Saving Seafood

US distributor plans to hike invasive catfish sales

October 4, 2018 — Congressional Seafood Company, which already sells invasive blue catfish to Whole Foods Market and other major buyers, is aiming to significantly grow sales of the fish in the state of Maryland.

Around four years ago, Jessup, Maryland-based Congressional began selling blue catfish, an invasive species in the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac River, and other waterways. Blue catfish feeds on many native species, including blue crabs, rockfish, and mussels.

“I started reading about this environmental crisis because of the explosion of the fish in the tributaries, and knew we had to try to sell it,” Congressional founder and executive vice president Tim Sughrue, told SeafoodSource. “However, one of the hardest thing I’ve had to do … is create a market for a fish that has never been sold before.”

Blue catfish has a great flavor and it tastes similar to snapper to rockfish, Sughrue said. However, its meat yield is 25 percent on average, versus around 65 percent for mahi and 70 percent for tuna.

After contacting several restaurant and retailer chains, Congressional got its “first big break” in 2014, when Clyde’s Restaurant Group, based in Washington D.C., agreed to menu blue catfish regularly, according to Sughrue.

In 2015, Congressional got another break when Whole Foods Market’s mid-Atlantic region came on board.

“I had been meeting with Whole Foods for a while, but it wasn’t until blue catfish was rated ‘green’ by Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program, that they said they could sell it,” Sughrue said. “That allowed us to gain a market for it.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The Eel Deal: This D.C. Restaurant Serves Up Eel From The Chesapeake

September 14, 2018 — Eels are misunderstood. They’re slimy, and look like snakes—which makes it hard for some people to stomach the thought of eating one. But eel season is ramping up at one D.C. restaurant, where the chef serves eels caught in the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite appearances, eels are fish. They breathe through gills and move using two long fins—one down their back, another along their bellies. The two fins meet to form a tail.

At seafood restaurant The Salt Line, chef Kyle Bailey is happy to offer eel to his customers.

“They’re available and I want that because I don’t see them anywhere else in town, and I would love to be the restaurant that has something that nobody else has,” Bailey says.

Bailey’s eels are provided by Dock-to-Dish, a restaurant-supported fishery program in the Washington region. It allows chefs to trace the fish they get back to the dock they came from.

From Kent Island To The Salt Line

The source of Bailey’s eels is Troy Wilkins, one of a couple dozen Maryland watermen who fish for the elusive, yet abundant creatures on a regular basis.

On a recent day, Wilkins sails near Kent Island in the Chesapeake. From the deck of his fishing boat, the Misty Tango, he reels in two-foot-long, cylindrical eel pots one by one.

Several pots come up nearly full. Roughly a dozen greenish-brown eels writhe around inside the pots before he dumps them into a holding tank. Some eels are big, about four or five pounds. Others are much smaller.

Read the full story at DCist

 

MARYLAND: Seafood restaurant wages war with PETA

September 7, 2018 — After People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) targeted Maryland’s blue crab industry in an ad campaign last month, seafood restaurant Jimmy’s Famous Seafood is fighting back to protect its livelihood.

“It’s our livelihood and the Maryland blue crab is the bloodline of Maryland.…Tens of thousands of jobs depend on the Maryland blue crab economy on a daily basis,” John Minadakis, owner of Jimmy’s Famous Seafood in Dundalk, Maryland, told SeafoodSource.

To that end, Jimmy’s launched a scathing Twitter campaign that, in part, accuses PETA of slaughtering kittens and puppies. The restaurant also posted a billboard featuring a photo of its steamed crab with the statement: “SteaMEd crabs. Here to stay. Get Famous.”

In late August, PETA placed a billboard near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, home to several seafood restaurants such as Phillips Seafood, McCormick & Schmick’s, and The Oceanaire Seafood Room. The billboard, which includes an image of a Maryland blue crab, states: “I’m me, not meat. See the individual. Go vegan.”

“Just like humans, crabs feel pain and fear, have unique personalities, and value their own lives,” PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in a statement. “PETA’s billboard aims to give Charm City residents some food for thought about sparing sensitive marine animals the agony of being boiled alive or crushed to death in fishing nets simply by going vegan.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MARYLAND: Maligned cownose ray could be vulnerable to overfishing, study suggests

August 30, 2018 — Chesapeake Bay watermen have long viewed the cownose ray as a pest, preying on a vulnerable oyster population. Their contempt even inspired tournaments of bow-wielding ray hunters — a practice the state has banned, at least temporarily.

But new research backs up concerns that the winged creatures could themselves be susceptible to overfishing, an outcome that some scientists fear could harm the bay’s health.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., tracked a group of rays over two years. The rays, they found in research published last week in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, spend their winters around Cape Canaveral, Fla., then migrate north in the spring to the same rivers where researchers initially found them — perhaps the rivers and creeks where they were born.

The finding could be valuable as Maryland fishery regulators develop the state’s first plan to manage the cownose ray population, balancing the concerns of the seafood industry with the limited data available on the rays’ place in the Chesapeake ecosystem.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Our Coast’s History: NC’s Oyster War

August 29, 2018 — Late January 1891, the steamer Vesper, rented from the Wilmington Steamship Co. and mounted with a well-used howitzer and caisson borrowed from the state of Virginia, left Elizabeth City with militiamen of the Pasquotank Rifles. Their mission: To enforce “An Act to Promote and Protect the Oyster Interests of the State” that had been passed barely a week earlier.

After three years of growing tension between North Carolina oystermen and vessels drifting down from Chesapeake Bay to harvest oysters in Pamlico and Roanoke sounds, North Carolina’s legislature had acted, creating a list of draconian restrictions on the harvest that prohibited dredging and allowed only in-state residents to gather oysters.

Tasked with telling the oyster poachers — mostly from Maryland — of the new law, as conflicts go, the North Carolina oyster war wasn’t much of a war, the rhetoric far outstripping the action.

“As she (the Vesper) proceeds on the return trip if any dredgers are found continuing to ravish the oyster beds they will be arrested, even if their boats have to be blown out of the water and their crews killed,” the Wilmington Weekly Star wrote.

In the end, the Vesper made one arrest, with other boats heeding the warning and leaving North Carolina waters.

Although short-lived and bloodless, what occurred on the water was but a part of an intersection of changing priorities in northeastern North Carolina.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online 

 

The Anacostia River Is Mussel-ing Its Way To Clean Waters

August 28, 2018 — If you’ve got 5,600 freshwater mussels, you could serve about 280 steaming plates of moules marinières. Or, you could deposit the bivalves in the Anacostia River.

The Anacostia Watershed Society has opted for the latter as part of a larger effort to clean the river and renew the mussel population. Last week, staffers and volunteers with the nonprofit placed the creatures in 28 floating baskets at seven sites along the Anacostia River—six in D.C., and one in Maryland—with varying microhabitat conditions.

Jorge Bogantes Montero, the organization’s natural resources specialist, has already checked on one of the baskets, all of which have swimming pool noodles to keep them afloat and covered tops to protect the mussels from predators.

“They look great,” he says of the mussels in the baskets by the Anacostia Watershed Society’s floating office on Water Street SE.

How does he know? He peeked into the baskets and saw mussels with two little holes, which he calls an innie and an outie (one of which is filtering water and the other is secreting waste). “I could see pairs of holes all over the bottom, so I know they are working,” says Montero. “If you see slits open, that’d be a bad sign.” The next checkup will happen in late September, about a month after their deployment.

Much like oysters, mussels can filter large quantities of water (between 10-20 gallons daily) and they eat bacteria like E. coli. But that’s just one of their benefits to the ecosystem, says Montero. “They are providing a lot of ecosystem services even beyond filtration,” he says, like depositing sediment at the bottom of the river. Other critters also use their shells as places for shelter or nesting.

Read the full story at DCist

MARYLAND: After 42 years of fishing, he’s never seen anything like this 310-pound bull shark

August 15, 2018 — In the picture, the bull shark towers over the Maryland fisherman.

Larry “Boo” Powley stares into the camera, seemingly unfazed.

The story of how the 65-year-old commercial fisherman came to pose with a 310-pound bull shark began Monday morning when Powley set out on the Patuxent River in Southern Maryland.

Powley, who has been on the water for 42 years, said he was planning to catch his usual crop of menhaden, a common fish often used in fish oils for humans and bait for blue crab. Menhaden measure 15 inches at most, so the 8.6-foot-long bull shark that got stuck in his trap off Cedar Point, in St. Mary’s County, around sunrise wasn’t hard to notice.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Sportfishing Association opposes oil, gas, seismic testing along Atlantic coast

August 9, 2018 — The White Marlin Open is a hallmark event in Ocean City.

Last year, the tournament brought in more than 350 boats and 3,000 contestants – the camarederie and excitement were palpable.

The excitement this year is similar to last, but something has changed. We’ve all heard about the plans to open the Atlantic to drilling.

For the first time, fishermen are facing the prospect of our fisheries being pummeled by explosive noise, and our waters tainted by oil. Could this be our last tournament before oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic changes fishing and the town of Ocean City forever?

The Atlantic Coast Sportfishing Association hopes not.

Read the full story at Delmarva Now

VIRGINIA: Menhaden landings pacing below disputed cap

August 8, 2018 — Chesapeake Bay landings of menhaden are coming in at a pace well below a controversial cap imposed by an interstate fisheries commission, Virginia Marine Resources Commissioner Steven Bowman said.

As of the end of June, landings for the so-called reduction fishery came in at 24,000 metric tons, Bowman told the management board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) this week.

He said that meant landings this year would almost certainly come in below the 51,000-ton cap the interstate commission imposed last year — a cut of more than 40 percent that the General Assembly balked at adopting.

Bowman, joined by Maryland’s director of fisheries, asked the board to hold off declaring that Virginia was not in compliance with the cap because the General Assembly had not written the 51,000-ton limit into state law.

That finding, if adopted by the commission and accepted by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, could shut down the menhaden fishery, which employs about 300 people working on Omega Protein’s fishing boats and its processing plant in Reedville, on the Northern Neck. While the cap applies only to menhaden caught by the big “purse seine” vessels Omega operates to catch fish to be processed for oil and fish meal, board members said a finding of noncompliance could shut down the bait fishery, in which smaller operators use a different technique to catch fish used by crabbers and in commercial fin-fisheries

Instead, Bowman and Blazer proposed that the commission find Virginia out of compliance if landings this year actually exceeded 51,000 tons.

That effort failed, but the board decided to delay until February acting on an alternative declaring Virginia out of compliance.

Omega spokesman Ben Landry said he believed the menhaden board’s decision to delay acting reflected commissioners’ new-found concern, underlined by NOAA’s Lynch, about the scientific basis for the cap.

“We have no intention of blowing past the 51,000,” he said. “But it’s an artificial number … our concern is flexibility; if there are storms out in the ocean, we’d like to be able to come into the bay.”

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Southern Maryland county considers limiting dock access for oyster farmers

August 7, 2018 — Oyster farming has grown rapidly in Maryland in recent years — too rapidly, in the eyes of some. Last week, spurred by complaints from waterfront homeowners and others, local elected officials in St. Mary’s County moved to put the brakes on the burgeoning industry along their shoreline.

The Southern Maryland county’s board of commissioners voted on July 31 to hold a public hearing on Aug. 28 on a proposed 18-month moratorium on the use of commercial docks to land oysters from any newly issued aquaculture leases in local waters.

Randy Guy, president of the five-member board of commissioners, said they want to “slow down” what he called a proliferation of oyster farming operations in St. Mary’s. The county has no direct role in the approval of state-issued aquaculture leases, so they’re looking to change that by asserting local zoning control over the use of docks and marinas that support the shellfish enterprises.

“We’ve got people coming in who are not involved in the local water culture,” Guy said, noting that some of those seeking leases don’t live in St. Mary’s. “We feel some of this is restricting recreational areas and causing hazards for boating. … I’m worried about an accident happening.”

He and other commissioners — three of whom own waterfront homes — have said they’re also concerned about the aesthetics and impacts on property values from cages or floating baskets of oysters in front of waterfront homes. And at least a couple contend homeowners should have a say in whether they’re permitted.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal