Saving Seafood

DELAWARE: Hudson, Freeman and menhaden industry will be Lunch and Learn topic Sept. 9

August 30, 2016 — The Lewes Historical Society’s Lewes Lunch and Learn for noon, Friday, Sept. 9, will feature Joanne Guilfoil with “Joe Hudson, Ted Freeman, and the Menhaden Fishing Industry” at Hotel Rodney. This is the first Lunch and Learn of the new season.

As best friends in high school, local boys Joe Hudson and Ted Freeman played football on the first team in the area and were “really hurt by those Rehoboth boys,” as Joe Hudson recalled. As 10th-graders in the late 1940s they traded work for flying lessons, and then began flying out of the Rehoboth Airport.

During this presentation, learn how these two best friends became pioneer fish spotters flying for Otis Smith, before graduating from high school, the Lewes School, in 1948. Attendees may be surprised by the significant impact their influence had on changing the developing menhaden industry, which by 1956 recorded the haul of fish at over 2 billion pounds.

Read the full story at the Cape Gazette

MAINE: State senate candidate Emery applauds reopening of Atlantic menhaden fishery

August 30, 2016 — ROCKLAND, Maine — Facing a shortage of herring that threatens the Maine’s fishing industry, lobstermen and bait fishermen have been relying on menhaden during the peak of the lobster season. Menhaden, known locally as pogies, is the common alternative bait used by lobstermen.

The annual catch limit had been exceeded in July and an emergency extension of the quota to 3.5 million pounds for New England was instituted. As the catch rapidly approached the temporary “episodic event” quota extension, the Maine Department of Marine Resources closed the pogie fishery.

The week of Aug. 19, Maine DMR reopened the pogie fishery after it determined that, even with the increased catch, fish stocks remain healthy.

Dave Emery, Republican candidate for the Maine Senate in District 12, was a member of the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Conservation, and the Environment when he served in Congress. Emery met at F.J. O’Hara & Sons with fishermen and industry experts two weeks ago to discuss the bait issue, along with other issues impacting the industry.

“Better data and more frequent analysis would provide the industry with a more complete understanding of fish population. This is important both to guarantee necessary conservation measures, but also to provide the lobster industry with sufficient bait for the robust lobster market, which is valued at $500 million in Maine,” Emery said.

Read the full story at the Village Soup

NEW JERSEY: Are humans causing the fish die offs?

August 30, 2016 — An increasing number of fish kills like the four that occurred in New Jersey this past week are in the state’s future if officials don’t take steps to improve the water quality, environmentalists warned.

The die-off of more than a million peanut bunker since Aug. 22 along the waterways of Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay in Monmouth County and Great Bay in Ocean County were caused by a lack of sufficient levels of oxygen for the fish to survive. But human activities on land have helped contribute to that oxygen deficiency, said L. Stanton Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership.

Hales, who has studied New Jersey’s waterways for more than two decades, said that while fish kills caused by low dissolved oxygen levels are naturally occurring events, they are now exacerbated by the deteriorating conditions of the state’s waterways.

“These things can happen naturally, but they’re made worse by everything we’re doing (on land),” he said.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has said the fish kills in Monmouth and Ocean counties were caused by too many peanut bunker – a juvenile form of Atlantic menhaden – in water that had too little oxygen because of warm temperatures.

Bob Considine, a spokesman for the DEP, has said the number of Atlantic menhaden has been “extremely high” this year, the highest it has been in a decade off the Atlantic coast.

Data from the past few years shows that spawning of Atlantic menhaden has been high because of favorable conditions, including water temperatures, salinity and food availability for them, said Tina Berger, spokeswoman for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

She said there are about 3 billion pounds of Atlantic menhaden off the Atlantic coast and national fisheries requirements limit the total catch allowed to about 416.5 million pounds a year.

Read the full story at NJ.com

NEW JERSEY: What do you do with 20,000 dead fish? It was all hands on deck in Shore town

August 30, 2016 — Bob Considine, the DEP’s director of communications, said the menhaden population off New Jersey appears to be exceptionally large this year. He said the department had tested samples of the dead fish and “none appear obviously diseased.”

Loesch said that the fish kill was the first in Little Egg Harbor in the 39 years he has lived there. When the scale of it became apparent, the township council authorized the payment of overtime for the public works department.

On Sunday, volunteer firefighters and public works crews working in small boats trained fire hoses on the heaps of dead fish, sending them into the lagoons around Osborn island.

There, MUA employees used a vacuum truck to suck the fish up and transport them to a landfill.

“You can get a lot more volunteer firemen out on a Sunday than you can on a Monday,” Loesch said. “We were lucky.”

Read the full story at Philly.com

NEW JERSEY: Bay water temperatures come back down, a relief to fish

August 29, 2016 — In the Keansburg area a massive fish kill was experienced on Waackaack Creek where an estimated million peanut bunker died, a result of low levels of dissolved oxygen in the water, the state Department of Environmental Protection said.

Low levels of oxygen can be caused by a prolonged increase in water temperature. Officials said the creek water can also get stagnant during certain tides and with so many fish concentrated in a small body of water, there just wasn’t enough oxygen for them to survive.

Some fishermen don’t think oxygen depletion was the only cause.

Rich Isaksen a third-generation Belford commercial fishermen, said it was a result of menhaden mismanagement. New Jersey purse seine fishermen reached their quota of bunker almost two months ago and their nets are sitting dry on the dock.

“There’s so many fish right now and nobody’s catching them. That’s why you had this fish kill. You’ll see more of them,” he said.

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press

Several hundred thousand dead fish wash up in New Jersey creek

August 24, 2016 — KEANSBURG, N.J. — Several hundred thousand dead fish have washed up in a central New Jersey marina’s creek in the past week, wildlife officials said.

The fish in Waackaack Creek, which peaked Saturday, are peanut bunker — the name describing Atlantic Menhaden after hatching, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Bluefish or skates probably chased them into the creek, officials believe.

“Although the water is tidal, the creek and other surrounding waters where the fish have washed up can get stagnant during certain tides and we believe at this point that the die-off is due to dissolved oxygen levels in the water,” Bob Considine with the state EPA said.

Read the full story at UPI

MAINE: Pogy fishery reopens with strict new rules

August 16, 2016 — Maine made bait fishermen and lobstermen happy Monday when it reopened its pogy fishery after concluding there is still enough menhaden left in the Gulf of Maine to keep the population healthy.

Those who hunt for nearshore schools of the flat, oily-fleshed silver fish – the second most popular lobster bait in Maine after herring – must follow strict new rules to prevent unusual damage or imminent depletion of the Atlantic menhaden. If they limit their fishing days to three and their catch to no more than 120,000 pounds a week, Maine fishermen can use up the remaining 2.3 million-pound quota allotted to Maine, Rhode Island and New York during a so-called “episodic” fishing event, when pogies are deemed unusually plentiful in New England waters.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources closed the traditionally quiet fishery on Aug. 5 after initial landing reports indicated the state had used up its usual pogy quota of 166,000 pounds a year and was racing through an extra 3.7 million “episodic event” pounds given to qualifying New England states much faster than expected. With the herring shortage already creating a tight bait market, DMR didn’t want to risk running out of pogies just as the lobster season peaks, when the state’s biggest commercial fishery, with a value of nearly $500 million in landings, need them most. Any overage could also trigger severe federal penalties.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

RONNIE SHELDON: Menhaden aren’t being ‘decimated’

August 16, 2016 — The following is an excerpt from a letter-to-the editor in the Mississippi Sun Herald.

Lately, I’ve read several opinion articles about the menhaden fishery and problems with Omega Protein.

I’m a lifelong resident of Pascagoula and a sport fisherman. I have no connections or interests in Omega Protein, but most of my spare time is spent fishing for trout and redfish, and I typically fish the same area (Round Island) where Omega Protein fishes for menhaden.

I have no issue with menhaden fishing. Their industry provides hundreds of jobs and pumps millions of dollars into our local economy. Indirectly, their product helps provide food for many as animal feed.

Their bycatch is closely regulated and very small. I’ve never personally seen evidence of any bycatch dumped overboard.

In his “Menhaden haven’t been ‘researched’” (July 31) letter, Steve Shepard’s statement that “menhaden are being decimated by boats during the hot summer months” doesn’t seem to be viable. The commercial menhaden fleet has been operating in our area for 60 years now. If Omega Protein were to decimate the menhaden fishery, they would put themselves out of a job, so it’s not probable.

Read the full letter at the Sun Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: Thanks for all the fish!

August 16, 2016 — It can sometimes be difficult, depending on the choppiness of the waves, for pilot Wayne Davis to spot from his two-seater plane the dark silhouettes of great white sharks swimming off the coast of Chatham during research expeditions with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.

But there was no missing a giant school of fish this week as he flew near the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge.

The conservancy, a non-profit based on Cape Cod, shared a photo Friday taken by Davis from his Citabria earlier in the week of what looks to be hundreds — if not thousands — of menhaden, or forage fish.

The fish are gathered together not far from a lurking great white, forming a shape like a pinpoint on a Google map. The collection of fish creates a striking black dot in the middle of the blue-green Cape waters as though a shadow were cast over the sea.

The conservancy’s nearby boat is dwarfed by the mass of menhaden, which can live to be 12 years old and are known to swim in large schools close to the water’s surface during the spring, summer, and fall, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Beware: Sharks are on the rise near East Coast

August 15, 2016 — “There are definitely more sharks in the area,” Paul Sieswerda, former curator of the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, told The Post. A perfect storm of successful shark conservation efforts, less-polluted waters, and warmer ocean temperatures from climate change has made our shores more welcoming to bait fish like menhaden — and the sharks who love them.

“It’s kind of like the menhaden are the wildebeests of the African plains — everything likes eating them and there are more every year,” Sieswerda said.

He said the huge schools of menhaden, a k a bunker, also attract seals, which is a favorite of great white sharks.

Read the full story at the New York Post