Saving Seafood

JUSTIN FOX: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

May 26, 2017 — In his famous 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” biologist Garrett Hardin singled out ocean fishing as a prime example of self-interested individuals short-sightedly depleting shared resources: “Professing to believe in the inexhaustible resources of the oceans,’ they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.”

The whales have actually been doing a lot better lately. Fish in general, not so much.

Then there’s the Maine lobster. As University of Maine anthropologist James M. Acheson put it in his 2003 book “Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry”:

“Since the late 1980s, catches have been at record-high levels despite decades of intense exploitation. We have never produced so many lobsters. Even more interesting to managers is the fact that catch levels remained relatively stable from 1947 to the late 1980s. While scientists do not agree on the reason for these high catches, there is a growing consensus that they are due, in some measure, to the long history of effective regulations that the lobster industry has played a key role in developing.”

Two of the most prominent and straightforward regulations are that lobsters must be thrown back in the water not only if they are too small but also if they are too big (because mature lobsters produce the most offspring), and that egg-bearing females must not only be thrown back but also marked (by notches cut in their tails) as off-limits for life. Acheson calls this “parametric management” — the rules “control ‘how’ fishing is done,” not how many lobsters are caught — and concludes that “Although this approach is not supported by fisheries scientists in general, it appears to work well in the lobster fishery.”

Read the full opinion piece at Bloomberg

Maine lobstermen worry about possible closure to protect coral

May 25, 2017 — Charles Kelley began fishing for lobster on Outer Schoodic Ridge about 20 years ago, preferring the solitude of deep waters to the crowded inshore fishery.

The Steuben resident and preacher was willing to sail two hours for the freedom to drop his 30-trap trawls anywhere he wanted along that ridge, which sits about 25 nautical miles southeast of Mount Desert Island. The area is more crowded now, and Kelley’s trawls are shorter, but in the winter the 54-year-old is still dropping most of his traps in these waters. He says he earns about 40 percent of his yearly profits here, too.

“It’s my bread and butter,” Kelley said of the ridge. “I really don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t fish there. Have to move someplace else, I guess, but that would just be taking bread off someone else’s table, from those I’ve known and worked beside all my life. It would cause untold hardship not just for me, but for all the fishermen up and down this stretch of coast, from Winter Harbor all the way to Jonesport.”

Kelley is worried that he could lose his winter fishing territory if interstate regulators decide to ban all fishing in a 31-square-mile area at the ridge and an 18-square-mile area southwest of Mount Desert Rock to protect deep-water coral gardens found in those waters. The rare, slow-growing gardens of sea whips, fans and pens provide essential habitat for cod, silver hake, pollock and larval redfish.

The New England Fishery Management Council voted last month to exempt lobstering from the coral fishing ban it is considering, but the proposal won’t be finalized until June. Until then, the council is holding a series of public hearings on the proposal, including one Thursday in Ellsworth. State officials hope lobstermen show up in large numbers to lobby the council to keep the lobster exemption in its final plan.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Red tide prompts state to close many clam flats

May 24, 2017 — A large segment of the Maine coastline between Old Orchard Beach and Harpswell was declared off-limits to clam harvesting this week because of red tide, adding further restrictions to a much larger area that has been under a shellfish harvesting prohibition for more than a month.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources and its Bureau of Public Health made the announcement on Monday, warning that the ban on clam harvesting takes effect immediately because of the threat of paralytic shellfish poisoning caused by red tide.

According to the department’s announcement, it is unlawful now to dig for clams in the area between Old Orchard Beach and Harpswell.

The clam harvesting ban, which applies only to soft-shell, hard-shell and razor clams, will affect clam digging areas on Cousins Island in Yarmouth, Chebeague Island in Cumberland, Woodward Point in Brunswick, Foster Point in West Bath, and Basin Point in Harpswell.

Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the marine resources department, said a regional ban that prohibited the harvesting of mussels, European oysters and carnivorous snails was implemented April 3. The regional shellfish ban affects the area between South Berwick in York County and Pemaquid Point in the Lincoln County community of Bristol, he said. Clam harvesting may still occur in flats to the south of Old Orchard Beach and north of Harpswell under the regional ban.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

What did your lobster eat before you ate your lobster? And why should you care?

May 23, 2017 — If you like lobster – and care about maintaining the fishery as both a cultural and economic resource in Maine – should you care what it ate before it made it to your plate?

Lobsters get a bad rap for being scavengers, says veterinarian scientist Robert C. Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute in Orono. In fact, they have rather discerning chemosensory apparatus housed in the short antennae on their heads and tiny sensing hairs all over their bodies.

With a sense of smell more akin to a dog’s than a human’s, lobsters can sniff out a single amino acid that tags their favorite food. For Maine lobsters, that’s herring. So lobstermen favor it as bait up and down the coast.

In 2016 the state’s lobster fishery hit record numbers in volume (over 130 million pounds) and value ($530 million). With so many traps in play, herring became the second-most valuable fishery in Maine, weighing in at $19 million last year. The hike in its value corresponded with the demand from hungry lobsters just as there was a drop off in herring landings in New England.

Earlier this month, interstate marine fisheries regulators approved new rules to avoid another bait shortage. To space out the catch, herring fishermen are now subject to a weekly limit on the amount they can bring to shore. Bayer says it takes one pound of herring to produce one pound of lobster. That same input/output ratio, when used in fin fish aquaculture, has been rendered an unsustainable practice.

Read the full story at CentralMaine.com

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