Saving Seafood

Another outside crab species turns up in Maine waters

October 15, 2019 — A scientist with an environmental group says she has found what she believes is the first recorded appearance of a potentially damaging species of crab in Maine waters.

Marissa McMahan of the Massachusetts-based group Manomet said she located the smooth mud crab this month on a research trip. The crabs are typically found south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They can pose problems for aquaculture businesses because they prey on young oysters — a species of high economic value that is grown in Maine.

McMahan collected the single specimen, and it’s still alive. She said it’s too early to know how the animal ended up in the New Meadows River in West Bath, but it’s important to monitor for more of them.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

A Fishermen’s Perspective on Electronic Reporting

October 15, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

For 200 days of each of the past 44 years, Tony Borges has been setting out from New Bedford, Massachusetts in search of groundfish, fluke, and squid. That’s roughly 8,800 days for those of you keeping score at home. He started fishing with his father, though Borges says his father tried to dissuade him from being a fisherman. He encouraged Borges to join the U.S. Coast Guard instead.

Nevertheless, in 1977, along with his cousin, aunt, and father, he purchased the brand new FV Sao Paulo. He still owns and operates it today.

For the last seven years, Borges has also been participating in the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Study Fleet. As part of this scientific data collection program, he records haul-by-haul catch (kept and discarded) information for all species.

When I met Borges early one morning on the Sao Paulo, he was down in the engine room covered in grease. He was working on his vessel’s first complete overhaul in 40 years!

Read the full story.

Fishing rules don’t match industry realities, advocates say

October 11, 2019 — The federal government on Wednesday released data showing that cod stocks in the area remain overfished and are not on target to be rebuilt by 2024. NOAA Fisheries also reported that “overfishing is occurring” among an already-depleted Gulf of Maine Atlantic cod population.

“Abundance is very low, not the way it used to be, so that’s obviously of great concern to us,” Division of Marine Fisheries Director David Pierce told the News Service after participating in “seafood day” activities Thursday to recognize the contributions of the fishing sector and the 90,000 jobs in the seafood industry.

Pierce said he had not yet reviewed the latest federal assessment, but said an industry-based survey and one in the works at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will also influence cod quotas for 2021 and 2022.

“It’s a very important assessment. A lot hinges on it,” Pierce said. “The health of the Gulf of Maine groundfish fishery is very dependent on the health of that Gulf of Maine cod stock.”

Calling the report “concerning,” Sen. Bruce Tarr, who represents the fishing port city of Gloucester, told the News Service, “I’m still reading through the details but I think it points to the fact that we should be doing things differently than we are today.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

NOAA Fisheries Seeks Comments on Amendment 8 to the Atlantic Herring Fishery Management Plan

October 10, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries proposes establishing an Atlantic herring acceptable biological catch (ABC) control rule and prohibiting the use of midwater trawl gear in inshore waters from Canada to Connecticut.

Acceptable Biological Catch

The proposed ABC control rule is intended to ensure sustainable harvest of the Atlantic herring resource and account for Atlantic herring’s role as forage in the ecosystem. The control rule would limit fishing mortality to 80 percent of the fishing mortality rate to support maximum sustainable yield when Atlantic herring biomass is high and restrict fishing even further when biomass is low. The control rule would set Atlantic herring ABC for three years but would allow ABC to vary year-to-year with projected estimates of biomass.

Prohibiting Midwater Trawl Gear Inshore

This amendment would prohibit the use of midwater trawl gear inshore of the 12-nautical mile territorial sea boundary from Canada to Connecticut and inshore of 20 nautical miles off the east coast of Cape Cod (see below).

The proposed inshore midwater trawl restricted area is intended to minimize user group conflict as midwater trawl vessels overlap with other user groups (i.e., commercial fisheries, recreational fisheries, ecotourism) that rely on herring as forage. Moving midwater trawl effort offshore is intended to mitigate potential negative socioeconomic impacts on other user groups resulting from short duration, high volume herring removals by midwater trawl vessels and help ensure herring is available inshore for other users groups and predators of herring.

The proposed inshore restricted area may also have biological benefits if it minimizes catch of river herring and shad, reduces fishing pressure on the inshore component of the herring stock, and helps ensure herring are available to predators.

