Saving Seafood

Ocean Shock: Lobster’s Great Migration Sets Up Boom and Bust

October 31, 2018 — STONINGTON, Maine — This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

A lobster tattoo covers Drew Eaton’s left forearm, its pincers snapping at dock lines connecting it to the American flag on his upper arm. The tattoo is about three-quarters done, but the 27-year-old is too busy with his new boat to finish it.

Eaton knows what people here in Stonington have been saying about how much the boat cost him.

“I’ve heard rumors all over town. Small town, everyone talks,” he says. “I’ve heard a million, two million.”

By the time he was in the third grade, Eaton was already lobstering here on Deer Isle in Downeast Maine. By the time he was in the eighth grade, he’d bought his first boat, a 20-footer, from a family friend. The latest one, a 46-footer built over the winter at a nearby boatyard, is his fourth.

Standing on the seawall after hauling lobster traps for about 12 hours on a foggy day this August, he says he’s making plenty of money to cover the boat loan. He’s unloaded 17 crates, each carrying 90 pounds of lobster, for a total haul of nearly $5,500. It’s a pretty typical day for him.

Eaton belongs to a new generation of Maine lobstermen that’s riding high, for now, on a sweet spot of climate change. Two generations ago, the entire New England coast had a thriving lobster industry. Today, lobster catches have collapsed in southern New England, and the only state with a significant harvest is north in Maine, where the seafood practically synonymous with the state has exploded.

The thriving crustaceans have created a kind of nautical gold rush, with some young lobstermen making well into six figures a year. But it’s a boom with a bust already written in its wake, and the lobstermen of the younger generation may well pay the highest price. Not only have they heavily mortgaged themselves with pricey custom boats in the rush for quick profits, they’ll also bear the brunt of climate change — not to mention the possible collapse of the lobstering industry in Maine as the creatures flourish ever northward.

Shifts by 85 percent of species

In the U.S. North Atlantic, fisheries data show that at least 85 percent of the nearly 70 federally tracked species have shifted north or deeper, or both, in recent years when compared with the norm over the past half-century. And the most dramatic of species shifts have occurred in the last 10 or 15 years.

Just in the last decade, for example, black sea bass have migrated up the East Coast into southern New England and are caught in the same traps that once caught lobsters. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, only 50 percent of lobster caught in the United States came from Maine. That started to shift in the 2000s, and this decade, nearly 85 percent of all lobster landings are in Maine.

Read the full story at VOA News

Maine program aims to help recovery of endangered Atlantic salmon

It will be funded by fees on infrastructure projects paid in lieu of required environmental mitigation efforts.

October 29, 2018 — AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine is launching a new program to help pay for conservation work that benefits Atlantic salmon. The money will come from fees for road and bridge projects.

Salmon were once abundant in the rivers of New England, but they are now listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act after years of habitat loss and overfishing. The Atlantic Salmon Restoration and Conservation Program can help support the fish’s recovery, the Maine Department of Marine Resources said.

The program will allow public and private organizations working on road and bridge projects to pay a fee in lieu of environmental mitigation efforts that are required by law, the department said. Sean Ledwin, director of the sea-run fisheries division at the marine department, said the money will be used to “restore and enhance salmon habitat in Maine.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

 

The Cultural and Historical Importance of Atlantic Salmon in New England

October 29, 2018 — For thousands of years, Atlantic salmon – known as the King of Fish – ran almost every river northeast of the Hudson. And for decades, the first fish caught in Maine’s Penobscot River was actually presented to the president of the United States in a “first fish” ritual.

But overfishing and dams brought populations to their knees and the commercial fishery for Atlantic salmon closed seventy years ago in 1948. For most of us, the closest we’ve ever gotten to an Atlantic salmon is the farm-raised variety in the fish market.

But, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is celebrating the international year of the salmon, and the New England Aquarium is marking the occasion with a public lecture by Catherine Schmitt, author of The President’s Salmon: Restoring the King of Fish and its Home Waters; and Madonna Soctomah, former Passamaquoddy Tribal Representative with the Maine State Legislature and St. Croix International Waterway Commissioner. That’s the St. Croix River in Maine and New Brunswick, not the Caribbean island.

The Presidential “first fish” ritual started in 1912 with angler Carl Anderson. He decided that he wanted to give his fish – which was the first fish caught on opening day April 1st – to the president of the United States.

Read and listen to the full story at WCAI

 

NOAA scientists admit a gaffe on risk to whales of lobster trap lines

October 29, 2018 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Late last month, the NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center released a “technical memorandum” suggesting that expensive efforts by Maine lobstermen aimed at reducing the risk that endangered North Atlantic right whales and other large whales would become entangled in vertical buoy lines had backfired.

According to the memorandum, issued just before a weeklong meeting of NOAA’s Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team in Providence, R.I., to consider possible changes to the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan, when the industry increased the number of traps trawled together and marked by a single buoy line, lobstermen began using stronger rope. That worsened the entanglement problem.

The memorandum seemed to offer support for calls by some conservation groups for the use of even fewer vertical buoy lines, weaker ropes and the development of a “ropeless fishery” with traps that used a remote device to release a submerged buoy when it was time to raise the gear.

In a letter addressed to NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center Director Jon Hare, Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher blasted the memorandum, expressing “significant concerns about the scientific merit” of the data and research on which it was based.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

 

New Maine program aims to help fund recovery of wild salmon

October 26, 2018 — Maine’s Department of Marine Resources (DMR) has announced a new program aimed at helping to fund the recovery of wild caught Atlantic salmon in the US state while also reducing the regulatory burdens associated with road and bridge construction projects.

The Atlantic Salmon Restoration and Conservation Program (ASRCP) will provide public and private parties working on road and bridge construction projects the flexibility to pay a fee in lieu of the mitigation efforts required by federal law to offset the unavoidable environmental impacts of the construction activity, DMR explains in a press release.

The idea takes advantage of the existing In-Lieu Fee (ILF) program created in 2008 by the Army Corps of Engineers. It requires that funds paid by companies doing such work be used to support other restoration work that results in, at a minimum, no net loss of habitat or habitat function.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Dogfish Population Declines off East Coast, as Will Harvest

October 26, 2018 — Portland, Maine — A small species of shark that is fished for food off the East Coast has declined slightly in population, and fishermen will be allowed to catch slightly less of it in the coming year.

Spiny dogfish are harvested off several Atlantic states, and they are especially popular in Europe. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says a recent assessment of the shark’s population shows a decline in the number of spiny dogfish.

The commission says the decline requires a 46 percent reduction in the dogfish quota for the 2019-20 fishing year. The commission says the reduction is designed to avoid overfishing.

Fishermen will be allowed to catch about 20.5 million pounds of the dogfish in the new fishing year. They caught nearly 27 million pounds in 2016.

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

Search turns to recovery: Body of Maine lobsterman found

October 25, 2018 — Divers recovered the body of Scott Chandler, a 51-year-old West Jonesport, Maine, lobsterman, on Tuesday evening after he went overboard in the morning.

“Chandler was seen falling off his 20-foot lobster boat near the island at approximately 9:20 a.m. Tuesday… by commercial seaweed harvesters in the area who reported the incident,” said Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Nichols reported that divers recovered Chandler’s body near Doyle Island, about 200 yards west from where he entered the water near Hopkins Point in Jonesport, at about 5:10 p.m. on Oct. 23.

Local weather conditions on Tuesday afternoon included waves roughly a foot high and light and variable winds, according to U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Chellsey Phillips. A rescue crew, including members of the Coast Guard, Maine Marine Patrol, Maine State Police and the Maine Warden Service, searched 233 square miles. Phillips said rain started to fall around midafternoon, reducing visibility.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Here’s how $1.4M in NOAA grants will be used to help Maine’s fishing industry

October 25, 2018 — Sea lice infestation costs the salmon aquaculture industry an estimated at $15 million annually in the United States and $740 million globally — and remains the greatest barrier to continuing and expanding salmon aquaculture in the oceans.

That’s the industry context underscoring the relevance of the $725,365 grant awarded to a University of Maine team to study potential new treatments for sea lice infestation.

The grant is one of two to UMaine that were announced recently by National Sea Grant College, a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both projects are expected to further advance the development of a sustainable marine and coastal aquaculture industry in the United States, according to a NOAA news release.

Heather Hamlin, Deborah Bouchard and Ian Bricknell of UMaine’s Aquaculture Research Institute will research an integrated approach to addressing sea lice control in the commercial culture of Atlantic salmon in sea pens. The project will address gaps in knowledge of sea lice biology and control methods, such as integrated pest management, and new, ecologically sensitive chemical compounds and their effects on nontarget species, such as lobsters.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Turning an invasive problem into a bait solution

October 25, 2018 — With concerns growing over a likely bait shortage in the lobster industry in Maine and Canada due to a drastic cut in the upcoming season’s herring quota, Nova Scotia resident Patrick Swim has a possible solution. Swim thinks he can solve the bait shortage by harvesting an invasive species.

Silver carp is one of the four species of the invasive Asian carp (silver, bighead, grass, and black) that have placed the Great Lakes water system at risk. Carp were brought to North America in the 1970s as a biological control of algae, plants, and snails in aquaculture sites. Subsequent flooding allowed them to escape their pens, which created a new problem for the environment and marine life. A mature meter-long carp can weight 40 kilograms and consume up to 40 percent of their body weight each day, which puts stress on resources for native species. They also reproduce rapidly.

Swim was intrigued by reports that silver carp are so disturbed by noise and vibration caused by boat motors that they jump up to three meters out of the water. While looking at this flying fish phenomenon, Swim, whose family have long fished lobster on Canada’s Cape Sable Island, had an idea to harvest the carp, freeze it, cut it into pieces and sell it as a cheap bait to East Coast lobster fishermen.

In the past decades, Asian carp have replaced native fish species in areas of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Their advance towards the Great Lakes has spurred the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to spend tens of millions of dollars annually trying to contain them. So far, electro-magnetic fields and fish fences have prevented all but a few carp from entering the lakes.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MAINE: Regulators moving to ban exotic bait that could threaten lobster fishery

October 23, 2018 — The American Lobster Management Board took a first step toward adopting regional bait safety rules, voting Monday to develop a resolution to prohibit the use of exotic baits that could introduce disease, parasites or invasive species to East Coast waters.

The board unanimously agreed on the need to shield native species, including the $1.4 billion Maine lobster industry, from the dangers posed by the mad scramble for new kinds of bait that may occur when regulators slash herring quotas next year.

This action came at the request of Maine Department of Marine Resources, which enacted its strict bait rules in 2013. But Commissioner Pat Keliher said risky bait is still finding its way into the Gulf of Maine through New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Canada.

“This is one of the most serious issues we face as an organization,” Keliher told the board.

The board – which is part of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission – agreed to develop a bait safety resolution based on Maine’s rules that all lobstering states would enact by 2020 – a quick but voluntary fix. To get compliance, the board also plans to begin the slow process of adding bait safety to its lobster management plan.

The horseshoe crab board, for example, passed a similar resolution banning the use of Asian horseshoe crabs as bait. Most member states voluntarily honored the bait ban resolution, but New York continues to allow the practice, regulators noted.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald