Saving Seafood

NMFS enacts ocean-bottom protections for Gulf of Maine corals

June 22, 2021 — The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has enacted the New England Fishery Management Council’s Omnibus Deep-Sea Coral Amendment, effectively protecting deep-sea corals in an area roughly 25,000 square miles in size.

The amendment was first approved on 20 November, 2019, after the council developed the action and the NFMS approved it. The final rule, published 21 June, implements the amendment, which prohibits the use of all bottom-tending gear – with the exception of red crab pots – along “the outer continental shelf in waters no shallower than 600 meters to the exclusive economic zone,” the final rule states.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Meet the new NMFS director: Janet Coit

June 22, 2021 — Janet Coit has been appointed the assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries. She will also serve as acting assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, and deputy NOAA administrator, according to a press release from NOAA.

Coit succeeds Paul Doremus, who has been acting NMFS administrator since January. The appointment is effective immediately.

“I have worked closely with Janet Coit for many years in Rhode Island, and I am thrilled to see her expertise and skillful leadership recognized by this administration,” said Chris Brown, a Rhode Island commercial fisherman and president of the Seafood Harvesters of America. “Janet will be a thoughtful and steady NMFS AA, carefully listening to stakeholders while keeping sound science, not politics, at the heart of the agency. She won the respect of commercial fishing industry in Rhode Island, and I expect her to do the same as NMFS AA.”

Coit directed the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management for more than 10 years, where she focused on improving natural resource conservation, promoting locally grown and harvested food, including seafood. She worked to improve new infrastructure for commercial and recreational fisheries and promote sustainable management of fisheries, including a new shellfish initiative.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

RHODE ISLAND: Former DEM chief Janet Coit named to lead U.S. fisheries office

June 22, 2021 — It’s a rare thing for someone to occupy a Cabinet-level position in state government under three different governors. But Janet Coit was able to do it, steering the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management for a decade, the longest tenure of any director in the 44-year history of the agency.

Now, she’s set to take a set of traits — diligence, diplomacy, likeability — that she used to great effect as Rhode Island’s top environmental official to what will surely be a more challenging position on the national stage. On Monday, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Coit’s former boss in the Rhode Island State House, announced the selection of Coit to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries office.

Raimondo described Coit as a source of trusted counsel while she was governor and said she will bring a wealth of experience to what’s also known as the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

Film highlights how lobster fishers could help save right whales

June 21, 2021 — David Abel sees a clear solution to the human threat posed to North Atlantic right whales, involving a rethink of the rope-based methods of lobster fishing off New England and Atlantic Canada.

The Boston Globe journalist and documentary maker, along with producer Andy Laub, laid out the vision in the film “Entangled” released this week. It portrays the tensions between environmentalists, regulators and lobster harvesters during 2019 as the whale appeared on the way to potential extinction.

Warming waters in the northeastern Atlantic have put the whales on a collision course with fishing gear in lobster and crab areas, as well as bringing the animals into shipping lanes where vessel strikes are more probable, the documentary notes.

The threats have created challenges for the National Marine Fisheries Service in the United States and the federal Fisheries Department, as they’ve have struggled to balance the vying interests of an endangered species with the need to preserve a mainstay fishery of northeastern North America’s coastal communities.

Read the full story at Canada’s National Observer

Nominations Sought for Positions on the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee

June 17, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries is seeking nominations to fill vacancies on the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee. MAFAC advises the Secretary of Commerce on all living marine resource matters that are the responsibility of the Department of Commerce. The Committee researches, evaluates, and provides advice and recommendations to the Secretary and NOAA on the development and implementation of agency policies that address science and regulatory programs critical to the mission and goals of the NOAA Fisheries Service.

MAFAC members are highly qualified, diverse individuals with experience across the wide spectrum of:

  • Commercial, recreational, aquaculture, and subsistence fisheries
  • Seafood industry, including processing, marketing, working waterfronts, and restaurants
  • Marine, ecosystems, or protected resources management and conservation
  • Human dimensions or social sciences associated with living marine resources.

