Saving Seafood

A top chef has an answer to Maine’s green crab scourge: Fry them in oil, then dig in

May 23, 2017 — European green crabs have scurried around coastal waters off Maine since they first hitchhiked here on ships in the 1800s, but only in the past few years have the invasive crustaceans begun to devour the softshell clam industry and decimate delicate eelgrass habitat.

And as harvesters and scientists have scurried to find a solution to the invasion, a number of uses for the crabs have been floated — extracting the meat in China, composting, and even processing the creatures into cat food.

But Portland restaurateur Sam Hayward of Fore Street Restaurant, who in 2004 was named Best Chef Northeast by the James Beard Foundation and in 2011 won the the Chef’s Collaborative Sustainer of the Year award, on Monday shared a simple recipe he learned from a fellow chef to transform the crustaceans into “a sandy, seafoody deliciousness.”

One recent summer, Hayward worked with chef Evan Mallett of Black Trumpet in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at “Take a Bite Out of Appledore: An Eco-Culinary Retreat” held on the Isles of Shoals.

One night, after “foraging the intertidal zone,” Mallett debuted the crabs, deep fried and “a little bit like croutons,” Hayward said.

“Get a pot of oil — I’m not sure what oil we used, I think it was olive — and get it up to 340, 345 degrees, as if for deep frying,” Hayward said. “Then drop them in for a few minutes until they’re crisped up.”

“Toss a handful on top of a salad,” he said. “They sort of dissolve into a sandy, seafoody deliciousness.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

How Maine came to play a central role in an international eel smuggling scheme

May 23, 2017 — Years after officials launched an investigation into baby eel poaching on the East Coast, the first of several men to plead guilty to participating in the wildlife trafficking ring was sentenced last week in a federal courtroom in Maine.

Michael Bryant, 40, a former Baileyville resident who now lives in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, is one of more than a dozen men who the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says poached thousands of pounds of the baby eels, also known as elvers or “glass” eels, from 2011 through 2014. 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.

Maine found itself at the center of a criminal enterprise that illegally netted elvers along the Atlantic seaboard, where most states ban their harvesting, and then shipped the eels overseas to feed East Asia’s voracious seafood appetite, according to investigators.

Bryant and other poachers benefitted from a combination of environmental, economic and regulatory factors earlier this decade that created an unexpected boon for elver fishermen in Maine, where the vast majority of the country’s legal elver harvest occurs. Maine, one of only two states with legal elver fisheries, has approximately 1,000 licensed elver fishermen who over the past seven years have caught 81,000 pounds of elvers valued at more than $126 million. South Carolina, the other state, issues only 10 licenses each year and has much smaller harvests.

Last October, Bryant was one of seven men who pleaded guilty in federal court in Maine to trafficking in poached elvers. According court documents, Bryant did not have a fishing license but caught 207 pounds of elvers in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia over four consecutive springs, from 2011 through 2014. He sold them to unscrupulous dealers or middlemen, with roughly half his catch being funneled through Maine, for an average of $1,600 per pound, netting a total of $331,084, according to authorities.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

New England Fisheries Council to Consider Deep Sea Coral-Protection Rules

May 19, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The New England Fishery Management Council wants to hear from the public about proposed rules for new management areas to protect deep-sea corals in the Gulf of Maine and in the slope/canyon region south of Georges Bank.

At issue are several alternatives under consideration in the Draft Omnibus Deep-Sea Coral Amendment. The Council wants feedback from the public on which alternatives should be selected and why.

The public comment period will end on June 5, and the Council will take final action on the amendment during its June 20-22, 2017, meeting in Portland.

The Council is using its discretionary authority of the Magnuson-Stevens Act to identify and implement measures to reduce effects of fishing gear on deep sea corals in New England. One proposed amendment attempts to identify and protect concentrations of corals in select areas and restrict the expansion of fishing effort into areas where corals are likely to be present.

“Deep sea corals are fragile, slow-growing organisms that play an important role in the marine ecosystem and are vulnerable to various types of disturbance of the seafloor,” the Council wrote in a public hearing notice on May 18. “At the same time, the importance and value of commercial fisheries that operate in or near areas of deep sea coral habitat is recognized by the Council. As such, measures in this amendment will be considered in light of their benefit to corals as well as their costs to commercial fisheries.”

The Council’s preferred alternative for the inshore Gulf of Maine would prohibit mobile bottom-tending gear (trawls and dredges) within both the Schoodic Ridge and Mt. Desert Rock areas.

While an option to prohibit all bottom-tending gear, including lobster traps/pots, is still in the amendment, it is not the Council’s preferred alternative.

“The Council recognized the economic impact associated with preventing the lobster fishery from working within the inshore areas and acknowledged that shifts in effort to other locations could be problematic,” it wrote. “Preferred alternatives are an indication of which way the Council is leaning, but the Council is not obligated to select them for final action, so it is critically important that Maine fishermen who fish in these areas attend the public hearing or submit comments to let the Council know their views!”

