April 25, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s baby eel fishermen are on track to catch the entirety of their quota for the valuable fish after falling short in recent years.
The eels are sold to Asian aquaculture companies, and are part of the worldwide supply chain for Japanese food. Maine’s the only U.S. state with a significant fishery for the eels, called elvers, and regulators limit them to 9,688 pounds per year.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Seattle Times
April 25, 2018 — If rising temperatures have you dreaming about that first lobster roll of the season, be prepared to get sticker shocked.
The price of lobster has surged over the past few months as Maine, the state the dominates the U.S. lobster haul, saw the catch fall due to a long winter and chilly spring while global demand remains on the rise, according to The Boston Globe. Cold weather in Canada is keeping its fisheries iced over, adding to the shortage.
Hard-shell lobster prices have shot up to about $15 a pound, nearly double from last year’s $8 a pound. And restaurants looking to buy pre-shucked lobster meat for their rolls can expect to shell out about $40 a pound.
The Globe surveyed seafood prices in restaurants around Boston and found the cost of many lobster dishes to be “off the charts,” the paper reports. A lobster roll at Chef Chris Coombs’ restaurant Deuxave will set you back $49, instead of the usual $22. And another area restaurateur told the Globe that it currently costs $47 to prepare his lobster rolls, but has kept the menu price at $29.
Read the full story at NBC New York
April 24, 2018 — The Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research awarded a $300,000 grant to CEI to investigate the economic viability of a Japanese scallop production technique that has been shown to grow scallops faster as well as produce larger yields of meat.
U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, announced Monday that FFAR, a nonprofit corporation established by the 2014 Farm Bill, awarded the $300,000 research grant to Hugh Cowperthwait of CEI, which is matching the award to double its impact.
It is one four grants totaling $1.5 million announced by FFAR that will fund research to improve economic opportunities for farmed fish, shellfish and marine invertebrate production and increase the supply of domestically-produced, nutritious foods in the United States.
The grants are matched by five companies, one industry association and three universities for a total of $3 million in funding for research including best practices for aquaculture producers and economic feasibility studies. All research results will be shared publicly with the goal of stimulating aquaculture markets.
Read the full story at MaineBiz
April 24, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Three men accused of together poaching and selling as much as $1 million worth of baby eels, called elvers, have been sentenced to a combination of probation and fines.
The sentencing Thursday was part of a bust of an eel poaching ring, the Bangor Daily News reports. The Operation Glass Eel bust led to 21 men being prosecuted on charges of illegally catching, selling and transporting more than $5 million worth of elvers in nine East Coast states. Twelve of the men are from Maine.
Two of the men sentenced Thursday in Portland were from Massachusetts. The third lives in Maine.
Elvers are one of the country’s most lucrative fisheries on a by-the-pound basis. They are sold to Asia for sushi.
Maine is the only U.S. state with a significant fishery for baby eels, or elvers. The tiny, translucent eels are sold to Asian aquaculture companies to be raised to maturity for use as food. They’re a key piece of the worldwide supply chain for Japanese dishes such as unagi, and some eventually make it back to the U.S.
The elvers are also legally harvested in South Carolina. Massachusetts only has a fishery for older eels, those larger than 9 inches, as do Maryland, Virginia and Delaware.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Times
April 19, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — NOAA Fisheries and NMFS have approved measures included in Framework Adjustment 29 to the Atlantic Sea Scallop Fishery Management plan. The final rule was published in the Federal Register on Thursday and sets an annual catch limit of 60 million pounds of scallops for FY 2018. In comparison, the 2017 fishing year was set at 51.7 million pounds.
Framework 29 sets management measures for the Atlantic Sea Scallop fishery for the remainder of the 2018 fishing year, which runs from April 19, 2018 to March 21, 2019. Northern Gulf of Maine management measures in Framework 29 were previously published on March 26, 2018 and were set to prevent overfishing and improve the yield-per-recruit and overall management of the Atlantic sea scallop resource in the Northern Gulf of Maine. Those measures went into effect on April 1, 2018. The Framework Adjustment 29 to the Atlantic Sea Scallop Fishery Management Plan is in addition to the March 26 final rule.
Framework 29 also “allocates effort into four rotational access areas (Mid-Atlantic, Nantucket Lightship-West, Nantucket Lightship-South, and Closed Area 1).” Both Closed Area 1 and Nantucket Lightship-West contain new area available to scallop fishing through the Omnibus Habitat Amendment. In addition, Framework 29 adjusts the scallop fleet’s accountability measures for Southern New England/ Mid-Atlantic yellowtail flounder and Georges Bank yellowtail flounder.
You can find the final rule in the Federal Register here.
This story was originally published by Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.
April 18, 2018 — As regulators consider alternatives to management of the Atlantic herring fishery — which extends from North Carolina to Maine — fishermen are cautiously hoping for a better year than recent ones.