Members may be associated with tribes and indigenous peoples, environmental organizations, academia, consumer groups, and other marine life interest groups.

Nominees should possess demonstrable expertise in one of these areas. They must also be able to fulfill the time commitments required for two in-person annual meetings, one to two virtual meetings, and between-meeting subcommittee work. Membership is balanced geographically across states and territories, ethnically, and on the basis of gender, in addition to the range of expertise and interests listed. Individuals serve for a term of 3 years and may serve a second consecutive term, if re-appointed.

Read the full release here

Fishermen lose challenge to rule requiring at-sea monitors

June 16, 2021 — A federal judge in Washington D.C. on Tuesday denied the bid of New Jersey-based herring fishermen who sued the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) last year to block a new regulation that will require them to pay for third-party “at-sea monitors” who will survey by-catch.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the agency had not acted in violation of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) when it approved in February 2020 the rule that the plaintiffs said could “destroy their iconic way of life” by cutting by 20% their profits from commercially fishing herring along the U.S. Atlantic coast.

About half-a-dozen small fishing vessel operators, including the Loper Bright Enterprise, brought the lawsuit last year.

Ryan Mulvey, an attorney for the plaintiffs with the Cause of Action Institute, an advocacy group favoring limited government, said he was disappointed with the decision. “The federal government has overextended its regulatory power far beyond what Congress authorized,” he said.

Read the full story at Reuters

Suit challenging new charter boat rules OK’d as class action

June 15, 2021 — Six captains and five companies from Florida and Louisiana can represent others in a lawsuit challenging new federal regulations for nearly 1,300 charter boats across the Gulf of Mexico, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan certified the suit early this month as a class action for the people who take small groups of anglers into the Gulf. She rejected an argument that some charter captains support the regulations.

“The claims and defenses of class representatives are typical of the claims of the class as a whole,” she wrote on June 2.

The lawsuit contends that privacy and other rights are violated by regulations which require permanently active tracking devices on the boats. The suit also challenges requirements to report information including the crew size, number of customers, the fee charged to each and the amount and price of fuel.

Although the regulations took effect in January, the government has not yet set a date for requiring the devices, said Judy Pino, spokeswoman for the nonprofit law firm New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents the captains.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

PACIFIC DAILY NEWS: US must hear out territories on coral critical habitat designation

June 14, 2021 — It’s important for the United States to protect endangered species and their habitats, but it’s also important for the federal government to talk to and work with states and territories before it makes far-reaching decisions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Marine Fisheries Services plans to impose coral critical habitat designation on Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The reason is that seven coral species, several of which are found in the waters of these territories, have been listed under the Endangered Species Act. The federal law requires the designation of critical habitat for listed species within the U.S., if “reasonable and prudent.”

Read the full opinion piece at the Pacific Daily News

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

NOAA’s whale framework draws fire from fishermen, conservationists

June 9, 2021 — A framework released by the National Marine Fisheries Service last month that calls for reducing risks to the endangered North Atlantic right whale in federal fisheries has been criticized both by conservationists and lobstermen, though for different reasons.

The framework was included in the service’s long-awaited biological opinion and requires the reduction of risks to the whales by a cumulative 98 percent in the next 10 years.

The exact measures to ensure this reduction have yet to be determined and are expected later this year, but conservationists have heavily criticized the 10-year timeline, which they argue is much too slow and not in line with rules under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

“A lot of the conservation community feel that the timeline that NOAA has laid out in the bi-op may not hold up legally,” said Zack Klyver, the director of science at Blue Planet Strategies.

Klyver and other conservationists said that under the act, the federal government is supposed to institute a plan that will get potential deaths down to almost zero annually within six months, but the fisheries service’s plan only gets there after several years.

“What they’ve suggested is they start much higher and over a 10-year period bring it down to zero,” he said.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander