Saving Seafood

Humpback whale sightings around Hawaii declining

October 1, 2018 — Whale researchers are spotting a trend in the Hawaiian Islands — a decline in humpback whale sightings.

Not only are there fewer sightings, fewer male Hawaiian humpback whales have been recorded singing, and the number of mother-calf pairs has been diminishing for the past three seasons, according to the researchers. While the trend has been consistent over the past three years, the scientists refrained from sounding an alarm about the whales disappearing as a new season is around the corner.

“They’re not all gone,” said Ed Lyman, who is with the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. “We are seeing indications of fewer whales near the islands where our effort is … There are still plenty of whales out there.”

The peak of the season is usually between January and March, when thousands of humpback whales migrate from Alaska to Hawaii to mate, calve and nurse their young, although they can be spotted in November or earlier, and stay as late as May.

Lyman, a researcher and the sanctuary’s whale entanglement response coordinator, said for him, the first signs of the decline were in late December 2015.

That’s when he got calls from whale-watching tour operators on Hawaii island, inquiring about their late arrival. Lyman reached out to tour operators on other islands, as well, and found them saying the same thing — the whales were late, and there were fewer sightings. He got the same reports from contacts in Mexico.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser

 

Revised NAFTA agreement between US and Mexico may leave Canada behind

August 28, 2018 — The United States and Mexico have come to a preliminary agreement to revise the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),

The agreement, which does not yet include Canada, is expected to be finalized within days, according to U.S. President Donald Trump. It includes modest changes to the trade accord, which was put in place in 1994 as a means to lower tariffs and other trade barriers between the three countries.

“We’re very excited about this agreement,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in an interview with CNBC. “We think it is going to lead to more trade, not less trade.”

Changes to the accord include modifications to regulations affecting the automobile, energy, and telecommunications industries, as well as a tightening of intellectual property protections. The agreement, which extends NAFTA for 16 years, also includes a sunset clause that requires the U.S., Mexico, and Canada to ratify the deal every six years.

However, an agreement that does not involve Canada is likely to face a legal challenge, according to The New York Times.

“[NAFTA] is a trilateral agreement. It requires legislation and a change to NAFTA requires legislation,” said U.S. Senator Patrick J. Toomey [R-Pennsylvania]. “I’ve told them any change has to go through Congress. There is not necessarily complete agreement about that.”

Trump will also likely face opposition from Congress, which only granted his administration authority to renegotiate NAFTA as a trilateral deal.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

US Chamber analysis shows helping all sectors hit by tariffs would cost $39 billion

July 31, 2018 — A new U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis found that providing similar aid to all sectors affected by President Trump‘s tariffs would cost U.S. taxpayers $39 billion.

The Trump administration last week announced a $12 billion emergency aid package for the nation’s farmers who are taking a hard hit from retaliatory tariffs unloaded by China, Mexico, Canada and other trading partners because of the president’s imposition of tariffs.

The Chamber’s analysis shows that on top of the $12 billion that could be doled out to farmers as early as this fall, another $27.2 billion would be needed to help other sectors such as fishermen, cotton and fabric manufacturers and makers of steel and aluminum.

After Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the agriculture aid last week, the Chamber decided to determine how much it would cost to provide a similar level of aid to each industry affected by the budding trade war.

Read the full story at The Hill

 

Court Orders Seafood Import Ban to Save Vaquita

July 31, 2018 — Responding to a lawsuit filed by conservation groups, the U.S. Court of International Trade has ordered the U.S. Government to ban seafood imports from Mexico caught with gillnets that kill the critically endangered vaquita porpoise.

As few as 15 vaquita remain, and almost half the population drowns in fishing gillnets each year. Without immediate additional protection, the porpoise could be extinct by 2021.

This is the life line the vaquita desperately needs, said Giulia Good Stefani, staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who argued the case before the Court.

The ruling follows a lawsuit filed in March by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Animal Welfare Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity, and it affirms Congress’ mandate under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act that the United States protect not just domestic marine mammals, but also foreign whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

 

To save the world’s rarest marine mammal, conservationists seek ban on Mexican seafood imports

July 12, 2018 — A decade of rescue crusades by conservation groups, hard-core eco-activists and the U.S. Navy have failed to prevent the world’s rarest porpoise from becoming fatally entangled in gill nets set for seafood in Mexico’s northern Gulf of California.

Now, with less than 20 vaquita left in the wild, the prospect of the species’ extinction within two years has prompted a last-ditch effort with significant economic and political consequences for the United States and Mexico.

Conservationists on Tuesday asked an international trade court judge in New York for a preliminary injunction banning imports of an estimated $16 million worth of fish and shrimp harvested with gill nets in an area of the gulf roughly a third the size of Los Angeles County and just three hours south of the border.

U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Gary Katzmann said he would rule within two weeks. His decision may hinge, in part, on whether the costs of implementing an embargo to save the species are greater than the costs of its disappearance.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

Coast Guard risks rough seas stopping red snapper poachers

March 2, 2018 — SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — A small but swift U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat bounced violently over the choppy Gulf of Mexico last week, becoming airborne more than once before the chief ordered the pilot to slow down.

Five-foot waves and constant swell are typical February conditions at the U.S.-Mexico maritime boundary — even pleasant compared to other days the armed and ready crew members search for Mexican fishermen poaching in U.S. waters.

Four or five men in a simple Mexican watercraft, or “lancha,” can easily take tens of thousands of dollars in fish on a single run. The boats don’t look like much — rickety white fiberglass hulls with no steering wheels, powered by standard Yamaha outboard motors, equipped with simple fishing gear and rusting navigational equipment. But Mexican poachers are mostly winning the cat-and-mouse game, slipping through the violent chop and back into Mexico’s territorial seas, coolers laden with fish.

Their goal is one of the most popular commercial and recreational fish species in the Gulf today: red snapper.

“Almost exclusively what we’re seeing being targeted is red snapper,” said Capt. Tony Hahn, commander of the Coast Guard regional crew out of Corpus Christi, Texas. “Where they’re going and the reefs they’re fishing in are definitely populated by red snapper, which aren’t migratory. They’re hitting places where they know they’re going to catch red snapper, and that’s what we’re seeing from their catch.”

The U.S. has protested to the Mexico government, but the response has been lacking. Last year, NOAA decertified Mexico under compliance rules aimed at tackling illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The decertification means that no Mexican fishing vessel can enter any U.S. port, accept under exceptional circumstances and only with the Coast Guard’s approval.

Several million dollars’ worth of red snapper have already been stolen from U.S. waters by Mexican fisherman. As the problem persists and may worsen, NOAA may go even further next year. An officer with NOAA’s enforcement division says the next step could entail restrictions or an outright ban on imports of fish from Mexico.

Read the full story at E&E News

 

Biologists Have Recorded The Loudest Known Fish And Oh Boy

December 21, 2017 — Each year between February and June, the fish gather to spawn in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. The fish, a type of croaker called the Gulf corvina, meet in water as cloudy as chocolate milk. It’s a reunion for the entire species, all members of which reproduce within a dozen-mile stretch of the delta.

When the time is right, a few days before the new or full moons, the male fish begin to sing. To humans, the sound is machine guns going off just below the waterline. To female fish, the rapid burr-burr-burr is a Bing Crosby croon. Make that Bing cranked up to 11.

Marine biologists who recorded the sound describe the animals as the “loudest fish ever documented,” said Timothy J. Rowell, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Rowell and Brad E. Erisman, a University of Texas at Austin fisheries scientist, spent four days in 2014 snooping on the fish with sonar and underwater microphones. The land surrounding the delta is desolate, Rowell said. Fresh water that once fed wild greenery has been diverted to faucets and hoses.

But the delta is alive with the sound of fish. “When you arrive at the channels of the delta, you can hear it in the air even while the engine is running on the boat,” Rowell said. Sound is measured differently in water than in air; still, the fish are as loud as lawn mowers, Rowell said.

Read the full story from the Washington Post at Science Alert

 

Maine Lobster, The Most Valuable Species In US Seas, Hit By Trump’s Trade Stance

November 22, 2017 — Maine lobster has become more valuable than any other single species commercially fished in the United States, but trade policies pursued by President Donald Trump could reduce its annual worth for the first time in nearly a decade.

Of the more than $600 million worth of North Atlantic lobster caught in the U.S. in 2016, nearly 90 percent, or $538 million, was harvested and brought ashore in Maine, according to a report on nationwide fisheries released this month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

No other single commercially fished species, even those harvested in multiple states, exceeded $500 million in landings in 2016 or in 2015, according to the report. Maine lobster first earned the most-valuable distinction in 2015, when $501 million worth of American lobster was harvested in the state, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

The value of Maine’s lobster catch has risen every year since 2009. But it’s on track to drop for 2017, in part because of U.S. trade policies that put Maine’s lobster industry at a disadvantage to Canada in selling abroad.

Trump is pursuing efforts to renegotiate trade deals with Mexico, Canada, and South Korea, the fifth-largest importer of Maine lobster. He also pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation free-trade agreement, and has talked tough on trade with Europe.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

It Rained Fish In Mexico, Officials Say. No, It’s Not The End Times (We Think)

September 29, 2017 — Sure, it’s been known to rain cats and dogs during some heavy thunderstorms. And if we’re to believe The Weather Girls — and who wouldn’t? — it was even raining men that one time in 1982.

But fish? That feels like a new one.

Yet during a light rain Tuesday morning in Tampico, Mexico, it appears that’s precisely what happened: Several fish fell from the sky, slapping the pavement right in front of a few startled onlookers, at least one of whom recorded some video.

That’s according to Pedro Granados, the director of civil protection in Tamaulipas state, who noted the reports and videos his agency had received from local residents.

“Not to say there were a lot of fish — one here, one there,” Granados told local media. “It has to be said, they’re very small fish, which weigh a few grams. It’s strange, not normal.”

Read the full story at NPR

Pacific Alliance for Sustainable Tuna earns MSC certification

September 7, 2017 — The following was released by the Pacific Alliance for Sustainable Tuna

After an in-depth assessment by independent auditors, the Pacific Alliance for Sustainable Tuna (PAST) –  comprised of four leaders in the Mexican tuna industry Grupomar, Herdez del Fuerte, Pesca Azteca, and Procesa – has achieved Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification. The assessment, which included detailed stakeholder consultation and independent adjudication, concluded that the fleet of 36 purse seine vessels meets the high bar of sustainability set by the MSC Fisheries Standard.

Widely recognized as the world’s most rigorous and credible assessment of wild fishing sustainability, the MSC Fishery Standard is founded on three principles: healthy fish stocks, minimizing impact on the wider marine environment, and effective fishery management.

The detailed sustainability assessment of the Northeastern Tropical Pacific purse seine yellowfin and skipjack tuna fishery was carried out by the accredited third-party certification body, SCS Global Services, and included extensive review by scientists, peer review, and stakeholder consultation.

Brian Perkins, MSC regional director – Americas, said: “Nearly 30 years of actions to minimize impacts on the oceans by the Northeastern Tropical Pacific purse seine yellowfin and skipjack tuna fishery have been recognised through the MSC assessment process. PAST’s bold actions to address tough environmental challenges have been transformative. We believe this is the kind of progress that MSC was designed to inspire.”

Sustainable fishing practices

The fishery operates in compliance with all requirements of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the Regional Fishery Management Organization. Importantly, the fishing fleet adheres to the Agreement on International Dolphin Conservation Program (AIDCP), a legally binding multilateral agreement between fishing nations within the IATTC with conservation objectives.  All of PAST’s fishing vessels have an independent observer on board to ensure continued compliance. Additionally, in June 2015 PAST withdrew voluntarily from fishing Pacific Bluefin tuna, a species that is overfished, for a seven-year period.

Each team of fishermen works proactively to minimize impact on the ocean ecosystem including aiming for 100% live release of all non-target species. Their efforts include using a specially designed net that incorporates a fine mesh safety panel, known as the “Medina Panel,” which allows non-tuna species to swim clear of the net. The industry also employs highly specialized and trained divers to assist any remaining dolphins with escaping the net prior to lifting the net.

Mariana Ramos, Executive Director of the Pacific Alliance for Sustainable Tuna said: “Our members – Grupomar, Herdez del Fuerte, Pesca Azteca, and Procesa – are driven by sustainability and dedicated to providing ocean-safe tuna to their customers and to continuing to make a difference for oceans. The MSC certification is one more way we can demonstrate to our customers that our tuna is fished in a highly sustainable manner.”

Commitments to safeguard the environment and livelihoods

As part of achieving MSC certification, PAST has committed to a comprehensive sustainability action plan, which includes: further dolphin protection measures including investments in regular net alignment practices as a means to reduce the risk of dolphins becoming entangled, and other training in best practices across the fleet; significant financial investment in an international research program to assess dolphin populations in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean; zero retention and maximum live release program for all sharks and rays; and active stakeholder engagement in building more transparency in fisheries across Mexico.

The fishery provides over 30,000 direct and indirect jobs and economic opportunities in many communities in the Americas and US$ 750 million in productivity to the Mexican economy.

30 years of actions

Since the 1980s, concern for the impacts of purse seine fishing in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean (EPO) drove international governments and NGOs to sign a series of transformative conservation agreements focused on sustainability. One of the most significant of these is the 1999 Agreement on the AIDCP, focused on the sustainability of fishing in the EPO and the protection of dolphin populations through science-based regulation, concerted improvement of fishing practice, and independent monitoring by onboard scientific observers.

The AIDCP was awarded the Margarita Lizárraga Medal by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2005 for its “unqualified success” in protecting dolphins and ensuring the sustainability of fishing in the EPO. Under this agreement, which requires 100% coverage by onboard scientific observers to monitor compliance, fishers work proactively to ensure the live release of non-tuna species including dolphins. Data shows that between 1985 and 1997 dolphin mortalities as a result of purse seine fishing in the EPO fell by 99%.

Objections process

In the final stage of this assessment an independent adjudicator (IA) reviewed the certifier’s determination in light of concerns raised by World Wildlife Fund Germany (WWF). The IA upheld the certifier’s determination that the fishery met the MSC Fisheries Standard.

Download factsheet and timeline

Download assessment documents from msc.org

Video about the AIDCP