Saving Seafood

New England herring fishing to be limited in September

September 12, 2018 — Interstate fishing regulators say the quota is almost tapped out in one of the most productive herring fishing areas of the Northeast, and they’re shutting the fishery down for the rest of the month.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says 97 percent of the quota has been harvested from the inshore Gulf of Maine. The area includes coastal Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The commission says the fishery will be shut down from Thursday morning until Sept. 30. Boats that harvest other species will also be allowed to possess no more than 2,000 pounds of herring per trip per day.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

Ocean Funding Will Benefit Right Whales, Sea Turtles, Salmon

September 11, 2018 — The National Marine Fisheries Service is sending more than $6 million to nearly 30 marine conservation projects as part of its Species Recovery Grant Program.

The grants are designed to help marine species that face threats in the wild. Four of the awards are going to the Maine Department of Marine Resources, which will do an assessment of how fishing impacts endangered North Atlantic right whales.

The Maine department is also getting grants designed to help the salmon population, which has been the focus of years of conservation efforts in the state.

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

Farmed Scallops are Coming to a Plate Near You

September 11, 2018 — Bangs Island Mussels’ farm manager Jon Gorman heads out on Casco Bay, off of Portland, Maine, in a blue and white fishing boat named Le Cozze (Italian for mussels). He motors past one of the rafts where the company is growing mussels and on to a more unusual venture: Bangs Island’s new sea scallop farm.

Gorman cuts the engine and drops the anchor, under the watchful eyes of harbor seals lounging on a nearby island. Scallops need cold, nutrient-dense water to grow, and Maine’s protected bays provide the ideal environment.

Cranking a winch, Gorman and his crew pull up a taut, algae-covered rope from the depths of Casco Bay’s gray water. Leaning over the side, they haul out a lantern net, a long, box-shaped structure that serves as a scallop nursery, onto the deck. Gorman reaches into one of the lantern net’s 10 compartments and pulls out a handful of golden-brown scallop shells, about the size of old-fashioned silver dollars.

Eyeballing them, he looks pleased. When his measurement confirms they’re 65 millimeters across, Gorman nods. “These are ready for ear hanging,” he says.

Gently dropping the lantern net back in the water, the crew motors further out, where 2,000 larger scallops are hanging on 26 longlines. The crew hauls up a line with dozens of larger scallops, hanging in pairs by their “ears,” the flat wings that fan out from the base of the shell. The animals that emerge from the water are lively; they’re snapping and gurgling, coated with algae and a smattering of barnacles.

Gorman measures again. These scallops are on target for harvest in the fall, which means that Bangs Island Mussels will be one of the first companies to bring a mature, environmentally friendly, farmed sea scallop to market in the U.S.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Maine to hold hearings on scallop fishery rules

September 10, 2018 — Maine’s scallop fishermen will have a chance to weigh in on a plan to keep the rules governing their fishery about the same in the coming season.

Scallopers would be allowed to harvest the same amount of the shellfish per day under a proposal by state regulators. The hearings are scheduled for Monday in Augusta, Tuesday in Machias and Wednesday in Ellsworth.

The proposal also includes localized closures, which the state uses to allow young scallops to grow.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Whale seen struggling in fishing net in Gulf of Maine ‘appears to be OK,’ expert says

September 7, 2018 — A whale caught in a fishing net last week appeared fine when seen swimming in the area over the weekend, said Dianna Schulte, research coordinator and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation.

Named “Owl,” the 32-year-old humpback whale “appears to be OK physically,” she elaborated.

Owl was entangled in the fishing net deployed off a “purse-seiner” vessel Aug. 30 off the Isles of Shoals, a small group of islands straddling the border between Maine and New Hampshire, according to multiple witnesses. The witnesses included 85 people aboard a Granite State Whale Watch tour, led by captain Peter Reynolds.

Reynolds said Friday that Owl was one of 12 humpback whales in the area at the time, that the fishing net was intentionally set in spite of them and he thought Owl was going to die while trapped and thrashing in the net for about 50 minutes. He said the fishing crew continued to try to haul the net while Owl was caught and “in obvious distress,” while his passengers watched and were “horrified.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Regulators weigh health of shrimp fishery

September 7, 2018 — Fishery managers will move closer to deciding the fate of the Gulf of Maine’s northern shrimp fishery when they meet in October to review the latest assessment of the imperiled stock.

