Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: Ørsted pitches its Ocean Wind project

August 28, 2019 — Offshore wind energy developer Ørsted is introducing the New Jersey public to its Ocean Wind project – at a planned 1,100 megawatts the largest U.S. waters project to date.

“New Jersey is at the epicenter of offshore wind,” said Kris Ohleth, Ørsted’s senior stakeholder relations manager, as she opened the company’s first meeting in Atlantic City Monday evening. “We can supply the nucleus of the supply chain.”

That’s music to the ears of southern New Jersey political and labor leaders, in a region that never fully recovered from the Atlantic City casino industry’s downturn and construction recession after the 2008 financial meltdown.

Ørsted opened an office in the city last year to prepare for building the Ocean Wind project on a federal lease 15 miles offshore, and it’s expected the company could soon pick a location for its onshore support station and docks on the city waterfront.

That would represent 70 permanent jobs, beyond the 3,000 construction jobs the company predicts for its building cycle through to 2024. The company is already working with the city school system and Richard Stockton University to recruit future workers and plan for training and workforce development.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

New Jersey Department of Agriculture visits local producer to highlight state’s seafood industry

August 27, 2019 — Officials with the New Jersey Department of Agriculture (NJDA), as well as state and local officials, paid a visit to Viking Village in Barnegat Light as a part of the department’s efforts to highlight the importance of seafood in the state.

The commercial fishing industry generated USD 6.2 billion (EUR 5.6 billion) for the state in 2018, according to stats from NOAA, placing the state at fifth in the U.S. for the value of its commercial fishing. Viking Village, a commercial seafood producer in Barnegat Light, New Jersey, works with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the various management councils to emphasize the state’s seafood.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Climate change: NJ is warming faster than most of the country

August 26, 2019 — The New Jersey lobster boom has passed.

Tom Fote, legislative chairman for The Jersey Coast Anglers Association, recalls a time in the 1990s when warming waters off the Jersey Shore prompted the tasty crustaceans to reproduce more, attracting more boats to fish for them.

But then the water got too hot. The lobsters stopped reproducing as they had been.

“We were the canaries in the mines,” Fote said of anglers in New Jersey.

New Jersey has emerged as a top state in the nation experiencing climate change, according to a new analysis of climate data by The Washington Post. 

New Jersey heated by nearly 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, since about the turn of the last century, the Post found. That’s double the average for the continental United States. Alaska, then Rhode Island crossed the 2-degree mark, the Post reported. New Jersey is close.

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press

Efforts with scallops and oysters paying off in NJ

August 19, 2019 — Fisheries management has provided a model for how people can adjust their impact on the natural world to benefit themselves and the environment. Scallops have made New Jersey a leader in East Coast seafood landings, with Cape May the region’s No. 2 port behind New Bedford, Connecticut. And oysters, while slowly growing into a robust and lucrative industry, now also promise to clean coastal waters and help reduce flooding.

Years of federal fisheries managers allowing Atlantic sea scallops to thrive by limiting their harvest have yielded an abundance of this shellfish delicacy.

New data shows their harvest last year reached more than 58 million pounds, the highest since 2011 and the fifth highest since record keeping began in 1945.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

2°C: Beyond the Limit: Extreme climate change has arrived in America

August 14, 2019 — Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched as local hockey clubs battled one another and the Skate Sailing Association of America held competitions, including one in 1926 that featured 21 iceboats on blades that sailed over a three-mile course.

In those days before widespread refrigeration, workers flocked here to harvest ice. They would carve blocks as much as two feet thick, float them to giant ice houses, sprinkle them with sawdust and load them onto rail cars bound for ice boxes in New York City and beyond.

“These winters do not exist anymore,” says Marty Kane, a lawyer and head of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation.

That’s because a century of climbing temperatures has changed the character of the Garden State. The massive ice industry and skate sailing association are but black-and-white photographs at the local museum. And even the hardy souls who still try to take part in ice fishing contests here have had to cancel 11 of the past dozen competitions for fear of straying onto perilously thin ice and tumbling into the frigid water.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

NY spending $2M to study offshore wind impact on waterways, fishing

August 9th, 2019 — New York State said Thursday it will spend more than $2 million for five studies to examine ways to reduce offshore wind farms’ impact on marine environments and commercial fishing.

The studies, awarded by the state Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, followed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s announcement of the first two large offshore wind projects for the state power grid.

The projects will produce 1,700 megawatts of a potential 9,000 megawatts planned by the state by 2040. Hundreds of turbines upward of 800 feet high will spin in waterways off Long Island, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

Another project by Norway-based Equinor for 816 megawatts will be located as close as 15 miles offshore from Long Beach.

Read the full story at Newsday

Dramatic Increase in Whales in NJ/NYC Raises Safety Concerns

August 9th, 2019 — The number of humpback whale sightings in New York City and northern New Jersey has increased dramatically in recent years, by more than 500 percent, as a result of warmer and cleaner waters, raising the risk of dangerous interactions between the huge marine mammals and humans, according to a Rutgers University-New Brunswick researcher.

The increase in sightings near one of the world’s busiest ports is a safety concern for both whales and humans, especially with a new wave of migration headed close to shores this fall, said Danielle Brown, a doctoral student in ecology and evolution in Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biology Sciences and the lead humpback whale researcher and naturalist for Gotham Whale, a New York-based nonprofit that studies and advocates for whales.

Since Gotham Whale started documenting humpback whale sightings in the New York Bight apex – the Atlantic Ocean area from New York harbor east to Fire Island and south to the Manasquan Inlet– the number has increased to 272 last year up from five in 2011. Many of the sightings have occurred less than two miles from the shore.

Read the full story at Rutgers Today

New Jersey builds up man-made reef off Atlantic City

August 5, 2019 — New Jersey has found a new use for an old U.S. Navy lock gate: leaving it to the fish.

The state Division of Fish and Wildlife last week added a more than 100-foot-long and 40-foot-high caisson gate to an artificial reef about 8.8 miles off the coast of Absecon Island. Caisson gates are made of heavy gauge steel and are used to dam off the open end of dry docks.

The reef is one of 17 similar projects encompassing 25 miles of the sea floor in waters across the state under the Bureau of Marine Fisheries’s Artificial Reef Program. They are created to provide additional habitat for marine life, grounds for anglers and underwater structures for scuba divers.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

NEW JERSEY: New sharks could be visiting the Jersey Shore thanks to climate change

July 31, 2019 — While sharks off the Jersey Shore are nothing new, experts who study the ocean predators say New Jersey’s waters are becoming an increasingly popular destination for unlikely species of sharks.

Ocean-warming climate change is already bringing sharks typically found in southern waters, like bull sharks and blacktip sharks, to New Jersey on a more frequent basis said Thomas Grothues, an associate research professor at Rutgers who studies sharks (he just happens to be a past Shark Week star.)

As the planet continues to warm, this trend is likely to continue, Grothues said.

Read the full story at NJ.com

New Jersey weighs measures to protect lobsters as harvests shrink

July 25, 2019 — The US east coast state of New Jersey is undertaking a “full review of its lobster management” practices, including possible changes to the minimum size, following a continued drop in landings, the New Jersey Evening Post reports this week.

The state landed just 193 metric tons in 2018, down even from the 268t harvested in 2011, according to the newspaper. However, lobster remains New Jersey’s most valuable commercial species, with its landings accounting for about half of the fishing fleet’s annual income.

That was $190.5 million in 2017, down from $193.0m in 2017, according to the latest available data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The current review is looking at all management measures and has had input from scientists and fisheries managers in  European countries, according to the newspaper, which notes that several harvesters have been taken to court recently for exceeding minimum catch sizes.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News