Saving Seafood

Elver season ends

June 8, 2017 — Maine’s elver season ended Wednesday. By most accounts it was successful.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission limited Maine harvesters to a landings quota of 9,616 pounds for this year. According to the Department of Marine Resources, as of 6 p.m. Monday, Maine dealers reported buying 9,281.269 pounds of elvers and paying harvesters a total of $12,088,884 — an average price of $1,303 per pound.

The total quota is allocated among harvesters licensed by the state and the four federally recognized Indian tribes.

As of Monday evening, DMR-licensed harvesters had landed just over 7,315 pounds out of a total quota of 7,566.3 pounds.

Harvesters of the Houlton Band of Maliseet had landed about 87 pounds from their approximately 107-pound quota.

Micmac Nation harvesters landed their entire 38.8-pound quota and Penobscot Nation harvesters had landed all but one pound of their 620-pound quota.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Sen. King tells researchers that data is the key to protecting lobster industry

June 6, 2017 — Calling proposed cuts in federal science funding “unacceptable,” U.S. Sen. Angus King told lobster researchers Monday that data is the key to protecting Maine’s most valuable fishery.

Maine’s independent senator asked the 250 biologists, oceanographers and fishery managers at a global conference on lobster biology in Portland this week to give him data on the impact of the changing sea environment on lobster, including temperature, salinity and acidification, and whether that is prompting a migration of Maine’s $533.1 million a year fishery to Canada.

“If lobsters are moving toward Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, that’s a serious practical issue that will get the attention of politicians,” he said. “It’s when you start seeing jobs go away that politicians start saying ‘Gee, we’d better do something about this.’ Are they moving, if they are why, and if they are, what’s the timing? Is it five years? Twenty years? A hundred years?”

But federal funding for scientific research is under fire. President Trump’s budget calls for a 17 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the national fisheries programs and funded almost a fifth of Maine Department of Marine Resources’ annual budget. It would eliminate the Sea Grant program, which funds research by the University of Maine’s Rick Wahle, conference co-chairman, among others.

“The lobster industry in New England is valued at close to $500 million and yet we know very little about how ocean acidification may affect this species,” Libby Jewett, NOAA’s ocean acidification director, said last fall when awarding Wahle’s team a $200,000 grant for lobster research. “These projects should help move the needle forward in our understanding and, as a result, enable broader resilience in the region.”

King said it is unlikely that Trump’s budget, containing what he considers drastic cuts in scientific funding, will pass Congress.

“The last thing we should be doing on a federal level is cutting research funding,” King said. “That is one of the most important functions of the federal government, whether it is climate change or cancer. It’s how we solve problems. To cut research, and particularly to cut research when you get the feeling that the motivation is that we don’t want to know, is unacceptable. … Congress understands this.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Northern Gulf of Maine Scallop Management Area to be Surveyed this Summer through Scallop RSA Program

June 2, 2017 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

At the request of the New England Fishery Management Council, NOAA Fisheries intends to take action to facilitate survey work this summer in the southern portion of the Northern Gulf of Maine (NGOM) Scallop Management Area. The additional coverage will occur through the Scallop Research Set-Aside (RSA) Program. The agency is working to amend two previously approved RSA awards for 2017 scallop surveys on Georges Bank so that both surveys can be expanded to include coverage in the Gulf of Maine as follows.

  • Coonamessett Farm Foundation will receive an additional 12,000 pounds of scallop RSA allocation to: (1) survey portions of Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge with HabCam, a habitat mapping camera system; and (2) conduct complimentary scallop dredge surveys to collect biological samples. And,
  • The School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will receive an additional 1,734

During its mid-April meeting, the Council voted to send a letter to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) asking the center to explore options for including the southern portion of the NGOM area in upcoming 2017 scallop surveys. A 2016 survey conducted by the Maine Department of Marine Resources and the University of Maine indicated that biomass in the NGOM had increased substantially since the last time the area was surveyed in 2012, but no additional survey work was scheduled for 2017.

Fishing effort increased significantly in 2016 and 2017 in the area, especially off Cape Ann and the northeastern portion of Stellwagen Bank. Consequently, the Council determined it needed the most updated biomass estimates possible to help inform the management of the NGOM going forward.

Read the full release here

At Meeting, Maine Lobstermen Say They Aren’t Harming Threatened Coral Beds

May 30, 2017 — The fragile deep-sea corals that populate the canyon walls and basins in the Gulf of Maine provide habitat for many species of fish as well as baby lobster, crabs and squid. But the New England Fisheries Management Council has concluded that the northeast coral beds are threatened when they are disturbed by commercial fishing operations and is weighing new restrictions that could affect Maine.

The council held a public hearing in Ellsworth Thursday night, where lobstermen spoke in support of a plan that protects coral colonies while still allowing them to haul their traps.

Most of the lobstermen who spoke agree that the coral beds in the Gulf of Maine play an important role in the overall health of the marine ecosystem. And most, such as Cranberry Isles fisherman Jack Merrill, think that Maine lobstermen and the coral beds have been getting along well for decades.

“It is evident to me that the marine corals in these zones appear to be thriving, which means that they are successfully coexisting with the trap fishery that has been there for many years,” he says.

The major coral beds are located off the Georges Banks. There are two areas about 25 miles off the Maine coast that have been identified as coral protection zones: the Outer Schoodic Ridge off the southeast Hancock County coast and Mount Desert Rock off Mount Desert Island.

The area is regularly fished, and Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Pat Keliher says he supports an alternative plan that would prohibit trawlers from working the ocean bottom in the two targeted regions, but would also allow lobster trap fishing in the regions.

“Lobster fishing is the economic backbone of the Down East coastal communities, and each of these proposed coral protection areas represents an important fishing ground for over 50 vessels from approximately 15 communities, and many of these vessels fish these areas throughout the majority of the year,” he says.

Read the full story at Maine Public

MAINE: Red tide prompts state to close many clam flats

May 24, 2017 — A large segment of the Maine coastline between Old Orchard Beach and Harpswell was declared off-limits to clam harvesting this week because of red tide, adding further restrictions to a much larger area that has been under a shellfish harvesting prohibition for more than a month.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources and its Bureau of Public Health made the announcement on Monday, warning that the ban on clam harvesting takes effect immediately because of the threat of paralytic shellfish poisoning caused by red tide.

According to the department’s announcement, it is unlawful now to dig for clams in the area between Old Orchard Beach and Harpswell.

The clam harvesting ban, which applies only to soft-shell, hard-shell and razor clams, will affect clam digging areas on Cousins Island in Yarmouth, Chebeague Island in Cumberland, Woodward Point in Brunswick, Foster Point in West Bath, and Basin Point in Harpswell.

Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the marine resources department, said a regional ban that prohibited the harvesting of mussels, European oysters and carnivorous snails was implemented April 3. The regional shellfish ban affects the area between South Berwick in York County and Pemaquid Point in the Lincoln County community of Bristol, he said. Clam harvesting may still occur in flats to the south of Old Orchard Beach and north of Harpswell under the regional ban.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

What did your lobster eat before you ate your lobster? And why should you care?

May 23, 2017 — If you like lobster – and care about maintaining the fishery as both a cultural and economic resource in Maine – should you care what it ate before it made it to your plate?

Lobsters get a bad rap for being scavengers, says veterinarian scientist Robert C. Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute in Orono. In fact, they have rather discerning chemosensory apparatus housed in the short antennae on their heads and tiny sensing hairs all over their bodies.

With a sense of smell more akin to a dog’s than a human’s, lobsters can sniff out a single amino acid that tags their favorite food. For Maine lobsters, that’s herring. So lobstermen favor it as bait up and down the coast.

In 2016 the state’s lobster fishery hit record numbers in volume (over 130 million pounds) and value ($530 million). With so many traps in play, herring became the second-most valuable fishery in Maine, weighing in at $19 million last year. The hike in its value corresponded with the demand from hungry lobsters just as there was a drop off in herring landings in New England.

Earlier this month, interstate marine fisheries regulators approved new rules to avoid another bait shortage. To space out the catch, herring fishermen are now subject to a weekly limit on the amount they can bring to shore. Bayer says it takes one pound of herring to produce one pound of lobster. That same input/output ratio, when used in fin fish aquaculture, has been rendered an unsustainable practice.

Read the full story at CentralMaine.com

A top chef has an answer to Maine’s green crab scourge: Fry them in oil, then dig in

May 23, 2017 — European green crabs have scurried around coastal waters off Maine since they first hitchhiked here on ships in the 1800s, but only in the past few years have the invasive crustaceans begun to devour the softshell clam industry and decimate delicate eelgrass habitat.

And as harvesters and scientists have scurried to find a solution to the invasion, a number of uses for the crabs have been floated — extracting the meat in China, composting, and even processing the creatures into cat food.

But Portland restaurateur Sam Hayward of Fore Street Restaurant, who in 2004 was named Best Chef Northeast by the James Beard Foundation and in 2011 won the the Chef’s Collaborative Sustainer of the Year award, on Monday shared a simple recipe he learned from a fellow chef to transform the crustaceans into “a sandy, seafoody deliciousness.”

One recent summer, Hayward worked with chef Evan Mallett of Black Trumpet in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at “Take a Bite Out of Appledore: An Eco-Culinary Retreat” held on the Isles of Shoals.

One night, after “foraging the intertidal zone,” Mallett debuted the crabs, deep fried and “a little bit like croutons,” Hayward said.

“Get a pot of oil — I’m not sure what oil we used, I think it was olive — and get it up to 340, 345 degrees, as if for deep frying,” Hayward said. “Then drop them in for a few minutes until they’re crisped up.”

“Toss a handful on top of a salad,” he said. “They sort of dissolve into a sandy, seafoody deliciousness.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Clammers feeling the pinch as green crabs threaten another harvest

May 22, 2017 — Clammers face a shrinking harvest again this year after predator green crabs survived the mild winter, but one scientist may have an answer – aquaculture.

The second mild winter in a row means Maine’s tidal flats will likely be overrun by large, ravenous invasive green crabs this summer.

That’s bad news for the state’s already weakened soft-shell clam industry. One green crab can consume 40 half-inch clams a day and will dig 6 inches to find clams to eat. In 2016, clam landings fell 21 percent, from 9.3 million to 7.3 million pounds, the lowest total reported since 1991, according to the state Department of Marine Resources.

Some of the landings decline was undoubtedly a result of an unusual bloom of toxic algae that forced a monthlong shellfishing ban along about a third of Maine’s coastline last fall. But researcher Sara Randall of the Downeast Institute in Beals notes that a review of clam landings in towns with traditionally high numbers south of the Deer Isle-Stonington closure line found that 19 out of 24 towns, or 79 percent, had harvested fewer clams.

For example, from 2015 to 2016, landings fell 35 percent in Harpswell, 87 percent in Yarmouth and 21 percent in Scarborough. In Freeport, a town on the front line of the effort to combat the green crab invasion, landings decreased 17 percent despite efforts by municipal officials, clammers and researchers like Randall, among others, to use protective measures such as nets and other tools to ward off the green crabs.

The mild winter may only make matters worse. Clammers had hoped for a cold winter so the deep freeze and ice would kill off a lot of the crabs, allowing the clam seed still found in high numbers in Maine waters a chance to settle in the tidal flats and grow, forming those telltale tiny holes that tell clammers a harvest awaits them under the mud.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine Marine Patrol Searching for Missing Man on Androscoggin River

May 13, 2017 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

Maine Marine Patrol is searching for a missing man who, according to eye witness reports, fell from his boat into the Androscoggin River near Brunswick last night.

The man, Stephen Wines, 27 of Bailey Island, was on board a small boat in the Androscoggin with his brother William, 30 of Bailey Island, when eye witnesses on shore reported seeing them pass by in the water. The incident was reported to 911 at approximately 8:40 p.m.

Lifeflight of Maine and the Brunswick Fire Department conducted a search while Marine Patrol and Brunswick Police Department conducted an investigation of the incident last evening.

The boat has been recovered and life jackets were on board, however reports indicate that neither man was wearing a life jacket at the time of the incident. 

According to Marine Patrol reports, William made it to shore and was transported to a nearby hospital where he was treated and released.

The Marine Patrol along with Brunswick Police Department and the State Police/Marine Patrol Dive Team are continuing the search today, focusing their efforts near Bay Bridge Landing.

Officials: Maine Elver Harvest at Almost 80 Percent of Annual Quota

May 8, 2017 — After a slow start, Maine fishermen are closing in on their annual harvest quota for baby glass eels more than a month before the season officially ends.

Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said the eels — known as elvers — are currently fetching around $1,300 a pound from dealers, who can’t ship the catch to Asian markets fast enough.

“We’re probably at almost 80 percent of the total quota, harvesters have landed over 7,500 pounds of the 9,616 of the overall quota and that leaves a couple of thousand pounds left to harvest,” he said.

Read the full story at Maine Public Radio