Saving Seafood

Bed-scale impact and recovery of a commercially important intertidal seaweed

February 17, 2023 — A study led by the University of Maine captured how entire rockweed beds recover from harvest, and the practice has a smaller impact than previously thought.

Rockweed wields immense influence over its intertidal habitat. Its tangled branches form the backbone of a rich ecosystem that shelters and feeds an abundance of marine life. Everywhere rockweed grows, invertebrates, fish and fowl follow.

The marine alga has also been valued as a soil amendment for centuries, and more recently as crop biostimulants. The Maine Department of Marine Resources reports that commercial  has more than tripled over the past 20 years. Rockweed grows back following harvest, with biomass recovering faster than height. This change, combined with climbing harvest pressure, has led to concern regarding the practice. Harvesters, landowners, ecologists and community scientists want to understand how cutting and removing rockweed affects the ecosystem it creates.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

Are cod ‘severely depleted’ in the Gulf of Maine? Why fishermen, scientists view ocean depths differently

February 16, 2023 — When fishermen and women look at the gray Atlantic waters off New England, they see a marine environment literally swimming with cod, the popular white fish prized around the world for its mild flavor.

Scientists, on the other hand, say Atlantic cod stocks in the Gulf of Maine are severely depleted and possibly vulnerable to extinction.

The question of how fishermen and marine scientists employed by government agencies can view cod numbers so differently has puzzled Micah Dean, a marine biologist with the state of Massachusetts, for years.

While a doctoral student at Northeastern University, Dean believed he came up with an answer.

In a paper published recently by the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences—appropriately titled “Lost in Translation”—Dean says that fishermen and scientists view the ocean depths with such different lenses that they are literally not seeing 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 says.

Read the full article at Northeastern Global News

Nordic Aquafarms loses court battle over land crucial to its Maine RAS plans

February 16, 2023 — Nordic Aquafarms, which has plans to build a large land-based recirculating aquaculture system salmon farm in Belfast, Maine, U.S.A., has lost its fight over rights to intertidal land the company planned to use to site its inflow and outflow pipes.

In a 16 February ruling, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found the plaintiffs in the case – Jeffrey R. Mabee and Judith B. Grace – were correct in their original assertion they are the owners of the intertidal land.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Lobster fishers sued federal government over closure to help whales

February 13, 2023 — A group of Massachusetts lobster fishers has sued the federal government over an emergency closure of fishing grounds that are designed to protect a vanishing species of whale.

The closure, enacted Feb. 1, blocked off about 200 square miles (518 square kilometers) of Massachusetts Bay from lobster fishing until the end of April. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the closure was necessary to protect North Atlantic right whales from dangerous entanglement in fishing ropes.

Read the full article News Center Maine

Wind energy efforts in Gulf of Maine pick up steam

February 10, 2023 — Stakeholders across Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in partnership with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), are inching closer to developing offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine.

In a series of public meetings last month, including one in Portsmouth, BOEM detailed its progress on bringing the renewable energy source to a portion of the 36,000-square-mile gulf area.

Last August, the Department of the Interior released a request seeking “commercial interest in obtaining wind energy leases in the Gulf of Maine consisting of about 13.7 million acres.” Based on input from the request, BOEM joined with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Center for Coastal and Ocean Science to produce a spatial analysis. This led to reducing the potential offshore wind gulf acreage to 9.9 million acres.

Read the full article at NH Business Review

Maine lobstermen are clawing to keep livelihoods afloat amid push to sink industry

February 8, 2023 — The U.S. lobster industry is clawing to keep their livelihoods and sounding off on a potentially “devastating” legal battle against environmental groups funded by big bucks from liberal, dark money groups.

“It seems like there’s always a battle in this industry,” Lobster 207 CEO Mike Yohe said on “Fox & Friends First” Tuesday. “They have deep pockets, so they just file another lawsuit to get us out of the water or change gear or change how we fish in the state of Maine.”

“The lobster industry is all we have here. And a lot of our coastal towns in my town, that’s pretty much what everybody does,” fourth-generation lobsterman Dustin Delano added on “Fox & Friends.” “If you’re not a lobster boat captain, you work on a lobster boat or you are involved in the supply chain, or you sell bait to the lobstermen, or you sell vehicles to lobstermen or in their crews. It’s just one of our number one things here in Maine, and this coast would be completely devastated without it.”

A recent Fox News Digital review of tax filings found environmental groups that have led litigation targeting the lobster fishing industry have been heavily funded by various liberal dark money groups that don’t disclose their individual donors.

Read the full article at Fox Business

MAINE: Wave of changes hitting Maine’s lobster industry all at once

February 8, 2023 — Even with congressionally-approved six-year reprieve from economically restrictive rules related to preserving the remaining population of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, the lobster fishery in the U.S. Northeast is facing an inflection point.

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is continuing to battle the National Marine Fisheries Service in court, challenging the agency’s May 2022 biological opinion for right whales.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Despite a pause on new regulations, U.S. and Canadian lobstermen see big challenges ahead

February 7, 2023 — After a two-year hiatus, members of the U.S. and Canadian lobster fisheries met in Portland over the weekend to discuss challenges facing their industry. Top of mind is how the industry will prepare before new federal regulations designed to protect endangered right whales begin in six years.

Fisheries in Maine had late last year expressed relief about the years-long delay in the rules change included in a federal spending bill, as it bought the industry more time to research and test new fishing techniques and other measures aimed at protecting North Atlantic right whales.

Read the full article at wbur

Legal sizes for lobsters could change to protect population

February 7, 2023 — The rules about the minimum and maximum sizes of lobsters that can be trapped off New England could soon become stricter, potentially bringing big changes to one of the most valuable seafood industries in the country.

Fishers are required to measure lobsters from eyes to tail and must throw back the crustaceans if they’re too large or too small. The rules, which can vary slightly based on fishing grounds, are intended to maintain a breeding population of the lobsters in key areas such as the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.

The regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering changing the standards by a fraction of an inch in some of the fishing grounds. The commission said it’s considering the changes because of a worrisome lack of baby lobsters growing off New England.

The changes would arrive at a time when the lobster industry is experiencing record highs in both catch and value, and consumers are paying more for lobsters — already a premium product — than they were just a few years ago. The industry is also challenged by warming oceans and new fishing rules designed to protect rare whales.

Read the full article at ABC News