In 2017, the New England Fishery Management Council released options that could affect the industry that provides food for consumption, fish oil and bait. The council will make a final decision this summer about possible changes regarding fishery catches and potential closures to address concerns about localized depletion and user conflicts.
Variation in the fishery, in terms of volume, area and season, is not uncommon, but what drives the swings depends on whom you ask.
In 2016, fishermen (mostly from Maine and Massachusetts) hit 60.4 percent of quota when they hauled in about 140 million pounds of herring — the lowest since 2002. But dockside, the catch was worth more than $28.8 million, among the highest value totals on record. In 2017, preliminary NOAA estimates indicate just 48.2 percent of herring’s annual catch limit was harvested from a quota just over 226 million pounds.
Read the full story at National Fisherman
April 17, 2018 — BOOTHBAY, Maine — Public health officials say they will use extreme caution to manage toxic algae blooms this year to prevent another expensive and potentially dangerous shellfish recall.
In the last two years, sudden toxic algae blooms of a previously unrecorded type of phytoplankton forced the Maine Department of Marine Resources to close huge sections of the Down East coast to shellfish harvesting and to issue rare recalls of tons of clams and mussels from as far away as Utah.
Recalls are bad for public health, business and Maine’s seafood brand, said Kohl Kanwit, head of the department’s public health division, during a workshop Tuesday for harvesters, seafood dealers, regulators and researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay.
“The risk is high; you never get 100 percent back” from a recall, Kanwit said. “It is really costly for the industry and bad all around.”
This year, the department isn’t taking any chances as it monitors for pseudo-nitzschia, a single-cell organism that can bloom unexpectedly and make domoic acid, a dangerous biotoxin that may cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, or ASP, in humans and animals. In serious cases, ASP can lead to memory loss, brain damage or even death. The first recorded ASP event, on Prince Edward Island in 1987, killed three people and made at least 100 sick.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald
April 13, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — A disease that disfigures lobsters has ticked up slightly in Maine in the last couple of years, but authorities and scientists say it’s not time to sound the alarm.
The disease, often called epizootic shell disease, is a bacterial infection that makes lobsters impossible to sell as food, eating away at their shells and sometimes killing them. The Maine Department of Marine Resources said researchers found the disease in about 1 percent of lobsters last year.
Circa the early- and mid-2000s, they almost never found it in Maine. But overall prevalence of the disease remains low, especially compared to southern New England waters, where it’s in the 20 percent to 30 percent range, the department said.
Scientists who study the fishery, such as microbiologist Deborah Bouchard of the University of Maine, said it remains important to monitor for the disease, which appears to correlate with warming temperatures.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe
April 11, 2018 — The Atlantic Ocean circulation that carries warmth into the Northern Hemisphere’s high latitudes is slowing down because of climate change, a team of scientists asserted Wednesday, suggesting one of the most feared consequences is already coming to pass.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has declined in strength by 15 percent since the mid-20th century to a “new record low,” the scientists conclude in a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature. That’s a decrease of 3 million cubic meters of water per second, the equivalent of nearly 15 Amazon rivers.
The AMOC brings warm water from the equator up toward the Atlantic’s northern reaches and cold water back down through the deep ocean. The current is partly why Western Europe enjoys temperate weather, and meteorologists are linking changes in North Atlantic Ocean temperatures to recent summer heat waves.
The circulation is also critical for fisheries off the U.S. Atlantic coast, a key part of New England’s economy that have seen changes in recent years, with the cod fishery collapsing as lobster populations have boomed off the Maine coast.
Some of the AMOC’s disruption may be driven by the melting ice sheet of Greenland, another consequence of climate change that is altering the region’s water composition and interrupts the natural processes.
Read the full story at the Washington Post
April 11, 2018 — BOOTHBAY, Maine — Public health officials say they will use extreme caution to manage toxic algae blooms this year to prevent another expensive and potentially dangerous shellfish recall.
In the last two years, sudden toxic algae blooms of a previously unrecorded type of phytoplankton forced the Maine Department of Marine Resources to close huge sections of the Down East coast to shellfish harvesting and to issue rare recalls of tons of clams and mussels from as far away as Utah.
Recalls are bad for public health, business and Maine’s seafood brand, said Kohl Kanwit, head of the department’s public health division, during a workshop Tuesday for harvesters, seafood dealers, regulators and researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay.
“The risk is high; you never get 100 percent back” from a recall, Kanwit said. “It is really costly for the industry and bad all around.”
This year, the department isn’t taking any chances as it monitors for pseudo-nitzschia, a single-cell organism that can bloom unexpectedly and make domoic acid, a dangerous biotoxin that may cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, or ASP, in humans and animals. In serious cases, ASP can lead to memory loss, brain damage or even death. The first recorded ASP event, on Prince Edward Island in 1987, killed three people and made at least 100 sick.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald