Saving Seafood

Oyster aquaculture limits disease in wild oyster populations

December 17, 2018 — A fisheries researcher at the University of Rhode Island has found that oyster aquaculture operations can limit the spread of disease among wild populations of oysters. The findings are contrary to long-held beliefs that diseases are often spread from farmed populations to wild populations.

“The very act of aquaculture has positive effects on wild populations of oysters,” said Tal Ben-Horin, a postdoctoral fellow at the URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences. “The established way of thinking is that disease spreads from aquaculture, but in fact aquaculture may limit disease in nearby wild populations.”

Working with colleagues at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Rutgers University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Ben-Horin integrated data from previous studies into mathematical models to examine the interactions between farmed oysters, wild oysters and the common oyster disease Dermo.

Read the full story from the University of Rhode Island at Phys.org

‘Just short of a crisis’: Tensions flare as Virginia halts oyster seed harvest in James

December 17, 2018 — Virginia fishery managers are taking the rare step of halting oyster seed harvests in the lower James River as they seek to protect the baby bivalves from overfishing.

Oyster seeds are wild-grown juvenile oysters, or “spat.” Many oyster farmers working in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries depend on regular shipments of fresh seed to replenish their lease areas.

The Virginia Marine Resources Commission expects to temporarily stop the catch before the season’s scheduled closure at the end of the year. Without the action, watermen almost certainly would surpass the fall quota of 40,000 oyster seed bushels taken from the river, officials said.

The commission also agreed to block out-of-state seed transfer permits, effective Oct. 31. Between half and two-thirds of the seeds collected from the James are typically sold to Maryland buyers, according to the commission, which will decide whether purchases can resume in the spring based on fall surveys of the river bottom.

The moves come after the commission cut off last year’s spring harvest — when as many as 80,000 bushels were up for grabs — with about a month left to go. That marked the first time since the cap was enacted in 2011 that the commission called on watermen to hang up their hand tongs.

“Basically, the quota did what it was supposed to do,” said Andrew Button, head of the commission’s oyster conservation and replenishment department. “It’s not really to limit anybody but a way to protect the resource.”

Read the full story at The Bay Journal

Virginia conservationists blast approval of seismic testing for oil, gas in Atlantic

December 4, 2018 — Virginia conservationists are blasting the Trump administration’s decision to reverse course and approve seismic air gun surveys along the Atlantic coast to search for buried oil and gas reserves.

The groups cite widespread public opposition to seismic blasting and offshore drilling, as well as the harm posed to marine life and coastal economies that rely on healthy waters and wetlands.

“This action flies in the face of massive opposition to offshore drilling and exploration from over 90 percent of coastal municipalities in the proposed blast zone,” said Diane Hoskins, campaign director at the D.C.-based advocacy group Oceana. “President (Donald) Trump is essentially giving these companies permission to harass, harm and possibly even kill marine life.”

“Offshore drilling in our region would pose far too many risks to the health of coastal waters and the Chesapeake Bay, fishing, aquaculture, tourism and all jobs that depend on clean water,” said Lisa Feldt, vice president for environmental protection and restoration at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “We need to run away from offshore drilling, not move towards it.”

Read the full story at the Daily Press

NOAA Approves Seismic Blasts off Coast of Md., Va.

December 4, 2018 — The federal government has cleared the way for five companies to do seismic surveys in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, as a first step to possible offshore drilling for gas and oil.

National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, gave final authorization, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, to “incidentally, but not intentionally, harass marine mammals to companies proposing to conduct geophysical surveys in support of hydrocarbon exploration in the Atlantic Ocean.”

That means NOAA Fisheries will allow seismic blasts even though they may unintentionally disturb marine mammals. The companies will be required to monitor acoustics, and take action to reduce the impact on animals. The required actions include vessels listening and watching for marine life, especially protected species. Companies must increase the seismic activity gradually “to alert animals in the area and reduce potential for exposure to intense noise.” And when certain sensitive species are nearby, they must stop blasting.

The geophysical surveys use airgun arrays to explore for hydrocarbons. A 2017 Presidential Executive Order encourages energy exploration like this. The NOAA Fisheries decision to allow blasting on the Atlantic Coast was met with outrage from conservation groups like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says there is no evidence that seismic surveys harm marine life, but a study it conducted in 2014 shows that nearly three million dolphins and half a million whales could be harassed, or worse, by survey activity.

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Maryland oyster restoration project remains stalled by lack of federal funds

November 29, 2018 — Oyster restoration work in Maryland’s Tred Avon River appears likely to remain on hold for at least another year, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers still has no funding allotted through next September for reef construction in the Chesapeake Bay.

Restoration work in the Eastern Shore river began in 2015 and has so far relied overwhelmingly on federal funds. The Trump administration did not request funding for the project in its budget proposal for fiscal year 2019, but the Corps’ Baltimore District did ask for support through discretionary funds authorized by Congress.

While the Corps decided to provide $13 million in additional funding for various projects in the Bay region, including the use of dredged material to restore two vanishing Bay islands, it did not give the Baltimore District money to continue work in the Tred Avon.

“The District is certainly committed to continuing the program,” said Sarah Lazo, spokeswoman for the Baltimore District. But until funding becomes available, she said, it can’t go forward.

It’s not clear whether the oyster restoration funding request was denied by Corps headquarters or by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has final say on the Corps’ workplan for spending its discretionary funds. Corps headquarters provided no explanation for why District funding requests were not included in its workplans.

Since 2015, the Corps and its state, federal and nonprofit partners have completed the initial restoration of nearly 81 acres of river bottom in the Tred Avon, at a combined cost of $4.6 million. They have planted a total of 380 million hatchery-spawned seed oysters on reefs that are protected from harvest.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Blockages gone, fish back in post-Sandy projects in Mass., 5 other states

November 26, 2018 — Billions of dollars have been spent on the recovery from Superstorm Sandy to help people get their lives back together, but a little-noticed portion of that effort is quietly helping another population along the shoreline: fish that need to migrate from coastal rivers out to the sea and back.

After the 2012 storm, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spent nearly $11 million on a series of projects to remove dams and other blockages from coastal waters in six states, partnering with local environmental groups. Fish species that were scarce or entirely absent from those waterways for years soon began showing up again.

The so-called “aquatic connectivity” projects in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia were part of a $105 million effort not only to fix what was damaged by Sandy, but also to improve environmental conditions in places where recreational benefits could help tourism and the economy, as well. While the storm did its worst damage in New York and New Jersey, its effects were felt in many states along the East Coast.

“The idea was not only to do good things for fish and wildlife, but to provide community benefits and make communities more resilient,” said Rick Bennett, a scientist with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Massachusetts. “By removing dams, you also reduce flooding, especially upstream.”

Aquatic species benefiting from the work include the Eastern Brook trout, sea run brown trout, sea lamprey, American eel and river herring.

One of the first and most successful projects happened in Spring Lake, New Jersey’s Wreck Pond. For years, the conflicting goals of protecting the environment and some of the New Jersey shore’s priciest real estate from storms have bedeviled the pond.

Storms sometimes open a channel between the 48-acre tidal pond and the ocean, but governments keep sealing it shut to protect homes from flooding. The result was poor water quality and much narrower access to the ocean, which hurts fish that travel from ocean to pond to breed.

The American Littoral Society oversaw construction of a concrete culvert between the pond and the ocean to make it easier for fish, including herring, to reach the sea. In addition to letting fish in and out more easily, the culvert can be opened or closed as needed during storms to control flooding.

It succeeded at both goals, said Tim Dillingham, the group’s executive director.

“The restoration of connectivity to allow fish to return and spawn has been a great success,” he said. “We’re seeing fish come back in numbers we hadn’t seen before. And it has also added to the resiliency of the area during storms, by adding capacity to deal with flooding.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Boston.com

December 2018 Council Meeting Agenda, Briefing Materials, and Webinar Information

November 21, 2018 — The following was released by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council:

The public is invited to attend the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s meeting to be held December 10-13 in Annapolis, MD. The meeting will be held at Westin Annapolis (100 Westgate Circle, Annapolis, MD 21401, Telephone 410-972-4300).

Meeting Materials: Briefing documents will be posted at http://ww.mafmc.org/briefing/december-2018 as they become available.

Public Comments: Written comments must be received by 5:00 p.m. on November 28 to be included in the Council meeting briefing book. Comments received after this deadline but before 5:00 p.m. on December 6 will be posted as “supplemental materials” on the Council meeting web page. After that date, all comments must be submitted using an online comment form available at available at http://www.mafmc.org/public-comment.

Webinar: For online access to the meeting, enter as a guest at: http://mafmc.adobeconnect.com/december2018.

Agenda: Click here to view a detailed meeting agenda.

 

New study: Chesapeake oyster decline not due to overfishing

November 14, 2018 — Warmer winters, rather than overharvesting, caused the steep decline of oysters and other commercially valuable shellfish in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere along the Atlantic coast, according to a controversial new study that’s getting pushback from some scientists.

The study, which appeared in Marine Fisheries Review, a quarterly journal of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says that multi-year stretches of mild temperatures in normally weather months altered the food web in coastal waters. That impaired the growth and reproduction of oysters, quahogs, soft-shell clams and scallops, scientists said. It also led to increased predation on shellfish larvae and outbreaks of diseases.

“The temperatures got warm and that changed the whole environment, so [the oyster diseases] MSX and Dermo could flourish,” said Clyde MacKenzie, Jr., the study’s lead author and a longtime researcher at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center at Sandy Hook, NJ. Mitchell Tarnowski, who runs the annual fall oyster survey for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, is the co-author.

The paper’s conclusions, especially its dismissal of overfishing as a factor in Chesapeake oyster declines, came under fire from scientists with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Its publication comes as the DNR prepares to release a first-ever stock assessment of the oyster population in the Upper Chesapeake, including an evaluation of whether current harvest levels are sustainable.

The scientific consensus has long been that overharvesting, disease and habitat loss over the decades devastated the Bay’s oyster population, with some estimates putting it in recent years at 1 percent or less of historic levels of abundance. From an annual commercial harvest of nearly 17 million bushels in 1880, landings have trended downward, hitting historic lows in 2003-04 of just 50,000 bushels. The harvest has rebounded some since then, though much of the gain has come via private oyster farming, especially in Virginia.

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