Saving Seafood

MAINE: Mills’ storm relief bill caught up in last-minute state budget battle

April 17, 2024 — Gov. Janet Mills’ storm relief bill appears to be at risk of falling victim to a wide-ranging legislative brawl over the supplemental budget.

A bipartisan group of Senators that now includes Senate President Troy Jackson wants to load the bill with a bevy of costly riders – which is estimated to bring the bill’s total cost to $117 million – that have nothing to do with the $60 million infrastructure repair that Mills asked lawmakers to approve as an emergency measure a month ago. The additions include raises for education techs, new behavioral health programs, and higher, non-lapsing funding for nursing homes and veterans homes.

But House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, and Mills want a storm relief bill that isn’t weighed down with all that extra spending. They want to keep the other spending contained within the official supplemental budget bill, which was voted out of the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee Monday. And while Mills had wanted infrastructure repair money to go out fast, the House was so intent on adopting a stripped-down storm relief bill that it appeared willing to give up hopes of adopting the bill as an emergency measure.

Read the full article at the centralmaine.com

MAINE: Maine researchers, students are sorting through muck and slugs to study baby scallops

April 15, 2024 — Baby scallops are easy to miss in a pile of muck or a large netted spat bag. At around one to six months old, they are less than 5 millimeters long – dwarfed by a fingernail.

It takes a discerning eye to find the juvenile scallops. But researchers, fishermen, farmers and students have learned how to spot them.

People from each of these groups are collaborating with the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership and Colby College in the second year of a study meant to help identify how many young scallops there are off Maine’s coast, and where they’re living. The work is funded by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The tiny, two-shelled juveniles, or spat, are uniquely important to fishermen who scoop wild scallops from the ocean floor and aquaculture farmers who raise them in contained areas.

Read the full article at the Press Herald

MAINE: Maine delegation traveling to France to explore culinary world of scallops

April 14, 2024 — A group of chefs, seafood professionals, writers, economic development specialists and educators will travel to France from April 14-22 to explore French techniques for handling and preparing scallops in support of the scallop farming and commercial fishing sectors in Maine.

The project is made possible by a grant from the NOAA National Sea Grant Office to the Maine Sea Grant College Program. Among the Maine delegation of culinary professionals and other specialists traveling across France are Dana Morse, senior extension program manager and aquaculture lead at Maine Sea Grant and University of Maine Cooperative Extension, and Rob Dumas, UMaine food science innovation coordinator and manager of the Dr. Matthew Highlands Pilot Plant.

The group will be in Paris, Normandy and Brittany. The trip will wrap up with a scallop festival in Paimpol April 20-21. The week of travel will be followed by educational programming led by Dumas to share what the group learned from its travels with other chefs and other culinary professionals.

The project is spurred by the unparalleled quality of Maine dayboat scallops, both the traditional product from the fishery and whole live product from Maine sea farmers.

“The quality of dayboat scallops from Maine is finally getting the long overdue recognition it deserves. Scallops from different areas have different flavors (merroirs) and Maine is the only state in the country offering whole cultivated scallops. I look forward to learning from the masters of place-based gastronomy how to get the word out about our amazing scallops,” said delegation member Togue Brawn, owner and founder of Downeast Dayboat.

Read the full article at the Penbay Pilot 

Atlantic cod stocks from the eyes of fishermen and scientists

April 9, 2024 — Scientists claim that Atlantic cod stocks are severely depleted in the Gulf of Maine, but on the other hand, fishermen look at the marine environment and see a thriving species that will be shipped and eaten around the world for years to come.

The question of how fishermen and marine scientists employed by government agencies can view cod stocks so differently has left Micah Dean, a Marine biologist with the Mass. Division of Marine Fisheries (MDMF) puzzled for years.  According to Northeastern Global News, Dean believed he discovered the answer when he was a doctoral student at Northeastern University.

He claimed that fishermen and scientists view the ocean depths with such different lenses that they are not viewing the same things.

“We did a telephone survey, and we asked commercial fishermen, over the last 10 years, do you think the cod population in the Gulf of Maine has gone down a lot, gone down a little, stayed the same, gone up a little, or gone up a lot,” Dean shared.

The most common response they received from fishermen was that the population had increased.

According to the article from Northeastern Dean stated,  government scientists say that the Gulf of Maine cod stock has declined about 80% from 2005 to 2017 and is less than 5% of its target level, making it “severely depleted.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Fishermen hope to find Gulf of Maine shrimp stocks revived

April 6, 2024 — Maine fishermen hope to discover if Gulf of Maine shrimp stocks could support a revived fishery. After a precipitous drop in landings in 2013, Maine’s shrimp fishery officially ended with a moratorium imposed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) in 2014. A few boats continued fishing in a test fishery until 2021 when the Shrimp Section extended the commercial and recreational fishing moratorium through 2024.

“This three-year moratorium was set in response to the low levels of biomass and recruitment and the fact that should recruitment improve, it would take several years for those shrimp to be commercially harvestable,” reads the ASMFC website. After that, monitoring relied primarily on surveys conducted by the R/V Gloria Michelle, which have now been curtailed.

“Federal money to continue the surveys was cut, so the ASMFC shrimp section asked for ideas,” said Glen Libby, who has been involved in the shrimp fishery for decades and whose brother Gary chairs the Advisory Panel. Libby wrote a draft proposal for a plan to sell licenses to previous license holders, allow them to fish at their own expense, and report their findings.

“It would give you a much better picture of stock status than using Gloria Michelle or the Albatross, which is what they were doing,” said Libby, who questioned the validity of the data collected. They had too much spread on the net and were getting mud half the time. It was like towing a butterfly net with a dump truck.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman

MAINE: Maine fishers brought in USD 611 million in 2023

March 30, 2024 — Commercial fishers in the U.S. state of Maine earned USD 611 million (EUR 564 million) at the dock in 2023, a 4 percent year-over-year increase, according to preliminary data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR).

“The Maine seafood industry continues to be a powerful economic engine for our state,” Maine Governor Janet Mills said in a statement. “The dedication to sustainability and premium quality by our fishermen, aquaculturists, and dealers is a source of tremendous pride for everyone who calls Maine home.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MAINE: Lobster alliance donates $10,000 to Working Waterfront Support Fund

March 30, 2024 — The Maine Lobster Community Alliance, a non-profit organization based in Kennebunk whose mission is to foster thriving coastal communities and preserve Maine’s lobstering heritage, has announced in a press release that it is donating $10,000 to the Working Waterfront Support Fund.

The fund was established following January’s devastating storms and historic flooding that caused widespread destruction and millions of dollars of damage in communities up and down the Maine coast. According to MLCA’s website, the fund “will be utilized to provide resources and support to fishing businesses and working waterfronts that suffered damages due to the storms.”

Read the full article at Penobscot Bay Pilot

MAINE: ‘I’m not going to hang around:’ Some Maine lobstermen decide to quit over new regulations

March 28, 2024 — Maine lobstermen say they’re frustrated by a new round of rules and regulations in place up and down the coast.

Some are even deciding to quit.

Rules that took effect January 1 require lobstermen to make monthly reports detailing when, where and the number of lobsters caught each day, along with the number of traps in the water.

Some lobstermen have decided the paperwork, and more harsh future regulations, aren’t worth it.

Read the full article at Fox 23

MAINE: Maine lobstermen struggle to adapt to new electronic reporting rules. Their licenses are on the line.

March 25, 2024 — Alice Mayberry and Sue Kelley spend most of their days talking to lobstermen about what they’ve hauled in. Mayberry is riffling through paper logs. Kelley is texting until 9 p.m.

Then, they both log onto the Maine Department of Marine Resources’ database and plug in what the lobstermen did for the day.

Over the last several years, state and federal regulators started requiring more fishermen to report what they caught, and where. A few years ago, only a portion of harvesters needed to submit that information, and it could be sent in on a piece of paper.

Now, all fishermen who harvest 15 species of fish – pogies, scallops, lobster, halibut, mussels, eels and others – have to file their landings, and most must do so electronically.

Fishermen in Maine are gradually learning what they’re supposed to do. For lobstermen, adjusting has been particularly hard.

Regulators used to require a random 10% of lobstermen to report their landings. The weight and value of lobster hauled from local waters were measured and reported primarily by the dealers who first purchased the fish.

Read the full article at centralmaine.com

MASSACHUSETTES: Massachusetts fishermen say feds are hypocritical in Gulf of Maine wind energy designation

March 25, 2024 — A move to designate two million acres in the Gulf of Maine as a hub for wind energy is snagging a sharp hook from Massachusetts fishermen who say the development overlooks risks to the North Atlantic right whale.

A handful of Bay State fishermen advocacy groups are teaming with counterparts from across New England in criticizing the Biden administration’s plans to industrialize the area off the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management finalized the designation earlier this month, an action it says looks to support President Biden’s clean energy goals.

The area, which ranges from 23 to 92 miles off the coasts of the three states, has the potential to support generation of 32 gigawatts of clean energy, the bureau said. That amount of energy surpasses “current state goals for offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine: 10 GW for Massachusetts and 3 GW for Maine,” BOEM said.

Specifically, industrialization could lead to the deployment of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030 and 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind energy capacity by 2035, according to the feds.

Local, state and federal officials over the years have mandated fishermen to follow a growing number of protocols to preserve the endangered right whales — in some cases, barring them from taking to certain waters.

Read the full article at the Boston Herald