Saving Seafood

Right whale extinction threat is being overstated, lobstermen fear

April 9, 2018 — The math of protecting right whales from extinction is scary stuff: The stakes are high, scientific opinion varies and some rescue plans could make it impossible for lobstermen to earn a living.

Getting that math right matters when the futures of right whales and Maine’s lobster industry are so closely intertwined. Right whale numbers have dwindled to about 450 because of deadly ship strikes, fishing gear entanglements and low birth rates, while Maine’s lobster industry is the backbone of the state’s coastal economy, raking in about $434 million from landings in 2017 and generating another $1 billion for Maine in post-dock revenues.

“This will be the largest challenge for this industry,” said Commissioner Pat Keliher of the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Those who fish for lobster in Maine and manage the fishery claim that their side of the whale story, and peer-reviewed species projections, are being lost in the extinction din.

Regulators claim they already have a right whale management plan in place and that it’s working. Despite the industry’s size, and the up to 3 million lobster traps in the water, no scientist or whale advocate has ever linked a whale death back to Maine’s lobster fishery, Keliher said. Dead whales have washed ashore in Maine, but they can swim for miles before they die, and carcasses can drift, too. No dead whale has ever been found in marked Maine ropes, officials say.

“None of the mortalities have any relationship back to the Maine fishery,” Keliher said Thursday at a Lobster Advisory Council session on right whale strategy.

Read the full story at the Sun Journal

 

In wake of menhaden quota increase, some states rejoice as others push back

April 9, 2018 — Changes to the menhaden quota allocation on the East Coast of the U.S.A. have been met by support from some states, while others are pushing back.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) decided in November 2017 to increase the menhaden catch limit from 200,000 metric tons to 216,000 metric tons for the 2018 and 2019 seasons. Menhaden typically are utilized for the high amount of omega-3 fats they contain, and their oils are used dietary supplements, animal feed, lipstick, and many other products. The fish also serves as bait for a number of commercial fisheries along the coast, particularly in the crab and lobster industries.

While the overall quota was increased, it was also redistributed. Some states, like Maine, saw their quotas jump enormously.

“Maine’s quota jumped to 2.4 million pounds (1 million kilograms) – 13 times the quota available in 2016 and 2017,” said Jeff Nichols, director of communications for the Maine Department of Marine Resources. “The number of harvesters that reported landings associated with Maine’s total allowable catch (TAC) in 2017 is too few to report because of confidentiality provisions in law. However, 17 vessels participated in the episodic event fishery and 13 in the incidental catch fishery, both of which are triggered once the TAC is met.”

An episodic event was triggered last year in Maine, allowing fishermen to catch far more than the typical quota. The Interstate Fishery Management Plan for menhaden allows the Atlantic Menhaden Management board to set aside one percent of the total allowable catch for “episodic events.”

“Episodic events are defined as any instance when a qualified state has reached its individual state quota, prior to 1 September, and has information indicating the presence of unusually large amounts of menhaden in its state waters,” said Max Appelman, fishery management plan coordinator for the ASMFC.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

The Turning Tides of New England Fisheries

April 5, 2018 — Andrew Applegate’s family has been in the fishing business since his ancestors moved from Cranbury, New Jersey, to the Sandy Hook area around 100 years ago. Along with some commercial fishing, Applegate’s father ran a couple of large party fishing boats out of Atlantic City, and through the decades the family caught whatever was available. But now, Applegate is part of a New England fishing community forced to depend on fast-changing marine species they’ve never seen in the region before, and give up on others that are dying out.

The Gulf of Maine has witnessed its cod stocks collapse but its lobster population explode. To the south, in contrast to their current success north of Cape Cod, lobsters have suffered shell-wasting disease and poor productivity down into the Mid-Atlantic. And black sea bass is being found in northern New England when 20 years ago that would’ve been unheard of, says Michael Pentony, regional head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Greater Atlantic fisheries division. In the face of such changes, those involved in fisheries management are trying to prepare for a murky future. Reliable and more timely data paired with flexible regulations could, they hope, allow those in the business to adapt as fisheries change in the coming years.

These changes are forcing some to disregard historical knowledge gathered in logbooks by generations of fishermen who recorded where to catch certain fish at certain times of the year, says Ben Martens, the executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.

“Now you just have to throw those out. They don’t work anymore. And every year is completely different from the year before,” Martens says. “Sometimes we have water that’s too warm; this year we had cooler water. We’re seeing a lot more turbulence in what’s happening in our planning and in our business stability.”

Read the full story at Ozy

Elver prices soar to new heights amid shortage, Asian demand

March 30, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — The price of baby eels in Maine is soaring to record highs at the start of a season in which buyers expect to pay more for the valuable fish.

Baby eels, called elvers, are an important part of the worldwide Japanese food trade. Maine fishermen harvest them from rivers and streams so they can be sold as seed stock to Asian aquaculture companies.

The average price per pound to fishermen through the first week of the 2018 season was $2,608, the Maine Department of Marine Resources said Friday. The most elvers have ever sold for in a full season was $2,172 per pound, in 2015, and they sold for a little more than $1,300 per pound last year.

Fishermen in Maine, which has the only significant elver fishery in the U.S., are poised for high prices this year because of a poor harvest in Asia. The early part of Maine’s season has been held back somewhat by bad weather, but harvesters are looking forward to a good year, said Darrell Young, co-director of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association.

“Hoping that when there’s eels around, they fight over them,” Young said. “When mother nature decides she wants to turn around.”

The season opened March 22, and fishermen had about 95 percent of their 9,688 pound quota remaining through Thursday evening, the state marine agency reported on its website. The season runs until June 7, and the first week was somewhat slow, which fishermen expected at the end of a cold winter.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

Maine: Early elver landings slow

March 28, 2018 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Forecasters predicting a slow but lucrative start to the elver fishing season were right on both counts.

The season got under way last Thursday and, by the close of business on Tuesday, the Department of Marine Resources said dealers reported buying 114.95 pounds of elvers and paying harvesters $315,789 for their landings — an average price of $2,747 per pound.

Darrell Young, a longtime elver harvester who established a buying station in Ellsworth this year, said the price opened high last week and has fluctuated between $2,600 and $2,900 per pound.

“I think the price will stay high,” Young said Tuesday.

The season, and the market, still has a long way to go.

Maine elver harvesters fish under a fixed landings quota of 9,688 pounds during a season that ends this year on June 7. Based on the DMR reports, with slightly more than nine weeks left in the 10-week season, about 1.2 percent of the quota has been taken out of Maine’s rivers.

Of the early landings, 51.84 pounds, about 45 percent of the total, were landed by holders of licenses issued by the Passamaquoddy Tribe. Under an agreement negotiated among Maine and the state’s four federally recognized Indian tribes in 2013, the Passamaquoddy have been allotted 14 percent (1,356 pounds) of the total elver quota allowed the state by the interstate Atlantic States Fisheries Management Commission. Another 7.9 percent is allocated among the Penobscot Nation, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians and the Aroostook Band of Micmacs.

Earlier this week, the ASMFC’s American Eel Board announced that it would defer until August a decision, currently being considered, on whether to restore Maine’s elver quota for the 2019 fishing season to its 2014 level of 11,749 pounds.

It isn’t hard to understand why the season is off to a slow start.

Elvers are juvenile eels that migrate from the Atlantic Ocean, where they are born, up Maine’s streams and rivers to fresh water, where they may live as long as 20 years before returning to the sea to spawn. Right now, the water in those rivers is cold, with the temperature kept down by recent snow melt.

On Tuesday, Young said fishing was slow around eastern Maine and in the Ellsworth area.

“There were just a couple of fishermen fishing last night and they got nothing,” Young said.

“We need warmer water, get rid of the snow and get the ice out of the ponds,” he said. “There are no eels running now. They’re laying out in the ocean.”

The data confirms what is obvious to the eye, and the elver fisherman.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

 

Endangered status of Atlantic sturgeon up for review

March 27, 2018 — Federal fishing regulators say they are conducting a five-year review of threatened and endangered populations of Atlantic sturgeon.

Populations of sturgeon are listed as threatened in the Gulf of Maine and endangered in New York Bight, the Chesapeake Bay and off the Carolinas and South Atlantic.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the Endangered Species Act requires the agency to conduct the review to ensure the listings are still accurate. The listings are intended to be based on the best available scientific data.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said last year that a sturgeon stock assessment indicated the population is still very low compared to its historical abundance. They face threats such as climate change, ship strikes and fishing.

