June 22, 2017 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:
The Maine Marine Patrol this morning is searching the waters beneath the Penobscot Narrows Bridge after a report of an abandoned vehicle on the bridge.
The Marine Patrol received the report at approximately 6:00 am this morning and began searching shortly after 7:00 am. The report indicated that the vehicle was discovered at approximately 3:30 am.
The State Police is investigating this incident.
June 20, 2017 — A 38-year-old Woolwich man pleaded guilty on Friday to illegally trafficking in poached elvers — juvenile American eels — in 2012.
Michael Squillace pleaded guilty to violating the federal Lacey Act, which prohibits interstate transport or transactions of any species of fish or wildlife illegally harvested or handled in any state. He was released on personal recognizance, according to court documents. A sentencing date was not available on Monday. He faces up to five years in prison with a maximum of 3 years supervised release.
Prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division and Environmental Crimes Section said Squillace illegally sold 183 pounds of elvers, valued at about $375,000, to an unnamed Maine elver dealer.
Since 2011, elvers on average have fetched around $1,500 per pound for fishermen, and netted more than $4 million total for the 12 convicted poachers who have pleaded guilty to federal charges in South Carolina, Virginia and Maine.
Squillace is the sixth midcoast Maine man to be charged with selling poached elvers in recent years, most as part of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigation dubbed “Operation Broken Glass,” which has spanned across 11 states on the East Coast. Eleven people so far have pleaded guilty to federal charges filed in Maine, South Carolina and Virginia, and have admitted to trafficking in more than $2.75 million worth of illegally harvested elvers, according to federal prosecutors.
In March, William Sheldon, 71, of Woolwich, a longtime commercial elver dealer operating as Kennebec Glass Eels pleaded not guilty to trafficking in elvers between 2011 and 2014.
June 19, 2017 — Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and Reps. Chellie Pingree and Bruce Poliquin sent a letter Monday to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asking that the 13 groundfish permits forfeited by Carlos Rafael — a New Bedford fisherman who has pleaded guilty to 28 federal counts of tax evasion, falsifying fishing quotas and conspiracy — be redistributed to fishermen throughout the Northeast, not only New Bedford.
In their letter, the Maine congressional delegation said that groundfish permits embody a shared resource and, as such, should be returned to groundfish fishermen in “a fair and uniform manner.”
“Mr. Rafael’s grave and extensive disregard for both the law and sustainable fishing practices is a setback to the recovery of the beleaguered Northeast multispecies (groundfish) fishery, and has done, and will continue to do, financial harm to fishermen from Maine to New York,” the delegation wrote.
“These fishermen, who have complied with federal quotas and regulations, were forced to compete with this illegal activity and now must endure its repercussions on future stock assessments,” they wrote. “For these reasons, we believe the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) should cancel each of the groundfish permits that Mr. Rafael currently holds and reallocate the fishing privileges associated with such permits to all eligible permit holders in the fleet.
“We are specifically troubled that the City of New Bedford (where Mr. Rafael’s enterprise is based) is seeking to acquire control of his permits. We believe, instead, that all members of the fleet, including those in New Bedford, who have been disadvantaged by Mr. Rafael’s illegal activity, deserve a share of the rights to access these permits once remanded back to NMFS,” the delegation wrote.
June 18, 2017 — Over the last several days, thousands of dead bait fish have washed up on the shores of Middle and Maquoit bays in Brunswick.
The pogies, a type of bait fish, appeared to have died after a single vessel which caught them was ill equipped to handle a large catch, not low oxygen content in the water or predation by a larger fish, according to the Brunswick Police Department.
Since then, the Brunswick Police Department’s Marine Resources and Harbor Management Division has received numerous complaints about dead fish being found on the shore.
“It’s stinky,” Dan Devereaux, Brunswick’s harbor master and marine resource officer, said Sunday, adding that he has received at least 50 complaints from people complaining about the smell of rotting fish. Pogies are particularly pungent because their flesh is so oily, he said.
Devereaux said that on Sunday, a group of recent high school graduate and college students collected 21 totes full of fish within about a 70-yard stretch of the five-mile span of affected coastline.
In an effort to rid the town of rotting pogies, the town is inviting the local fishing community to come collect the excess fish for use as crab and lobster bait.
June 16, 2017 — River herring are dying in droves this month in Ellsworth after passing through Leonard Lake Dam, according to a Maine conservation group calling for safer passage for the fish.
“Community members have reported seeing hundreds of dead fish floating down stream below the dam and the Route 1 bridge on multiple occasions over the past 12 days,” said Brett Ciccotelli of the Downeast Salmon Federation. “Dead fish have been seen as far downstream as the city’s Harbor Park.”
Some of those fish appeared to have parts chopped off, while others suffered slashes across their sides or were missing eyes, indicating they struck turbines in the dam, according to the group.
The federation says “thousands” of adult river herring have been killed since early this month while returning from their spawning grounds farther upriver. The group made similar claims following another large-scale fish kill back in October.
“Their life history — needing fresh water to lay their eggs and returning to the same rivers year after year — makes dams without safe downstream passage particularly dangerous to river herring,” Ciccotelli said.
Brookfield Renewables, the parent company that owns the Ellsworth dam, is in the midst of a five-year process for renewing its federal license for the dam for another 30 years.
Ciccotelli argued that one requirement of that renewal should be an upgrade to the fish passage through the dam to reduce the number of fish kills.
Brookfield did not immediately return messages Friday requesting comment.
In October, Brookfield said in a news release that it was “constantly working to minimize the potential environmental impacts associated with our operations and activities.”
June 15, 2017 — Maine has had a commercial lobster industry since the 1700s, and the lobster’s place in food has changed a lot during that time.
Today, Maine is faced with an unprecedented glut of lobsters–so many that the price of lobster is on the way down. But it wasn’t always so. And it may be different tomorrow.
In the 1600s and 1700s, writes Daniel Luzer for Pacific Standard, there were so many lobsters around Massachusetts Bay Colony, for instance, that they washed up on the beach in piles two feet high. “People thought of them as trash food,” Luzer writes. The ocean bugs were regarded as food for lower-class people and convicts, and used as fertilizer at times.
That began changing in the 1800s. Lobster prices–and interest in eating lobster–began to go up and down according to price, culinary innovations (like cooking lobster alive rather than dead) and availability. A century and a half later, he writes, “lobster was firmly established as a delicacy; lobster was something movie stars ate when they went out to dinner.”
On the coast of Maine, lobster culture became a way of life. But all was not well. .In the early twentieth century, once-abundant lobster had become rare, writes the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute, and “there were plenty of rumors about lobstermen turning to rum-running along the Maine coast during Prohibition days.”
According to Gwynn Guilford for Quartz, lobster stocks dwindled and the number of boats fishing lobster went up–a pattern, she writes, that looked like that of “other fisheries on the eve of collapse.” But today, Maine is in the midst of a lobster boom.
Maine now produces 80 percent of American-caught lobster, writes Justin Fox for Bloomberg View, and more than seven times the average take in a pre-2000 year.
June 15, 2017 — Fishermen barely outnumbered representatives of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission last Thursday at a public hearing in City Hall on proposed rule changes that would reshape shrimp fishing in the Gulf of Maine.
Three fishermen — John Williams and Ricky Trundy, both of Stonington, and James West of Sorrento — offered comments on a proposed amendment to the ASMFC fisheries management plan for northern shrimp. Department of Marine Resources External Affairs Director Terry Stockwell and Resource Management Coordinator Trisha Cheney dutifully recorded those comments on behalf of the ASMFC.
Stockwell serves as DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher’s representative on the multi-state fisheries management group. He plans to retire at the end of the month after 21 years at DMR and Cheney will assume his role.
Although a somewhat larger crowd was on hand for a hearing the previous evening in Augusta, the sparse audience reflected the state of the fishery from Downeast waters. It also is a reflection of the fact that there has been no commercial shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Maine since ASMFC shortened the season in 2013 and imposed a complete fishing moratorium before the 2014 season.
For more than a decade, ASMFC managed the fishery by establishing a total allowable catch (TAC) for the entire fishery based on assessments of the size and reproductive success of the shrimp resource that was adjusted annually. As the shrimp resource declined, so did the TAC — and the fishery.
June 14, 2017 — Gray seals are booming. They’ve flocked to coastal Massachusetts, where hunters once killed the animals wholesale — a dead seal’s nose could fetch a $5 reward in the 1960s.
Twenty years ago, there were about 2,000 seals near Cape Cod and Nantucket. A new estimate, published Wednesday in the journal Bioscience, suggests there are now as many as 50,000.
‘‘We should be celebrating the recovery of gray seals as a conservation success,’’ said David Johnston, an author of the study and marine biologist at Duke University .
Where seals go, sharks often follow. Great white sightings in Cape Cod increased from 80 in 2014 to 147 in 2016. Johnston said the shark spike may be linked to the seals. ‘‘One of our tagged animals was killed by a white shark,’’ he said.
Maine and Massachusetts once placed bounties on seals because fishermen feared they would gobble up valuable fish such as cod. (There is little evidence that seals actually compete with fishermen, Johnston said.) The century-long bounty hunt claimed up to 135,000 animals.
The seals bounced back after 1972’s Marine Mammal Protection Act outlawed the killings. ‘‘I’m a firm believer if you just stop doing bad things to wildlife they will recover,’’ Johnston said. The seals’ recovery raised a question infrequently asked in conservation: What happens after success?
‘‘We haven’t done a great job of preparing people,’’ he said, ‘‘that they would be back again.’’
Part of that means quantifying the success. In 2011, a National Marine Fisheries Service aerial survey estimated 15,000 seals swam in southeastern Massachusetts waters.
June 14, 2017 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week that it was recommending six Maine fisheries research projects for a total of $1.5 million in Saltonstall-Kennedy program grants.
In line for funding, but still subject to final approval, are grants to the following.
The Downeast Institute for Applied Marine Research and Education, $278,000 for demonstrating aquaculture technologies designed to increase the supply, quality and diversification of domestic seafood and field experiments with cultured arctic surf clams. Last Friday, the organization celebrated the groundbreaking of a $5.8 million expansion of its facilities on Beals Island.
The Gulf of Maine Research Institute, $288,888 to study the issue of “choke species” in a changing climate. Choke species are fish with very small landings quotas. Fishermen who haul them in as bycatch may be forced to stop fishing for other species.
The Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association, $141,092 to continue and expand the 2015 tagging effort studying lobster migration and growth on Georges Bank and in the Gulf of Maine.
The Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, $298,932 to study the phytoremediation potential of farmed kelp in connection with shellfish aquaculture.
The University of Maine, $299,623 to evaluate the life history and stock structure of yellowfin tuna in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.
The University of Maine, $275,308 to assess the potential for the sustainability of fishing-dependent coastal Maine communities in the face of environmental and socioeconomic change.
June 14, 2017 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:
The New England Fishery Management Council will hold a three-day meeting from Tuesday, June 20 through Thursday, June 22, 2017. The public is invited to listen-in via webinar or telephone. Here are the details.
MEETING LOCATION: Holiday Inn by the Bay, 88 Spring Street, Portland, ME 04101
START TIME: The webinar will be activated at 8:00 a.m. each day. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, and 8:30 a.m. on Thursday. The webinar will end at approximately 6:00 p.m. EST or shortly after the Council adjourns each day.
WEBINAR REGISTRATION: Online access to the meeting is available at:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4158423727836271874.
There is no charge to access the meeting through this webinar.
CALL-IN OPTION: To listen by telephone, dial +1 (914) 614-3221.
The access code is 906-936-530.
Please be aware that if you dial in, your regular phone charges will apply.
AGENDA: The agenda and all meeting materials are available on the Council’s website at:
http://www.nefmc.org/calendar/june-2017-council-meeting.
THREE MEETING OUTLOOK: A copy of the New England Council’s Three Meeting Outlook is available here.
QUESTIONS: If you have questions prior to or during the meeting, call or email Janice Plante at (607) 592-4817, jplante@nefmc.org.