RI Fishermen During Pruitt Hearings

January 19, 2017 — WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse quizzed President-elect Trump’s nominee for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency about his support for Rhode Island fishermen.

During Senate hearins today, Whitehouse asked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt if “he would support the fishing and aquaculture industries in the face of climate change, and whether he would protect Rhode Islanders from out-of-state polluters.”

“As we discussed when you and I met, the oceans off our Ocean State are warming due to fossil fuel-driven climate change,” said Whitehouse. “It is crashing our fisheries, like lobster and winter flounder, and making earning a living harder for our fishermen. I see nothing in your career to give those fishermen any confidence that you will care one bit for their well-being, and not just the well-being of the fossil fuel industry.”

Read the full story at Patch Narragansett

Maine fishermen hooked on Obamacare, but now benefits are threatened

January 19, 2017 — Chris Welch, a Kennebunk lobsterman, had never purchased health insurance before the Affordable Care Act started offering individual marketplace insurance in 2013. He’s maintained the benefits ever since, even though as a healthy 28-year-old he doesn’t need to use his insurance that often.

Welch is among the thousands of people who work in Maine’s iconic lobster and fishing industries who could have their ACA insurance taken away if the law is repealed without a comprehensive replacement. Congress has set the wheels in motion to repeal the ACA, and lawmakers are debating whether to immediately replace it, and if so, with what plan. Lawmakers have yet to coalesce around a replacement plan, and the incoming Trump administration has not yet revealed a proposal.

There’s no exact count of how many fishermen or lobstermen have purchased ACA insurance, but U.S. Census data indicate robust enrollment in the industry.

Coastal communities with large numbers of self-employed workers have some of the highest percentages of residents signed up for ACA insurance, according to a ZIP code analysis of 2016 enrollment data from the federal government and workforce data from the U.S. Census.

For instance, on North Haven and Vinalhaven islands, both on the midcoast and known for the lobster industry, 22 percent and 21 percent of the people on each island, respectively, have ACA insurance, among the highest rates in the state. Forty-seven percent of Vinalhaven households include a person who is self-employed, while on North Haven it’s 38 percent, among the highest levels of self-employment in Maine.

Other coastal fishing communities with high ACA enrollment levels include Pemaquid, Round Pond, Beals and Brooklin.

The ACA’s individual marketplace was designed to be a place where those who can’t obtain insurance through an employer – such as a self-employed fisherman or a part-time worker – can purchase subsidized insurance. About 80,000 Mainers have health benefits through the ACA.

“If a repeal happens, it’s going to be a big hurt for these communities,” said Emily Brostek, executive director of Consumers for Affordable Health Care, an Augusta-based health advocacy nonprofit. “These are industries that we care about in Maine, but that don’t traditionally offer medical benefits.”

Congressional Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump have vowed to repeal President Obama’s signature health care legislation, which could leave more than 20 million Americans without insurance, depending on what a replacement bill looks like.

Welch, who has operated his own lobster boat since he was 16, has had health insurance since 2014, seeing it as a way to protect his health and finances.

“I didn’t have insurance prior to the ACA, and I wouldn’t have got it if it weren’t for the ACA,” said Welch, who estimates he pays about $220 a month for the benefits.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald 

Ocean advocates hope Trump takes climate change seriously

December 9, 2016 — LONG BRANCH, N.J. — For Tom Fote, of Toms River, the decline of the lobster industry in New Jersey is proof that ocean warming is having big environmental and economic effects.

“I manage lobsters, and we saw what happened in the last 20 years. We had a huge population of lobster that grew in the Mid-Atlantic. Now it’s starting to collapse,” said Fote, who is one of three New Jersey commissioners on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

He told panelists at the 12th Annual Future of the Ocean Symposium, focused on priorities for the Trump administration and Congress at Monmouth University on Wednesday, that the water off New Jersey has become too warm for lobsters.

Fishermen need help dealing with the effects of climate change on their industry, he said.

Panelists at the symposium included former New Jersey Governor and federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Donald E. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge, Md.

“If I were to say one thing to the incoming administration and to the president-elect, it’s, ‘Listen to your daughter.’ Ivanka believes in climate change,” said Whitman of Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser. “It has real everyday implications to our lives, and to national safety. It is a national security issue.”

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

Marine Scientist Follows Hot Fish as They Move to Cooler Waters

November 30, 2016 — Warming oceans have fish on the move, and one man is in hot pursuit.

That man, Rutgers University marine biologist Malin Pinsky, has tracked fish species all over North American waters to learn where they’re headed in search of cooler conditions.

Recently, he’s seen lobsters nearly disappear from Long Island Sound, driven out by disease and a series of warm summers. The delicacies are thriving in the cooler Gulf of Maine, but that may be temporary: Water temperatures there are rising faster than anywhere else in the North Atlantic. Pinsky has also observed Black sea bass, traditionally plentiful off Virginia, start to relocate to the Gulf of Maine and the waters off the New Jersey coast. And out west, Pacific halibut and arrowtooth flounder in the eastern Bering Sea off Alaska have shifted north toward the Arctic.

“It’s not one species in one place or a few species in a limited area,” Pinsky says of the moving populations. “It’s actually hundreds of species in North America shifting toward cooler waters, and that’s significant.”

The changes pose major questions for fishermen and fishery managers. As species move, will fishermen relocate their businesses to follow? How do fishery managers set rules when fish have moved to new areas where they may be more susceptible to overfishing? And will species such as lionfish, which are invasive in the Atlantic Ocean and thrive in warm Southern waters, suddenly appear in force farther north along the Atlantic coast? Even more confounding is the effect of temperature changes on species such as corals that have difficulty relocating to a more suitable place.

Read the full story at National Geographic

What’s on a real roll? Demand for the Maine lobster

November 25, 2016 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — The demand for lobster is on a roll — often literally. And that is helping to keep the price that Maine lobstermen are getting for their catch near historic highs.

The annual per-pound price first rose above $4 in 2004 and stayed there through 2007, then fell sharply during the recession. In 2015, annual price paid to Maine lobstermen reached $4.09 a pound, the first time it had topped the $4 mark since 2007.

This year, dockside prices for lobster have been close to or above the $4 level throughout the summer and fall, when most lobster is caught and prices usually dip to reflect the ample supply.

The demand for lobster has been buoyed, in part, by the number of casual restaurants that now include it on their menus and by the growing popularity of lobster rolls sold from roadside food trucks, according lobster industry officials.

“No question, more people are offering lobster up and down the [restaurant] hierarchy,” Matt Jacobson, head of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, said. “More awareness and more vendors is great, and drives demand.”

Among the eateries boosting demand for lobster rolls are the Luke’s Lobster chain of restaurants, franchised food trucks, such as Cousins Maine Lobster, and even McDonald’s, which has served lobster rolls at its New England locations the past two summers.

Jim Dow of Bar Harbor, vice president of Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said that, despite the mild weather last winter and warmer-than-usual water in the Gulf of Maine this past spring, there was not a repeat of the glut of new-shell lobster that in 2012 sent prices plummeting to their lowest point in decades.

“We did not get a big burst when the shedders first started” in early summer, Dow said. “They came in, but it was short-lived.”

Dow, who fishes out of Bass Harbor on Mount Desert Island, said that while fisherman in that area have been getting around $4 to $4.50 per pound this fall, the price of bait has been much higher than last year. This year he is paying $45 to $50 per bushel of herring, compared with $25 a year ago.

“Our bait price doubled,” Dow said, adding that fuel prices have stayed relatively low.

Patrice McCarron, executive director of Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said recently that the increase in bait costs could mean that many lobsterman earn less money this year even if their gross revenues rise.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News