Saving Seafood

MAINE: Early elver landings reports reflect still chilly water temperatures

April 2, 2019 — With the onset of spring, many a young man’s fancy may turn to love, but in Maine it’s elvers that get the juices flowing.

With ice still in many ponds and rivers, though, Maine has yet to see its first big run of the tiny moneymakers.

The fishing season opened on March 22 and, by Saturday evening, dealer reports to the Department of Marine Resources suggested that the juvenile eels that were the source of Maine’s second most valuable fishery last year were still scarce. The shortage of elvers has apparently failed to drive up the price that dealers were paying fishermen to the $2,800-per-pound level seen last year, at least not yet.

Maine elver harvesters fish under a statewide quota of 9,688 pounds imposed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Of that, just over 7,566 pounds are allocated to harvesters licensed by DMR. The balance is allocated among Maine’s four federally recognized Indian tribes: the Aroostook Band of Micmac; the Houlton Band of Maliseet; the Passamaquoddy Tribe; and the Penobscot Nation.

All harvesters, whether licensed by DMR or by one of the tribal governments, are required to sell their landings to state-licensed dealers and those dealers are required to report their purchases electronically to DMR on a daily basis.

As of 6 p.m. Saturday, dealers reported buying a total of just over 230 pounds with a reported value of $369,321 — an average price of $1,606 per pound.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Jonah Crab Moves Mainstream In Gulf Of Maine After Decades As Lobster Bycatch

April 2, 2019 — Regulators are taking comments on plans to expand a lucrative new crab fishery that’s stirring interest in the Gulf of Maine.

Jonah crabs are a native species that, until recently, was mainly caught as bycatch – by accident – in lobster pots.

Now, as warming waters push the lobster fishery north, more fishermen – especially in southern New England – are targeting Jonah crabs on purpose to supplement their income.

New Hampshire Fish and Game biologist Josh Carloni says in Northern New England and the Gulf of Maine, lobster is still king – but that could change.

Read the full story at New Hampshire Public Radio

Lifejackets for Lobstermen seeks to change culture and save lives

April 1, 2019 — Life jackets save lives. That’s the simple message that Lifejackets for Lobstermen is trying to spread across port cities in Massachusetts and Maine.

The message may seem intuitive, but according to statistics from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, it’s not.

From 2010-14, lobster fishing deaths ranked the highest in occupational fatalities in East Coast Fisheries and in 80 percent of those deaths, from either falls overboard or vessel disasters, none of the recovered victims was wearing a life jacket.

In response to this trend, the Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety: Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing (NEC) used a grant from NIOSH to work with 181 lobstermen in Massachusetts and Maine to find out what they could do to increase life jacket use.

They gave the lobstermen one of nine different styles of life jacket at random and asked them to use it for a month and share their input on things like comfort and their ability to work while wearing it.

The study and the feedback they received led to their project Lifejackets for Lobstermen.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Bait crisis could take the steam out of lobster this summer

April 1, 2019 — The boom times for the U.S. lobster industry are imperiled this year because of a shortage of a little fish that has been luring the crustaceans into traps for hundreds of years.

Members of the lobster business fear a looming bait crisis could disrupt the industry during a time when lobsters are as plentiful, valuable and in demand as ever. America’s lobster catch has climbed this decade, especially in Maine, but the fishery is dependent on herring — a schooling fish other fishermen seek in the Atlantic Ocean.

Federal regulators are imposing a steep cut in the herring fishery this year, and some areas of the East Coast are already restricted to fishing, months before the lobster season gets rolling. East Coast herring fishermen brought more than 200 million pounds of the fish to docks as recently as 2014, but this year’s catch will be limited to less than a fifth of that total.

The cut is leaving lobstermen, who have baited traps with herring for generations in Maine, scrambling for new bait sources and concerned about their ability to get lobster to customers who have come to expect easy availability in recent years.

“If you don’t have bait, you’re not going to fish. If the price of bait goes up, you’re not going to fish,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “We have to take the big picture, and make sure our communities continue to have viable fisheries.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Boston.com

U.S.-Canada ‘Lobster War’ film to be screened in Waterville

April 1, 2019 — The waters off Machias Seal Island along the Maine coast are beautiful, but the war between U.S. and Canadian fishermen fighting over territory where climate change has caused the lobster population to explode is decidedly ugly.

That conflict is portrayed in vivid detail in “Lobster War: The Fight Over the World’s Richest Fishing Grounds,” an award-winning documentary film co-directed and produced by David Abel, a Boston Globe reporter, and Andrew Laub, a writer, editor, filmmaker, cinematographer, visual effects artist and soundtrack composer.

The film will be shown at 7:15 p.m. Sunday at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville. Abel will engage in a question-and-answer session with the audience via Skype after the showing.

The 2018 film focuses on the clash between the U.S. and Canada over 277 square miles of ocean off the 20-acre Machias Seal Island that both countries have claimed since the end of the Revolutionary War, according to Abel. U.S. lobster fishermen traditionally fished the so-called Gray Zone, but as the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than nearly any other water body on Earth, the lobster population there has grown significantly, prompting Canadian fishermen to assert their sovereignty there, he said. Fighting between Canadian and American fishermen over the territory has been ongoing, with threats of violence and sabotage.

Abel, an environmental reporter who has long covered fisheries issues, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that “Lobster War” shows how the warming waters of the Gulf of Maine are affecting lobster, Maine’s iconic species, whose population for the last 15-plus years has boomed, partly as a result of climate change.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine to study sea level rise impact for Penobscot Bay towns

March 29, 2019 — Ten communities surrounding Penobscot Bay will be the subjects of a state study to determine what actions to take to deal with rising sea levels.

The Maine Coastal Program, part of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, received a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to conduct the study in Rockland, Camden, South Thomaston, Lincolnville, Belfast, Searsport, Vinalhaven, North Haven, Castine, and Stonington, said Coastal Program Deputy Director Matthew Nixon.

The goal of the project is project the sea level rise for each community and develop recommendations on protecting public infrastructure such as piers, public landings, and causeways.

“If there is going to be public investment, we want to make sure it’s spent wisely,” he said of public infrastructure projects.

Read the full story at The Courier-Gazette

Fishing Year 2019 Atlantic Sea Scallop Management Measures Go Into Effect April 1

March 27, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The management measures for the Atlantic Sea Scallop fishery for the 2019 fishing year go into effect on April 1, 2019.

Framework Adjustment 30 to the Atlantic Sea Scallop Fishery Management Plan:

  • Sets specifications for the scallop fishery for fishing year 2019, including Days-at-Sea (DAS) allocations, Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs), and sea scallop access area trip allocations. These allocations are similar to those set in the 2018 fishing year. This action also sets precautionary default 2020 specifications, in case we implement the next framework after the April 1, 2020 start of the 2020 fishing year;
  • Allocates effort into three rotational access areas (Mid-Atlantic, Nantucket Lightship-West, and Closed Area 1). Scallop landings allocated to Closed Area 1 are flexible and can be landed from any available access area;
  • Sets a 205,000 lb Northern Gulf of Maine total allowable catch for 2019 that will be split as 137,500 lb for the Limited Access General Category (LAGC) and 67,500 lb for the limited access fleet;
  • Standardizes default specifications for Limited Access DAS and LAGC IFQ allocations; and
  • Standardizes the approach used to set the number of access area trips available to the LAGC IFQ fleet.

Read the final rule as published in the Federal Register, and the permit holder bulletins for the Limited Access and Limited Access General Category scallop vessels available on our website.

Read the release here

Warming oceans cast a chill over New England’s sea turtles

March 26, 2019 — If we ignore the dangerously shifting global climate system, there will be consequences: more extreme rainfall, more intense hurricanes, drier and longer wildfire seasons, and continued sea level rise all loom on the horizon. In fact, extreme weather changes are already being seen around the globe.

But one of the lesser known, already visible impacts of climate change is on sea turtles. A recent paper, led by UMass Amherst doctoral candidate Lucas Griffin, links a rapidly warming Gulf of Maine to increased sea turtle strandings on Cape Cod.

“We were surprised the results suggested this increase was linked with warmer sea surface temperatures,” Griffin says. The scientists originally thought the strandings might be associated with how many young sea turtles hatched. But turtles, it turns out, are just one of many Gulf of Maine species “exhibiting a similar shift in both habitat distribution and in phenology patterns.”

The Gulf of Maine is in crisis: The region is warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean. Fish stocks are moving north, key food web events like the spring plankton bloom are occurring earlier in the year, and regional waters are staying warmer for longer. Griffin’s team used both machine learning and Bayesian statistical methods—using existing data and probability to quantify uncertainty in inferences—to analyze the relationship between water temperatures and the number of cold-stunned turtles, the potentially lethal turtle equivalent of hypothermia. The innovative approach confirmed what local naturalists and wildlife biologists had been observing for years: Warmer waters in the region actually lead to an increased threat of cold-stunning.

Read the full story at Massive Science

Baby Eel Fishermen Hope for Year Free of Poaching, Shutdowns

March 25, 2019 — Maine fishermen began several weeks of taking to rivers and streams to fish for baby eels Friday, which marked the start of a high-stakes season harvesters hope isn’t interrupted by poaching concerns as it was a year ago.

Fishermen in Maine use nets to harvest baby eels, called elvers, to feed demand from Asian aquaculture companies, who use them as seed stock.

The tiny eels are the source of one of the most valuable fisheries in the country on a per-pound basis, and they were worth a record of more than $2,300 per pound last year. Maine’s home to the only significant elver fishery in the country.

Last year’s season was shut down two weeks early by state regulators after investigators found that illegal sales had caused Maine to blow past its quota for the eels. New controls on the fishery are expected to clamp down on clandestine sales, and the use of a swipe card system to record transactions remains in effect.

Darrell Young, co-director of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, said the health of the fishery also depends on members of the industry “behaving themselves” this time around.

“Buyers wanted to find their way around the swipe cards. They just made it harder for everybody else,” Young said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Lobsters unharmed by Atlantic Canada salmon farm, 8-year study finds

March 22, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — An eight-year study of lobsters living below a salmon farm off New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island found the aquaculture operation had no impact on the crustaceans’ abundance, size or growth.

The peer-reviewed, industry-funded study was published this month in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

Its authors say it’s the most in-depth examination of its kind in Atlantic Canada.

“There isn’t anything like this. Any surveys that have been done have been sort of cursory,” said Jon Grant, the study’s lead author and a Dalhousie University oceanographer.

How the study worked

The study involved divers visiting a sample area under the Benson Aquaculture salmon farm at Cheney Head off Grand Manan in 2008, and returning every August and September.

To establish a baseline, surveying started before the fish farm opened. The study covered two production cycles at the farm, which uses pesticides to control sea lice and has been opposed by lobster fishermen.

It also included a fallow period and a farm expansion to 336,000 fish from 10,000 during the second production cycle.

An identical survey was conducted about a kilometre outside the farm.

By the time the project ended in 2015, divers had counted 1,255 lobsters inside the farm and 1,171 outside.

What the study found

“In both cases, whether it was on the farm or off the farm, over those eight years the abundance of lobsters went up. A lot. By 100 per cent or more. And there was no difference in those lobsters in any way — in their size, in their sex or their abundance, whether on or off the fish farm,” Grant told CBC News.

“We don’t detect any evidence that the fish farm affected behaviour, growth or abundance of those lobsters.”

He said the study proved one hypothesis: the population inside or adjacent to the farm matched growth seen elsewhere in lobster fishing areas.

“It reflects the fact that the fishery is ongoing and it’s thriving and that fish farming does not seem to have impacted it, at least in eastern New Brunswick,” said Grant, who is funded by New Brunswick-based Cooke Seafoods and holds the NSERC-Cooke industrial research chair in sustainable aquaculture.

Surveys ordered by government regulators

The surveys were a requirement of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the New Brunswick government. The Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association funded the study.

The field work was carried out by SIMCorp, a New Brunswick-based marine environmental consulting firm that works for the aquaculture industry in Atlantic Canada and Maine.

SIMCorp is recognized as the standard for aquaculture, said Grant.

Tara Daggett, a SIMCorp biologist and co-author of the study, said the results are encouraging news for the aquaculture industry.

“We can fairly say aquaculture can coexist with fisheries and other species. It has a place,” she told CBC News.

However, Daggett cautioned the results only reflect what happened at one fish farm.

“The fish farm is typical of Grand Manan with sandy and cobbled bottom, but in science we don’t extrapolate. We need to test at other sites.”

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.