The review is one of the final steps leading to a decision whether to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing for the 2019 season for the first time in six seasons.

It does not look good.

The popular winter fishery has been shuttered since the beginning of the 2014 season to all but research-related shrimping because of historically low abundance and biomass numbers that reflect a stock in free fall.

The 2017 benchmark assessment — which led regulators to close the fishery for the 2018 season — showed no signs of improvement from previous years and regulators seem to expect the same outcome from the 2018 stock assessment.

“The trends are similar,” Megan Ware, a fishery management plan coordinator with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates the fishery, said Thursday. “We’re still seeing the low trends that we’ve seen in the past five years.”

The 2017 stock status report made for sobering reading.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

How New England’s Jonah Crab Turned From Garbage To Delicacy

September 6, 2018 — The Jonah crab is a medium-sized crab, ranging from brownish to reddish to greyish, boasting big claws tipped with black. During the winter, when most of the year’s crabs are caught along the Atlantic coast from Maine down to Rhode Island, it has an exceedingly hard shell, requiring a hammer or a saw to open. It’s mostly served as a plate of the large claws, with someone else taking care of scoring and cracking them open for the customer.

If this reminds you of Florida’s famed stone crab, which sells for about $30 a pound, you’re on the right track; the two species are very similar in appearance and even flavor. And yet until just a few years ago, the Jonah crab cost about $0.50 a pound. Or it was free. “Lobstermen would pull them up and in most cases have no idea what to do with the things, so they’d usually just throw them back,” says Bryan Holden, a partner at Luke’s Lobster who’s been right at the forefront of the Jonah crab’s transformation. (Luke is his brother.)

Jonah crabs are attracted to the same bait as lobsters, and are equally as flummoxed by lobster traps, so for decades, they were simply a bycatch. Maybe the lobstermen would bring them home themselves, or sell them for basically nothing to the small seafood shacks that spring up along any coast. Until about four years ago, there was no Jonah crab industry: few were processing it, and hardly anyone besides those who make their living from the sea in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine had even heard of it.

Read the full story at Modern Farmer

Meeting Set to Consider Future of Maine Shrimp Fishery

September 6, 2018 — A regulatory panel will meet next month to consider what the future holds for New England’s shuttered shrimp fishery.

The fishery has been shut down since 2013 because of low population, poor survival of young and concerns about warming oceans. An arm of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will meet in Portland on Oct. 4 to review the most recent assessment of the shrimp stock.

The board will consider sending potential changes to the fishery out for public comment. Possibilities include crafting new rules for the fishery if it reopens. However, officials with the Atlantic States commission say that’s unlikely at this point because little about the shrimp’s status seems to have changed.

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

Waters off New England in midst of record year for warmth

August 31, 2018 — The waters off of New England are already warming faster than most of the world’s oceans, and they are nearing the end of one of the hottest summers in their history.

That is the takeaway from an analysis of summer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine by a marine scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. The average sea surface temperature in the gulf was nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average during one 10-day stretch in August, said the scientist, Andy Pershing, who released the work Thursday.

Aug. 8 was the second warmest day in recorded history in the gulf, and there were other sustained stretches this summer that were a few degrees higher than the average from 1982 to 2011, Pershing said. He characterized this year as “especially warm” even for a body of water that he and other scientists previously identified as warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Maine Scallopers Would Be Allowed Same Limits Under Proposal

August 28, 2018 — Maine scallop fishermen would be allowed to harvest the same amount of the shellfish per day under a proposal floated by state regulators.

The state’s scallop season takes place every winter in the state’s icy waters. The Maine Department of Marine Resources is proposing a 2018-19 fishing season in which fishermen in most of Maine would be limited to 15 gallons per day. Fishermen in a zone that includes scallop-rich Cobscook Bay would be limited to 10 gallons per day.

The proposal also includes localized closures. It’s up for public hearings next month in Augusta, Machias, and Ellsworth.

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