Saving Seafood

Herring quota’s sting may lead Maine lobstermen to sit out next spring

September 27, 2018 — At the height of the season, Brooklin lobsterman David Tarr spends $600 to $800 a day to bait his traps with herring, pogies or redfish.

While some Maine lobstermen swear by herring, Tarr is willing to play the field based on price and availability. Unlike most of his peers, Tarr also has the luxury of a personal bait cooler, which allows him to buy bait when the price is right, salt it himself and store up to 200 barrels of it away – $40,000 of bait, enough for a half-season of fishing – for use during tough times.

On Wednesday, one day after the New England Fisheriesy Management Council voted to recommend slashing the yearly herring quota by 80 percent, Tarr figured tough times are coming. He plans to spend the spring stocking his bait cooler before the lobster season kicks into high gear and bait prices go up, possibly doubling at the peak of the season.

One thing that Tarr probably won’t be doing in the spring? Lobstering.

“At a certain point, it is just not worth it,” Tarr said. “I won’t go fishing just to pay for my bait.”

Every lobsterman will be doing exactly the same math, Tarr said. They’ll look at their daily bait bill, and then lobster prices. Then they’ll figure out how much lobster they would have to catch just to cover their bait bill, and estimate the likelihood of surpassing that threshold. For Tarr, that means he needs to land three crates of lobster – about 270 pounds – to cover his daily bait bill alone.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Who Has The Edge In The Lobster Trade War?

September 27, 2018 — There are few New England scenes as iconic as the ol’ lobster shack. Local crustaceans being served up fresh and delicious in whole or in roll form. Well, it turns out that “just-off-the boat” experience has pretty broad appeal … like as far away as China.

“There’s always been a demand for it, but they wanted the live lobster,” said Arthur Sawyer, a Gloucester lobster fisherman and President of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association. “Live lobster — ya know — it’s like a 36 hour thing to get to China.”

A decade ago, the Chinese market for U.S. live lobster was essentially nonexistent. But a few years back, shippers finally worked out how to reliably get fresh live lobster to China. It was a game changer. Last year, the country imported nearly $150 million worth.

“There’s a whole lot of exporters that have gotten into the lobster business strictly because of China,” said Sawyer.

But live lobster got swept up in the trade war this July, when Beijing slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. imports. And just three months in, it’s already having an impact here. Vince Mortillaro, a local wholesaler, said China has stopped buying from him completely, and he’s has had to lay off three employees.

“They’re affecting me a lot,” he said of the tariffs. “We’re losing like 40,000 pounds of sales a week.”

For now, the pinch wholesalers are feeling has yet to trickle down to lobster fishermen on the boats, who sell to the wholesalers, or the lobster-craving public. As for why? Well, it’s complicated. Live lobster exports are an important part of the equation. But a sizable chunk of New England total haul each year gets sold off to be processed.

Read the full story at WGBH

NEFMC Reelects Dr. John Quinn as Chair and Terry Stockwell as Vice Chair

September 27, 2018 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

At the start of its September 24 -27, 2018 meeting in Plymouth, MA, the New England Fishery Management Council reelected Dr. John Quinn of Massachusetts and Terry Stockwell of Maine to serve as Council chair and vice chair for another term. The two ran unopposed and were ushered in unanimously.

This marks Dr. Quinn’s third consecutive year as chairman. Prior to that, he served three years as Council
vice chair under Stockwell. The two switched leadership positions during 2016 but continued to work
together as a team to direct the Council’s management and policy initiatives. “I appreciate the confidence the Council has shown in me over the past couple of years,” said Dr. Quinn. “I look forward to doing more good work with all of our Council members and stakeholders.”

Dr. Quinn recently was promoted to Assistant Dean of Public Interest Law and External Relations at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) School of Law. He is a former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he spent 18 years. He also represented many fishing interests while practicing law in private practice for over two decades in New Bedford before joining UMass.

Read the full release here

Plans for second-largest oyster farm in US state of Maine runs into resistance

September 27, 2018 — An effort to launch what would be the second-largest oyster farm in the US state of Maine is running into some resistance, the Portland Press Herald reports.

Doug Niven and Dan Devereaux, owners of The Mere Point Oyster Co., in Brunswick, have planned a 40-acre oyster farm in Maquoit Bay, consolidating 26 aquaculture licenses to produce about 5 million oysters annually.

