Maine Archives - Page 273 of 296

The scallop harvest in Maine has grown to 3 million pounds a year — and the price is growing too

May 9, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s rebuilt scallop fishery is enjoying high demand from the culinary world for its prized meaty mollusks, and the 2016 season that ended last month is likely to go down as another strong year.

All sea scallops have been growing in value over the past 15 years, and while Maine’s catch is a small fraction of the national total, they are a premium product for which restaurants and consumers pay top dollar.

The Maine scallop fishery dwindled to just about 666,000 pounds in 2009 before rebuilding to more than 3 million pounds in each of the last three years. State fishing managers credit new regulations, including a rotational management system that protects localized areas from being too heavily fished.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Providence Journal

Misunderstood pollock a key to New England seafood’s future

May 9, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — It might not be time yet to rechristen Cape Cod as Cape Pollock, but the humble fish is staking its claim.

The Atlantic pollock has long played a role in New England’s fishing industry as a cheaper alternative to cod and haddock, but the fish’s place in America’s oldest fishing industry is expanding as stocks like cod fade.

But the fish has an image problem.

While considered a whitefish, its uncooked gray-pinkish color looks drab compared to the snow-white cod fillets consumers are used to seeing on seafood counters. And many confuse it with the very different Alaska pollock, which is the subject of a much larger industrial fishery that provides fish for processed food products such as the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish.

A loose consortium of fishermen, processors, restaurateurs and sustainable seafood advocates wants to change all that. They’re trying to rebrand Atlantic pollock as New England’s fish, and the push is catching on in places like food-crazy Portland, where food trucks offer pollock tacos to eager crowds.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

Maine lobster suppliers strategize to foil EU ban

May 9, 2016 — Maine lobster suppliers met behind closed doors with dealers from some of Europe’s biggest lobster importing countries in Brussels last week to discuss a pending ban on importing live North American lobsters into Europe.

The six Maine companies joined their Massachusetts and Canadian peers, as well as national trade officials, to discuss the proposed ban with buyers and trade officials from eight European countries, including the three biggest importers of Homarus americanus: France, Italy and Spain. The meeting occurred at the world’s largest seafood industry trade show, said spokesman Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, an American seafood industry trade group.

About 75 people met for 90 minutes to talk about how to avoid the all-out ban that Sweden asked the European Union to adopt in March after finding North American lobsters in European waters.

“Brussels was productive,” Gibbons said. “Unnecessarily excluding live North American lobsters from that market would have real impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, sales and jobs. So, no one is taking this lightly.”

In March, Sweden petitioned the European Union to declare the North American lobster an invasive species, which would ban live imports to the EU’s 28 member states. It based its petition on an 85-page risk assessment that claims the discovery of a small number of North American lobsters in the waters off Great Britain, Norway and Sweden over the last 30 years, including one female lobster carrying hybrid eggs, proved cross-breeding had taken place. The Swedish scientists say a ban would protect the European lobster from cross-breeding and diseases carried by the North American lobster.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Scallopers to White House: Marine monument a bad idea

May 6, 2016 — A fishing trade group that represents scallopers from Maine to Virginia has joined Northeast groundfishermen in opposing the designation of any marine national monuments in New England waters.

The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) penned a May 4 letter to Obama administration officials stating its opposition to the establishment of the monuments while also criticizing the unilateral process — presidential decree through the Antiquities Act — being considered for designating them.

“A monument designation, with its unilateral implementation and opaque process, is the exact opposite of the fisheries management process in which we participate,” FSF legal counsels David Frulla and Andrew Minkiewicz wrote to Christy Goldfuss and Whitley Saumwebber, executives in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Public areas and public resources should be managed in an open and transparent manner, not an imperial stroke of the pen.”

The FSF letter comes almost two months after Goldfuss, the managing director of the White House environmental council, told fishing stakeholders at a March 24 meeting in Boston the White House has shelved the proposal pushed by environmental and conservation groups to establish a marine national monument about 80 miles east of Cape Ann in the area around Cashes Ledge.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Maine’s Meaty Mollusks Likely Bring Strong Scallop Season

May 6, 2016 — Maine’s rebuilt scallop fishery is enjoying high demand from the culinary world for its prized meaty mollusks, and the 2016 season that ended last month is likely to go down as another strong year.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

New rules for fishermen in growing Jonah crab business

May 5, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — Fishing regulators say there will be a new limit on how many Jonah crabs fishermen will be allowed to harvest.

East Coast fishermen’s catch of Jonah crabs has been growing in recent years as the crustacean grows in popularity.

They are used in processed products and as an alternative to the more expensive Dungeness and stone crabs.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

Report: Diners shell out more when menu says the lobster’s from Maine

May 4, 2016 — Serving up Maine lobster is paying off big for restaurants that tout the state’s iconic offering on their menus.

Restaurants selling lobster are charging $6.22 more, on average, when it comes from Maine and its provenance is identified by name on the menu, according to a new report issued Tuesday by the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative. The Portland-based nonprofit, which was founded in 2013 and is funded by industry license surcharges, based its finding on a 2015 menu survey of about 7,000 American restaurants conducted by Technomic Inc., a food consulting and research firm based in Chicago, said Executive Director Matt Jacobson.

“There’s lobster, and then there’s Maine lobster,” Jacobson said. “People are willing to pay for that difference. Not just pennies more, but $6 more a plate, plus. Chefs are drawn to the taste, the story and sustainability of Maine lobster. When chefs like to cook it, customers are willing to pay for it. That’s good for everybody, including the lobstermen.”

The Technomic data contained in the collaborative’s first quarterly report proves what many in the industry have long suspected, but couldn’t prove because of a lack of consumer research, especially in the domestic market, Jacobson said. It will serve as another tool in the collaborative’s arsenal when it begins its summer-long campaign to convince chefs to add Maine lobster to their menus. Only a quarter of all restaurants identify the origin of their lobster dishes, he said, but most of those who do are selling Maine lobster.

Last summer, when the cooperative began its Maine lobster education campaign, the organization arranged a series of “collisions” between what Jacobson calls rock-star chefs, who tend to set the culinary tone in local foodie markets, and Maine lobstermen. Sometimes the collaborative brought chefs out on a Maine lobster boat, but usually, the collaborative brought one of Maine’s lobster harvesters into the kitchens of some of the best restaurants in the country for cooking demonstrations, recipe sharing and story telling.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Lobster fishing to be restricted in bid to save population

PORTLAND, Maine — May 3, 2016 — Southern New England’s fading lobster fishery will be the subject of a battery of new regulations to try to save the crustacean’s population locally.

The number of adult lobsters in New England south of Cape Cod was estimated in 2013 to be about 10 million, which is one-fifth the total from the late 1990s. Scientists issued a report last year that said the historic and economically important species is shifting northward in large part due to the warming of the ocean.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s lobster management board voted on Monday to use new measures to address the lobster decline, which has dramatically reduced lobster catches off Rhode Island and Connecticut.

The new regulations could include a combination of things like closed seasons, closed fishing areas, trapping cutbacks and stricter standards about the minimum and maximum size of harvestable lobsters.

“We’ve clearly got an overfished stock. We’ve got multiple problems that we actually need to fix,” said David Borden, chair of the lobster board. “The climate’s changing. When you do this, there is a cost to the industry.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CBS Boston

Helping Fishermen Catch What They Want, and Nothing Else

May 3, 2016 — Heather Goldstone, of NPR affiliates WGBH and WCAI, discusses bycatch reduction in fisheries on a recent episode of “Living Lab.” Her guests were veteran gear designer Ron Smolowitz of the Coonamessett Farm Foundation, who has worked with the southern New England scallop industry; Steve Eayrs, a research scientist at Gulf of Maine Research Institute, who has worked with groundfishermen in Maine; and Tim Werner, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium, who put acoustic pingers on gill nets to warn away dolphins. An excerpt from the segment is reproduced below:

It’s the holy grail of commercial fishing: catch just the right amount of just the right size of just the right species, without damage to the physical environment. It’s a tall order, and few fisheries are there yet.

Leaving aside the issue of straight up over-fishing, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that, each year, fishermen around the world accidentally catch more than seven million tons of marine life – everything from whales and turtles, to sea cucumbers – that they weren’t even after. Such by-catch, as it’s known, is essentially collateral damage.

And fishing has other environmental impacts. In some parts of the ocean, the scars left by trawls dragged across the sea floor can be seen for years.

But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Over the past decade or so, a lot of effort has gone into designing fishing gear and related equipment that allows fishermen to catch more of what they do want, and less of what they don’t, while also minimizing damage to the environment. For example:

Veteran gear designer Ron Smolowitz and the Coonamessett Farm Foundation have worked with the southern New England scallop industry over the past several years to develop a trawl that excludes loggerhead sea turtles. It turns out, it’s also better at capturing scallops, with the end result that scallopers can use smaller areas and less fuel – 75% less – to make their catch.

Read the full story and listen to the segment at WCAI

MAINE: Mild winter heats up efforts to protect Casco Bay’s clams

May 2, 2016 — Soft-shell clams are a summer tradition around Casco Bay, both for the tourists and residents who love steamers and for the clam diggers who turn long, backbreaking hours on the mud flats into cold, hard cash.

But an infestation of invasive green crabs ravaged juvenile clam stocks in the past four years, adding to ecological changes, competition for coastal access and other pressures facing the state’s second most valuable fishery. Clam landings in the Casco Bay communities of Freeport, Harpswell and Brunswick, some of the state’s leading clam producers, plummeted to historic lows in 2015, and the scarcity of soft-shell clams contributed to all-time high prices.

While some shellfish managers say clam populations have rebounded thanks to a few cold winters that killed off green crabs, harvesters are anxious that the mild winter this year could produce a resurgence of green crabs and throw the fragile industry into a tailspin.

Those fears have clam diggers and scientists stepping up efforts to defend clam beds with boxes and nets. And they are fueling calls for a sea change in the management of soft-shell clams by leasing clam beds so that clammers can better protect the resource from predators.

Some are sounding alarms that without human intervention, the resource faces total collapse.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like people are just going to be able to go out and dig clams like they have without the protection element,” said Sara Randall, a Freeport researcher working with clammers in that town.

Others worry about an overreaction. Although most agree that active management and conservation efforts will be required in the future, not all believe the industry is facing a doomsday.

“We realize there is a bunch going on, but we don’t see it as the end of wild harvest,” said Darcie Couture, a marine scientist working with Harpswell clammers.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald