Saving Seafood

UMaine team gets help in battle with salmon-ruining lice

October 19, 2018 — The University of Maine is getting a boost from the federal government for a pair of aquaculture projects, one of which addresses a pest problem in worldwide salmon farming.

The money is coming from NOAA Sea Grant, which supports fishery and coastal projects. The university says three researchers at its Aquaculture Research Institute will receive more than $700,000 to work on new approaches to address sea lice in salmon operations.

The lice are a major problem for salmon farms in Maine, Canada and around the world as they render the fish impossible to sell. The industry is struggling with resistance to pesticides used to control the lice.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Times

Lower herring quotas squeeze lobster trade

October 19, 2018 — Nothing new, but for the fishing industry nothing is as constant as change.

Last year, according to the Department of Marine Resources, lobster was Maine’s most valuable fishery with landings of 110,819,760 pounds — the sixth highest ever — worth some $450,799,283.

Despite all the talk about high value species such as scallops and elvers, according to DMR herring were the state’s second most valuable commercial fishery in 2017.

Herring boats like the Sunlight and the Starlight owned by the O’Hara Corp. in Rockland or the Portland-based trawler Providian landed some 66,453,073 pounds of herring worth about $17.9 million at a record price of 27 cents per pound.

Most of those landings went to the dealers who supply herring — the primary source of bait for the lobster industry — to fishermen up and down the coast. And most of those herring came from what is known as “Area 1-A,” the inshore waters of the Gulf of Maine.

All that is going to change.

Faced with data that indicates the herring population, an important source of food for whales, tuna and seabirds, among other species, regulators at the New England Fisheries Management Council last week recommended drastic steps to reduce the amount of herring that fishermen will be allowed to catch.

If approved by NOAA Fisheries, the 2019 landings quota for herring would be set at just 14,558 metric tons (about 32 million pounds). That cut comes on top of an already sharp reduction imposed this past summer.

In the middle of the year, the quota was cut by more than half, from 110,000 metric tons (242.5 million pounds) to about 50,000 metric tons (some 110.2 million pounds).

Maine lobstermen were already worried about what last summer’s cut would do to bait availability. Last week’s decision suggests that herring will be in extremely short supply and that what is available will be extremely expensive.

In 2013, Maine Lobstermen’s Association Executive Director Patrice McCarron said, fishermen were paying $30 a bushel for bait. Last summer, a bushel cost about $45 on the coast, $60 on the islands.

On the O’Hara Lobster Bait website this week, the price of herring was quoted at $175 for a 400-pound barrel (44 cents per pound) or $690 for an 1,800-pound tank (about 38 cents per pound).

Whatever the cost, lobstermen use a lot of bait — thousands of pounds in a year.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD: Proposed lobster rules not based on science

October 16, 2018 — A scientific paper that called for stricter regulations on Maine’s lobster fishery to protect endangered right whales plainly illustrates a two-sided problem.

We need policymakers who will rely on science. And they need science that they can rely on. If either side of the equation is missing, nothing works.

When we talk about climate change, we are used to politicians who ignore the science. But this time, it was the scientists who let us down.

A report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in advance of a big regulatory conference singled out stronger ropes, which, they said, are being used by Maine lobstermen and are entangling whales as they migrate through Maine waters.

The report’s authors proposed more gear changes and possible closures in some areas to respond to a rising number of whale deaths. They attributed the fatal entanglements to an unintended consequence of earlier regulations, which limited the number of vertical lines in the water, thus requiring longer strings of traps. “While this reduced the number of lines, it also meant that lines had to be stronger to accommodate the increased load of multiple traps,” the report’s authors wrote.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Hearings set on future of New England shrimp fishery

October 16, 2018 — Interstate fishing managers are holding a pair of public hearings about the future of the New England shrimp fishery, which continues to look bleak.

The shrimp fishery has been shut down since 2013 and the shrimp have been largely unavailable to the public. A new analysis of the shrimp stock says they remain depleted and threatened by warming waters.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is hosting the hearings on Nov. 5 in Augusta, Maine, and Nov. 6 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. An arm of the commission is set to vote on whether to reopen the fishery late in the month.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The State

With right whales at risk of extinction, regulators consider drastic action that could affect lobstermen

October 16, 2018 — With North Atlantic right whales increasingly at risk of extinction, federal regulators are considering drastic protection measures that could have sweeping consequences for the region’s lucrative lobster industry.

The species is in dangerous decline, with a record 17 right whale deaths and no recorded births last year, and entanglements in fishing gear are believed to be the leading cause of premature deaths. Three have died in US waters this year, including one 35-foot-long whale found Sunday about 100 miles east of Nantucket, federal officials said.

In an effort to protect the dwindling species, regulators last week hosted a series of often emotional meetings with fishermen, environmental advocates, and other federal and state officials about what to do.

The goal is to find a way to protect the whales while limiting the impact on lobstermen, who have hundreds of thousands of fishing lines that extend from their traps on the seafloor to their buoys on the surface of the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Northern Shrimp Draft Addendum I Public Hearings Scheduled

October 16, 2018 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

Maine and New Hampshire have scheduled their hearings to gather public input on Draft Addendum I to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Northern Shrimp. The details of those hearings follow.

