Saving Seafood

Maine approves new card system to track sea urchin sales

PERRY, Maine (AP) — July 5, 2015 — Maine wants to get better and timelier information about the harvest of its sea urchins, which are the most valuable in the country, and it will begin doing so with a new swipe card system in a few weeks.

Maine sea urchins are harvested for their roe, which is especially popular in Japan and Japanese restaurants in America as sushi and sashimi. The swipe card system is similar to a program the state unveiled for its baby eel fishery last year.

The new card system will allow the state to collect information about volume and price of urchin sales in real time, said Maggie Hunter, a biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The season begins Sept. 1 and Hunter said the cards will likely be ready by October.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Inside Bay Area News

 

A big shift is coming to the Maine lobster population — and it could devastate the local economy

July 7, 2015 — There aren’t many foods more closely associated with Maine than the lobster.

So it’s pretty scary that this valued American crustacean could one day soon become a Canadian treasure — a change that could have a devastating impact on Maine’s local economy.

The problem is, lobsters like cold water. And oceans are warming, especially in New England.

The waters in the Gulf of Maine, specifically, are warming 99% faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.

And as a result, lobsters are moving north toward colder climates.

Over the last decade, southern lobster fisheries along Long Island and Connecticut have already seen their catches drop due to lobsters moving north into Maine, which hauled record catches during the same time period, according to the Portland Press Herald.

Maine lobsters have already moved north about 43 miles per decade between 1968 and 2008, according to a 2013 study.

Read the full story at Business Insider

Mainer sees success in commercial clam farm, but not everyone loves the project

August 2, 2015 — GEORGETOWN, ME — Marching across the clam flats near the head of Heal Eddy, you notice two things.

First, both the seafloor and the sea grass meadows on the shoreline are cratered with holes – the work of green crabs, the voracious crustaceans blamed for the widespread destruction of the state’s soft-shell clams.

 Then you see Chris Warner’s response: five long rows of what appear to be net-covered garden beds, some 70 patches in all, spread across the exposed ocean bottom at the mouth of a 300-foot-wide cove. Beneath the netting, protected from the hungry crabs, the tiny seed clams Warner planted here in May 2014 have been growing toward harvestable size, grazing on the plankton-rich seawater that floods the area with each tide.

Behold Maine’s first commercial-scale soft-shell clam farm, an experimental project that aims to test whether a single owner-operated farm can earn a worthwhile return for clam diggers who heretofore relied exclusively on the whims of nature to earn a living from the seafloor. If it works, it could revolutionize Maine’s second most valuable fishery, enhance the livelihoods of diggers and stop the assault of the green crabs in their tracks.

But the project has been contentious here in Georgetown, a coastal community 6 miles south of Bath, where some clam diggers fear that self-employed clam diggers like Warner and themselves will eventually be pushed out by corporate growers if the succulent mollusks are farmed rather than gathered in the wild.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Collaborative of Maine Lobster Businesses Sets Sights on High End Restaurants

July 28, 2015 — PORTLAND, Maine — Maine lobster is one of the reasons tourists come to the state. The goal of a new marketing and promotion effort is to have those tourists also eat Maine lobster in their home cities.

The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative is leading the effort and was formed by the state and the industry. It is paid for by increased license fees on fishermen and dealers.

The promotional target, at least to start, is out of state restaurants. Collaborative executive director Matt Jacobson said research identified 2,200 “upscale casual restaurants” between Maine and Delaware, which are considered the focus for the marketing effort.

Read the full story here

 

 

Maine Sens. King, Collins want a National Lobster Day

July 28, 2015 — WASHINGTON — A group of U.S. senators from New England say the lobster’s role in the region’s heritage and economy are important enough to justify a national day of celebration.

