Saving Seafood

Groups Praise Oliver as likely NMFS assistant administrator

May 19, 2017 — Pacific Seafood, fishing organizations and other groups, praised the likely appointment of Chris Oliver, executive director of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, as the next assistant administrator for Fisheries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States.

Oliver, who was championed for the position by major U.S. seafood processors and organizations, confirmed the appointment in an email to SeafoodSource, which was also sent to his staff members.

“I have been contacted by the Department of Commerce, offered the position, and have accepted the position, with a tentative start date of June 19,” Oliver wrote.

However, Oliver stressed that the appointment is not final yet, since it is still subject to the White House vetting and approval process.

“I, and Commerce, would have preferred to keep this information close hold until the full appointment process is indeed finalized; but, given the timing involved, and the necessary transitional aspects involved, I feel it is incumbent upon me to let everyone know the status of this,” he said.

Oliver has served as the executive director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council for the past 16 years. Prior to serving as executive director, Oliver also worked as the deputy director of the council and as Gulf of Alaska Fishery Management Plan Coordinator.

Since January, Pacific Seafoods, American Seafoods Company, other processors, and several fishing groups, have pushed for Oliver’s appointment. Other candidates for the job included LaDon Swann with the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium and Robert Barham, who previously served as wildlife and fisheries secretary in Louisiana.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

GOP lawmakers to Trump administration: Fix red snapper season

May 16, 2017 — Five southern Republican lawmakers are calling on U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to extend the number of days for this year’s recreational red snapper season.

Among those signing a letter sent to Ross on Monday is U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Fairhope, who calls the current three-day recreational season as “simply not acceptable.”

The season is scheduled to run from June 1-3. It makes it the shortest recreational season ever for red snapper fishing in the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters.

“Anyone who knows anything about Gulf Coast fisheries would agree that the red snapper fishery is incredibly healthy,” Byrne said.

The letter was signed by Byrne and fellow U.S. House members – John Carter and Randy Weber of Texas, Garret Graves of Louisiana and Steven Palazzo of Mississippi.

“We feel re-evaluating your agency’s decision for the 2017 seasons is warranted, and we urge you to continue working with us to develop a long-term solution to address these issues impacting our recreational fishermen and coastal communities,” the letter states.

Read the full story at AL.com

Pilot program would give Louisiana control of red snapper stocks for three years

May 8, 2017 — The head of the Fisheries Division of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries on Thursday told the board that regulates his agency he’s optimistic Louisiana may get to manage red snapper in federal waters off the state’s coast in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Patrick Banks updated the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission about a proposal he made to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council that would establish a pilot program allowing Louisiana to manage red-snapper stocks in both state and federal waters off its coast for three years. By an 11 to 5 vote, the council approved the proposal, which gives Louisiana the go-ahead to flesh it out into an actual amendment that would ultimately need to be approved by the advisory panel.

“It’s not everything we want, but it’s certainly a better ride than what we’ve got right now,” Banks told the commission.

Details of the plan must still be worked out, and Banks said it’s possible the council will alter the ultimate amendment so much it will look nothing like what’s originally proposed. But his intention is to allow Louisiana to set seasons and regulations out to 200 nautical miles off the coast during the three years of the pilot program to demonstrate how regional management might work.

Banks cautioned, however, that wouldn’t mean a 365-day season with high daily limits.

Under the proposal, state anglers would get access to Louisiana’s historical catch, which is 15.8 percent of the total Gulf recreational red snapper quota. Based on current numbers, that would be about 1.1 million pounds of red snapper.

Since more waters would be open to anglers from the Texas to Mississippi state lines, Louisiana’s share of the quota would be much more quickly reached than under the current management regimen. In 2016, the federal season was only 11 days, but state waters were open to red snapper harvest for nearly nine months.

Read the full story at the Times-Picayune

Three Contenders Emerge to Lead Fisheries Service

May 5, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS [E&E News] — A former Louisiana official, an Alaskan fishery manager and a Sea Grant program director are reportedly in the running to head the National Marine Fisheries Service.

NMFS — an agency within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — oversees fishing regulations, endangered species listings and fisheries research. It is headed by an assistant administrator for fisheries, a position that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross can fill without Senate confirmation.

It’s unclear when Ross — or the White House — will make that decision. But three names have popped up as contenders, according to several sources inside and outside the agency: Robert Barham, Chris Oliver and LaDon Swann.

Barham was once Louisiana’s wildlife and fisheries secretary, Oliver heads the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and Swann is the director of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium.

Fishermen are split in their support.

Robert Barham

Barham served as wildlife and fisheries secretary under former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). Some recreational fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico — as well as the shrimp and menhaden industry — recently sent letters to Ross emphasizing Barham’s Louisiana experience and his identity as a hunter and fisherman.

“We have had the opportunity to work with Mr. Barham over the years and … it is evident that he possesses the management ability and understanding of the nuances of maintaining sustainable fish populations, while maximizing their economic value,” wrote officials from Omega Protein Corp. and other companies that harvest menhaden, a tiny forage fish used in fish oil.

Some Gulf of Mexico anglers have also tried to propel Barham to the NMFS spot, with the hope that he will come down on their side in the controversy over red snapper quotas. The debate has made its way to Capitol Hill, with some Republicans newly enraged by this year’s three-day recreational fishing season.

In a Facebook post shared among anglers, fisherman Steve Hoyland Jr. provided a form letter to send to Ross that praised Barham’s ability to “manage the public’s fish and wildlife resources in a manner that balances conservation and access.”

“If Robert Barham could get this position, it would totally change how our fishery is managed,” Hoyland wrote in one post. “THIS MAN IS ON OUR SIDE!!! We need him in this seat.”

Barnum’s tenure at the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries was marred after auditors found questionable spending between 2010 and 2015. A report from the state legislative auditor found, among other things, that the department spent some Gulf oil spill recovery money on boats, cameras, iPads, clothing and “an abundance of fishing and water sports equipment.”

The money was part of $10.5 million BP PLC provided for a seafood safety program to test fish. According to the Associated Press, Barnum has said the program came in under budget and properly tested fish. He has also emphasized that it wasn’t a taxpayer-funded program.

Chris Oliver

Oliver is the longtime executive director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is based in Anchorage, Alaska. Commercial and charter boat fishermen have endorsed him as an experienced leader, with groups from New England, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico sending letters of support to the Commerce Department.

Most recently, the Gulf Seafood Institute, the Louisiana Restaurant Association, the Charter Fisherman’s Association and similar groups wrote in an April letter to Ross that Oliver “has proven to be a motivated and talented leader with a passion for bridging divides among diverse fishing interest in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.”

Oliver has helmed the fishery council for 16 years. In an interview with the Alaska Journal of Commerce earlier this year, he said he would be “inclined” to take the NMFS job if asked.

“There’s no guarantee … that I would say yes if they offered it to me,” he told the newspaper. “But I’ve got a lot of people who’ve expended a lot of effort, and my understanding is I’ve got a pretty strong backing from our congressional delegation.”

Oliver began at the council in 1990 as a plan coordinator. He is from Texas and worked on Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery management issues, according to his biography on the council’s website. He has advocated for a more regional approach to fishery management.

Several council decisions in recent years have been reversed by the courts. Last year, for example, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2011 decision to remove an Alaskan salmon fishery from federal oversight. Fishing groups won a lawsuit in 2012 to overturn the council’s fishing closures to protect Steller sea lions.

LaDon Swann

Swann directs one of 33 Sea Grant programs President Trump has proposed eliminating, citing its primary benefit to “industry and state and local stakeholders.”

Congress appears unlikely to follow through with that suggestion; an omnibus spending package slated to pass this week preserves the popular program. And Swann — who has also worked at the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program — is reportedly the pick of some Alabama lawmakers who see him as a good fit for NMFS.

In his position at Sea Grant, Swann must help coastal communities become resilient without stirring up debate about climate change. He recently told ProPublica that the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium is “a neutral broker of science information” that is there to give communities the data — not persuade them of the link between climate change and coastal hazards.

Swann is also a recreational fisherman. A 2015 al.com article detailed his record-breaking catch of a 94-pound cubera snapper.

Swann, who has a master’s in fisheries biology and a Ph.D. in curriculum, is also former president of the United States Aquaculture Society. In recent years, NMFS has attempted to promote sustainable aquaculture as a way forward for the increasing demands for seafood.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

LOUISIANA: Spring shrimp season to open Monday

May 5, 2017 — Local shrimpers can return to inshore waters at 6 a.m. Monday when the spring shrimp season begins.

The Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission today set the opening dates of the season based on data provided by its biologists and public comments.

The middle of the state, which includes the Terrebonne and Barataria basins, will be the first to open.

“If you look at Barataria and Terrebonne basins, they account for about 80 percent of brown shrimp landings,” said LDWF biologist Jeff Marx. “The next 10 percent is from Pontchartrain, a little bit from the Mississippi River Delta and very small amounts in the Atchafalaya, Vermilion and Calcasieu” basins.

Following the opening of Zone 2, which stretches from the western shore of the Vermilion Bay to the eastern shore of the mouth of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, the rest of the state will open at 6 a.m. May 15.

Marx recommended to the LDWF board that the season should begin next week because of favorable conditions for shrimp this year. All of the shrimpers agreed with Marx and said opening the season next week was the right option. Some shrimpers said the season should have opened earlier.

“I was here at the last meeting in April, they had a bunch of guys that wanted to wait,” said John Brown, a shrimper from Barataria. “I think the shrimp season should’ve opened in April.”

Read the full story at Houma Today 

The tide is changing for offshore aquaculture

May 4, 2017 — Harlon Pearce walks muck-booted past processors gutting wild drum and red snapper to showcase a half-full new 5,000-square-foot freezer he hopes someday will house a fresh boom of marine fish. Harlon’s LA Fish sits just across the railroad tracks from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, perfectly positioned to ship fish out of Louisiana.

As president of the New Orleans–based Gulf Seafood Institute, seafood supplier Pearce is a big fish himself in these parts, connected to fishermen, federal agencies, restaurateurs and even the oil industry. He knows better than anyone that wild fisheries alone can’t supply U.S. consumers’ growing demand for fish. Which is why he’s doing his best to bring everyone to the table to achieve one goal: farming the Gulf of Mexico.

No commercial finfish operations are in U.S. federal waters, between 3 and 200 miles offshore. Pearce and others are convinced that jumping into the rapidly growing open ocean aquaculture industry expanding into offshore waters globally is the future of sustainable seafood.

In 2015, per capita fish consumption in the United States was 15.5 pounds (PDF), up from 12.5 pounds (PDF) in 1980. Globally, however, the amount of all wild-caught fish has stayed relatively stagnant — at around 90–100 million tons — for the past two decades.

Globally, in total, around 160 million metric tons of fish — wild, farmed, marine and freshwater — are produced to satisfy annual demand.

The Gulf of Mexico annually yields a catch of about 32,000 tons of wild-caught finfish, which are bony fish such as snapper or grouper. Given regional demand, Pearce said, “our wild marine fish don’t go too far.” To his point, a seafood restaurant is on practically every block of New Orleans’ French Quarter.

Read the full story at GreenBiz

SEAMAP Releases 5-Year Management Plan

April 19, 2017 — The following was released by the Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program:

The Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program (SEAMAP) has released its 2016-2020 Management Plan. Prepared by the South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean components of SEAMAP, the Management Plan serves as a reference for official SEAMAP policies and procedures through 2020. The Plan also includes detailed information on SEAMAP activities and highlights how SEAMAP data meet critical needs for recent stock assessments and management decisions. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, the Plan details how SEAMAP’s core surveys have been impacted by level/declining funding. It identifies how expansions in funding could be used to refine existing assessments and advance the movement towards ecosystem-based management; ultimately, leading to more comprehensive fisheries management in the Southeast region.

SEAMAP is a cooperative state/federal/university program for the collection, management, and dissemination of fishery-independent data and information in the Southeastern U.S. and Caribbean. Representatives from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) jointly plan and conduct surveys of economically and ecologically important fish and shellfish species and the critical habitats that support them. Since 1982, SEAMAP has sponsored long-term standardized surveys that have become the backbone of fisheries and habitat management in the Southeast and Caribbean. SEAMAP currently provides the only region-wide mechanism for monitoring long-term status and trends of populations and habitats within the region.

As a cooperative effort, SEAMAP monitors the distribution and abundance of fish and other marine resources from North Carolina through Texas and into the Caribbean. SEAMAP is intended to maximize the capability of fishery-independent and associated survey activities to satisfy data and information needs of living marine resource management and research organizations in the region. The primary means of performing that task is to optimize coordination and deployment of regional surveys and provide access to the collected data through documents and online databases. Additional roles of SEAMAP are to document long- and short-term needs for fishery-independent data to meet critical management and research needs, and to establish compatible and consistent databases for ecosystem and predictive modeling applications. SEAMAP promotes coordination among data collection, processing, management, and analysis activities emphasizing those specifically concerned with living marine resource management and habitat protection, and provides a forum for coordination of other fishery-related activities.

The 2016-2020 SEAMAP Management Plan is available online at: http://bit.ly/2pw1qXM. For more information about SEAMAP, particularly the South Atlantic component, please visit www.SEAMAP.org or contact Shanna Madsen, SEAMAP-SA Coordinator, at smadsen@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.      

More wetland projects, shoreline protection sought in Louisiana coastal plan

April 19, 2017 — Louisiana’s proposed 2017 master plan update for coastal restoration and hurricane protection should contain more marsh creation projects in the Barataria and Terrebonne basins. It needs more projects protecting coastal and lake shorelines on the western part of the state. And it needs more money for flood-proofing businesses, elevating houses and moving people out of frequently flooded locations.

Those are the major themes of more than 1,300 comments submitted by the public to the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which is scheduled to vote on the master plan Wednesday (April 19). The authority’s staff has incorporated some of the suggestions in updated versions of the master plan and the 2018 annual plan, which acts as the budget of the master plan. If both documents are approved, which is expected, they will be submitted to the Legislature for a vote in its current session ending June 8.

The written comments include several complex recommendations from public officials, business leaders, scientists, fishers and the general public, along with many simpler recommendations. Too, there are hundreds of form letters distributed by a coalition of interest groups such as Native American tribes, interfaith community organizations and Vietnamese Americans.

Read the full story at The Times-Picayune

LOUISIANA: Threshold set for shrimp vessel permits in Gulf

April 14, 2017 — The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council last week set a threshold for shrimp vessel permits in the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

According to an amendment approved at the council’s meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, if the number of permits drops below 1,175, a panel will form to discuss the issuance of more permits. The minimum permit threshold was set at 1,072.

Myron Fischer, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries senior adviser and one of the 17 voting members of the council, said he hopes the council will freeze the permits when they drop to 1,175 rather than waiting for them to drop to 1,072.

Currently there are about 1,440 permits with about 384 issued in Louisiana, Fischer said.

Last month, council members met with shrimpers to discuss the amendment, and the overwhelming majority of fishermen said the council should issue more permits sooner and the threshold should be much higher.

Read the full story at Houma Today

Louisiana Shrimp Stocks in Good Shape But Not Ready for Early Season Opener

April 13, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — While shrimp conditions are good this year, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Commission isn’t ready to open the spring season early.

Commission members said at their meeting today in Baton Rouge that they want more data before setting the dates for the season.

Nearly all of the shrimpers at the meeting said they would rather wait for the season to open at the normal time so the shrimp can grow to be larger. The spring shrimp season usually opens in mid to late May.

LDWF biologist Jeff Marx said data he’s collected show better conditions than in previous years. Shrimp size, growth and development generally depend on the amount of rainfall, the temperature and salinity level of the water.

But shrimpers spoke against an early season.

“We have a year where Jeff’s data, so far, stated we have optimum weather for growth,” said Houma shrimper Barry Rogers. “I’ve spoken to factories, spoken to fishermen (and) everyone would like to see us at least work on 60 to 70 count (per pound) shrimp. It would be great for the fishermen and great for the processors.”

Acy Cooper, a commercial shrimper and president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, said two weeks can make a big difference in the size of the shrimp, especially with how high the temperatures are right now.

“I don’t think we need a meeting at the end of the month because of the fact that we can’t go opening the season with smaller shrimp,” Cooper said. “Giving them another week or two would make a big difference. Even if it takes a little longer for us to go to work, the shrimp (will be) bigger and it’s more profitable for us.”

Cooper said last year the shrimp were so small that it was hard for shrimpers to make any money.

John Brown, a 33-year shrimper, was the sole fishermen to express interest in opening the season early. Brown said because of the pump stations and freshwater diversions in the Barataria Basin area, shrimp haven’t been able to grow large anymore.

“If you wait, you’re gonna catch nothing. I can tell you what you’re going to catch,” Brown said. “One hundred percent of my income comes from fishing. When the season’s open, I trawl. I don’t make money on big shrimp because we don’t catch big shrimp anymore.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.