Maine Department of Marine Resources

Monday, November 5, 2018 at 4 PM

Maine Department of Marine Resources

Conference Room #118

32 Blossom Lane

Augusta, Maine

Contact: Nicholas Popoff at 207.624.6554

New Hampshire Fish and Game

Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 7 PM

Urban Forestry Center

45 Elwyn Road

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Contact: Doug Grout at 603.868.1095

The Draft Addendum proposes providing states the authority to allocate their state-specific quota between gear types in the event the fishery reopens. The Draft Addendum is available at http://www.asmfc.org/files/PublicInput/NShrimpDraftAddendumI_PublicComment.pdf and can also be accessed on the Commission website (www.asmfc.org ) under Public Input.

Fishermen and other interested groups are encouraged to provide input on Draft Addendum I either by attending a public hearing or providing written comment. Public comment will be accepted until 5 PM on November 7, 2018 and should be forwarded to Megan Ware, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at 1050 N. Highland Street, Suite 200A-N, Arlington, VA, 22201; 703.842.07401 (fax); or comments@asmfc.org (Subject line: Northern Shrimp).

The Section and its Advisory Panel will be meeting November 15-16, 2018. At this meeting, the Section will consider final action on Addendum I and set 2019 specifications. Information regarding the date and location of the November meeting will be provided, when available, in a subsequent press release.

For more information, please contact Megan Ware, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at mware@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740

Report ‘erodes trust’ for lobstermen

October 15, 2018 — A new federal report on right whales was intended to set the stage for a weeklong meeting of groups trying to save the endangered species, but a lack of documentation for one of its central claims left the fishing industry feeling unfairly targeted.

Lobstermen accused the Northeast Fisheries Science Center of incompetence after it claimed a 2015 rule requiring fishermen to reduce the number of surface-to-seabed ropes had prompted some fishermen to start using stronger rope, which poses a bigger threat to whales.

“While this reduced the number of lines, it also meant that lines had to be stronger to accommodate the increased load of multiple traps,” the report reads. “This natural adaptation … contributed to an increase in the severity of entanglements.”

The lobster industry jumped on this sentence in the 24-page report, saying the center had no data to back it up, and knew it. Its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, gave Maine a $700,000 grant to collect this kind of data in April.

“You have an agency who’s been managing you for over 20 years fundamentally not understanding your fishery, publishing a technical memo that, quite frankly, felt more like an opinion piece,” said Patrice McCarron, director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

Such mistakes make it difficult for industry leaders to persuade constituents to participate in surveys like the one Maine is conducting if they believe federal regulators already believe the Maine lobster industry is to blame for the decline of the right whale population.

Read the full story at the Sun Journal

Herring, key to coastal health, slowly returning to rivers

October 15, 2018 — A little fish on the East Coast that once provided vital protein for American colonists and bait for generations of New England lobstermen is slowly making a comeback after falling victim to lost habitat and environmental degradation.

River herring once appeared headed to the endangered species list, but they’re now starting to turn up in rivers and streams at a rate that fishing regulators say is encouraging. The fish is a critical piece of the ecosystem in the eastern states, where it serves as food for birds and larger fish.

The comeback is most noticeable in Maine, the state with by far the largest river herring fishery in the country. Maine fishermen capture alewives, a species of river herring, and their catch of nearly 1.7 million pounds last year was the second largest in the last 37 years.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The News Tribune

Ropes are latest flashpoint in tug of war over endangered right whales

October 15, 2018 — The lobster industry is willing to consider switching to weaker rope to protect the endangered right whale from deadly entanglements, but whale defenders say that doesn’t go far enough to help a species that can’t bear even one more death.

A team of scientists, regulators, animal rights groups and fishermen met this week in Providence to review proposals to help a species that has dwindled to about 450 individuals after coming back from the brink of extinction.

The team is advising the National Marine Fisheries Service on how to prevent whales from getting entangled in fishing gear as they migrate, feed and mate as they travel back and forth along the East Coast of the United States and Canada.

The team agreed on a lot of measures that could help them understand why the whales are dying, like putting distinctive marks on all fishing gear so regulators can know which fisheries pose the biggest threat, but not on how to actually stop entanglement deaths.

Led by Maine regulators and fishermen, the lobster industry agreed Friday to explore weaker vertical lines – the rope that links seabed traps to a surface buoy – in areas where whales gather in numbers or eat, an act that puts them at greater risk of a fatal entanglement.

Rope strength limits would represent “a giant step forward,” lobster industry officials said.

“We pushed ourselves way beyond our comfort zones to present this idea with a bow on it,” said Patrice McCarron, director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “Let’s get the low-hanging fruit and find gear that we could actually fish and get in the water.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

New England Shrimp Population Still Depleted, Board Says

October 11, 2018 — A regulatory board says New England’s shrimp population remains depleted years after the fishery for the species was shut down.

Fishermen in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts used to harvest Northern shrimp in the winter, but regulators shut the fishery down in 2013 amid concerns about low population and warming waters.

An arm of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says it has reviewed a new assessment of the shrimp population that says there are far fewer of the crustaceans off of New England than there used to be. The commission says the rising temperatures of the Gulf of Maine are a threat to the shrimp.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News