Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: Some of the long-term challenges facing New Jersey’s beach replenishment efforts

September 30, 2016 — Even before hurricane Hermine threatened to strip New Jersey’s beaches yet again earlier this month, skeptics questioned how the state and Army Corps of Engineers can commit to spending nearly $2 billion in beach replenishment through the mid 21st century.

Mercifully, Hermine headed farther east over the Atlantic Ocean, sparing New Jersey’s beach replenishment program another price increase.

But the question of whether the program is misguided, due to its high price on both the taxpayers and the environment remains. It will need continual rejuvenation as even the best-engineered beaches lose sand frequently regardless of storms.

Depleting underwater sand piles

As sand becomes increasingly valuable, fisherman expect underwater ridges to be depleted, despite being home to large schools of fish and other sea life. And with an expected sea-level rise, there’s no telling how the ecosystem will adjust or how much sand will be required. The only certainty is that local underwater sand hills will be exhausted before century’s end.

Judging from the experience with building Long Beach Island beaches — where historic ridges called the Harvey Cedar Lumps are nearly mined out — it appears certain that underwater sand hills close to the beaches will be gone within decades.

Read the full story at Newsworks

NEW JERSEY: Money and Sand: Will There Be Enough for New Jersey’s Beaches?

September 29, 2016 — Beach replenishment is costly and exacts a heavy toll on the environment, depleting underwater ridges that are home to a broad variety of sea life

Even before hurricane Hermine threatened to strip New Jersey’s beaches yet again late last summer, skeptics questioned how the state and Army Corps of Engineers can commit to spending nearly $2 billion in beach replenishment through the mid 21st century.

“This project is another important component of the Christie administration’s plan to bring engineered beaches and dunes to the entire coast,” state Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin said September 2, as he announced work would start soon on a new project, pumping another 3.8 million cubic yards of sand from the sea floor onto eight miles of beach from Atlantic City to Longport.

Mercifully, Hermine headed farther east over the Atlantic Ocean, sparing New Jersey’s beach replenishment program another price increase.

But the question of whether the program is misguided, due to its high price on both the taxpayers and the environment remains. It will need continual rejuvenation as even the best-engineered beaches lose sand frequently regardless of storms.

As sand becomes increasingly valuable, fisherman expect underwater ridges to be depleted, despite being home to large schools of fish and other sea life. And with an expected sea-level rise, there’s no telling how the ecosystem will adjust or how much sand will be required. The only certainty is that local underwater sand hills will be exhausted before century’s end.

Read the full story at NJ Spotlight

Fishing lines threaten whales, but help is possible

September 20, 2016 — Humpback whales off New Jersey’s coast, like the young male that washed up dead Friday on a Sea Isle City beach, were taken off the federal endangered species list this month because of rebounding numbers.

The animals may have gotten entangled, then disentangled, but might have starved to death because of infection or another totally unrelated disease, Gouveia said.

Commercial fishermen are doing what they can to prevent such interactions, said Greg DiDomenico of the Garden State Sea Food Association in Cape May, who is part of the NOAA task force that devises the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan.

“These are things no one wants to see happen,” said DiDomenico of entanglements. “It’s never intentional, but still it makes you feel bad.”

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

Mid-Atlantic Council October 2016 Council Meeting Agenda​

September 13, 2016 — The following was released by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council:

The public is invited to attend the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s October 2016 meeting to be held October 4-6, 2016 in Galloway, New Jersey. The meeting will be held at the Stockton Seaview Hotel, 401 South New York Road, Galloway, NJ 08205, Telephone 609-652-1800.

Webinar: For online access to the meeting, enter as a guest here.

Meeting Materials: Briefing documents will be posted here as they become available.

Read the full agenda here

JEFF TITTEL: Fish kills result of Christie failed policies

September 2, 2016 — The millions of fish kills happening along the Jersey Shore are like a canary in a coal mine. These fish are dying because they are unable to survive due to low dissolved oxygen levels in the water. When stormwater and pollution enter our waterways, the level of nutrients increases and oxygen levels drop. The warmer water temperatures we have seen also accelerate algae blooms and bacteria growth that come from nutrient runoff. Instead of protecting our bays, the Christie administration has promoted overdevelopment, increased nonpoint source pollution, and failed to address climate change.

While our bays are dying, Gov. Christie is rolling back water quality protections. The DEP is overhauling and weakening rules to protect Category 1 waters, eliminating stream buffers, and increasing development in environmentally sensitive areas, which will all increase pollution. Most of the stormwater control systems we have are broken or do not work, but our governor has weakened stormwater rules. This would have required recharging and detention of stormwater as well as buffers to help clean up our waterways. There is even more potential for fish kills to start occurring on the Barnegat Bay beaches because the DEP’s failure to require Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant to install cooling towers has resulted in millions of gallons of thermal pollution in the Bay.

Read the full letter at the Asbury Park Press

ME, NJ, and VA Atlantic Menhaden Harvester and Dealer Survey Participants Sought for Socioeconomic Study

September 2, 2016 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

Arlington, Va. — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission awarded funding to a research team headed by Dr. John Whitehead of Appalachian State University and Dr. Jane Harrison from North Carolina Sea Grant to conduct a socioeconomic study of Atlantic menhaden commercial fisheries. The study is intended to characterize the coastwide commercial fisheries, including bait and reduction sectors and the fishing communities they support.

The principal investigators have sent survey announcements to fishermen and bait dealers in Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia. Virginia fishery participants will receive postcards announcing the surveys while Maine and New Jersey participants will receive an email announcement. Reminders will be sent throughout August and early September. Participation in this survey is highly encouraged, as the data from this study will be used in the development of Draft Amendment 3 to the Atlantic Menhaden Fishery Management Plan in 2017 and subsequent management decisions. The deadline for responding to this survey is September 15.

The full proposal can be found here. For more information, please contact Dr. Jane Harrison, North Carolina Sea Grant, at jane_harrison@ncsu.edu or 919.513.0122.

US seafood distributor off the hook for hepatitis outbreak caused by contaminated scallops

August 30, 2016 — New Jersey-based seafood distributor True World Foods has been cleared of blame in reference to a hepatitis A outbreak that has afflicted more than 200 Hawaiians thus far this summer.

The Hawaii Department of Health withdrew initial reports implicating True World Foods when it discovered that the raw Sea Port Bay Scallops responsible for the outbreak – which were provided to Genki Sushi restaurants on Oahu and Kauai – were supplied by a different distributor. While True World Foods does indeed purchase Sea Port Bay Scallops, the company has not shipped compromised lots of the product from its warehouse.

“The scallops received by True World Foods have not been distributed to any restaurants in the state and were embargoed at their warehouse,” according to the Hawaii Department of Health’s website.

“This incident marks the first time in our 38-year history that seafood distributed by True World Foods has been linked to hepatitis A contamination, despite the fact that we sold 34 million pounds of seafood last year,” added Robert Bleu, president of True World Foods. “Food safety is a top priority at our company, and we are continually monitoring our suppliers, processes and procedures to protect the health of every consumer who eats at any of our customer sites.”

True World is destroying all potentially contaminated scallops from the Philippines at its Hawaii-based facility with the help of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); none of the scallops at True World Foods’ 22 other warehouses in the U.S. come from the lots implicated in the outbreak, said the company in a press release. However, as a precaution, True World has suspended the sale of any seafood products produced by the Philippines-based scallop supplier in question until an internal food safety investigation is complete.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NEW JERSEY: Are humans causing the fish die offs?

August 30, 2016 — An increasing number of fish kills like the four that occurred in New Jersey this past week are in the state’s future if officials don’t take steps to improve the water quality, environmentalists warned.

The die-off of more than a million peanut bunker since Aug. 22 along the waterways of Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay in Monmouth County and Great Bay in Ocean County were caused by a lack of sufficient levels of oxygen for the fish to survive. But human activities on land have helped contribute to that oxygen deficiency, said L. Stanton Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership.

Hales, who has studied New Jersey’s waterways for more than two decades, said that while fish kills caused by low dissolved oxygen levels are naturally occurring events, they are now exacerbated by the deteriorating conditions of the state’s waterways.

“These things can happen naturally, but they’re made worse by everything we’re doing (on land),” he said.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has said the fish kills in Monmouth and Ocean counties were caused by too many peanut bunker – a juvenile form of Atlantic menhaden – in water that had too little oxygen because of warm temperatures.

Bob Considine, a spokesman for the DEP, has said the number of Atlantic menhaden has been “extremely high” this year, the highest it has been in a decade off the Atlantic coast.

Data from the past few years shows that spawning of Atlantic menhaden has been high because of favorable conditions, including water temperatures, salinity and food availability for them, said Tina Berger, spokeswoman for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

She said there are about 3 billion pounds of Atlantic menhaden off the Atlantic coast and national fisheries requirements limit the total catch allowed to about 416.5 million pounds a year.

Read the full story at NJ.com

NEW JERSEY: What do you do with 20,000 dead fish? It was all hands on deck in Shore town

August 30, 2016 — Bob Considine, the DEP’s director of communications, said the menhaden population off New Jersey appears to be exceptionally large this year. He said the department had tested samples of the dead fish and “none appear obviously diseased.”

Loesch said that the fish kill was the first in Little Egg Harbor in the 39 years he has lived there. When the scale of it became apparent, the township council authorized the payment of overtime for the public works department.

On Sunday, volunteer firefighters and public works crews working in small boats trained fire hoses on the heaps of dead fish, sending them into the lagoons around Osborn island.

There, MUA employees used a vacuum truck to suck the fish up and transport them to a landfill.

“You can get a lot more volunteer firemen out on a Sunday than you can on a Monday,” Loesch said. “We were lucky.”

Read the full story at Philly.com

Failed polygraph may mean $2.3 million more for New Jersey fishermen

August 30, 2016 — Three New Jersey fishermen could soon be $2.3 million richer thanks to some failed polygraph tests.

Earlier this month, Trenton police sergeant Brian Suschke, Trenton firefighter Rich Kosztyu, and boater Damien Romeo took home $767,091 from the  White Marlin Open in Ocean City, Md., for their 236.5-pound bigeye tuna catch. That fish set records for both weight and payout in the tournament’s tuna category.

Now, as NJ.com reports, that amount could increase significantly, with the tournament announcing last week that the winners of its white marlin category may forfeit their $2.8 million winnings over violating tournament rules. That fish was the only qualifying entrant into the competition’s white marlin category.

To settle the situation, the White Marlin Open has filed a court action in Maryland alleging that fishermen on that $2.8 million-winning boat failed polygraph examinations conducted after their catch. The tournament requires anglers receiving prize money in excess of $50,000 to go through a polygraph examination, and has not taken this type of legal action since 2007, as Delaware Online reports.

If the court decides against the other boat’s fishermen, then Kosztyu, Suschke, and Romeo could collect slightly more than $2.3 million more in prize money thanks to special stipulations from the group’s tournament sign-up. The remaining $500,000 would be split among other winning boats, court documents indicate.

Read the full story at Philly.com