The bay is about 3,000 acres and the Maine Department of Marine Resources limit for aquaculture farms is 100 acres. A site review shows the farm unlikely to affect boat traffic or hinder lobster harvesters and bait fishermen.

But some residents, calling themselves the Maquoit Preservation Group, attended a meeting of the Brunswick Town Council last week to voice concerns about the proposal, including especially the impact on the environment and the amount of noise produced by the oyster tumbler. One resident compared the oyster sorting machine to having a cement mixer on the water. They say they were surprised to learn of the size of the farm, as most other oyster farms in the area are just five to 10 acres.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Maine lobstermen say move to avert collapse of herring fishery will have dire consequences

September 26, 2018 — Regulators are taking drastic steps to avert a collapse of the herring fishery, adopting trawling bans and proposing rock-bottom quotas.

While environmental groups and those who fish species that rely on herring for food, like striped bass and tuna, cheered the action, the Maine lobster industry was left wondering how it will survive without its favorite bait. Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen Association, predicted it will force some lobstermen off the water.

“It is going to be really devastating,” McCarron told the New England Fisheries Management Council on Tuesday. “People aren’t going to be able to fish. There’s just not going to be enough bait. If you do get bait, you’re going to be on rations. The price of bait is going to skyrocket. … A lot of people are going to go out of business.”

About 70 percent of all herring landed in the U.S. ends up as bait, mostly for the lobster industry. In the last five years, as lobster hauls increased, the demand for herring went up, too, just as herring landings began to fall, McCarron said. That has driven up the bait price. In 2013, Maine lobstermen were paying $30 a bushel. Now, a bushel costs $45 on the coast, or $60 on the islands.

McCarron expects the price of bait to double next year, which would be a disaster for Maine lobstermen, she said. Her organization has been meeting with Maine bait dealers to talk about their storage capability, which she said was limited, and herring alternatives such as pogeys and redfish, whose prices likely will rise as lobstermen are forced to abandon herring as bait.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Drastic measures considered to arrest plunge in herring population

September 25, 2018 — The small, silver fish that teem in large schools in the waters off New England are vital to the marine ecosystem, providing a crucial source of food to many of the region’s iconic species, including cod, striped bass, humpback whales, and seabirds such as puffins.

But recent surveys have found that the Atlantic herring population in the Gulf of Maine is at risk of collapse, with so few being born that federal officials have slashed fishing quotas and are now considering even more draconian steps to reduce the catch.

The proposed measures, which the New England Fishery Management Council is slated to take up on Tuesday, are so controversial that they have pitted fishermen against each other and have raised concerns about the future of the region’s lucrative lobster fishery, which mainly uses herring as bait.

“The decline of Atlantic herring represents an existential threat to many New England fisheries and the fishing families who depend on them for their livelihoods,” said Ben Martens, executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, an advocacy group that promotes sustainable fishing. “Without food in the ocean, without bait in the traps, the ecosystem and the entire fishing economy of New England begins to crumble.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

The Future of Fish Farming May Be Indoors

September 25, 2018 — On a projection screen in front of a packed room in a coastal Maine town, computer-animated salmon swim energetically through a massive oval tank. A narrator’s voice soothingly points out water currents that promote fish exercise and ideal meat texture, along with vertical mesh screens that “optimize fish densities and tank volume.” The screens also make dead fish easy to remove, the narrator cheerily adds.

The video is part of a pitch made earlier this year for an ambitious $500-million salmon farm that Norway-based firm, Nordic Aquafarms, plans to build in Belfast, Maine, complete with what Nordic says will be among the world’s largest aquaculture tanks. It is one of a handful of projects in the works by companies hoping these highly mechanized systems will change the face fish farming—by moving it indoors.

If it catches on, indoor aquaculture could play a critical role in meeting the needs of a swelling human population, Nordic CEO Erik Heim says. He believes it could do so without the pollution and other potential threats to wild fish that can accompany traditional aquaculture—although the indoor approach does face environmental challenges of its own. “There’s always some risk, but the risk of the land-based system is a small percentage of the risk of an outdoor system,” says Michael Timmons, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has studied aquaculture for more than 20 years and is not involved in the Nordic project.

