Saving Seafood

A Maine clam could help fishermen as climate change pushes out other species

December 20, 2021 — Some commercially fished species in Maine have seen their numbers decline in recent years due to climate change, but one of the state’s clam fisheries is growing and could help provide another way for fishermen to earn a living.

Northern quahogs, also known as hard clams, are among a handful of fisheries including Maine oysters — most of which are grown at sea farms — seaweed, and baby eels whose harvest volumes and values have increased over the past decade. Meanwhile, others including northern shrimp, softshell clams — and even the state’s still dominant lobster fishery — have shrunk.

For Mark Cota, a Topsham fisherman who grew up in Harpswell, the money in quahogs (pronounced “ko-hogs”) has been good enough that this year he started harvesting them full-time.

“I’ve done it for like four years,” Cota, 33, said Friday, chatting on the phone while raking for the clams on the tidal New Meadows River, which separates the towns of Brunswick and West Bath. “The price is right, and I’m getting good at it.”

Read the full story at The Bangor Daily News

Clam industry growing as climate change warms New England’s waters

December 20, 2021 — Maine’s clam industry is growing as climate change warms the Gulf of Maine.

The Bangor Daily News reports northern quahogs are among the state’s fisheries that have seen increased harvest volumes and values over the past decade.

The average price of what are also known as hard clams has gone from 40 cents per pound in the 1990s to around $1.50 per pound in recent years, the newspaper reports.

Annual harvest totals have also increased since the early 2000s, reaching a record of more than two million pounds in 2019, according to the paper. The annual harvest value is around $2.6 million, up from just over $10,000 as recently as 2004.

Read the full story at WHDH

 

Lobstering, climate change, and Maine. Read 7 takeaways from our ‘Lobster Trap’ series

December 17, 2021 — In “The lobster trap,” The Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald zoomed in on a small island central to Maine’s signature industry, smack dab in the crosshairs of global climate change. Reporters immersed themselves in the lives of local lobstermen reckoning with change and struggling to plot a path into the future.

Below are seven key takeaways from the series:

1. The forces that sparked a lobster boom, and brought unprecedented prosperity to Maine lobstermen, can also take it all away.

The American lobster thrives in chilly waters between 54 and 64 degrees, but can stay healthy up to 68 degrees. Long-term exposure to anything hotter spells serious trouble, like respiratory and immune system failure.

As ocean temperatures rise, the epicenter of the lobster population is shifting north to cooler waters. Right now, the thermal sweet spot is off midcoast Maine, where Vinalhaven and Stonington lobstermen fish.

But scientists warn the good times won’t last: As warming continues, they predict the catch will decline by half within 30 years.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

New England shrimp fishery to stay shuttered as waters warm

December 17, 2021 — New England’s commercial shrimp fishery will remain shut down because of concerns about the health of the crustacean’s population amid warming ocean temperatures.

The cold-water shrimp were once a winter delicacy in Maine and beyond, but the fishing industry has been shut down since 2013. A board of the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted on Friday to keep the fishery shuttered for at least three more years.

The shrimp prefer cold water and their population health is imperiled by the warming of the ocean off New England. The Gulf of Maine, in particular, is warming faster than most of the world’s ocean.

China’s difficulties a potential boon for US seafood processors

December 16, 2021 — Mounting difficulties in bringing seafood processed in China into the United States has created an opportunity for U.S. processors, including Portland, Maine-based Bristol Seafood.

China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed China’s seafood-processing sector’s production, and related logistical and transportation issues have impeded delivery of their products to the U.S. Those issues, along with the continued imposition of U.S. tariffs as high as 25 percent on seafood imported from China, have made China a less-attractive option for processing for U.S. seafood buyers, according to Bristol Seafood CEO Peter Handy.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Island Institute tackles the big picture of working waterfront access in Maine

December 15, 2021 — A grizzled lobsterman hauls traps onto the wharf as the sun sets slow and pink over the harbor. Fishing boats head home to unload catch as captains and sternmen young and old call back and forth in a Downeast Maine accent. Fresh-caught local seafood is featured at restaurants and markets.  

Maine’s “blue economy” is worth over $1 billion annually, according to a 2018 Colby College report. It’s also a big draw for tourists and new seasonal and year-round residents. But their increasing presence may imperil a big part of what brought them to Maine: the working waterfront. 

“There’s a critical connection between the ocean and Maine’s economy,” Island Institute Senior Community Development Officer Sam Belknap said, following the institute’s August 2021 publication, “The Critical Nature of Maine’s Working Waterfronts and Access to the Shore.” 

The report’s main takeaway? “Without institutional support, high-level policy and programmatic coordination and sufficient funding to protect access, the future of Maine’s working waterfront is dire.” 

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

Viewpoint: Help Maine lobstermen fight unfair federal rules

December 15, 2021 — No one ever said that life was fair. But the 10-year plan put forth in August by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales is so obviously unfair and, to make matters worse, based on bad science, that the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) has sued the federal government because of it. If this flawed plan remains in place the Maine lobster fishery could be erased within a decade, decimating the precious coastal communities where we live and work. 

The plan’s goal is to reduce risk to the whales from lobster gear by 60 percent right now, then by another 60 percent in 2025, and a final 87 percent in 2030, resulting in a 98 percent reduction in the already minimal risk that lobstermen pose to the whales. That does not leave much, if any, room for a viable lobster fishery in this state. 

The MLA contends that NMFS got it wrong. The best available science does not support the agency’s plan and instead, the government needs to come up with a plan that will protect the whales without sinking the lobster industry. 

We care about protecting the whales. Since 1997, Maine lobstermen have taken many actions to protect right whales from entanglement. We’ve put in place measures such as removing thousands of miles of rope from the water, keeping rope off the surface where a whale might feed, putting weak links in our rope so that a whale can break free, and marking our lines so we know if Maine lobster gear is responsible for an entanglement. These measures have worked. The right whale population had doubled in two decades. 

More importantly, no right whale has been known to become entangled in Maine lobster gear since 2004. No right whale has ever died from Maine lobster gear. 

Read the full op-ed at the Mount Desert Islander

The Lobster Trap

December 14, 2021 — A hard rain falls all around Johnny McCarthy, beading across the sprawling deck of his brand-new lobster boat, as he steers around the hidden threat of Folly Ledge through an ink-black night and into his home port.

His journey this midsummer night is momentous: a maiden voyage on the boat he’s always dreamed of, from the boatyard where her hull took final shape to the harbor where their fates will be made together.

You’d never know it to meet McCarthy – an unassuming, soft-spoken man who goes to work in a T-shirt and waterproof oilskins – but he is, at 32, among the most successful lobstermen in a place where lobster is king. On this remote and rocky island, 15 miles offshore, virtually everyone from the grocery clerk to the family doctor traces their living back to the tanks full of lobster that these boats haul into port each day.

The Gulf of Maine has been kind to McCarthy and his neighbors. The vast expanse, which stretches from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is one of the fastest warming ocean territories on the planet – and, for 30 years, that trend worked in Vinalhaven’s favor, turning the waters that surround the island into a near-perfect nursery for lobster. It is now the state’s second-richest port, and hard-working men and women like McCarthy have joined Maine’s one-percenters, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in a state where the average worker earns about $32,000.

McCarthy’s decision to invest in a new $650,000 boat – a gleaming, green-hulled fiberglass beast, 45 feet long and the envy of every captain in Vinalhaven’s 200-boat fleet – was a vote of confidence that the good times would continue. At least it was when he made the down payment three years ago.

That was before the coast of Maine became a front line in the battle over climate change.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Protests and Prayers

December 14, 2021 — When she heard the news, in the middle of her shift selling tickets at the ferry terminal, Cathy Watt broke down in tears.

The U.S. government had just ordered the unprecedented closure of a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean off Maine’s coast to traditional lobster fishing for four months a year, starting in October. It was the latest in a chain of crushing repercussions linked back to climate change: Warming oceans have hastened an endangered whale’s journey to the brink of extinction, and now Maine fishermen would pay the price.

Watt worried about her lobsterman son, a 30-year-old father of three who had just bought a new house. She nervously twisted her wedding band on her finger as she thought of her husband, a 48-year-old lobsterman and church deacon who counseled other fishermen through tough times — more of which, she feared, lay just ahead.

“It’s not like we can just go down to the next office building and find some new career that will take care of our family,” Watt said as she gestured toward Main Street, home to two dozen island businesses, many of which shut down in winter.

Flustered by the depth of her emotion, she wiped tears away and struggled to compose herself: for her young granddaughter, there beside her in the tiny ticket office with its smell of must and brine, and for the next customer in line.

At stake she felt was the future of their island, and the whole Maine coast.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Despite calls for ‘ropeless’ fishing gear, Maine lobstermen have doubts

December 14, 2021 — The elimination of fishing lines that run from lobster traps on the Gulf of Maine’s seafloor to marker buoys on the water’s surface is increasingly being sought as a way to help save the estimated 336 endangered North Atlantic right whales left in the world. But Maine lobstermen are skeptical.

Lobster industry officials say that the technology currently isn’t commercially viable and questioned if it’s really necessary in Maine, where whale sightings are rare.

“I think some people are probably contemplating it and some people can’t ever imagine it ever working,” Patrice McCarron, the head of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said.

McCarron emphasized that each fisherman is their own individual business and when it comes to testing out the gear, they have to make decisions based on what’s best for them.

Ropeless gear gets rid of the persistent vertical fishing line that can entangle whales and other species. Alternatives include gear that releases a buoy to the surface and others that fill a bag with air, floating the traps up to a waiting boat.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News