Saving Seafood

The ‘dark fleet’: Global Fishing Watch shines a light on illegal catches

June 11, 2018 — New data is being used to expose fleets of previously unmonitored fishing vessels on the high seas, in what campaigners hope will lead to the eradication of illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.

Global Fishing Watch (GFW) has turned low light imaging data collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) into the first publicly available real-time map showing the location and identity of thousands of vessels operating at night in waters that lie beyond national jurisdiction.

More than 85% of the “dark fleet” detections include smaller vessels that are not fitted with transponders and larger ones that have switched off their tracking systems to avoid detection, according to GFW, which launched the map on Friday to mark World Oceans Day.

The data, collected by the NOAA’s visible infrared imaging radiometer suite, is being used to track a fleet of about 200 mostly Chinese vessels at the edge of Peru’s economic exclusion zone.

The monitoring, conducted by GFW, a non-profit organisation campaigning for greater transparency in the fishing industry, and the conservation group Oceana, reveals that about 20% of the Chinese vessels are not broadcasting via automatic tracking systems, raising suspicions they are operating illegally.

The report on the high seas activity coincides with the launch by GFW of the first ever real-time view of transshipment, which enables fishing boats to transfer their catch to refrigerated cargo vessels and remain at sea for months, or even years, at a time but still get their catch to the market.

Read the full story at The Guardian

New Lobbying Group Formed by East Coast Fishing Industry to Address Wind Power Concerns

June 11, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A new lobbying group, the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, has been formed by the East Coast Fishing industry to represent seafood interests in discussions and permitting around offshore wind development.

One of the criticisms by the industry of offshore development of wind power was that with a localized permitting process, there was no way for the overall fisheries impact of multiple projects to be recognized.

“The current, splintered approaches to engaging fishing communities in the offshore wind leasing process are ineffective and inefficient, and the result is that critical fishing industry expertise is not being considered,” said Anne Hawkins, legal and scientific counsel for RODA. “Fisheries need a unified effort to ensure they get the best possible offshore outcomes.”

Hawkins is a lawyer with Kelly Drye, the firm that has long represented scallopers and other fishing interests in New Bedford and elsewhere along the East Coast.

One of RODA’s first priorities is exploring partnerships with NOAA and the Atlantic states to develop collaborative scientific research. This research would address the lack of peer-reviewed information on the effects of offshore development to fisheries and fish populations. It would also be used to inform offshore developers and regulators in planning sites, awarding leases, designing operations plans, and developing mitigation strategies.

Another principal in the effort is Robert Vanasse, communications and media advisor to RODA. Vanasse founded Saving Seafood, and also works on other East Coast fisheries issues such as Omega Protein’s menhaden fishery.

“The industry needs to speak as one,” said Vanasse. “The offshore wind energy industry, and regulators at the federal, state, and local levels need to hear clearly the concerns of participants in our domestic fisheries.  We will work to foster the productive dialogue among those parties that is urgently needed and sorely lacking.

Specifically, RODA will coordinate engagement between offshore development and affected fisheries to guide the planning of future offshore development sites, and to implement effective operations and mitigation programs for existing sites. By creating a united effort from fishing communities, RODA will facilitate more informed development of shared offshore resources.

This article originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission. 

NFI’s Connelly: NOAA’s silence giving rise in US to third-party certifiers

June 11, 2018 — John Connelly, the president of the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), used his opportunity in front of US representative Rob Bishop, chairman of the House’s Natural Resources Committee, to light a fire under the federal government’s top fisheries regulator to better promote its quality work.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “regulation of seafood sets a global standard for success, but it needs to do a better job of explaining that”, said Connelly, whose group most significantly represents seafood processors, wholesalers and importers, according to a statement.

“…Communicating about its successes raises NOAA’s profile, while a sea of third-party certifiers jockey for recognition in the commercial landscape,” he continued.

“Fisheries managed by NOAA shouldn’t need a third party to come in and certify that they’re doing a good job. We spend more than 800 million taxpayer dollars on fisheries management annually, the least NOAA can do is talk about it.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

HAWAII: Sleuthing leads to new findings about opah

June 8, 2018 — The fish buyer noticed something different about the large, colorful, disc-shaped opah waiting to be sold at the auction house in Honolulu. Among the differences: One fish had a bigger eye than the other.

His curiosity set in motion DNA testing and more sleuthing that led to the identification of three new species of opah — a peculiar deep-diving fish recently found to be the first fully warmblooded fish.

“The more we looked, the more differences we could pull out,” said Karen Underkoffler, lead author of a recently published paper in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa that describes the anatomical characteristics of the different species of opah, including one marked by its big eyes and a purple tongue.

In all, the team of scientists with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries identified five distinct species of opah, revealing that there isn’t a single global species. Three are newly identified, one was already named and researchers better identified another that had been previously described.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Honolulu Star Advertiser

Updated Stock Assessment Improvement Plan Builds on Past Success

June 7, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA:

NOAA Fisheries released its new Stock Assessment Improvement Plan in 2018 to provide strategic guidance for its stock assessment enterprise. The plan is designed to complement other strategic guidance efforts to accomplish NOAA Fisheries’ mission of sustainable fisheries through science-based resource conservation and management.

In 2001, NOAA Fisheries published the first Stock Assessment Improvement Plan, in which we sought to bolster the capacity, content, extent, and infrastructure for conducting stock assessments. As a result, we have improved the scientific advice being provided to fishery managers allowing the recovery of many overfished stocks and dramatically reducing incidences of overfishing. However, given changes in legal mandates and decades of research and development of new scientific tools, there is a need for updating this important strategic document. In 2018, a new strategic document was published, titled Implementing a Next Generation Stock Assessment Enterprise: An Update to NOAA Fisheries’ Stock Assessment Improvement Plan.

This document describes the many challenges currently facing NOAA’s stock assessment enterprise, and some of the innovative research and operations that will meet these challenges. The next generation framework acts as a road map for addressing these needs and consists of three main themes. Collectively, these three foci constitute the Next Generation Stock Assessment (NGSA) Improvement Plan.

First, it advocates for expanding the scope of the stock assessment paradigm to be more holistic and ecosystem-linked. This means that more ecosystem and socioeconomic factors that affect the dynamics of fish stocks and fisheries are directly taken into account, and more goals of fishery management are taken into account in the evaluation of sustainable harvest policies.

A second focus is on the continued use of innovative science for data collection and analysis to reliably and efficiently provide data for maximizing use of advanced modeling methods. Examples of clear benefits from this emphasis include improved calibration of data collection methods, streamlined analytical processes, and establishment of robust harvest policies to manage fisheries between assessments.

Finally, the plan provides a method for objectively determining stock-specific goals that create a stock assessment process that is more timely, efficient, and effective at optimizing available resources and delivering results to fishery managers and the public.

The NGSA strategic vision is designed to complement other strategic efforts, particularly NOAA Fisheries’ Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management Road Map and Climate Science Strategy, in order to accomplish its mission of sustainable fisheries through resource conservation and management. The recommendations in this plan will be implemented through collaboration with regional partners and stakeholders to ensure that they improve stock assessment capabilities in accordance with existing regional processes.

Read the full release at NOAA Fisheries

Group Threatens Lawsuit Over Habitat Protection for Orcas

June 7, 2018 — A conservation group wants the federal government to move forward with protecting offshore areas along the U.S. West Coast to help endangered killer whales.

The Center for Biological Diversity told the National Marine Fisheries Service on Wednesday that it plans to take legal action if the agency keeps delaying a designation for offshore habitat where the Puget Sound orcas would be protected.

The fish-eating whales typically spend summers in inland waters of Washington state and winters foraging along the coast. They have struggled with food shortages, pollution, and noise and disturbances from boats. There are now just 76 of the animals, a 30-year low.

Most inland waters of Washington state, including Puget Sound and the waters around the San Juan Islands, received protection as critical whale habitat in 2006. Coastal and offshore areas in the Pacific Ocean weren’t included at that time.

In 2014, the conservation group petitioned the fisheries service to expand habitat protection. It asked the agency to add an area from Cape Flattery, Washington, to Point Reyes, California, extending about 47 miles (76 kilometers) offshore.

Satellite tagging surveys have shown that the whales forage for food along the coast in the winter, some traveling down to Northern California.

The fisheries service said in 2015 that it would move ahead with revising the orcas’ critical habitat and collecting and analyzing more data to develop a rule in 2017.

The group said in its letter Wednesday that the agency is violating U.S. law by not taking action in a reasonable time to protect habitat for the population of southern resident killer whales.

“The southern residents desperately need protected foraging areas full of salmon to feed them through the winter,” Catherine Kilduff, an attorney and marine scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “Without swift federal action, these whales will continue their steep slide to extinction.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

Smart Software Helps Fishermen Catch the Fish They Want, Not Endangered Species

June 6, 2018 — In the ocean, everything moves. Waves push around vast swaths of saltwater, tides ebb and flow, and over time tectonic rumblings transform the seafloor. With all that movement, marine life travels as well—making the oceans one of the most dynamic ecosystems on Earth. This constant shuffling can make it hard to predict where a particular marine species might be on any given day. But that is exactly what Elliott Hazen, a fisheries scientist from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association (NOAA), is trying to do through new modeling software.

Hazen and a team of other fisheries scientists developed EcoCast in an effort to reduce the unintended bycatch of protected marine species while supporting sustainable fisheries; their results were published last week in Science Advances. EcoCast is already being used to allow fishermen exemptions to fish in certain protected areas in California, and NOAA is working on a smartphone app that will give fishermen this dynamic data in real-time.

The team focused on the California Drift Gillnet (DGN) fishery, which targets broadbill swordfish along the U.S. West Coast. The fishery, which has declined in recent years, only brought in 176 metric tons of swordfish in 2017—down from a historical high of 2,198 metric tons in 1985. DGN fishermen use mesh nets that float vertically in the water to catch the swordfish, but the nets often trap additional species—a phenomenon known as bycatch—including the critically endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle, blue sharks, and California sea lions.

It’s not just an issue of protecting endangered species, explains Gary Burke, a fisherman in California and a member of the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara. “Fishermen don’t want bycatch. It breaks our gear and it’s expensive. So, we like to avoid it.”

EcoCast takes an array of oceanographic variables into account to generate a fluid map that highlights areas where fishermen are likely to find high concentrations of their target species and not the protected species they don’t want to catch.

Read the full story at Smithsonian.com

Fishing Industry Divided Over Push to Ease Catch Limits

June 4, 2018 — The number of fish stocks in the U.S. classified as “overfished” has reached an all-time low.

That was the headline of the annual “Status of Stocks” report compiled by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and released to Congress on May 17. The report found only 35 of 235 fishing stocks are overfished—the lowest number since the agency began tracking fish populations in 2000.

The news was hailed as proof, from sectors of the fishing and boating industries, that the time has now come to roll back certain fisheries regulations they view as overly burdensome and outdated.

Among the ideas being discussed are tossing out requirements that fisheries management decisions be based on peer-reviewed science, and instead giving Regional Fisheries Management Councils more “flexibility” in determining how fish stocks are divided between recreational and commercial interests.

Read the full story at Bloomberg News

New Tool Helps Fisheries Avoid Protected Species In Near Real Time

June 3, 2018 — New computer-generated daily maps will help fishermen locate the most productive fishing spots in near real time while warning them where they face the greatest risk of entangling sea turtles, marine mammals, and other protected species. Scientists developed the maps, the products of a system called EcoCast, to help reduce accidental catches of protected species in fishing nets.

Funded primarily by NASA with support from NOAA, California Sea Grant, and Stanford University, EcoCast was developed by NOAA Fisheries scientists and academic partners with input from fishermen and managers.

Using the swordfish fishery as an example, EcoCast incorporates data from tagged animals, remote sensing satellites, and fisheries observers to help predict concentrations of target species (broadbill swordfish) and three protected species (leatherback turtle, blue shark and California sea lion).

EcoCast will help fishermen, managers, scientists, and others understand in near real-time where fishing vessels have the highest probability of catching targeted species and where there is risk of catching protected species. In doing so, EcoCast aims to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of fisheries that sometimes inadvertently catch and kill sensitive species.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

NOAA rule sets dates for 2018 halibut season

March 12, 2018 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published an interim rule for the 2018 halibut season Friday that sets the season opening and closing dates to March 24 and Nov. 7. The rule also put quotas from 2017 in place, but that is likely to change.

The International Pacific Halibut Commission, which regulates halibut in U.S. and Canadian waters, typically sets both season dates and quotas.

But after surveys indicated halibut stocks were on the decline, U.S. and Canadian commissioners could not agree on cuts to the total allowable catch at the IPHC’s annual meeting in January.

When the commission cannot come to an agreement, quotas from the previous year are to be reinstated, but both sides did agree 2017’s numbers were too high.

Read the full story at KBBI