Saving Seafood

EU Tightens Fishing Rules in North Atlantic, Ups Some Quotas

December 14th, 2016 — European Union nations have reached a deal to tighten some fishing rules in its Northeastern Atlantic waters and the North Sea to edge closer toward a fully sustainable industry by 2020, but environmentalists said lenient quotas still allowed for far too much overfishing.

After marathon talks that started Monday and finished only early Wednesday, EU fisheries ministers said more stocks will be fished at maximum sustainable yield in hopes of pushing more species to within safe biological limits after decades of overfishing.

Ministers from fisheries nations such as Britain and France came away happy enough with increased quotas for some stocks of cod and mackerel, a sign environmentalists and maritime scientists would be left grumbling about the slow recovery of the EU’s vast eastern waters.

“We worked constructively to put people’s livelihoods first,” Scottish Fisheries Secretary Fergus Ewing said, adding he had “secured crucial increases for the majority of our key species.”

However, what sounded appealing to many of the fishermen left a bad taste in the mouth of environmental organizations.

The EU has about 145,000 fishermen, many of whom have struggled as overfishing depleted stocks and increasingly tight quotas were imposed. The EU is legally bound to return to sustainable fishing by 2020, but faces an uphill task to get there in time.

That task only will become tougher if fishing quotas are set too high as the deadline approaches.

The EU said that under Wednesday’s decision, 44 stocks will now be fished to maximum sustainable yield compared to only 36 last year.

“Overall, more fish stocks are being fished sustainably,” EU Fisheries Commissioner Karmenu Vella said.

Read the full story at The New York Times 

South Atlantic Fishery Management Council Meeting December 5-9, 2016 in Atlantic Beach, NC

November 22, 2016 — The following was released by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council:

Agenda Highlights

Mackerel Cobia Committee 

Review public comment and take final action for changing the fishing year for Atlantic cobia (GA to NY); and take final action on Coastal Migratory Pelagic Amendment 29 addressing king mackerel allocations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Snapper Grouper Committee 

Take final action for measures to reduce the harvest of mutton snapper; continue discussion on options for red snapper and recreational reporting; receive the annual review of the Vision Blueprint and consider options to include in the Vision Blueprint amendments for commercial and recreational snapper grouper fisheries; and consider measures to reduce harvest of golden tilefish based on the most recent stock assessment

Data Collection Committee  Take final action on the For-Hire Electronic Reporting Amendment that would require electronic reporting for federally permitted charter vessels and modify current reporting requirements for headboats.

Joint Dolphin Wahoo/Snapper Grouper/Mackerel Cobia Committees  Continue work on alternatives to modify allocations for dolphin (mahi mahi) and yellowtail snapper and approve for public hearings to be held in Jan/Feb 2017; and continue discussion on options for limited entry for federally permitted for-hire (charter) vessels.

See more information at the SAFMC

MASSACHUSETTS: Herring trawlers just offshore anger Cape fishermen

November 16, 2016 — ORLEANS, Mass. — They were visible from shore for most of Tuesday, seven vessels of between 140 to 170 feet in length, four miles off Nauset Beach.

Some worked in tandem, towing a huge net between them, scooping up mackerel or herring right on the Cape’s doorstep and making local fishermen like Bruce Peters angry.

“They suck up all the herring and mackerel, the forage fish we need for the cod, tuna, stripers, the whales, what we need for the food chain,” said Peters, a longtime commercial cod and groundfish fisherman, who now runs a charter boat business and fishes commercially for tuna. “We need a 50-mile buffer zone to keep these guys offshore.”

Buffer zones that prohibit the herring fleet from fishing within anywhere from 6 to 50 miles from shore are part of a new amendment to the herring fishery management plan that will be outlined at the New England Fishery Management Council meeting Thursday in Newport, Rhode Island, and voted on at the January meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The council — a representative body of fishermen, industry representatives, environmental organizations and state and federal fishery officials — draws up plans to sustainably manage fish and shellfish stocks in federal waters. They received 238 pages of comment, much of it in support of requiring the herring fleet to fish farther from shore.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

13 Benefits of Taking Fish Oil

October 20, 2016 — Fish oil is one of the most commonly consumed dietary supplements.

It’s rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are very important for your health.

If you don’t eat a lot of oily fish, taking a fish oil supplement could help you get enough omega-3 fatty acids.

Here is an evidence-based guide to fish oil supplements and their health benefits.

What Is Fish Oil and Why Should You Care?

Fish oil is the fat or oil that’s extracted from fish tissue.

It usually comes from oily fish such as herring, tuna, anchovies and mackerel. Yet sometimes it’s produced from the livers of other fish, as is the case with cod liver oil.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends eating 1–2 portions of fish per week. This is because the omega-3 fatty acids in fish provide many health benefits, including helping protect against a number of diseases.

But if you don’t eat 1–2 portions of fish per week, fish oil supplements can help you get enough omega-3s.

Read more at Best for Nutrition

Fishery council says no to river herring and shad plan

October 7, 2016 — A call to put river herring and shad in the same fishery management plan as mackerel, squid and butterfish was voted down by the Mid-Atlantic Marine Fisheries Council.

Incidental bycatches in ocean trawl fisheries was a main reason behind the consideration, but the council will stick with a plan already in place for dealing with it.

American shad, hickory shad, alewife and blueback herring — a quartet of anadromous fish that are at historic low population levels — often mix with mackerel in the ocean.

They get scooped up incidentally in commercial trawl nets meant for mackerel. The MAMFC said the amount may be substantial enough to negatively impact their populations.

The plan had the support of many sport fishermen, environmental and conservation groups on the Eastern seaboard who said the it would’ve led to more aggressive stewardship on the species.

Obama designates the first-ever marine monument off the East Coast, in New England

September 15, 2016 — President Obama declared the first fully protected area in the U.S. Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, designating 4,913 square miles off the New England coastline as a new marine national monument.

Obama’s previous marine conservation declarations have focused on some of the most remote waters under U.S. jurisdiction, including last month’s expansion of a massive protected area in Hawaii. But the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is more accessible, lying 130 miles off the southeast coast of Cape Cod.

Several regional fishing associations lobbied against the creation of a new monument, on the grounds that the federal government could reconcile environmental protections and ongoing fishing operations by regulating activities there under an existing fisheries management law.

Trawlers as well as offshore lobster and crab boat operators currently catch a range of species near the underwater canyons, including squid, mackerel, butterfish, lobster and Atlantic red crab. According to industry estimates, these fisheries are worth more than $50 million in total.

In an effort to lessen the economic impact, the administration will give lobster and red crab operators seven years to exit the area. Recreational fishing can continue around the three deep-sea canyons and four seamounts that are now protected, but seabed mining and any other extractive activities are banned.

Administration officials estimated there were six lobster boats operating in the area that will be protected, along with 20 other fishing vessels that move in and out of the area.

“The only user group that’s going to be negatively affected by this proposal is the fishing industry, period,” said David Borden, executive director of the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association, noting that the new protections will not affect oil tankers moving through the area or telecommunications cables lying on the seabed.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Ocean Warming Is Already Affecting Arctic Fish And Birds

September 13, 2016 — Up until a few years ago, mackerel were unknown in Greenland’s cold waters. The small oily fish typically spawned west of the British Isles and then migrated toward the northeast along the Norwegian current to feed for the summer. But in 2007, they began to show up in large numbers in the Irminger Current around Iceland. On the ocean highway, where they once turned right, they now turned left.

By 2011, the mackerel had found their way into Greenlandic waters, prompting the launch of a new fishery. Three years later, the mackerel fishery made up 23 percent of Greenland’s export earning, an “extreme example of how climate change can impact the economy of an entire nation,” Teunis Jansen, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a release.

The mackerel aren’t the only species being affected by warmer oceans. Soaring temperatures have pushed entire groups of species toward the poles, caused increases in disease in plants and animals and changed weather patterns, according to a report launched this week by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Marine species are moving northward at a rate roughly five times faster than the migration of land animals.

The report, released during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, highlights the impacts of ocean warming on marine life, from microorganisms to mammals. Eighty scientists from a dozen countries worked on the report, considered to be the most comprehensive collection of research on the planet’s warming oceans.

Truly Staggering

“We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report,” said Dan Laffoley, an IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors.

The world’s oceans have acted as a buffer against climate change. A “staggering 93 percent” of the heat produced by human activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans, Laffoley said. If the heat had entered the atmosphere instead of the oceans, the Earth would have warmed not by the 1C (1.8F) we have already experienced, but by 36C (64.8F). “Up to now, the ocean has shielded us from the worst impacts of climate change,” the report’s authors write.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Beautiful deep sea corals are being protected by Mid-Atlantic Council

August 31, 2016 — When people think about coral and coral reefs, they usually think about crystal clear, warm waters with hundreds of fish and aquatic animals, all of which live in or on brightly colored corals. These coral reefs are usually in some tropical locale, just off the pristine white sand beach of some isolated island.

And while these coral reefs are certainly important – and very beautiful – they are not the only places to find coral in our oceans.

During the past few decades, scientists have delved deep in search of deep-sea corals, corals that live and grow under hundreds, if not thousands, of feet of water and with almost no natural light at all.

