Saving Seafood

Maryland proposes 30% cut in commercial oyster harvest

September 11, 2019 — Acting to curtail overfishing, Maryland natural resources officials proposed new oyster harvest restrictions Monday night that they said could reduce commercial landings by about 30% in the upcoming season.

The proposed cutbacks, which include shortening the wild harvest season, reducing the maximum daily catch and closing some reefs in the Upper Chesapeake Bay, are aimed at making the declining oyster fishery sustainable in eight to 10 years, according to officials with the Department of Natural Resources.

“We need to start trending in the right direction,’’ DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio said.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

NEW HEARING ADDED: States Schedule Public Hearings on Atlantic Striped Bass Draft Addendum VI (October 3 MD Hearing added)

September 5, 2019 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

Please note Maryland has added an additional hearing to be held on October 3rd. The details of that hearing follow and has been included in the press release link below.

NEW HEARING: Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Service

October 3, 2019 from 6 – 8 PM

The American Legion Dorchester Post 91

601 Radiance Drive

Cambridge, Maryland  

Contact: Michael Luisi at 410.260.8341

The revised press release can be found here – http://www.asmfc.org/uploads/file/5d712d47pr24AtlStripedBassDraftAddVI_PublicHearings_revised3.pdf

Options to rebuild oyster population in Maryland draw criticism

August 30, 2019 — Maryland watermen face potential cutbacks in their wild Chesapeake Bay oyster harvest starting this fall, as the state eyes new regulations aimed at eventually making the troubled fishery sustainable. But critics question whether the state is serious about ending overharvesting, and lawmakers could order a do-over.

Officials with the Department of Natural Resources told their Oyster Advisory Commission in August that they were considering reductions of up to 20% in the daily harvest limits and setting a shorter season, which has traditionally run from Oct. 1 through March 31.

They also suggested they might close some areas of the Bay to wild harvest for the coming season if available data indicates oysters are unusually scarce there or the areas were being heavily overharvested.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Maryland plan to boost oysters criticized as administration makes push for approval

July 25, 2019 — Maryland natural resources officials say they have an “ambitious,” science-based plan for putting the state’s troubled oyster fishery on a path to sustainability in the next eight to 10 years. They want to get on with it.

But others say the plan falls short because it fails to set a goal for rebuilding the state’s decimated oyster population and doesn’t make a firm enough commitment to stop overfishing. They’re hoping the General Assembly will order a do-over.

At a legislative briefing on the Department of Natural Resources’ proposed oyster management plan on July 23, a key lawmaker predicted the legislature would do just that.

Montgomery County Del. Kumar Barve, chairman of the House Environment and Transportation Committee, said he was “a little disappointed” that Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed legislation that he and Anne Arundel County Sen. Sarah Elfreth sponsored.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

MARYLAND: How can we save oysters if we harvest them faster than they reproduce?

March 27, 2019 — This year’s Maryland General Assembly session marks a critical juncture for Chesapeake Bay oysters. Policies under debate in the halls of the legislature will chart the course for oysters’ next 100 years. Now is the time to make the changes necessary to protect the oyster.

Before the session, the bad news arrived. In November, the state released the first comprehensive stock assessment of Maryland oysters. It found that the bivalves’ population had declined by half since 1999 — from about 600 million adult oysters to the current population of 300 million. The population decline is bad for both the Bay’s ecology and for the watermen who depend on the wild harvest to make their living.

The oyster’s significant decline is a symptom of a long history of overharvesting, disease and pollution in the Bay. The current population of oysters in Maryland’s portion of the Bay is less than 10 percent of the number of oysters harvested each year before 1900, according to the stock assessment.

While we can’t expect to re-create the natural state of the Bay before significant human intervention, Maryland can’t continue with business as usual. To reduce Bay pollutants, create more habitat for fish species and preserve the oyster for future generations, we must put Maryland on a path toward oyster recovery.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

ASMFC expected to set stricter regs for harvesting striped bass

March 18, 2019 — A new status review has found the striped bass population to be in worse shape than previously thought, a result that will almost certainly trigger new catch restrictions for the prized species next year in the Chesapeake Bay and along the East Coast.

A preview of a soon-to-be-released stock assessment presented in February to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission indicates that the striped bass population is overfished and has been for several years.

Members of the commission, a panel of East Coast fishery managers, knew that the migratory species has been in coastwide decline for more than a decade, but the new assessment paints a bleaker picture than many expected, including data that show recreational catches are significantly higher than previously estimated.

“We had all hoped that the results of the assessment would be a little better,” said Mike Luisi, an estuarine and marine fisheries manager with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “It is clear that we need to do something.”

Once the ASMFC officially accepts the new stock assessment, it will need to implement a plan within a year to end overfishing.

The commission can’t adopt the assessment until its May meeting, though. Its completion was delayed by the partial federal government shutdown, which sidelined biologists with the National Marine Fisheries Service who were working to complete both the final document and the peer review report.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Fisheries on both VA, MD legislative agendas for 2019

January 3, 2019 — Oysters will be on the legislative menu in Maryland in 2019, while Virginia lawmakers will have menhaden on their plates. But for legislators gathering in both states in January, many of the environmental issues confronting them will be leftovers from previous years.

In Annapolis, environmentalists hope to capitalize on an infusion of dozens of newly elected legislators to push through bills that have failed to gain traction in years past. In Richmond, activists face a different situation, seeking to make headway in an election year, with all of the legislative seats up for grabs.

Here are some of the environmental issues lawmakers in each state can expect to face.

Maryland

Oysters: In the wake of a troubling scientific assessment of Maryland’s oyster population, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is seeking legislation to protect the five Bay tributaries selected for large-scale restoration from being reopened to harvest and to lay out a framework for the development of a new fishery management plan for the species.

A Department of Natural Resources stock assessment found in November that the number of market-size bivalves last season was half of what it had been 15 years earlier, and that the shellfish were being overfished in roughly half of the state’s waters. The assessment had been ordered by the General Assembly in 2017 after the DNR moved to open some state oyster sanctuaries to supplement a faltering commercial harvest. Lawmakers blocked the DNR move until the assessment was complete.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Warm temps hurt shellfish, aid predators

November 13, 2018 — Valuable species of shellfish have become harder to find on the East Coast because of degraded habitat caused by a warming environment, according to a pair of scientists that sought to find out whether environmental factors or overfishing was the source of the decline.

The scientists reached the conclusion in studying the decline in the harvest of four commercially important species of shellfish in coastal areas from Maine to North Carolina – eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams and northern bay scallops. They reported that their findings came down squarely on the side of a warming ocean environment and a changing climate, and not excessive harvest by fishermen.

One of the ways warming has negatively impacted shellfish is by making them more susceptible to predators, said the lead author of the study, Clyde MacKenzie, a shellfish researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is based in Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

“Their predation rate is faster in the warmer waters. They begin to prey earlier, and they prey longer into the fall,” MacKenzie said. “These stocks have gone down.”

MacKenzie’s findings, the product of a collaboration with Mitchell Tarnowski, a shellfish biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, appeared recently in the journal Marine Fisheries Review. The findings have implications for consumers of shellfish, because a declining domestic harvest means the prices of shellfish such as oysters and clams could rise, or the U.S. could become more dependent on foreign sources.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Express

Study says ocean oscillation changes reduced shellfish landings

November 6, 2018 — For years, Maine shellfish harvesters have been complaining that there are fewer softshell clams while arguing that the diggers who go out on the mud flats aren’t the cause of the problem.

A recent study by researchers from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources backs them up on both counts.

According to Clyde L. MacKenzie Jr. of NOAA and Mitchell Tarnowski from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, between 1980 and 2010, documented landings of the four most commercially important inshore bivalve mollusks along the Northeast coast — eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams and northern bay scallops — dropped by 85 percent.

The principal cause, they say, was warming ocean temperatures associated with a shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation which resulted in damaged shellfish habitat and increased predation from Maine to North Carolina.

“My first response is that the article confirms what I have been seeing with soft-shell clams over at least the last decade or so,” Brian Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine Machias and director of research at the Downeast Institute on Great Wass Island, said last week.

The North Atlantic Oscillation is a fluctuation of atmospheric pressure over the North Atlantic that affects both the weather and the climate along the East Coast, especially in winter and early spring.

According to NOAA, shifts in the oscillation can affect the timing of a species’ reproduction and growth, the availability of microscopic organisms for food and predator-prey relationships.

Over a period of several years, MacKenzie and Tarnowski interviewed shellfish wardens and harvesters along the New England coast, as well as examining landings records and other research in an effort to determine the “true causes” of the precipitous drop in shellfish landings.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American