Saving Seafood

Maryland DNR Creates New Position to Give Seafood Industry More Input

July 29, 2015 — EASTON MD — Former Queen Anne’s County commissioner and waterman George O’Donnell has been brought onto the Department of Natural Resources’ payroll as a seafood industry and fisheries stakeholders liaison, of sorts.

O’Donnell has been in the position since July 8, and according to Maryland Watermen’s Association President Robert T. Brown, he’s already been working with the commercial industry to find solutions to their issues.

“We’ve finally got a friend up there,” Brown said.

O’Donnell’s official title at DNR is the fisheries customer relations manager.

It’s an outreach position to ensure that fisheries stakeholders’ views are communicated to state departments and policymakers for consideration.

“The administration believes that through outreach a better understanding can be reached to benefit the user groups as well as our marine resources,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell said that Gov. Larry Hogan, in his quest for the state government to provide better “customer service” to the people of Maryland, wants to make sure that any industry area of the state that feels underserved has a voice in Annapolis.

Read the full story at The Star Democrat

The Chesapeake Bay Is Turning Into Plastic Soup

July 22, 2015 — They’re in the oceans, in the Great Lakes, and now it turns out they’re fouling the Chesapeake Bay—microplastics, the remnants of unrecycled products that are damning the world’s water to seemingly eternal pollution.

The presence of microplastics—from broken-up containers to ingredients in bathroom products—has been established in four Bay tributaries by researchers at the University of Maryland, NOAA, and elsewhere. “Microplastics were found in all but one of 60 samples, with concentrations ranging over 3 orders of magnitude (<1.0 to >560 g/km2),” they write in Environmental Science and Technology. “Concentrations demonstrated statistically significant positive correlations with population density and proportion of urban/suburban development within watersheds.”

One can deduce that with more growth around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., we can expect to see yet more microplastics. See, and maybe eat, too, as scientists recently discovered the stuff’s being consumed by plankton and passed up the food chain. That’s bad news for marine animals, which can starve on the nutrientless substances or die of stomach obstructions, and possibly for humans, as plastics leach chemicals into fish with unknown impacts on our health. (They might also affect that treasured Chesapeake delicacy, blue crabs, as crabs both eat and breathe in microplastics.)

Read the full story at CityLab

 

115-year-old oyster fishing skipjack finally getting new life

July 3, 2015 — MARYLAND — Faded, dusty boat paraphernalia littered a warehouse on the Eastern Shore as a small group of people worked Thursday to lift the anchor on an old fishing vessel and send it home.

For a decade, the skipjack George W. Collier lay at the end of a long road in Cape Charles, literally and figuratively.

The 72-foot-long boat was built in Maryland in 1900 and was once used as an oyster fishing vessel, able to easily navigate shallow waters. But when engine-powered boats replaced skipjacks, the George W. Collier was left on a mud bank. Fewer than 30 of the traditional boats remain today.

The Allegheny Beverage Corp. found and restored the vessel in the ’60s and in 1978 donated it to the city of Norfolk, where it was renamed after the city and used in boat parades and to train teens. It even made a journey to New York City for the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty.

But the Norfolk City Council left the boat, in disrepair, to a nonprofit in Cape Charles 10 years ago, when even a $110,000 donation was not enough to repair it.

Thus, the George W. Collier found its way to the back of a Wako Chemicals building in Cape Charles, where it sat on a bed of grass, slowly decaying while the nonprofit lacked the resources to restore it. Its sister, the E.C. Collier, lives at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

On Thursday, the skipjack was finally sent to a shipyard, on its way to being restored in its birthplace on Deal Island in Maryland.

Read the full story at the The Virginian Pilot

 

Maryland launches campaign against illegal crab fishing

July 1, 2015 — Maryland on Tuesday launched a campaign to police recreational and commercial crab fishing as the state grapples with a low population of crabs that can be caught in the Chesapeake Bay, authorities said.

The enforcement campaign takes aim at poachers who defy regulations on minimum sizes, harvest limits and hours, as well as crab pot registrations, threatening the sustainability of Maryland’s blue crab population, officials said.

“Our officers will be on the water, on the docks, at wholesalers and at roadside stands to ensure that everyone plays by the rules,” Colonel George Johnson, superintendent of the Maryland Natural Resources Police, told a news conference in Annapolis.

Officers also will be on the lookout for recreational crabbers who keep female crabs, which is illegal in Maryland.  Officers plan to use patrols, undercover operations, night-vision equipment, cameras and radar, Johnson said.

Read the full story at Reuters