Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Count of locally spawned alewives on the rise

June 16, 2021 — The annual spring river herring census at the city’s West Gloucester fishway is in the books, with 2021 continuing to show low — if slightly improving — numbers of returning fish observed near the end of their spawning journey.

Rebecca Visnick, the Harbormaster’s Office staffer who shepherded the 2021 count, said her cadre of 40 fish counters officially observed 12 river herring, also known as alewives, from April 1 until Memorial Day.

While that pales in comparison to years such as 2017, when counters tabulated 3,300 of the fish making their way up the fishway, it is markedly better than 2020 (five alewives counted) and incrementally better than 2019 (11 alewives counted).

Visnick said the final number also might not reflect the actual number of alewives returning from the Atlantic Ocean — by way of the Little River — to spawn in Lily Pond at the top of the fishway.

“There were other observations (of the alewives) that weren’t part of the official count,” she said. “They were observed below the steep pass ladder and up around the Lily Pond.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Massachusetts Lobster Diver Survives After ‘a Humpback Whale Tried to Eat Me’

June 14, 2021 — A commercial lobster diver was injured when he said he was swallowed by a humpback whale off the coast of Cape Cod Friday.

Michael Packard was in the whale’s closed mouth for 30-40 seconds, he said in a Facebook post to a Provincetown, Massachusetts, community page.

“I was lobster diving and A humpback whale tried to eat me.I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out.I am very bruised up but have no broken bones,” Packard wrote, thankful for the help he received from rescuers in Provincetown and seeking to clarify what had happened to him as it generated headlines worldwide.

His sister, Cynthia Packard had told the Cape Cod Times that Packard was taken to Cape Cod Hospital with at least one broken leg after the encounter Friday morning.

Read the full story at NBC 4

A fear of great whites? Shark center aims to show fact vs. fiction

June 11, 2021 — There’s an 18-foot shark hanging in the air, waiting to greet you at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy Shark Center the next time you visit.

“Curly” is a life-sized replica of the largest recorded white shark tagged off Cape Cod. It’s one of many new features added to the Shark Center during a “pretty big renovation” that took place in winter 2020, says center manager Heather Ware.

The center is an arm of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, which has a mission to “support scientific research, improve public safety, and educate the community to inspire white shark conservation.”

But because of COVID-19 concerns, not nearly as many people got to hear that message, or see “Curly” or the rest of the renovation last summer as intended. Typically, the shark center would have had about 17,000 visitors in the summertime. Last year, just over 3,000 came by.

Read the full story at The Providence Journal

Lobstermen And Conservationists To Closely Watch Right Whale Court Case

June 11, 2021 — There are just over 360 right whales left in the world, and the fight is on to save them. Conservationists and fishermen will be closely watching a federal court case closely over the next 12 days.

“Arguably, the existence of the Massachusetts lobster fishery is at stake today,” said Eve Zuckoff, a reporter at GBH’s Cape Cod bureau who joined Henry Santoro on Morning Edition today to talk about the right whale court case.

The case is being pushed by activist Max Strahan, who wants a judge to ban Massachusetts from authorizing fisheries that use vertical ropes that can entangle and kill North Atlantic right whales.

Zuckoff explained that today’s case builds on a judge’s order from last year that gave the state 90 days to get a key federal permit that would increase federal oversight of the lobster industry.

Read the full story at WGBH

New buoy line changes benefit whales

June 11, 2021 — Earlier this month, the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission unanimously approved a proposed plan for new buoy line marking rules for lobster and crab fishermen. The buoy line markings proposal was first introduced to the commission in January, which took recommendations from a public hearing in May.

According to Bob Glenn, a member of the Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), these markings are important for the protection of the North Atlantic right whales in Massachusetts waters. In 2020, DMF provided comments to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) saying Massachusetts should have its fisheries, specifically lobster and crab fisheries, listed separately, based on its “very conservative” management program to protect the whales. The list is usually published in September or October, which is why the buoy line markings proposal is being pushed for this year. However, the NMFS was not willing to provide a separate designation, because the gear Massachusetts fishermen use was not different enough from other states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

The Center for Coastal Studies spotted 89 right whales in March in the Cape Cod Bay area. The whales had migrated elsewhere by May 13, allowing fisheries to open a little earlier than usual. Daniel McKiernan, director of the DMF, said these whales are routinely photographed via aerial surveys within a range from Plymouth to Provincetown. McKiernan said in the past 12 years, there have been only two nonlethal, off-season entanglement cases in Massachusetts. According to a risk reduction model DMF received from NMFS called a decision support tool, the estimates say DMF’s efforts since 2015 have helped reduce marine life mortality by 85 to 95 percent.

Read the full story at MV Times

Fisheries Survival Fund: Change Wind Energy Areas to Protect Scallops

June 11, 2021 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), representing the vast majority of the limited access Atlantic scallop fishery, is calling for the federal government to change its proposed lease sale boundaries for wind farms off the coast of New York to better protect the region’s fisheries from harmful development. These changes are necessary because the government’s current proposed lease sales, announced today, fail to incorporate any of the recommendations made by FSF or the city of New Bedford, the nation’s most valuable fishing port.

The sea scallop fishery is one of the most valuable in the country: in 2019, commercial landings totaled more than 60.6 million pounds, valued at approximately $570 million. In the New York Call Areas alone, there were $268 million worth of scallops landed over a five year period, from 2012-2016. Atlantic sea scallops are, in fact, the nation’s most valuable federally managed fishery.

FSF is requesting that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which is responsible for leasing areas for offshore development, incrementally change its lease plans for the New York Bight. Currently, two BOEM Wind Energy Areas (WEAs), Hudson South and Central Bight, are located in particularly sensitive areas for scallops. In their current form, these areas, including hundreds of thousands of acres of ocean, will have a serious negative impact on the fishery.

BOEM’s proposed eastern-most lease areas in Hudson South are directly adjacent to the Hudson Canyon Scallop Access Area (“Hudson Canyon SAA”). The Hudson Canyon SAA is one of the most important scallop grounds in the Northeast. From 2001-2018, over 60 million pounds of scallops, valued at well over $600 million, were harvested directly from the area. Further, a recently published paper principally authored by the lead federal scallop scientist concluded that successful management of the Hudson Canyon SAA resulted in a sevenfold increase in scallops in the nearby Elephant Trunk Scallop Access Area, and benefited scallops in the Delmarva Scallop Access Area.

Altogether, the Hudson Canyon SAA has been worth well over a billion dollars directly to the scallop fishery in the past two decades, not to mention the multiplied indirect community economic benefits of these fishery landings. The Hudson Canyon SAA’s ecological and economic benefits explain why FSF has requested that BOEM operate under the well-recognized “precautionary principle” to create a buffer between wind farms in the Hudson South and this critical scallop area.

The Central Bight is in the middle of prime, historic scallop habitat, and represents tens of millions of dollars of scallop catches over the past decade. Leasing of the Central Bight should be delayed, just as BOEM delayed, for view-shed reasons, leasing of the two Fairways lease areas in the northern New York Bight.

Read the full release here

Whale rescuers free humpback from fishing gear entanglement

June 11, 20221 — A three-day effort to free a humpback whale from entanglement in fishing gear ended in success this week, marine mammal experts said Thursday.

The whale, identified as a mature female named Valley, was first spotted Monday by a whale watch boat on Stellwagen Bank northeast of Provincetown, according to a statement from the Center for Coastal Studies.

The center’s entanglement response team found that the whale had a heavy line lodged in its mouth, but because sea conditions were poor, it could not be freed.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Daily Times

U.S. explores wind energy potential in Gulf of Mexico

June 9, 2021 — The Biden administration on Tuesday said it will explore the potential of offshore wind energy development in the Gulf of Mexico, part of its goal to supercharge growth in clean energy over the next decade.

“This is an important first step to see what role the Gulf may play in this exciting frontier,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

While the Gulf of Mexico is a major hub for offshore oil and gas production, it has had little renewable energy development. President Joe Biden has made the expansion of clean energy, especially offshore wind, a cornerstone of his fight against climate change.

Biden faces criticism in Gulf Coast states after putting a pause on federal drilling auctions. States including Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama sued in March to restore the sales, which are on hold pending a government review.

The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will publish a Request for Interest (RFI) on June 11 to see if there is any interest in offshore wind development in the Outer Continental Shelf.

Read the full story at Reuters

Gentrification pressures Northeast fishing communities

June 9, 2021 — Longtime small fishing ports in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts top the endangered list in a new NMFS social sciences study of how gentrification pressure is bearing down on those communities.

Barnegat Light, N.J., Montauk, N.Y., and Chatham, Mass., have history as home ports dating back to the 1700s, but transformed into high-priced resort towns in the 20th century. Inflating real estate values, tax burdens, development pressure, population growth are converging at a time when fishermen are facing regulatory and environmental challenges in their profession, the report shows.

Authors Matthew Cutler, a social scientist with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and Rose Jimenez, at the NOAA Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technology, applied a scoring matrix to assess social and economic changes in 29 Northeast ports from Virginia to Maine where commercial fishing is an important social and economic part of the community.

“We selected all the fishing communities in the Northeast region with ‘high’ fishing engagement scores in 2009–2018, which resulted in these 29 communities,” the authors explain in the report, published online in story map format.

“Then, for each year in each community, we added up the scores (ranging from 1 to 4) for the three gentrification pressure indices: retiree migration, urban sprawl, and housing disruption.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

MASSACHUSETTS: Count of elvers visiting Rockport high

June 9, 2021 — Consider the full life of the American eel and what it takes for the wee critters to find their way from their birthing grounds in the Sargasso Sea to the town’s historic Mill Brook.

Once born, eel eggs float to the surface of the salt water spawning grounds northeast of the Bahamas and southwest of Bermuda. They hatch into transparent larvae. If they had thumbs, this is when they would stick them out. No appendages mean no thumbs. Still, they manage to hitch a ride.

Largely left to the whims of wind and currents, the larvae begin a year-long journey to fresh water portals. Some land as far south as the north coast of South America. Others travel as far north as Greenland.

And some hit the sweet spot, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the Mill Brook and from there up into Rockport’s Mill Pond and Loop Pond, and perhaps as far away as Briar Swamp in Dogtown. In all, they swim more than 1,000 miles.

Waiting for them is Eric Hutchins and his merry band of volunteers, nature’s own census takers for the eels that have by now matured from larvae into translucent elver stretching roughly 2 to 4 inches.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times