Deep-sea corals are weird, but beautiful, organisms we have discovered hidden in some of the strangest parts of our oceans and with each dive we take to find these corals, we learn a little bit more about them and their environment.

Because of the nature of their environment, searching for deep-sea coral can be painstakingly arduous. However, scientists and researchers have found a plethora of coral and reefs right along the Atlantic Coast of the United States, including off the coast of Maryland.

Most of the larger coral colonies tend to be found in the submarine canyons located off the Atlantic coast, such as the Baltimore, South Vries, Warr and Phoenix Canyons.

To preserve these areas, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council approved a Deep Sea Corals Amendment to the Mackerel, Squid and Butterfish Fishery Management Plan to help to protect areas that are known or highly likely to contain deep-sea corals.

In June 2015, the Deep Sea Corals Amendment was approved by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and is ready to be submitted to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. It is expected to be approved and go into effect in October.

This historic piece of legislation could be key to the long-term health and future of these crucial deep-sea coral colonies.

Read the full story at the Delmarva Daily Times

Never Frozen: Why It’s So Hard to Find North Carolina Seafood

August 31, 2016 — JUST BEFORE sunrise in one of the last fishing villages on the Outer Banks, a widow stands at her back window and watches the lights from crab boats head into the bay, one by one. By this hour, she figures, her daughter must be about 150 miles west of here, on her way to Raleigh and Charlotte and Asheville with a load of cobia and Spanish mackerel and soft-shell crabs. Less than a mile away from the widow’s house— or, put another way, clear across the island—a woman wearing a mudstained Endurance Seafood T-shirt dives her hands into her family’s decades-old live boxes to see if any crabs shed their shells overnight. Nearby, her 82-year-old father pulls on his fluorescent yellow slicker.

When you step into the morning darkness on Colington Island, you can’t fake being from here or not from here. It’s evident in your accent, your look, your last name. On this Friday morning in May, in the middle of soft-shell crab season in the soft-shell crab capital of North Carolina, an outsider opens the door to his Chevy Suburban and slips into the leather seats. It’s 5:51 a.m., but the promise of a good day for his business hits him as he turns the key.

“Ah, yeah,” he says, “there’s that familiar smell.”

Two and a half years ago, Sean Schussler quit a six-figure job as vice president of sales for a printing company to start a seafood market. Catch On Seafood is a small shop in Plaza Midwood, a trendy Charlotte neighborhood where people drive eco-friendly cars with bumper stickers that read “Eat Local.”

Read the full story at Charlotte Magazine

Fish Fraud: Something Fishy Is Happening With the Labeling of Seafood

August 24, 2016 — These days, choosing fish isn’t easy, whether you’re buying it at the grocery store or ordering it at a restaurant. You want to select seafood that’s fresh, reasonably priced, high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in mercury. After all, fish is one of the healthiest foods on the planet – it’s a lean source of protein that’s good for your heart and mind, experts note – which is why the updated U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines encourage Americans to eat fish or seafood at least twice a week. It’s a tricky balancing act, though, because at the same time, consumers are frequently warned about the potential risks of contaminants like mercury, which tends to build up especially in large predatory fish.

Here’s a shopping shocker that makes the issue even more complicated: You may not be getting the fish you’re paying for at retail outlets or in restaurants. In an investigation from 2010 to 2012, Oceana, an international organization dedicated to ocean conservation, examined more than 1,200 fish samples from 64 restaurants, sushi venues and stores in 21 states throughout the U.S. and found that mislabeling occurred in 59 percent of the 46 fish types that were tested; in particular, less desirable, less expensive or more readily available fish were often swapped for grouper, cod and snapper. Holy mackerel!

Among the most common examples of fish fraud the Oceana study found: Tilapia is frequently substituted for red snapper; pangasius (Asian catfish) is being sold as Alaskan or Pacific cod or grouper; Antarctic toothfish is being swapped for sea bass; farmed Atlantic salmon is standing in for wild, king and sockeye salmon; and escolar is being sold as white tuna, according to the report. In South Florida, king mackerel – a fish that’s on the Food and Drug Administration’s “do not eat” list for sensitive groups such as women of reproductive age and young children because it’s high in mercury – was being sold as grouper, and in New York City, tilefish – which is also on the “do not eat” list for sensitive people – was being sold as halibut and red snapper.

“It’s all based on economics,” notes Roger Clemens, a professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Southern California and past president of the Institute of Food Technologists. “Many of the fish that are substituted are less expensive, so the restaurant or retailer profits from the deception.”

Read the full story at the US News & World Report