Saving Seafood

New Jersey: 7th dead whale washes up at Jersey Shore. Calls to stop offshore wind work grow.

January 13, 2023 — The seventh dead whale in just over a month has washed up on the New York-New Jersey coastline, a local photographer and a climate group told NJ Advance Media on Friday.

The humpback whale, the resident said, washed up at a beach in Brigantine.

“This was at the far north end of Brigantine,” said Connie Pyatt, who noted that the whale was dead.

The dead whale washed up just miles from where another whale was found in Atlantic City on Saturday — which itself washed up blocks away from where another humpback whale was found in December.

The Marine Mammal Stranding Center, a non-profit organization which is authorized by the state to rescue marine mammals and respond to whale strandings, did not immediately provide comment Friday.

Read the full article at NJ.com.

NEW JERSEY: Following the clues to why more beached whales along Jersey Shore

January 13, 2023 — This whale was bound to draw attention.  

Unlike a similar one that washed up a month ago in Strathmere, a sleepy barrier island hamlet in Cape May County, this 33.5-foot female humpback rolled ashore on Saturday morning on Atlantic City’s downtown beach. Twenty-four hours later, its carcass, by then dozed up to the edge of the dunes, where it would soon be buried, was surrounded by small plastic campaign signs imploring onlookers to “Protect Our Coast: Stop the industrialization of our oceans.”  

The placards, colored in red, white and blue, were a clear indication that the whale was now a reeking lightning rod for a growing anti-wind farm movement in South Jersey. But, say experts, the stranded whales highlight the complex ecology of the species and the busy waters in which they live, and that not one factor is to blame but many — some of which even they still don’t fully understand.  

The whale was the sixth to wash up dead or dying on New Jersey and New York beaches in 33 days. Two — an adult female humpback and a female sperm whale — appeared on Long Island shorelines in early December. In New Jersey, an infant sperm whale was discovered in Keansburg, Monmouth County, in early December, while the three other strandings, all humpbacks, were in South Jersey. Saturday’s incident was the second in Atlantic City in two weeks; a similar sized humpback washed up not far away on Dec. 23. In July, a 25-foot humpback also beached in North Wildwood. 

On Monday, standing before a podium set up on the sand, directly above where Saturday’s humpback was buried, the smell of decomposition still hanging in the air, Clean Ocean Action’s executive director, Cindy Zipf, announced that the advocacy group, along with others, had prepared a letter to President Joseph Biden, calling on him “to take immediate steps to address this alarming and environmentally harmful trend.” 

“Clean Ocean Action has been working to protect these waters for about the last 40 years, and never have we ever heard of six whales washing up within 33 days,” Zipf said. “The only thing different this year than in the past years is the enormous amount of offshore preconstruction and development activities occurring by the offshore wind industry.” 

Read the full article at NJ Spotlight News

Lund’s Fisheries’ CEO Wayne Reichle: Scallops, calamari center firm’s sales strategy

January 11, 2023 — Cape May, New Jersey, U.S.A.-based Lund’s Fisheries’ latest investment in its scallop operations is one part of the company’s long-term sales strategy, Lund’s Fisheries CEO Wayne Reichle told SeafoodSource.

Lund’s announced in early January it has purchased a new USD 2 million (EUR 1.8 million) tunnel freezer for its operations in Cape May – a move Reichle said geared toward enhancing the control of the scallop resources the company processes.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Humpback whale washed up in Atlantic City had a head injury, officials say, as groups call for wind turbine inquiry

January 10, 2023 — A young humpback whale that washed up on an Atlantic City beach on Saturday had evidence of a large head injury behind the blowhole, an official from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center said Monday.

“The only thing we suspect may have happened is that it was hit by a large boat,” said Sheila Dean, executive director of the Brigantine-based center. “There was a big hematoma.”

With environmental and citizens groups calling for a federal investigation into whether sonar mapping related to future wind turbine projects off the coast may have played a role in four recent humpback whale deaths in New Jersey, Dean said it was premature to conclude about a cause of death.

Others noted that the National Marine Fisheries Service has designated an unusual mortality event for humpback whales based on an increase in mortality that began in 2016, before any wind energy activity.

Read the full article the Philadelphia Inquirer  

NEW JERSEY: Offshore wind critics call for investigation of New Jersey whale strandings

January 10, 2023 — Groups opposed to offshore wind energy developments called on federal officials to suspend all survey work on those projects off New Jersey and New York, and investigate recent humpback whale strandings including two dead juvenile whales that washed up at Atlantic City, N.J. two weeks apart.

The New Jersey-based environmental group Clean Ocean Action organized a Monday press conference at Atlantic City and a joint letter to President Biden, demanding a shutdown of all offshore wind development activity in the New York Bight pending an investigation into “the unprecedented number of dead, predominately juvenile, whales washing up in the last 33 days on the New Jersey/New York coastline.”

“Six whales washing-up on the New Jersey/New York coastline in just over a month is unprecedented,” the groups wrote. “As concerning, none of the whales exhibited obvious causes of death such as ship strikes, entanglements, or predator attacks. With one major exception, no clear differences can explain or suggest this alarming number of deaths in the region.

“The exception is the ongoing geological seafloor-mapping and surveying and other pre-construction and construction actions by numerous offshore wind energy developers.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Offshore wind farms threaten New Jersey’s shellfish industry. Should fishing communities be compensated?

January 3, 2022 — Scallops and clams are likely to get more expensive to harvest off New Jersey, as commercial fishing vessels will soon have to compete for ocean space against offshore wind energy companies.

Earlier this month, New Jersey announced it would join eight other states that are seeking a regional approach to compensate fishing communities for the impending losses.

“Are we going to be allowed to fish inside of them (the wind turbine fields)?” asked Kirk O. Larson, a scallop fleet owner and mayor of Barnegat Light, New Jersey. “Why did (the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) put a wind farm right inside of a scallop area, the most productive scallop area pretty much on the East Coast, not counting Georges Bank (a shallow area of ocean off Cape Cod).”

Read the full article at Yahoo News

Much at stake in US Supreme Court review of at-sea monitoring case

December 21, 2022 — Herring fishermen in the U.S. state of New Jersey are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review their case challenging the at-sea monitoring program, a cause that has gained support from a wide variety of groups.

According to the Cause of Action Institute, which is representing the fishermen suing the federal government, 39 groups are part of 14 amicus briefs that have been filed in the case. That includes attorneys general from 18 states as well as the small business group NFIB, the Cato Institute, several legal foundations, and other fishing-industry stakeholders.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Rate Counsel suggests NJ slow down the pace of offshore wind development

December 15, 2022 — Offshore wind farms in New Jersey should consider scaling back how much new offshore wind capacity is approved next year because economic and financial uncertainties could lead to higher prices, according to the Division of Rate Counsel. 

Rate Counsel Director Brian Lipman suggested slowing down the pace of offshore wind development as higher interest rates, supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures are causing some developers to seek to renegotiate the contracts they have been awarded to build wind farms. 

“This is of great concern,’’ Lipman told the staff of the state Board of Public Utilities Tuesday during a stakeholder meeting. The board was meeting to discuss making a third solicitation for offshore wind projects early next year. Lipman suggested that the board’s staff develop guidelines to prevent after-the-fact increases to contracts awarded to developers. 

Ørsted, the developer of New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm about 15 miles off Atlantic City, has acknowledged it is not earning what it expected on its U.S. projects. If the company seeks to renegotiate its contract, it must file a petition with the BPU, Lipman said. 

Read the full story at NJ Spotlight News

N.J. to Consider Fund to Compensate Fishermen for Revenue Lost to Offshore Wind Development

December 14, 2022 — Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia – on Monday released a Request for Information (RFI) aimed at receiving input from impacted members of the fishing industry, offshore wind developers, corporate and financial management entities, as well as interested members of the public, to inform efforts to establish a regional fisheries compensatory mitigation fund administrator.

The request follows the language of a draft “fisheries mitigation framework” report released in June which calls for “a fair, equitable, and transparent manner for impacted Atlantic Coast fishing industry members and offshore wind developers.”

The states’ RFI seeks feedback on concepts and proposals on how to best establish a single regional administrator for the Atlantic coast to “collect, hold, determine eligibility, and dispense funds for economic losses to affected fishing industry members,” a statement from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said.

Read the full article at Brick

STEFAN AXELSSON: Time to Toss the Administrative State Overboard

December 10, 2022 — The following is an excerpt from an opinion piece published in National Review by Stefan Axelsson. Stefan is a third-generation fisherman from Cape May, New Jersey, and is the captain of the fishing vessel Dyrsten.

If you’re a good driver, you follow the rules of the road, obeying the speed limit, coming to full stops at stop signs, and yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks. And that ought to be enough. But now imagine that the government mandated you carry a state trooper in your passenger seat, one assigned to ensure you obey every traffic law at all times — and one whose salary you were obligated to pay out of your own pocket.

Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Something similar is happening to me today.

I make my living fishing out of Cape May, N.J. While I don’t have a state trooper riding in my car, the federal government makes me carry a monitor on my vessel to observe my activities and report back to the government.

And yes, the government wants to force me to pay the monitor directly — at least when I fish for herring — at a cost of more than $700 a day. That comes on top of an obligation to provide the monitor with a bunk and meals during what can be days-long outings. At times, the monitor is the highest-paid person on the boat, outearning both the captain and the crew.

Federal law gives NOAA the power to force me to carry a monitor on my boat, but it doesn’t give the agency the power to make me pay for the monitor. If Congress had passed a law that allowed NOAA to force herring fishermen to pay for monitors, we could at least use our voices and our votes to check the lawmakers who’d voted for it. But since in this instance a federal agency has tried to do the same thing through an unconstitutional, unilateral power grab, we’ve been forced to settle the issue in the courts.

Our case seemed like a slam dunk to me until I learned about “Chevron deference,” a legal doctrine established in a 1984 Supreme Court decision that effectively requires judges to cede their authority to interpret the law to federal bureaucrats. Judges are supposed to be a check on executive-branch abuses, but Chevron deference turns that upside down and transforms judges into rubber stamps for the whims of the federal bureaucracy.

Read the full opinion piece at National Review

An additional editorial on the issue was recently published by the Washington Times. Read the editorial here.