Seven public hearings will be held from May 22 to 26:

Wednesday, May 24
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Sheraton Harborside
250 Market Street
Portsmouth, NH 03801

Thursday, May 25
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Ellsworth High School
299 State Street
Ellsworth, ME 04605

Friday, May 26, 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Webinar: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/98257139389273345

Written comments can be submitted via mail, email, or fax:

Thomas A. Nies, Executive Director
New England Fishery Management Council
50 Water Street, Mill 2
Newburyport, MA 01950

Email: comments@nefmc.org Fax: (978) 465–3116

Please note on your correspondence “Comments on Deep-Sea Coral Amendment”

Written comments must be submitted before 5:00 pm EST on Monday, June 5, 2017.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Warming water threatens fishing ports

May 22, 2017 — The continued warming of the Gulf of Maine is expected to pose additional threats to the region’s commercially important species of seafood — and by extension to the fishing communities that harvest them, according to a new study.

The study, jointly compiled by researchers at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Nature Conservancy, draws the link between the region’s unprecedented warming and concerns about the ability of species to find new, sustainable habitats.

“These changes will directly affect fishing communities, as species now landed in those ports move out of range, and new species move in,” said the authors of the study that appears in journal Progress in Oceanography.

The migration of a spectrum of species could create “economic, social and natural resource management challenges” throughout the region, according to the study.

“The projections indicate that as species shift from one management jurisdiction to another, or span state and federal jurisdictions, increased collaboration among management groups will be needed to set quotas and establish allocations,” the researchers concluded. 

At the heart of the concern is the startling rate at which the Gulf of Maine is warming.

Previous research has shown the region’s surface waters are warming faster than 99 percent of the Earth’s oceans and the study’s researchers project the region will continue to warm “two to three times faster than the global average through the end of this century.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Clammers feeling the pinch as green crabs threaten another harvest

May 22, 2017 — Clammers face a shrinking harvest again this year after predator green crabs survived the mild winter, but one scientist may have an answer – aquaculture.

The second mild winter in a row means Maine’s tidal flats will likely be overrun by large, ravenous invasive green crabs this summer.

That’s bad news for the state’s already weakened soft-shell clam industry. One green crab can consume 40 half-inch clams a day and will dig 6 inches to find clams to eat. In 2016, clam landings fell 21 percent, from 9.3 million to 7.3 million pounds, the lowest total reported since 1991, according to the state Department of Marine Resources.

Some of the landings decline was undoubtedly a result of an unusual bloom of toxic algae that forced a monthlong shellfishing ban along about a third of Maine’s coastline last fall. But researcher Sara Randall of the Downeast Institute in Beals notes that a review of clam landings in towns with traditionally high numbers south of the Deer Isle-Stonington closure line found that 19 out of 24 towns, or 79 percent, had harvested fewer clams.

For example, from 2015 to 2016, landings fell 35 percent in Harpswell, 87 percent in Yarmouth and 21 percent in Scarborough. In Freeport, a town on the front line of the effort to combat the green crab invasion, landings decreased 17 percent despite efforts by municipal officials, clammers and researchers like Randall, among others, to use protective measures such as nets and other tools to ward off the green crabs.

The mild winter may only make matters worse. Clammers had hoped for a cold winter so the deep freeze and ice would kill off a lot of the crabs, allowing the clam seed still found in high numbers in Maine waters a chance to settle in the tidal flats and grow, forming those telltale tiny holes that tell clammers a harvest awaits them under the mud.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Gulf of Maine will become too warm for many key fish, report says

May 22, 2017 — A new study by federal fisheries scientists predicts the warming of the Gulf of Maine will cause a dramatic contraction of suitably cool habitat for a range of key commercial fish species there. On the other hand, lobsters are more likely to find hospitable areas.

The study by seven scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, used a high-resolution global climate model and federal fisheries survey data to model how key fisheries species would likely be affected by predicted warming over the next 80 years.

The results confirmed previous research using other models and methods that found that the Gulf of Maine can be expected to become increasingly uncomfortable for many of the cold-loving species that have thrived here for all of recorded history but are at the southern ends of their ranges. Those include cod, haddock, redfish, plaice and pollock.

“The main message here is how important it is to understand the potential magnitude of the changes that you see when you get a finer, higher-resolution view of the implications of changing sea temperatures,” says co-author Michael Fogarty, chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

The scientists caution that the research analyzes just one factor – albeit an important one – the distribution of thermally appropriate habitat for each of 58 species. Their results predict the changes in the amount and location of such habitat but don’t account for many other factors that can influence the future populations of the species themselves, such as what happens to what they eat or what likes to eat them, or how the increasing acidity of the ocean – another product of climate change – will affect each.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Longtime fisheries advocate receives prestigious ‘Hero of the Seas’ award

May 16, 2017 — Robin Alden, executive director of the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, received a prestigious “Hero of the Seas” award from the international Peter Benchley Ocean Awards nonprofit organization.

Named in honor of the author of “Jaws,” the 10 annual awards recognize “outstanding achievement across many sectors of society leading to the protection of our ocean, coasts and the communities that depend on them.” Alden’s award recognizes her career “working at the grassroots, engaging fishermen’s knowledge and participation to build sustainable, healthy coastal fisheries and fishing communities.”

She received the award at a gala event on May 11 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.

“It is just unbelievable to have international recognition for Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries basic approach: that the knowledge fishermen have about the ecology they work in every day is important to a healthy fisheries and our communities,” Alden said in a news release.

She added, “This is a great time for this award. Fisheries are at a turning point because climate change is forcing fishery regulators to face the fact that the ocean changes all the time. Constant change makes real time, on-the-ground observation so much more important than the old approach of primarily depending upon abundance predictions. We — fishermen, scientists and regulators — have to learn how to learn and act together.”

Read the full story at Mainebiz.com

Maine Marine Patrol Searching for Missing Man on Androscoggin River

May 13, 2017 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

Maine Marine Patrol is searching for a missing man who, according to eye witness reports, fell from his boat into the Androscoggin River near Brunswick last night.

The man, Stephen Wines, 27 of Bailey Island, was on board a small boat in the Androscoggin with his brother William, 30 of Bailey Island, when eye witnesses on shore reported seeing them pass by in the water. The incident was reported to 911 at approximately 8:40 p.m.

Lifeflight of Maine and the Brunswick Fire Department conducted a search while Marine Patrol and Brunswick Police Department conducted an investigation of the incident last evening.

The boat has been recovered and life jackets were on board, however reports indicate that neither man was wearing a life jacket at the time of the incident. 

According to Marine Patrol reports, William made it to shore and was transported to a nearby hospital where he was treated and released.

The Marine Patrol along with Brunswick Police Department and the State Police/Marine Patrol Dive Team are continuing the search today, focusing their efforts near Bay Bridge Landing.

Regulators push pause on allowing greater striped bass catch

May 12, 2017 — Fishing regulators are pulling away from a plan to liberalize the regulation of the commercial and recreational striped bass fishery.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission was considering sending new rules for the fishery out to public comment, but chose not to this week. The commission will instead wait until the results of a new assessment of the striped bass stock.

Striped bass have been fished commercially from Maine to North Carolina over the years. The fishery was worth more than $18 million in 2015. Striped bass are also a very popular recreational sport fish.

The commission had been considering allowing more catch of the fish. Members were concerned that changing the management of the fishery could result in over-harvest.

Read the full story at Central Maine 

ASMFC Northern Shrimp Section Approves Public Hearing Document on Draft Amendment 3 for Public Comment New England States Schedule Public Hearings

May 12, 2017 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section (Section) releases Draft Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for Northern Shrimp for public consideration and input. The states of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts have scheduled their hearings to gather public comment on the Draft Amendment. The details of those hearings follow.

Maine Department of Marine Resources

Wednesday, June 7, 2017 at 6 PM

Maine Department of Marine Resources

Conference Room #118

32 Blossom Lane

Augusta, Maine

Contact: Terry Stockwell at 207.624.6553

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 at 6 PM

Ellsworth City Hall Conference Room

1 City Hall Plaza

Ellsworth, Maine

Contact: Terry Stockwell at 207.624.6553

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New Hampshire Fish and Game

Tuesday, June 6, 2017 at 7 PM

Urban Forestry Center

45 Elwyn Road

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Contact: Doug Grout at 603.868.1095

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Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries

Monday, June 5, 2017 at 6 PM

MA DMF Annisquam River Station

30 Emerson Avenue

Gloucester, Massachusetts

Contact: Kelly Whitmore at 978.282.0308

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The Section initiated Draft Amendment 3 with the intention of considering a limited entry program to address overcapacity in the fishery. In the 2010 and 2011 fishing seasons, increased fishing effort and untimely reporting resulted in early season closures and an overharvest of the total allowable catch (TAC). The 2012 fishing season was further restricted, resulting in a 21-day trawl season and a 17-day trap season. In the 2013 fishing season, despite the fact that only 55% of the TAC was harvested, the fishing mortality rate (0.53) was estimated above the target (0.38). In December 2013, the Section established a moratorium for the 2014 fishing season due to recruitment failure and a collapsed stock. The moratorium was maintained each year, through 2017, in response to the continued depleted condition of the stock.

Due to the uncertainty about if and when the resource would rebuild and the fishery reopen, the Section shifted the focus of Draft Amendment 3 to consider measures to improve management of the northern shrimp fishery and resource. Proposed options in the Draft Amendment include state-by-state allocations and accountability measures to better manage effort in the fishery. The Draft Amendment also explores the mandatory use of size sorting grate systems to minimize harvest of small (presumably male) shrimp, as well as reporting measures to ensure all harvested shrimp are being reported.

Fishermen and other interested groups are encouraged to provide input on the Draft Amendment either by attending public hearings or providing written comments. The Draft Amendment can be obtained at http://www.asmfc.org/files/PublicInput/NShrimpDraftAmd3_PublicComment.pdf or via the Commission’s website,www.asmfc.org, under Public Input. Public comment will be accepted until 5:00 PM (EST) on June 21, 2017 and should be forwarded to Max Appelman, FMP Coordinator, 1050 N. Highland St, Suite A-N, Arlington, VA 22201; 703.842.0741 (FAX) or at mappelman@asmfc.org (Subject line: Northern Shrimp). For more information, please contact Max Appelman at mappelman@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.