Saving Seafood

Off the Menu: Lobster is not the luxury meal it once was

September 17, 2024 — There was a time not all that many years ago when the restaurant industry marketed lobster as a luxury item. With the exception of shoreside clam shacks and resort eateries, enjoying lobster was mostly a white-tablecloth experience.

These days, however, lobster is seemingly everywhere – in lobster rolls, as part of grilled cheese sandwiches, and as a mac & cheese mix-in. Restaurants at all price points are featuring lobster: This summer, chains like Friendly’s and 99 Restaurants had lobster rolls on their menus. Even independents are on the lobster bandwagon, as exemplified by Villa Napoletana in East Longmeadow, where a month-long lobster menu promotion is underway.

The industry’s appetite for lobster seems almost limitless. Cousins Maine Lobster, the food truck franchisor whose menu is lobster-dominated, this month announced plans to open another 250 outlets over the next five years. Some industry experts predict future demand for lobster to continue to grow at an 8%-plus rate

Read the full article at Mass Live

Scientists document complex changes to Maine’s kelp forests

September 17, 2024 — Kelp forests are a foundational feature along Maine’s coastline, providing the food, habitat, and clean water needed for a rich marine ecosystem. But these forests are in flux due to changes in modern fisheries and, more recently, due to rapid warming.

A team of scientists led by Douglas Rasher, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory, are illuminating those changes with the first in-depth census of Maine’s kelp forests in almost 20 years. Their findings show the widespread collapse of forests along the southern coast but provide new evidence for the surprising resilience of kelp forests in northern Maine, even as warming drives slow but significant declines there.

This research, made possible by funding from Maine Sea Grant and recently published in the journal Ecology, highlights just how much climate change is altering long-standing ecological relationships, as well as the importance of regional differences in how ecosystems may respond to ocean warming.

“I was floored by how dramatically the seaweed communities had changed and how much warmer coastal waters had become,” said Thew Suskiewicz, a former postdoctoral researcher at Bigelow Laboratory and the study’s first author. “The more we sampled for this project, the more apparent those changes were and, sadly, I anticipate this is only the beginning.”

Read the full article at the Penobscot Bay Pilot

Biden-Harris Administration Announces First Offshore Wind Lease Sale in the Gulf of Maine

September 16, 2024 — The following was released by BOEM:

The Department of the Interior today announced it will hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on Oct. 29, 2024, for eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. If fully developed, these areas have a potential capacity of approximately 13 gigawatts of clean offshore wind energy, which could power more than 4.5 million homes. The announcement follows the Department’s recent announcement that it has approved more than 15 gigawatts of clean energy from offshore wind projects since the start of the Biden-Harris administration—equivalent to half of the capacity needed to achieve President Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.  

Since the start of the Biden-Harris administration, the Department has held five offshore wind lease sales, including a record-breaking sale offshore New York and sales offshore the Pacific, Central Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico, and approved 10 commercial-scale offshore wind projects. Earlier this year, Secretary Haaland announced a schedule of potential additional lease sales through 2028. 

 

Knives out on Maine-Canada border as lobster fishery gray zone dispute gets pointed over poaching accusations

September 16, 2024 — A long-running dispute over lobster fishing rights on the disputed border between the Canadian province of New Brunswick and the U.S. state of Maine is heating up.

After being “harassed, threatened, and attacked” with shotguns, knives, and bear spray, Canadian fisheries enforcement officers appear to be pulling back on enforcement efforts, with as many as many as 35 percent of agents assigned to marine patrols in the area refusing to report for duty, according to Union of Health and Environment Workers President Shimen Fayad. Fayad’s union represents fishery enforcement officers across Canada, including around 100 conservation and protection supervisors and fishery officers in Nova Scotia and southwestern New Brunswick.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MAINE: What Maine hopes to learn from its offshore wind research array

September 13, 2024 — Maine has big goals for adding offshore wind to its energy repertoire with hopes that it will not only be a friendlier option for the planet, but help revitalize communities through its economic and labor opportunities. But before those benefits can be realized, there are still a number of outstanding questions.

Last month, the state and the federal government reached an agreement on a lease for an offshore wind research array that will sit about 30 miles southeast of Portland. It will take up about 15 square miles in federal waters and include up to 12 floating turbines that will help inform how floating offshore wind operates and interacts with ecosystems in the water.

Just last week, the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its final environmental assessment that showed leasing activities such as surveys and installing meteorological buoys in the Gulf of Maine won’t harm the surrounding environment.

And while that assessment did not look at the impact of the offshore turbines, the goal of the research array is to better understand how they will interact with the Gulf of Maine ecosystems.

“The only way we really can answer those questions is to have this type of a program and this kind of a unique in-water opportunity to actually answer those questions,” said Stephanie Watson, offshore wind program manager for the state.

Research has been a throughline of Maine’s offshore wind efforts, Watson said, especially when thinking about the pioneering research and development from the University of Maine for semi-submersible floating turbines.

The next step in that process is to understand how to responsibly deploy the budding industry and actually transmit the energy back to shore, all while reducing impacts to the fisheries that are vital to the economy and culture of Maine, Watson said.

Read the full article at Maine Morning Star

American lobster show resilience amid climate change

September 12, 2024 — Experiments conducted at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) have shown that female American lobsters groom their offspring, and the grooming behaviors appear to remain stable despite the temperature and acidity conditions projected for Maine’s coastal waters by the end of the century. A study by researchers at William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences shows that the species may be more resilient to the effects of climate change than previously thought.

The study examines how a changing climate may impact the reproductive success of species that brood or incubate and hatch their eggs. The findings were published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series and suggested that American lobsters can handle future ocean changes well, as their egg care and survival rates stayed stable under different conditions through the study’s tests.

Digging into the study

The study’s researchers partnered with the Maine Department of Marine Resources to obtain 24 lobsters from commercial operations for the study for five months. They secured female lobsters at market size with all legs intact, which are commonly lost in the wild.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MAINE: Maine instituting workforce development programs to tackle aquaculture labor shortages

September 11, 2024 — The U.S. state of Maine’s USD 137 million (EUR 124 million) aquaculture industry is attracting investment and creating new job opportunities, but filling those jobs as fast as they’re opening has become an issue.

The Maine Aquaculture Association estimates that based on current growth trends, aquaculture businesses statewide will be short 1,300 employees 15 years from now, making workforce development a crucial issue for the industry if it wants to expand as planned.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Study offers hope for the resilience of the American lobster fishery

September 11, 2024 — According to a study by researchers at William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences, the American lobster may be more resilient to the effects of climate change than expected. For the first time, experiments performed at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) have documented how female American lobsters groom their offspring, providing evidence that these behaviors are not significantly impacted by temperature and acidity levels forecasted for Maine’s coastal waters by the end of the century.

The findings are published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Despite being one of the largest commercial fisheries in the U.S. with an annual economic impact of more than $460 million in Maine alone, few studies have documented the reproductive  of female American lobsters. With the Gulf of Maine warming faster than nearly any other ocean surface on the planet, it’s important to understand how the effects of climate change will impact the sustainability of the species and the fishery it supports.

“Brood grooming by female lobsters has been anecdotally observed, but it had not been quantitatively recorded before,” said Abigail Sisti, who is completing her Ph.D. in Marine Science at the Batten School and is lead author on the study. “In other crustaceans, these behaviors can have a significant impact on the survival of their offspring. Because the environment supporting the lobster fishery is rapidly changing, we wanted to understand how it might impact the way they care for their offspring.”

Female American lobsters can produce thousands of eggs that they hold under their tails for long periods of time, between five to 12 months, as the embryos develop. In other crustaceans, grooming behaviors help clear out parasites, remove dead eggs and facilitate the flow of water carrying oxygen and nutrients through the densely packed egg masses.

The study was part of a larger effort to determine how multiple stressors affect the reproductive success of the species. In this study, the researchers were testing whether increases in  and acidity had an impact on grooming behaviors and embryo survival.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

MAINE: Great Northern Salmon beginning pre-construction work on Maine-based salmon RAS

September 10, 2024 — Great Northern Salmon (GNS) announced it is commencing pre-construction work in preparation for its salmon recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) facility in Millinocket, Maine, U.S.A., in mid-September.

The company – formerly known as Katahdin Salmon – is a project of Xcelerate Aqua and is aiming to build a 10,000-metric-ton (MT) salmon RAS in two phases, with its first phase of construction capable of 5,000 MT, which can later be expanded. Great Northern Salmon plans to build the facility on the site of the former Great Northern Paper Co. mill, as part of the One North industrial site.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Federal report OKs Gulf of Maine for offshore wind leases

September 9, 2024 — The federal government is preparing to sell offshore wind power plots in the Gulf of Maine after determining that leasing the area would not harm the environment.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said that installing buoys and conducting surveys to assess leases across one million acres of ocean would have no significant environmental impact.

Read the full article at WSHU