Sturgeon suffered overfishing in the 20th century when it was harvested for eggs for caviar.

Shortnose sturgeon are listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as an endangered species throughout their range. Atlantic sturgeon are listed as five distinct population segments with those that hatch out in Gulf of Maine rivers listed as threatened, and those that hatch out in other U.S. rivers listedas endangered.

Once thought to number less than 100 in the Merrimack, the river’s shortnose sturgeon population has been on the rebound, researchers have said. Atlantic sturgeon are also found in the Merrimack, up to the Essex Dam in Lawrence.

Two distinct groups of adults, numbering more than 2,000, inhabit the river. One group includes fish born in Haverhill’s spawning grounds, while the other consists of fish born in Maine rivers such as the Kennebec and Androscoggin, which migrate to the Merrimack.

Researchers say that for much of the year, sturgeon are looking for food in the lower part of the Merrimack — from Amesbury to the Joppa Flats in Newburyport — and live there from November to March.

Haverhill is the only place in the river where sturgeon lay their eggs, and that happens in the spring.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Fishermen suit against Atlantic marine monument moves ahead

March 27, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Organizations suing to eliminate the first national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean have gotten the OK to proceed with a suit designed to reopen the area to commercial fishing, which environmentalists fear could jeopardize preservation efforts.

The fishing groups sued to challenge the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument created by President Barack Obama in 2016. It’s a 5,000-square-mile area off of New England that contains fragile deep sea corals and vulnerable species of marine life such as right whales.

The fishermen’s lawsuit had been put on hold by a review of national monuments ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration in April 2017. Court filings at U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia say the stay was lifted in mid-March and the litigation can proceed.

Marine national monuments are underwater areas designed to protect unique or vulnerable ecosystems. There are four of them in the Pacific. The Northeast monument, the only one off the East Coast, is also an area where fishermen harvest valuable species such as lobsters and crabs.

“To lose a big area that we have historically fished has quite an impact on quite a lot of people here,” said Jon Williams, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, crabber and a member of plaintiff group Offshore Lobstermen’s Association. “It’ll raise attention to it a little bit, which it needs.”

The court ordered the federal government, which is the defendant in the case, to respond by April 16. A spokeswoman from the federal Department of Commerce declined to comment.

The lawsuit’s ability to move forward will hopefully prod the federal government to make a decision about the future of the monument, which is unpopular with commercial harvesters, Williams said. But a coalition of environmental groups is also intervening in the case in an attempt to keep the monument area preserved.

Read the full story at the AP News

 

Decision To Allow More Baby Eel Fishing Pushed Back Months

March 27, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — A decision whether to allow fishermen to harvest more of the baby eels that are highly prized in Asian aquaculture has been put off for a few months.

Maine has the only significant fishery for baby eels, called elvers, in the country. The interstate Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering allowing the fishery a higher quota in future years.

A spokeswoman for the commission says action on the idea has been deferred until August. It was possible for a decision as soon as May, but instead states will hold hearings from May to July about the issue.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Maine Public

 

Elvers Price Highest Ever For Fishery

March 27, 2018 — The price of elvers in the first few days of the season, is being reported as the highest ever for the fishery.

Maine has the only significant fishery for the young eels, also called elvers, in the country. The Elver season started Thursday March 22, and the Maine Department of Marine Resources is reporting they’re currently selling for just over $2,800 a pound.

The previous height was reported in 2015, at just under $2,200 a pound. Elvers are by far Maine’s most valuable fishery by pound, but the elver catch is limited by a quota, so in absolute terms it’s one of the least valuable in the state.

Read the full story at Maine Public

 

US Says New Protections Will Help Build Cod Population

March 22, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — The federal government is touting new protections for young cod as a way to help rebuild the population of the fish.

The population of cod has plummeted off of New England, which was once home to a much larger fishery for the species. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says new fishing management rules include a Habitat Area of Particular Concern designation to help juvenile cod.

The zone stretches along the coast from Maine to Rhode Island and includes areas of rocky or vegetated habitats, as well as sandy areas nearby. NOAA says these areas need extra protection because they provide shelter from predators for young cod.

The agency says protection of the habitat is intended to try to give the cod a better chance to grow to maturity.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at US News