The senators are introducing a resolution to designate Sept. 25, 2015, as National Lobster Day. Maine’s Angus King and Susan Collins say the crustacean deserves the honor because thousands of families rely on the multimillion dollar American lobster industry to make a living.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

Maine taps new lead biologist for lobster monitoring program

July 23, 2015 — Maine is promoting the coordinator of its lobster monitoring programs to the role of lead lobster biologist for the state.

Kathleen Reardon has coordinated the state Department of Marine Resources’ lobster monitoring programs for the past 10 years. She is succeeding Carl Wilson as lead lobster biologist. Wilson became director of the Marine Resource Department’s science bureau in February.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

 

Maine fishing crew hauls in a whale of a lobster

June 13, 2015 — Ricky Louis Felice Jr. had never seen such a monster of the deep before, so he posted a photograph of himself holding the 3-foot-long, 20-pound lobster on his Facebook page Monday.

Since then, Felice, a 24-year-old criminal justice major from Cushing, said he has been bombarded with requests for interviews from news media outlets across Maine and New England.

Felice was working as a deckhand on the Big Dipper, a lobster boat based in Friendship, in late May when the crew hauled up a trap with the behemoth cowering inside.

Though the hardshell lobster was caught more than a month ago, Felice said he decided to post its photograph Monday on Facebook after his friends urged him to.

“He was huddled over in the corner (of the trap), all balled up. Lobsters are very territorial and I don’t think he liked the fact that there were five lobsters inside the trap with him,” Felice said Monday evening. “His whole body was inside the trap. He was the biggest lobster I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The three-man crew of the Big Dipper, which is captained by Isaac Lash of Friendship, each posed for a photograph with the big crustacean before tossing it back into the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

Lobstermen play waiting game while early prices spike

July 5, 2015 — Maine’s lobster industry is gearing up for another big year as the state’s 4,500 commercial fishermen wait for lobsters to migrate to the coast and shed the hard shells they’ve been carrying all winter.

And wait they must.

Fishermen and consumers probably won’t see those “shedders” until the middle of July – one to two weeks behind schedule – because of colder-than-normal water temperatures, according to scientists. The shortage has led to above-average lobster prices over the Fourth of July weekend, just when the state’s summer tourism season is coming into full swing. The Fourth of July weekend is considered the normal start date for the lobster fishery in Maine.

Fishermen who have traps in the water now aren’t catching much except for a few hard-shell lobsters, and those lobsters don’t seem eager to molt any time soon, said Peter McAleney, who runs New Meadows Lobster, a wholesaler in Portland.

“This winter has really messed us up,” he said. “The dealers and the fishermen are wondering what the heck is going to happen.”

Still, industry veterans say there’s no reason to panic. The lobsters will come again, just like they do every year, said Tom Flanigan, co-owner of Seaview Lobster Co. in Kittery.

“The old saying is: ‘The weather gets better before the lobster catch does,’” he said. “It takes awhile for the water temperatures to warm up and for the lobsters to do their thing.”

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald

 

Bill to limit Maine scallop harvest comes up short in state legislature

July 3, 2015 — A Washington County legislator says he will try again next year to persuade the Legislature to limit the harvest of Maine scallops.

The fishing industry this year resisted a bill proposed by Rep. Robert Alley, D-Beals, and it later died in committee in April. He had proposed legislation to create a limit of 90 pounds a day per person on wild-caught Maine scallops so future generations, he said, would still be able to harvest them.

Maine scallops are favored in culinary circles, typically fetching several dollars more per pound than other Atlantic scallops. This past scalloping season, they frequently sold for more than $20 per pound. They are harvested by drag boats or divers, and the fishery has been recovering after a collapse in the mid-2000s; the state’s 2014 catch was the most since 2000.

Alley said he will try to sell scallop fishermen and the public on the idea again next year.

“Some of the young kids that are coming out of high school, they don’t have a job, period, and they don’t have anything to look forward to as far as having a job,” said Alley, a lobsterman. “I’m looking out for the kids who want to have a job and stay here.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald