October 31, 2019 — Since the start of the trade war between the United States and China over a year ago, certain sectors of the seafood industry have seen sharp drops of trade between the two countries.
The United States and China have taken turns ramping up tariffs on each other’s products, starting at 10 percent tariff rates and escalating to 25 percent duties on most products, including seafood, traded between the two countries.
October 28, 2019 — The state’s year-to-date lobster catch is “way off” this year, according to Maine’s top fishing regulator.
As of the end of September, Maine fishermen had landed less than 50 million pounds of lobster, according to Commissioner Pat Keliher of Maine Department of Marine Resources. That is 40 percent less than what had been landed by September 2018, and 38 percent off from the five-year average.
Keliher told the American Lobster Management Board on Monday that some of the year-to-date decline could be because lobsters molted late this year. The bulk of Maine’s lobster fleet catches new shell lobster, or lobsters whose new shells are just starting to firm up after shedding their old ones.
“Maine lobster landings are down significantly, below 50 million pounds to date,” Keliher told the board. “Our landings are way off. Now that doesn’t mean the sky is falling. That means we certainly had a very big delay in the shed.”
October 28, 2019 — Few things are as embedded in Maine’s culture – or its mud – as clams, and an environmental group thinks the key to saving the shellfish might be growing a different kind of bivalve along the state’s coast.
Manomet, based in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is proposing the shellfish shift as a way to beat predators that plague Maine’s clam diggers. Seafood lovers have sought Maine’s softshell clams in chowders and clam rolls for decades, but wild harvesters are collecting fewer of those clams, in part because of the spread of crabs and worms that prey on them.
Manomet thinks the answer might lie in the aquaculture of quahogs, which are a harder species of clam associated more with Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The group is working with four shellfish farmers along the Maine coast to grow quahogs, study the results and bring the bivalves to market.
“Wouldn’t it make sense to branch out and do this new species? One of the things that attracted us to quahogs was they seem to be less susceptible to predation from green crabs and marine worms,” said Marissa McMahan, marine fisheries division director for Manomet, referencing a pair of pests that eat softshell clams.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald
October 25, 2019 — Two new studies published by University of Maine scientists are putting a long-standing survey of the American lobster’s earliest life stages to its most rigorous test yet as an early warning system for trends in New England’s iconic fishery. The studies point to the role of a warming ocean and local differences in oceanography in the rise and fall of lobster populations along the coast from southern New England to Atlantic Canada.
One of the papers, published in the scientific journal Ecological Applications, was led by Noah Oppenheim, who completed his research as a UMaine graduate student in 2016, with co-authors Richard Wahle, Damian Brady and Andrew Goode from UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences, and Andrew Pershing from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. They report that the numbers of young-of-year lobsters populating shallow coastal nursery habitats each year, and temperature, provide a reasonably accurate prediction of trends in the lobster fishery some four to six years later.
Their model predicted regional differences in the recent record-breaking boom over the past decade, and now suggests the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery may be entering a period of decline; in effect a “cresting wave” of lobster abundance that may be heading northward in the region’s changing climate.
“Our model projects that the Gulf of Maine’s lobster landings will return to previous historical levels,” said Oppenheim, who is now executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the Institute for Fisheries Resources in San Francisco. “These results don’t suggest a lobster crash, but this tool could give the fishing industry and policymakers additional lead time as they make decisions about their businesses and communities in the years ahead.
October 25, 2019 — New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts will work together on large-scale offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine. Stakeholders from the three states met today in Manchester talk about the possibilities and obstacles for that new industry.
The event was hosted by the Environmental Business Council of New England at the state headquarters of Eversource, which is developing several large offshore wind projects elsewhere in the Northeast.
Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the state’s Department of Business and Economic Affairs, said at the meeting that he thinks Northern New England could add tens of thousands of jobs building these offshore turbine farms, and the transmission infrastructure to bring their power on-shore.
“This is not just a project. This is not just an individual, ‘we’re going to find a site and put a couple of turbines up,’” Caswell says. “This is the establishment of, really, a whole new industry.”
October 24, 2019 — As the battle over how best to protect endangered northern right whales continues to escalate, the Department of Marine Resources is proposing a new set of requirements for lobster gear that the department believes will help reduce injury to the whales without imposing severe, and some say dangerous, restrictions on fishermen.
Last week, DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher announced that after “rigorous scientific analysis,” the department had come up with a new draft plan to address “both the risk to right whales and concerns of fishermen” that is “in keeping with the real risk the Maine fishery presents.”
Last March, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that the risk of injuries to right whales in the Gulf of Maine had to be reduced by at least 60 percent.
To meet that goal, a group of fishermen, scientists and conservation group representatives known as the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team recommended that NMFS require Maine lobstermen to reduce the number of vertical lines used to connect their traps to the surface marker buoys by 50 percent.
The NMFS proposal was based on a scientific model that ostensibly showed the restrictions to be necessary to meet the 60 percent risk reduction goal.
October 24, 2019 — Maine’s fishery regulators, on behalf of the state’s vital lobster industry, appear to be willing to meet the right whale take reduction team halfway on the removal of lobster buoy lines — but only in federal waters.
The state’s Department of Marine Resources last week released its own draft plan as a counterweight to the take reduction team proposal to remove 50 percent of all vertical lobster lines from wherever Maine lobstermen set and haul — in Maine state waters and the federal waters three miles beyond.
The DMR proposal calls for removing 25 percent of vertical buoy lines set in federal waters by Maine commercial lobstermen.
It said it would eliminate the lines by mandating lobstermen engage in a fishing practice called “trawling up” in which more traps — in ascending numbers as they move further offshore — are attached to each vertical line.
DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher said his agency’s plan protects the whales “by reducing risk where it occurs” and protects the state’s elemental lobster industry in the state waters where most permitted lobstermen ply their trade.
October 24, 2019 — Last month, lobstermen in Cape Cod Bay hauled up something disturbing. In one section of the bay, all of their traps were full of dead lobsters. Research biologists went to work trying to solve the mystery, and what they found suggests we may see more of this as the climate changes.
When the fishermen first started pulling up traps full of dead lobsters, their first call was to Beth Casoni of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association.
“As you can imagine, they were concerned — greatly concerned — because they didn’t know how they died or why they died,” Casoni said.
Over the next five days or so, she got more calls about dead animals in the traps.
“And it wasn’t just lobsters,” she said. “It was skate and flounder and ling, which is an eel.”
Casoni called the state Division of Marine Fisheries, which sent divers out to take a look at the seafloor in the area.
“The fishermen were fearful that there would have been a mass die-off and the bottom would be littered with carnage,” Casoni said. “And the division was happy to report that they did not see any mass die-off in the area.”
October 24, 2019 — NOAA Fisheries has awarded $1.1 million in funding for seven New England and Mid-Atlantic projects through the Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program.
The awards support key partners in research and development of innovative approaches and strategies for reducing bycatch, bycatch mortality and post-release mortality.
The New England Aquarium was awarded $125,000 for a project to study whale release ropes as a large whale bycatch mitigation option for the lobster fishing industry.
The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries received $176,572 for a bycatch reduction of red hake project in the Southern New England silver hake trawl fishery.
There were also a few projects related to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, which only number around 400.
Maine Department of Marine Resources was awarded $198,018 for a project to assess the feasibility of Time Tension Line Cutter use in fixed gear fisheries to reduce entanglement risk for right whales.
October 23, 2019 — As the battle over how best to protect endangered northern right whales continues to escalate, the Department of Marine Resources is proposing a new set of requirements for lobster gear that the department believes will help reduce injury to the whales without imposing severe, and some say dangerous, restrictions on fishermen.
Last week, DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher announced that after “rigorous scientific analysis,” the department had come up with a new draft plan to address “both the risk to right whales and concerns of fishermen” that is “in keeping with the real risk the Maine fishery presents.”
Last March, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that the risk of injuries to right whales in the Gulf of Maine had to be reduced by at least 60 percent.
To meet that goal, a group of fishermen, scientists and conservation group representatives known as the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team recommended that NMFS require Maine lobstermen to reduce the number of vertical lines used to connect their traps to the surface marker buoys by 50 percent.
The NMFS proposal was based on a scientific model that ostensibly showed the restrictions to be necessary to meet the 60 percent risk reduction goal.