Saving Seafood

MAINE: Big changes are occurring in one of the fastest-warming spots on Earth

October 25, 2015 — Sandwiched on a narrow sandbar between Yarmouth’s harbor and the open Gulf of Maine, the fishermen of Yarmouth Bar have long struggled to keep the sea at bay.

Nineteenth-century storms threatened to sweep the whole place away, leaving Yarmouth proper’s harbor more open to the elements, prompting the province to build a granite cribwork across the quarter-mile bar, behind which the hamlet’s fishing fleet docks. Global warming has brought rising seas, a two-story-high rock wall to fight them and the hamlet’s designation as one of the communities in the province most threatened by climate change.

Now, snaking around the snout of Nova Scotia and into the Gulf of Maine is a new, unseen threat to Yarmouth Bar and hundreds of coastal communities in Maine, eastern New England and the Maritimes: currents fueling the rapid warming of the sea.

The Gulf of Maine – which extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and includes the Bay of Fundy, the offshore fishing banks, and the entire coast of Maine – has been warming rapidly as the deep-water currents that feed it have shifted. Since 2004 the gulf has warmed faster than anyplace else on the planet, except for an area northeast of Japan, and during the “Northwest Atlantic Ocean heat wave” of 2012 average water temperatures hit the highest level in the 150 years that humans have been recording them.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

NASA commits $6.5M to Gulf of Maine Research Institute for climate change education

October 21, 2015 — The Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland is receiving a $6.5 million grant from NASA to create a new educational program focused on science knowledge and problem-solving related to climate change.

The grant will allow the nonprofit organization to upgrade the technical infrastructure at its Sam L. Cohen Center for Interactive Learning in Portland to deliver the new educational content to the 10,000 Maine 5th and 6th graders who visit each year, GMRI announced Tuesday. The organization will also making the educational programing web-accessible to visitors in other science centers and classrooms in Maine and nationwide.

Through customization of the new content from GMRI’s educational program, LabVenture!, the programming will allow students to investigate how climate change is affecting their local region and the rest of the world. The five-year grant, which will begin Nov. 1, will be shared with national science education partners.

Work at GMRI will begin immediately, and new programming content is expected to be available for the 2018-2019 school year.

Read the full story at Maine Biz

Maine Is Literally Dropping Fish Out of Low-Flying Airplanes, and It’s Mesmerizing

October 21, 2015 — Video of a man “aerial dropping” live fish into a pond from a low-flying plane has become a minor sensation after the footage was uploaded to the Facebook page of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The video has so far gotten more than 25,000 views.

“The department annually stocks over 1 million fish throughout the state, utilizing a variety of methods that include flying fish by airplane into remote ponds,” the department wrote in the video description. “The fish are loaded into tanks that are attached to the pontoons on the aircraft, stocking locations are verified and then the planes take off. The tanks are then emptied when flying over the water. The department generally stocks over 180 waters each year by airplane.”

Read the full story at News.Mic 

MAINE: DMR approves reduction to scallop fishing days

October 21, 2015 — Scallop fishers in parts of Maine will have fewer days to do their job this season compared to last year.

The Department of Marine Resources has voted in favor of a 10-day reduction for the upcoming season. Scallop season runs from early December to mid-April, at a time when lobster fishing is not as lucrative.

The area that will see a change this year, called Zone 1, runs from New Hampshire to the Penobscot River. Last season, scallop fishing in that zone was allowed on 70 days. This season, it’ll only be allowed on 60.

Read the full story at WCSH6 Portland

 

MAINE: Lobster season proves successful

October 20, 2015 — Maine’s 2015 lobster season is experiencing a boom this year, which according to biologists, stems from factors such as careful fishery management, dropping populations of predators like cod fish, and warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

Experts in the field also point to the fact that lobstering is regulated by a number of federal laws, and that Maine fisheries and governments cooperate with the help of the University of Maine Lobster Institute.

In addition, lobstermen also take an active part in conservation by marking egg-bearing female lobsters, Smithonian.com reported.

Another factor benefitting the industry has been the growth in supply. Exports of the state’s lobsters to China grew from almost nothing five years ago to around 2.7 million pounds last year, with South Korea and Hong Kong showing similarly large increases, according to WISERTrade, which tracks exports.

Read the full story at FIS World News

 

 

MAINE: Catching Jonah – Could an overlooked crab break Maine’s lobster dependence?

October 20, 2015 — Tina Gray of Deer Isle recalls when picking and selling crabmeat was a prevalent cottage industry along the Maine coast. She and other lobstermen’s wives routinely picked and packaged crab meat at their kitchen sinks, she said, but many got out of the trade years ago when new federal rules for seafood processing went into place.

Gray, who’s going on 33 years picking crab meat for a living, remains one of just a few in her area who keep up with the work. She bills herself as “ The Crab Lady.”

“I remember back when I started, there was like 300 people on this island that used to pick [crabmeat] in their homes,” Gray said, picking crab while standing at a work table in a small processing building outside her house. “Now I think there’s a total of maybe eight [processing] licenses on Deer Island and Stonington.”

Crabs, once a more prominent staple among the various marine fisheries in Maine, have always played second fiddle to lobster in the state’s clawed crustacean seafood industry. But the market divide between Maine lobster and crab has grown more acute over the past dozen years. The volume of Maine’s lobster catch has soared to all-time highs while landings for all crab species have declined to their lowest point since the early 1980s.

That trend stands in sharp contrast to southern New England, where lobster catches have dropped off considerably, but harvests for one type of crab — the large-clawed Jonah crab — have more than quintupled since the 1990s.

The disparity raises questions: Could crab landings rebound in Maine? If so, can they climb back up enough to help offset Maine fishermen’s overwhelming dependence on lobster, which scientists and other officials say could have disastrous consequences if the fishery goes bust?

Lobstermen mainly catch crab as a byproduct, hauling them up in their traps as incidental income. Maine does not issue separate licenses for crab and lobster, with the exception of the recently approved green crab license.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Pembroke company seeks to make Washington County the ‘clam capital of Maine’

October 19, 2015 — It’s a crisp sunny morning in early October in the Washington County town of Pembroke and Tim Sheehan walks briskly across an empty parking lot to greet me. He’d been expecting good news about clam flats in northwestern Cobscook Bay being reopened, but instead of a parking lot full of diggers delivering clams to Gulf of Maine Inc., the seafood business on Route 1 he co-owns with his wife, Amy, there’s just a quiet sunlit absence.

The flats had been closed for almost a week after an historic rainfall on Sept. 30 forced Maine’s Department of Marine Resources to close the entire coast to shellfish harvesting. Even though he knows the closures are a temporary and necessary precaution — until water quality testing determines there’s no longer a risk of runoff pollution contaminating soft shell clams and mussels in the tidal flats — it’s still hard for Sheehan to accept another blank day on his company’s ledgers.

“I’m a dealer, our business depends on clams,” he says.

He’s not alone in that frustration on this bright Tuesday morning. By mid-morning, a dozen or more clammers had sent text messages asking Sheehan if the flats were open yet. Others had pulled up to his seafood warehouse in pickup trucks — some more than once as the sun advanced towards high noon — wondering the same thing.

“Still no word,” Sheehan tells them. Weathered faces nod impassively. They’ve been through this drill before. A full-time clammer, Kittery or Pembroke no difference, is always waiting for something — the tides to change, DMR closures to lift, prices to go up and tiny seed clams to grow to harvestable sizes.

By his own admission, patience doesn’t come easily to Sheehan, who says by nature he’s driven to solve problems. It’s been a hallmark of the wholesale seafood business he and his wife created three years ago, when they realized the scientific specimen business they incorporated in 2002 — whose sales had plummeted with the recession — wasn’t coming back fast enough to keep them in Washington County.

Read the full story at Maine Biz

 

JES HATHAWAY: Conspiracy Queries

October 5, 2015 — Once upon a time, fishermen and environmentalists butted heads, pretty much all the time. Then for the most part, both sides slowly realized they had some things in common. We all want clean water (and plenty of it), preserved fish habitats, better fishing gear, more efficient engines, and the list goes on.

We are now in an era in which the environmental movement and the fishing industry often work well together to achieve common goals. But there are some groups who have little interest in collaboration, or indeed even hearing what the other side has to say.

Last week, the fishing industry watchdog Saving Seafood made public what they say are the results of a Freedom of Information Act request to Maine’s governor’s office that showed the New England-based Conservation Law Foundation was working behind the scenes (including attempts to reach out to some Maine state officials) in the hopes of securing an East Coast marine monument designation through the Antiquities Act, which does not require democratic review. The emails indicated that the group hoped President Obama could announce the monument plan at the Our Ocean Conference in Valparaiso, Chile, (taking place this week) and that they hoped to be well under way in the process toward that designation before any potential opposition was aware of it enough “to fight it, to organize against it,” said CLF’s Interim President Peter Shelley, according to Environmental and Energy Publishing.

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman

Maine’s Lobster Boom Continues, Feeding Expanding Market

October 17, 2015 — As Maine’s 2015 lobster season heads for the homestretch, the iconic New England fishery continues to show surprising signs of strength while it feeds a growing market.

Mainers appear to be pulling large numbers of lobsters from the waters off their shores, continuing a long winning streak.

Marine experts point to a few likely factors behind the boom: careful fishery management; dropping populations of predators, such as cod fish; and warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

Meanwhile, strong demand for lobster is surfacing in an array of places, from China, whose residents have a growing taste for lobster, to McDonald’s Corp. , which offered a fast-food lobster roll sold in New England this summer. Prices for the clawed crustaceans are up from last year, according to market experts and people connected to Maine’s fishing industry.

In 2014, lobstermen harvested about 124.4 million pounds of lobster from the water fetching an average of $3.70 a pound, according to the state’s Department of Marine Resources. The total catch was shy of an all-time record set in 2013, though the average price rose nearly 28%.

Read the full story and watch the video from The Wall Street Journal