Saving Seafood

ASMFC Atlantic Herring Days Out Call Scheduled for November 13, 2018 at 10:30 AM

November 9, 2018 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Fisheries Management Council:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Herring Management Board members from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts set effort control measures for the Area 1A (inshore Gulf of Maine) fishery via Days Out meetings/calls.

The Atlantic Herring Board members from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts are scheduled to convene via conference call to review fishing effort on:

• Tuesday, November 13th at 10:30 AM

To join the call, please dial 888.585.9008 and enter conference room number 502-884-672 as prompted.

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

Key US Shellfish Quotas Will Remain the Same Next Year

November 8, 2018 — A couple of the most significant fisheries for shellfish on the East Coast will have the same catch quotas next year.

Fishermen harvest surf clams and ocean quahogs from the Atlantic Ocean every year for use in chowders, fried clam dinners and other popular seafood dishes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the quota for the two species will be unchanged in the new fishing year that begins on Jan. 1.

The quota will be 5.33 million bushels for ocean quahogs and 3.4 million bushels for surf clams. The quota for Maine ocean quahogs will be limited to 100,000 Maine bushels, which is also the same as the current year.

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

Maine Aquaculture Projects Dredge Up Memories Of Polluted, Industrial Waterways

November 8, 2018 —  At a recent hearing in Kittery, so many people showed up to weigh in on the proposed expansion of an oyster-growing operation in a local creek, Department of Marine Resources hearing officer Amanda Ellis had to make a choice.

“Based on the number that we’re seeing we’ve made the decision to postpone the hearing,” she said.

But opponents such as Mike Dowling were still plenty willing to talk.

“I have many concerns, there’s a whole group of us, introducing over 2,500 objects suspended or floating into the creek creates a pinch point, and everyone uses that little sandy beach to go swimming,” he said.

Such complaints do arise with aquaculture enterprises, with neighbors — sometimes including fishermen — worrying about water access, environmental effects and property values. Up the coast in Maquoit Bay, near Brunswick, a proposed 40-acre shellfish farm is meeting some stiff resistance.

And then there’s Belfast, where a proposal to site what would be one of the world’s largest indoor salmon farms is stirring talk of the darker days, when the city was dominated by chicken processors.

Read the full story at WBUR

American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment Workshop Scheduled for January 28-31, in New Bedford, MA

November 8, 2018 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will hold the American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment Workshop at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, 836 South Rodney French Boulevard, New Bedford, MA. The stock assessment, which is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2020, will evaluate the health of the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank and Southern New England stocks and inform management of this species.  The Commission’s stock assessment process and meetings are open to the public, with the exception of discussions of confidential data*, when the public will be asked to leave the room.  

The Commission welcomes the submission of alternate assessment models. For alternate models to be considered, the model description, model input, final model estimates, and complete source code must be provided to Jeff Kipp, Senior Stock Assessment Scientist, at jkipp@asmfc.org by December 28, 2018. Any models submitted without complete, editable source code and input files will not be considered.

For more information about the assessment or attending the upcoming workshop (space will be limited), please contact Megan Ware, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at mware@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.

* Each state and federal agency is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of its data and deciding who has access to its confidential data.  In the case of our stock assessments and peer reviews, all analysts and, if necessary, reviewers, have been granted permission by the appropriate agency to use and view confidential data. When the assessment team needs to show and discuss these data, observers to our stock assessment process are asked to leave the room to preserve confidentiality.

 

Even Lobsters Can’t Escape Trump’s Trade War

November 7, 2018 — In his cargo shorts and T-shirt, Mark Barlow looked anything but an international trade warrior. Yet a few weeks ago, when he slid open the door to his low-slung warehouse in a scrappy industrial lot to reveal concrete tanks filled with 375,000 gallons of 40-degree water and a fortune in live Maine lobsters, he might as well have been leading a battlefield tour.

Since the 1990s, Barlow has built his company, Island Seafood, into a $50 million-a-year business by shipping live lobsters around the world. He exported one out of every five to China until recently. A lobster plucked from a trap in Maine’s frigid waters—home to North America’s richest fishery—could surface on a dinner plate in Beijing two days later. The first months of 2018 were the best start in Island Seafood’s history, says Barlow, who this year expected to ship a million pounds of lobster to Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other Chinese cities, where he’s built relationships for a decade. Then, as Barlow, a 57-year-old bear of a man who speaks like someone who’s spent years negotiating on the docks, puts it: “The orangutan in Washington woke up from a nap and decided to put tariffs on China,” and “the Chinese stopped buying immediately.”

If you want to understand the modern global economy, the implications of climate change, and the unintended consequences of President Trump’s trade wars, then you ought to “consider the lobster.” The writer David Foster Wallace’s 2004 essay of that name riffed on the history (“Up until sometime in the 1800s … lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized”) and morality (“It’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself”) of our love affair with Homarus americanus. To consider the lobster now, almost 15 years later, is to study crustacean economics just as U.S.-China trade tensions reach a roiling boil.

As Trump has rewritten America’s economic relationships, some of the country’s most prized exports—Kentucky bourbon, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Midwestern soybeans—have become retaliatory targets for China and the European Union. For its part, Beijing began imposing a 25 percent tariff on a long list of imports from the U.S., including live lobsters, on July 6. “The second this happened, I said to my sales team, ‘China’s dead,’ ” Barlow says. Correspondence with his Chinese customers confirmed his hunch. “I don’t think there is [a] way to import U.S. lobster,” one buyer texted.

Read the full story at Bloomberg Businessweek

Study says ocean oscillation changes reduced shellfish landings

November 6, 2018 — For years, Maine shellfish harvesters have been complaining that there are fewer softshell clams while arguing that the diggers who go out on the mud flats aren’t the cause of the problem.

A recent study by researchers from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources backs them up on both counts.

According to Clyde L. MacKenzie Jr. of NOAA and Mitchell Tarnowski from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, between 1980 and 2010, documented landings of the four most commercially important inshore bivalve mollusks along the Northeast coast — eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams and northern bay scallops — dropped by 85 percent.

The principal cause, they say, was warming ocean temperatures associated with a shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation which resulted in damaged shellfish habitat and increased predation from Maine to North Carolina.

“My first response is that the article confirms what I have been seeing with soft-shell clams over at least the last decade or so,” Brian Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine Machias and director of research at the Downeast Institute on Great Wass Island, said last week.

The North Atlantic Oscillation is a fluctuation of atmospheric pressure over the North Atlantic that affects both the weather and the climate along the East Coast, especially in winter and early spring.

According to NOAA, shifts in the oscillation can affect the timing of a species’ reproduction and growth, the availability of microscopic organisms for food and predator-prey relationships.

Over a period of several years, MacKenzie and Tarnowski interviewed shellfish wardens and harvesters along the New England coast, as well as examining landings records and other research in an effort to determine the “true causes” of the precipitous drop in shellfish landings.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Fisheries regulators to deliver the shrimp season news next week

November 6, 2018 — The wait will soon be over for gourmets and harvesters who yearn to know whether Maine shrimp will be on their plates — or in their nets — this winter.

Next week, fisheries regulators will meet over two days in Portland to consider the health of the Northern Shrimp resource and changes to the Northern Shrimp Fishery Management Plan, Most important, they will also determine whether there will be a shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Maine this winter and if so, how large it will be.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Technical Advisory Panel and Regulatory Section will meet on Thursday, Nov. 15, and Friday, Nov. 16, respectively, at the Maine Historical Society at 489 Congress St. in Portland.

The panel will meet Thursday from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. to review public comment on Draft Addendum I to the management plan, review the 2018 Benchmark Stock Assessment and prepare recommendations about both adoption of the draft addendum and the dates and landings quota, if any, for the 2019 shrimp fishing season for consideration by the Northern Shrimp Section.

On Friday, the section will meet from 9 a.m. to noon to consider the advisory panel’s recommendations, then take final action on the proposed changes and set specifications for the 2019 season.

The addendum would give each of the three states that have shrimp landings — primarily Maine but also New Hampshire and Massachusetts — the authority to allocate its shrimp landing quota set by the ASMFC between gear types in the event the fishery reopens. In the last years that there was a commercial fishery — there has been a moratorium on fishing since 2013 — trawlers caught about 90 percent of shrimp landed but there was a growing trap fishery.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Rule change for shuttered shrimp fishery could be coming

November 5, 2018 —  Fishery managers are seeking feedback on potential changes to New England’s long-shuttered shrimp fishery if it ever reopens.

Shrimp fishing has been shut down off Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire since 2013. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering changes to the way it allocates quota in the fishery.

The commission’s holding public hearings in Augusta, Maine, on Monday and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Tuesday.

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

Researchers identify causes of decline in shellfish harvests

November 5, 2018 — NOAA researchers studying the 85 percent decline between 1980 and 2010 of the four most commercially-important bivalve mollusks — eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams, and northern bay scallops — have identified the causes.

Along with the sharp decline in commercially important bivalves, there has been a corresponding decline in the numbers of fishermen (89 percent) who harvested the bivalves, said researchers with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

The bivalve declines are in contrast to the previous three decades (1950–80) when the combined landings of the same bivalves were much higher and the trend in each of their annual landings was nearly level, decade by decade.

The only exceptions to the declines were seen in the harvest of northern quahogs in Connecticut and American lobsters in Maine. However, the numbers of American lobster landings have fallen precipitously – as much as 98 percent – from southern Massachusetts to New Jersey.

The researchers also found during the course of the study that a number of groups of marine and land animals have also experienced large shifts in abundance since the early 1980’s.

Read the full story at Digital Journal

Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund grant improves Marine Patrol surveillance abilities

November 2, 2018 — AUGUSTA — With a $3,200 grant from the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund and matching funds of $2,339.50 from the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the Maine Marine Patrol has purchased binoculars that will improve officers’ ability to conduct surveillance for enforcement and search and rescue.

The new 14×40 Fujinon Image Stabilization binoculars have been distributed to the Marine Patrol’s fleet of large patrol vessels throughout the state, replacing previous models that had only 7x magnification.

“The enhanced magnification allows Marine Patrol officers to survey more area in greater detail,” said Marine Patrol Colonel Jon Cornish. “This is especially important as more fishing activity is moving farther offshore.

Read the full article on Bangor Daily News