Saving Seafood

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 

CONNECTICUT: Beneath the waves, climate change puts marine life on the move

August 29, 2016 — There was a hefty irony to the announcement by Connecticut’s two U.S. senators earlier this summer that they were joining the sponsorship for a National Lobster Day next month.

The iconic symbol of the state’s fishing industry for years, Long Island Sound was once flush with lobster, traps and people who made their livings from them.

But no more.

Connecticut’s lobster landings topped 3.7 million pounds a year, worth $12 million, in the late 1990s, but by 2014 had diminished to about 127,000 pounds worth a little more than $600,000.

Instead of the picture of fishing success, lobster has become the face of climate change in New England: a sentinel of warming water, ocean acidification and other man-made impacts that have sent them and dozens of other marine animals scurrying in search of a more hospitable environment.

“We’ve found quite dramatic shifts in where species are found,” said Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist with the Rutgers University Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources who researches how climate change affects fish and fisheries. He has used data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create OceanAdapt, which includes animations that regionally show how dozens of marine species have moved in the last 50 years. “Especially here in the Northeast you have something like American lobster about 200 miles further north than they used to be, and other species shifting similar amounts.”

Read the full story at the Connecticut Mirror

ASMFC Tautog Board Accepts Regional Assessments for Long Island Sound and New Jersey/New York Bight Management Use

August 3, 2016 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Commission’s Tautog Management Board approved regional stock assessments for Long Island Sound (LIS) and New Jersey-New York Bight (NJ-NYB) for management use. Stock status for both regions was found to be overfished and experiencing overfishing. The assessments were initiated in response to the findings of the 2015 benchmark stock assessment which explored a number of regional breakdowns for management purposes, including the option of: (1) Massachusetts and Rhode Island; (2) Connecticut, New York and New Jersey; and (3) Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. The Board had concerns about the biological implications of grouping LIS with New Jersey ocean waters. The Board requested a new assessment that would explore the population dynamics of the Connecticut, New York and New Jersey region in more detail. The regional assessments propose two additional stock unit boundaries for consideration at a finer regional scale: LIS, which consists of Connecticut and New York waters north of Long Island, and NJ-NYB, which consists of New Jersey and New York waters south of Long Island.

Given approval of the regional assessments by the peer review panel and Management Board, the Tautog Technical Committee will move forward with updating the benchmark stock assessment, including data through 2015 for all four regions for Board review and approval in October. Upon its completion, work on developing a new amendment to the Tautog Fishery Management Plan can begin. The draft amendment will propose a four region management approach: Massachusetts and Rhode Island; Long Island Sound; New Jersey/New York Bight; and Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. It is anticipated a draft for public comment will be presented to the Board for its review and approval in February 2017, with final amendment approval later in the year.

The stock assessments and peer review report, which are combined into one document, will be available on the Commission website on the Tautog page by the end of August.

NEW YORK: Lookout for humpback whales in the Long Island Sound

August 1, 2016 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is asking boaters to be on the lookout for humpback whales in the Long Island Sound, according to a press release.

There have been recent sightings of humpback whales feeding on small fish, possibly menhaden, in the western portion of Long Island Sound, NOAA officials said.

Humpback whales are about 60 feet and weigh nearly 40 tons.

The federal agency is asking boaters to follow safety viewing guidelines, which includes staying 100 feet away from whales.

“Humpbacks create bubble clouds to corral their prey and then lunge through the center to swallow the small fish,” according to the NOAA press release. “Fishermen or boaters in these bubble patches run the risk of colliding with a massive whale as it rapidly approaches the surface.”

Read the full story at The Suffolk Times

NEW YORK: Why Are Less-Likely Species Appearing in Long Island Sound?

July 29, 2016 — What makes any species on Earth seek greener horizons? A disaster. Lack of food or water. An unsuitable change in habitat. With people, it’s sometimes the drive to merely explore. With wildlife, though, it usually boils down to survival.

Every day, there is a change occurring somewhere on this planet. It might be imperceptible to the naked eye or it might be as obvious as an earthquake or a volcano. When a change does takes place, there isn’t just one occurrence, but rather, an accompanying domino effect. The effects might be felt instantly or they may take centuries to get noticed.

We’ve seen Long Island Sound and its tributaries fall from a rich, prolific waterway to the compromised body of water left in the wake of the early industrial era. From that, we’ve learned a valuable lesson and today we see the results of a Herculean restoration effort. Many of our fisheries that had been reduced by cataclysmic proportions have rebounded or are in the process of rebounding. Some, like our river herring, are still struggling.

Very often, some sort of over-fishing is the culprit. In some cases, a die-off can be attributed to reducing a stock. For the most part, what we are seeing along the Atlantic coast and in the Sound is a change in water temperature. As a result, the Sound is attracting more food, such as schools of menhaden, squid, butterfish, spearing, and shrimp. That increase in forage, coupled with higher water temperatures, brings in more southern and mid-Atlantic species of fish, as well as northern migrants that now take a detour into the Big Pond as they perhaps once did in the past.

Read the full story at zip06.com

Whales popping up in Long Island Sound for second year

July 26, 2016 — NORWALK, Conn. — For the second year in a row, whales have been spotted in the Long Island Sound, with sightings all the way in near Fairfield County. But why?

According to Joe Schnierlein, with the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, “They’re here for food. This is a smorgasbord for them.”

He’s referring to a fish called menhaden, also known as buffers.

“Right now, the entire western end of the Sound is loaded with them,” Schnierlein explained.

Read and watch the full story at FOX 61

Endangered Atlantic sturgeon find a new nursery in the Connecticut River

July 20, 2016 — OLD LYME, Conn. — Though facing extinction after 70 million years of existence, Atlantic sturgeon apparently aren’t done looking for new ways to adapt and survive.

“They’re really amazing fish,” Isaac Wirgin, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at New York University’s School of Medicine, said Monday. “This was really an unexpected result.”

The result he was referring to was the outcome of genetic tests he completed last fall on tissue samples from some 6-inch, 1-year-old Atlantic sturgeon caught in the lower Connecticut River in 2014.

Tom Savoy, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection who’s been researching Atlantic sturgeon in Long Island Sound for more than 20 years, caught the small fish while sampling with nets in the river for a related species — the short-nosed sturgeon — and knew right away he’d found something unique.

Based on their size, they had to have been born in the river.

“Prior to that, we assumed the breeding population had been extirpated in Connecticut,” said Savoy, who works out of DEEP’s Marine Headquarters on Ferry Road.

“But the great news is, evidently they are spawning in the Connecticut River,” he said. “Now, because they’re a federally protected species, the state is obligated to learn more. We need to know where they are, and how many there are.”

The ancient species, which supplied the caviar that became one of the first exports from the colonies, was declared a federally endangered species in 2012.

Living up to 70 years and growing up to 400 pounds, adult Atlantic sturgeon were popular fish for Native Americans and the European settlers who came after them.

“By the 1800s, about 75 percent of the stocks on the East Coast were wiped out,” Savoy said.

Since receiving endangered species status, more researchers have been looking for — and finding — Atlantic sturgeon in rivers and estuaries along the Atlantic coast, with the Hudson River population standing out as the most robust, Wirgin said.

Read the full story at The Day

Exactly where do Maine lobstermen find their catch? Hard to say

July 13, 2016 — It is the state’s largest fishery, bringing in more than $500 million a year and employing tens of thousands of people up and down the supply chain, but there is no map that shows exactly where Maine’s lobstermen trap their catch.

Most of them fish within 3 miles of the coast, and thus do not fill out detailed federal catch reports or have onboard satellite tracking systems that lend themselves to detailed maps of valuable fishing territories.

That suits many lobstermen just fine, because they say their territory changes from year to year and they don’t like the notion of the government tracking where they fish. But that attitude makes life difficult for regulatory agencies responsible for permitting non-fishing activities in the Gulf of Maine, such as wind farms or mining operations.

The lack of detailed, up-to-date maps of lobster fishing grounds is obvious when reviewing the hundreds of maps collected by the Northeast Regional Planning Body, the federal planning body that is overseeing the nation’s regional ocean planning from the Gulf of Maine to Long Island Sound. The council is building a trove of online data, maps and information tracking a wide range of coastal and marine activities, from popular cruise ship routes to protected marine mammal habitats to public beaches and beach restoration projects.

Trying to fill the information gap

The data portal has maps that paint a detailed picture of other fisheries, with current and historical views of the number of fishermen who work any given area for each species of groundfish and how much they are catching in each area. But the information about lobstering is limited to a few lobster biomass maps and management area maps.

The Island Institute, a nonprofit group out of Rockland that represents the interests of Maine’s island and more remote coastal communities, is trying to step up to fill that gap, if not with maps, then with voices from the lobstering industry.

The group has issued a report on the “spatial characterization” of the lobster fishery, which is government-speak for what a map of the lobster industry would look like if such a map existed, said Nick Battista, marine programs director for the institute and part of the team that produced the report.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Long Island Sound Fishing Entangled In Conflicting Multi-State Regulations

June 22, 2016 — WESTBROOK, Conn. — There’s a joke among Connecticut anglers that the first thing you really need for a Long Island Sound fishing trip is a lawyer: Catching the wrong fish at the wrong time in the wrong waters could land you in a tangle of legal trouble.

Let’s say you were fishing in the Sound in early June, believing you were in Connecticut waters where the black bass season began on May 1. If you hooked a good one but had drifted over the mid-Sound state line into New York’s jurisdiction, you’d have been in violation. New York’s black bass season doesn’t start until June 27.

“You move 100 feet this way, and you could be over the line,” Jack Conway Jr., a longtime Connecticut fisherman who has frequently served on state and regional fishing regulatory panels, explained last week.

Conway and his 81-year-old father, Jack Conway Sr., had just returned from a successful black sea bass fishing trip into the Sound with Bill Kokis, owner of Westbrook’s Marshview Marina.

Read the full story at the Hartford Courant

As Long Island Sound warms, its fish species are changing

June 13, 2016 — During a day of fishing on Long Island Sound earlier this month, Richie Nickerson of Niantic caught 10 legal-sized scup, a black sea bass and a northern kingfish — all species he wasn’t likely to land when he first started angling in these waters 30 years ago.

Tony Murphy of Berlin, who fished from the Black Hawk charter boat with Nickerson, also reeled in a haul of scup, also called porgies, as did most of the other 38 fishermen on board that day.

“It used to be we’d strictly catch bluefish and striped bass,” Murphy said. “But now, there are just so many porgies.”

Scup, black sea bass and northern kingfish are just three of the species once more prevalent in warmer mid-Atlantic waters that are now becoming abundant in Long Island Sound.

As the warmer-water species move in, they compete for food and habitat with cold-water species, such as winter flounder and cod, that are now becoming scarce.

“Everything’s changing,” said Greg Dubrule, owner and captain of the Black Hawk, which takes daily boatloads of anglers into the Sound from its docks on the Niantic River.

“There’s no question that, because of the warmer water, we’re seeing more scup and black sea bass, which had always been a New Jersey and southern Long Island fish,” he said.

“Our mainstay used to be winter flounder and cod, but now it’s sea bass, scup and fluke,” he added, “and we’re catching a lot of trigger fish, which we never used to see.”

Read the full story at The Day