Read the full release here

AquaBounty planning to label GM salmon in the US

October 7, 2019 — AquaBounty is planning to preemptively label its genetically modified salmon in the United States in 2020, a company spokesperson told SeafoodSource soon after Canadian seafood industry executives and NGOs spoke out against the fish.

At the Canadian Seafood Show in Montreal, Quebec, in September, a panel of seafood industry executives and environmental groups said that they do not plan to sell or support AquaBounty’s AquAdvantage salmon in Canada.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MASSACHUSETTS: Lobsters, fish fall victim to low oxygen levels in Cape Cod Bay

October 4, 2019 — Two weeks ago, lobstermen working off Scorton Creek started seeing something they had never experienced. Lobsters, in fact everything in their traps, were coming up dead.

Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries senior biologist Robert Glenn started fielding phone calls from puzzled fishermen Sept. 23. The fishermen were worried there might be something in the water that was killing the lobsters, fish, shellfish, even sea worms.

It turns out, it was something missing from the water: oxygen.

For the past two weeks, division researchers and scientists from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown have boarded vessels and taken water samples, gathered temperature data at various depths and measured the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Preliminary results from testing on dozens of dead lobsters found nothing toxic in the water that could have killed them, and the focus was on a phenomenon that occurs every year — low oxygen in the layer of water along the ocean bottom, Glenn said.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Federal Regulators Take Heat From Both Sides Of The Right Whale-Gear Debate

October 4, 2019 — Federal fisheries regulators are taking heat from both sides of the debate over protections for the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The latest salvo comes from a conservation group representing public employees, which says the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) ignored its own scientists when it reopened groundfishing areas that had been closed for decades.

Earlier this year, NMFS reopened 3000 square miles of ocean south of Nantucket to groundfishing, allowing the use of gillnets and rope. The agency said that based on previous regulatory reviews and some more recent scientific articles, it could not find sufficient evidence to conclude that fishing gear alone causes a decline in the health of large whales — and that further review was not necessary.

Conservationists say the agency cherry-picked the evidence.

Read the full story at Maine Public

NOAA answers lobstermen’s critique of whale rules science

October 4, 2019 — NOAA Fisheries released a more detailed response Wednesday to criticisms of the science it used to develop new protections for North Atlantic right whales, refuting or clarifying several points while admitting data collection remains “an ongoing challenge.”

The response was attached to a letter from NOAA assistant administrator Chris Oliver to Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. In August, the lobster trade group withdrew its support for the right whale protection plan approved in April by the federal Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team.

In its Aug. 30 letter to NOAA Fisheries, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association said it based its defection on its own analysis of the science NOAA utilized in developing the right whale protection plan that points to the lobster industry as a chief cause of whale entanglements.

The MLA said its review concluded that lobster lines and gear are among the least prevalent causes of serious whale injuries or death.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Federal agency accused of misrepresenting views of its scientists in opening fishing grounds off Cape

October 4, 2019 — Without citing its sources, the group told the inspector general of the Commerce Department, which oversees the Fisheries Service, that it has “reason to believe” that there are e-mails, memos, and other internal communications that support their allegations that the agency’s officials were responsible for “blatantly mischaracterizing” the recommendations of its scientists on whether to open 3,000 square miles of popular feeding grounds for right whales to fishermen. The move, made under pressure from the fishing industry, outraged environmental advocates.

“An internal review process would likely reveal a disagreement within the agency, or a failure to take into account the advice of … its own right whale scientists, or true ‘agency expertise,’” Whitehouse wrote.

Officials at the Fisheries Service and the Commerce Department declined to comment on the complaint. An official at the inspector general’s office said he had yet to review the complaint.

Representatives of the scallop industry, which has been allowed to access the newly opened areas and has earned millions of dollars from their catch, said they were operating safely.

“Scallopers have been fishing for years, and there’s not a single known interaction with a right whale,” said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney at the Fisheries Survival Fund in Washington D.C., which represents the scallop industry. “If we’re not impacting them, then why should we be restricted from the area?”

But scientists say that other fisheries, such as those that use fixed gear like lobster traps, pose a grave threat to right whales. That threat has increased in the waters off Nantucket, where more right whales have been spotted in recent years.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe