Saving Seafood

LOUISIANA: As Louisiana’s Wetlands Erode, A Fishing Culture Fights to Survive

March 4, 2026 — I grew up fishing these waters down here just like everyone down in Shell Beach,” says Brad Robin, whose family has lived here for generations. “We never had a bike ride in the streets. We had a pirogue battle in the canals,” he says, referring to the lightweight canoes used to navigate the marshlands here.

Like many of those who live in and around Shell Beach, a small fishing community 30 miles southeast of New Orleans, Robin’s ancestors were immigrants from the Canary Islands. Between 1778 and 1783, an estimated 2,000 Canary Islanders arrived in New Orleans, receiving land, a home, and a monthly stipend from Spain. Over time, these immigrants settled in the coastal towns of St. Bernard Parish, including Shell Beach, where they developed their own cultural identity as “Isleños.”

For over 200 years, the Isleños have provided for themselves by catching shrimp, fish, and oysters in the coastal wetlands of southeast Louisiana, passing their vocation on to their descendants and creating a way of life that follows the ever-changing tides of the Gulf of Mexico. “The natural environment has shaped the cultural heritage and legacy of everyone who’s here,” says St. Bernard Parish historian and 11th-generation Isleño William Hyland.

Isleño culture is defined by a spirit of reciprocity, one that extends to the kitchen, where families spend hours transforming daily seafood catches into traditional communal meals. Some favorite dishes: Besugo al Horno (baked red snapper with potatoes), Stuffed Mirlitons (chayote squash filled with crabmeat) and Gambas al Ajillo (garlic shrimp).

Read the full article at Civil Eats

LOUISIANA: In departure from norm, Coast Guard demands immigration papers on Louisiana docks

February 18, 2026 — Since November, the U.S. Coast Guard—the military branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — has conducted regular raids at Louisiana fishing docks and in Louisiana bayous to arrest immigrant deckhands and oyster harvesters.

Seafood workers say that the Coast Guard, in a departure from the norm, has conducted about seven sweeps since early November, resulting in multiple arrests. They have concentrated efforts 40 minutes east of New Orleans, around Hopedale, a small unincorporated fishing community in St. Bernard Parish that’s composed of a string of docks lining a single road, Hopedale Highway.

The raids at the quiet St. Bernard Parish docks, and on the surrounding waters of Biloxi Marsh, conducted largely out of public view, are surprising to local immigration attorneys, seafood industry owners, and workers — because the Coast Guard has not historically conducted immigration enforcement at inland docks.

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter told The Lens that he didn’t agree with the shift in Coast Guard priorities, and that he worried it could divert resources from the Coast Guard’s work in Louisiana that keeps river traffic moving and rescues people after disasters.

“Trump’s reckless Department of Homeland Security has placed deportations above all other priorities, making Louisianans less safe,” Carter said. “This has pulled our service members away from investigations into illicit activities and actual criminals that are endangering our communities.”

Read the full article at the Louisiana Illuminator

MISSISSIPPI: Mississippi opens financial aid for fishermen affected by 2019 Bonnet Carré diversion

August 15, 2023 — Mississippi is accepting applications for financial relief from commercial fishermen hurt by the 2019 Mississippi Bonnet Carré Spillway disaster.

The spillway is designed to divert floodwater away from the city of New Orleans and into the Mississippi Sound, but the surge of freshwater spillover into the ocean can shock oysters, crabs, and other aquatic life. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré  Spillway twice in 2019 – the first time it was ever opened twice in one year – it severely damaged area fisheries.

In 2020, the Department of Commerce declared the 2019 spillway releases a fishery disaster, allocating $88 million to Gulf of Mexico fisheries in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to compensate for lost revenue from lower oyster, shrimp, crab, and finfish landings. Of that $88 million, Mississippi received $21 million.

The total was significantly less than the $500 million in financial relief the three states asked for. Louisiana alone estimated it suffered $258 million from the flooding.

Now, four years after the spillway disaster and three years after the federal government announced the relief, the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources has launched for the 2019 Mississippi Bonnet Carré Spillway Fisheries Disaster Recovery Program to distribute the received USD 21 million in funding. Financial assistance applications for commercial fishermen, charter boat companies, and related businesses opened 9 August and will close on 7 September.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

US Court strikes down charter boat tracking rule

February 27, 2023 — An appeals court has struck down a federal fisheries management rule requiring operators of privately owned charter boats in the Gulf of Mexico to equip their vessels with tracking devices, a victory for a group of Louisiana and Florida charter operators who challenged the rule in a 2020 lawsuit.

Thursday’s ruling by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans reversed a lower court decision upholding the regulation, which had been developed to help regulators keep track of the amount of fish caught on recreational charter vessels.

Rejecting government arguments, the panel said that tracking devices are not the type of equipment regulators can require on recreational vessels under a federal fishing regulation law passed by Congress — the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Louisiana Fishing Community Recovery Coalition’s Harlon Pearce Tells It Like It Is

June 27, 2022 — Hurricane Ida, and three others in two years, has thrown the Gulf seafood industry into turmoil.  Add to that Covid, unprecedented fuel prices, new state and federal fishing regulations, inflation and a tight labor market; the result has been astronomical seafood costs for both the individual consumer and restaurants across the country.

“Restaurants are having a hard time putting oysters and other Gulf seafood on the menu because prices are so high,” said Harlon Pearce owner of Harlon’s LA Fish in New Orleans and chair of the Louisiana Fishing Community Recovery Coalition.  “What is sad is restaurants that would have never considered buying imported seafood, are now buying imports.”

Hurricanes Laura, Delta, Zeta, and Ida, made landfall in coastal Louisiana causing vital infrastructure losses of approximately $600 million to a region of national importance for domestic fisheries and seafood production.  Since forming in December of year last, the coalition has been seeking ways to rebuild that infrastructure, as well as prevent losses from future storms.

“Infrastructure can be many things to different people.  We have to rebuild docks that are buying product, and they have to be rebuilt better, stronger and higher,” explained Pearce. “That’s just part of the infrastructure we need.  We need bridges that are better and stronger; in Lafitte they lost the only bridge connecting them to Barataria.  Those are just two needs of a very long list.”

Read the full story at Gulf Seafood News

 

LOUISIANA: New Orleans restaurants’ oyster shells helped save the coast; can they again?

January 19, 2021 — In an eroding bay south of New Orleans, where the sea is rapidly claiming land, your dinner leftovers were being stacked into an 800-ton wall nearly a mile long.

The shells of oysters, shucked or slurped at the city’s restaurants, are the raw material for this bulwark against waves, storms and rising seas.

“It’s crazy to think each one of these was on someone’s plate,” coastal restoration specialist Deb Visco Abibou said, as shells packed tight in metal cages were hoisted from a barge and plopped into the shallow waters of Barataria Bay. “It always surprises me that they don’t smell more like garlic.”

The shells are cast-asides from the heady days before the coronavirus pandemic, back when New Orleans’ vaunted seafood restaurants were crammed with customers. The eateries were producing about 75 tons of shells per month for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, which runs New Orleans’ 7-year-old oyster recycling program.

The vast majority of oyster shells taken from the Gulf of Mexico never make it back. Instead, they end up in landfills or get crushed into chicken feed or road bed material.

Read the full story at NOLA.com

Study: Increased intake of omega-3 fatty acids linked to improved heart health outcomes

September 18, 2020 — A new study presents “compelling evidence” for consuming more of omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA – nutrients that seafood possesses rich quantities of – for cardiovascular prevention.

The meta-analysis, considered to be the “most comprehensive analysis of the role of omega-3 dosage on cardiovascular prevention to date,” was published in the most recent issue of in Mayo Clinic Proceedings and involves an in-depth review of 40 clinical trials. It finds that intake of EPA and DHA is correlated with reduced risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) events, which cause 7.4 million deaths globally each year, and reduced risk of myocardial infarction, or heart attacks.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Despite Federal Ruling, Fish Farm Company Says Gulf Project Moving Forward

August 10, 2020 — This week a federal court ruled that offshore fisheries cannot be permitted in the Gulf of Mexico under existing policy. Opponents of a proposed fish farm off Sarasota’s coast called the decision a victory, but the CEO of the company spearheading the local project says he’s pushing ahead.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that it was illegal for the Department of Commerce to issue regulations that would have permitted large-scale aquaculture operations offshore in U.S. federal waters. The ruling affirmed a 2018 decision, which the Trump Administration had appealed.

“Basically, the case hinged on whether aquaculture could be considered fishing under the law and the court decided that it couldn’t,” said Marianne Cufone, a Tampa and New Orleans based environmental law attorney who argued against fish farming.

“That seems correct,” she said. “Fishing and fish farming are not the same thing–just like duck hunting and duck farming aren’t the same thing. The agency was essentially saying that because they pull the fish from the water out of the net pens, that that equates to harvesting a wild fish and as the court said in its opinion, they wouldn’t bite.”

Read the full story at WUSF

Federal court ruling complicates US offshore aquaculture efforts

August 5, 2020 –A federal appeals court has struck down plans to open the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters to fish farming, creating mixed messages to the industry on exactly who will be managing the future of offshore aquaculture in the U.S.

On Monday, 3 August, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans blocked recent federal rules that would have allowed large-scale industrial aquaculture operations in offshore waters for the first time, upholding a 2018 federal ruling that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is not permitted the authority to regulate offshore aquaculture under existing national fisheries laws.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Appeals court: NOAA can’t make rules for offshore fish farms

August 4, 2020 — A federal appeals court in New Orleans has upheld a decision that throws out rules regulating fish farms in the Gulf of Mexico.

The law granting authority over fisheries to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does not also let the agency set rules for offshore fish farms, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its 2-1 decision on Monday.

The farms use enormous open-topped nets or submersible pens to raise huge numbers of fish, including tuna, salmon, seabass and cobia, out in open water.

The government says fish farming, including that on the open sea, is vital to seafood production and can both provide jobs and protect species and habitats. Opponents say huge numbers of fish confined in nets out in the ocean could hurt ocean health and native fish stocks, and the farms would drive down prices and devastate commercial fishing communities.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post