Fish farming has often been touted as an extremely efficient way to produce animal protein: the Global Aquaculture Alliance claims 100 kilograms of fish feed can deliver up to 15 times more meat than an equivalent amount fed to cows. The industry has gained international traction, with farmed fish surpassing wild-caught ones (pdf) in the global food supply in 2014. But traditional fish-farming methods come with significant environmental drawbacks. For example, salmon farmers in Norway and Chile—the world leaders in salmon production—typically use open-ocean cages that corral fish in suspended netting or pens. This setup allows waste to flow directly into the environment, along with pathogens and parasites that can infect wild populations. Open-air pond farms—found worldwide and representing the most common type of aquaculture in China, the top global producer of farmed fish—also have a track record of polluting local waterways with fish effluent and veterinary medicines that are used to keep disease at bay.

Read the full story at Scientific American

NOAA officials say seal die-off linked to virus

September 24, 2018 — Gray and harbor seals have lured sharks in increasing numbers into Cape Cod waters, with tragic results, but the burgeoning seal population is taking a hit from viruses.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has issued an unusual mortality event alert for both species of seal in the Gulf of Maine.

From July 1 to Aug. 29 (when the alert was issued) 599 seals were found dead (137) or ill and stranded (462) on New England shores. In the few weeks since that number has soared to 921. Most of those were in Maine (629), with 147 in New Hampshire and 125 in Massachusetts.

The dead or dying seals have been located mostly to the north but a couple were found as far south as Plymouth in Cape Cod Bay.

The dead or dying seals have been located mostly to the north but a couple were found as far south as Plymouth in Cape Cod Bay.

For comparison the nearly 500 seals found last month is roughly 10 times the number that stranded in August of 2017.

“That is attributed to the influences of disease,” noted Terri Rowles, NOAA’s Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Program coordinator.

Read the full story at the Eastham Wicked Local

 

Crowd overwhelms, forces postponement of hearing on shellfish farm expansion in Maine

September 21, 2018 — KITTERY, Maine — After upward of 80 people showed up to the state-held public hearing for Spinney Creek Shellfish’s aquaculture expansion application, officials postponed the meeting on the spot due to capacity issues.

The meeting was scheduled for the basement room in Kittery’s Rice Public Library. By the start time at 6 p.m., seating was full, nearly 30 people were standing, and a line formed out the back door.

Amanda Ellis, aquaculture hearings officer for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, announced the agency would be postponing Wednesday night’s meeting, and rescheduling to Thursday, Sept. 27, at a larger venue to later be decided.

“When we try to schedule these, we never really know how many people to expect,” Ellis said. “It makes sense for a variety of different reasons to move it to Sept. 27, so everybody can hear the testimony and hear about the proposal.”

Spinney Creek, a 127-acre salt water pond split between Kittery and Eliot in the shadows of the Piscataqua River Bridge, has recently become the center of an aquaculture debate, where a 35-year shellfish company wants to grow their business and expand local farming opportunities, while residential abutters are concerned with the impact and appearance of the proposal.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

Baked, then boiled: Why one Maine restaurant is sedating lobsters with marijuana smoke

September 20, 2018 — Lobsters in one Maine restaurant go out in a blaze of glory once they hit the pot. The owner of a lobster joint is sedating her crustaceans with marijuana smoke before cooking them — which she says gives them a blissfully humane death.

Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, told the Portland Press Herald that she had been looking for a way to reduce suffering of her signature menu item. She experimented with blowing marijuana smoke into a tank with one lobster, Roscoe (basically, she hot-boxed him). When Gill returned him to a tank with the other lobsters without his claw bands, she says, he was less aggressive. Gill has a medical marijuana license.

She plans to offer it as an option for customers who want their lobsters to be baked before they’re boiled. But that doesn’t mean the customer will get stoned from their dinner.

“THC breaks down completely by 392 degrees, therefore we will use both steam as well as a heat process that will expose the meat to 420-degree extended temperature, in order to ensure there is no possibility of carry-over effect,” Gill told the Press Herald. So while some might see it as a humane death for the lobster, others might think it’s a waste of perfectly good weed.

Chefs and scientists have long pondered the question of whether lobsters feel pain. Experiments have shown that crustaceans are responsive to stimuli that cause pain, like heat, but it is unclear whether this is a reflex or a pain response from their nervous systems. It’s also unclear whether cannabis has the same pain-relieving effect on lobsters that it has on humans.

Read the full story at The Washington Post