Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Disappearing bluefish lead to regulators’ plan to limit catch

December 6, 2019 — A precipitous drop in the abundance of bluefish in New York and East Coast waters has led interstate fisheries regulators to call for unprecedented cuts in allowable catch limits for the once-ubiquitous fish, starting next year.

At a meeting of the Department of Environmental Conservation in Setauket Thursday night, state regulators announced a planned 64% reduction in the commercial take of bluefish for 2020, to 287,667 pounds from this year’s quota of more than 800,000. The DEC, which regulates state waters, reported commercial fishermen this year landed 568,931 pounds.

Most bluefish are harvested recreationally by anglers in coves, bays and beaches, from Maine to Florida. On Long Island, bluefish are prized as a good fighting fish and young bluefish, or snappers, are the mainstay of fishing derbies that bring children into the sport.

A coastal stock assessment showed an all-time low in the recreational harvest 2018, to 13.47 million pounds coast wide, a steady drop from the approximately 50 million pounds reported in 2010 and a far cry from the all-time coastal high 151.46 million pounds reported in 1986.

While fisheries managers say overfishing is the likely cause of the declines, they acknowledged there’s much they don’t know about why bluefish, once prevalent year-round and famous for blitzes — the appearance of acres of bluefish feasting on baitfish such as bunker, with gulls and terns striking from above — visible from spring to fall, are so scarce.

Read the full story at Newsday

NEW YORK: Cuomo requests federal disaster declaration, aid for scallop die-off

December 6, 2019 — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday requested the U.S. Department of Commerce issue a disaster declaration for the Peconic Bay scallop fishery, following a catastrophic die-off of scallops in East End waterways.

An immediate declaration of a disaster is needed, he said, to provide “direct economic relief for the New York fishing industry.”

In a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Cuomo requested that the federal government formally declare a fishery failure in the bay scallop fishery in the Peconic Bay Estuary due to a “fishery resource disaster.”

Cuomo did not site a figure for economic losses or impacts tied to the die-off.

The move comes as researchers and biologists from the state, Suffolk County, Cornell University and Stony Brook University gathered Friday night at Stony Brook’s Southampton campus to detail the latest information about the die-off, which was first recognized as the scallop season opened Nov. 5.

Read the full story at Newsday

Report says 4 of 6 Chesapeake Bay states cut funding, staff for top agencies handling pollution

December 6, 2019 — Four of 6 states in the Chesapeake Bay region cut funding or staff to their main pollution control agency over the last 10 years, says a report released today by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Environmental agencies in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York each saw budget reductions, even after adjustments for inflation, between 2008 and 2018, according to the report, The Thin Green Line: Cuts in State Pollution Control Agencies Threaten Public Health. Those states, as well as Maryland, also reduced their environmental workforce during the same time period.

The report was especially critical of Pennsylvania legislators and governors for cutting funding by 16% and staffing by 15%, even as state spending overall grew by 18%.

Among the 48 states studied, 30 cut funding to the operating budgets of agencies that protect public health and the environment.

Both Delaware and New York were in the top 10 states with the largest cuts. Delaware cut funding to its Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control by 33% and staffing by 21% over the decade. New York cut the Department of Environmental Conservation by 31% and staffing by 29%.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Offshore Wind May Help The Planet — But Will It Hurt Whales?

December 5, 2019 — Tail! Tail!” shouts Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, a marine biologist, before grabbing his crossbow, as we close in on a humpback whale.

Rosenbaum gets into position on the bow of the boat, stands firmly with legs apart, takes aim, and fires at the 40-foot cetacean. The arrow that he releases doesn’t have a point – it has a hollow 2-inch tip to collect skin and blubber, and a cork-like stopper to prevent it from penetrating too deeply.

“Oh, yeah!” come shouts from the small research crew. The hit looks clean. Sure enough, when they scoop the floating arrow out of the water, its tip is filled with a small white sliver of whale flesh, containing DNA that will help identify the humpback and its pod and potentially say something about its migratory patterns.

This is the sort of research that Rosenbaum, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s “Ocean Giants” program, has been doing for decades around the globe. Recently, though, whale monitoring has taken on a new urgency in Rosenbaum’s own native habitat — the Atlantic waters off New York City and Long Island.

As whale populations have grown, the WCS and its collaborator, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, have been monitoring them, with an eye toward mediating conflicts with the ocean’s heaviest users: cargo ships, commercial fishing trawlers and the U.S. military.

Now, the whales are poised to get many new, potentially disruptive neighbors: hundreds of skyscraper-high wind turbines, rising from the ocean floor.

The New York Energy Research and Development Authority has awarded two large contracts for offshore wind and anticipates several more in the coming years. The first phase, expected to be complete by 2024, involves dozens of wind turbines in two different offshore plots, leased by energy companies from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. They would generate 1700 megawatts — enough to power more than one million homes.

Read the full story at NPR

Blue Harvest inks deal to acquire 35 Rafael groundfish vessels for $25m

November 26, 2019 — One of the most anticipated forced sell-offs in the history of US commercial fishing – the unloading of Carlos Rafael’s fleet in New Bedford, Massachusetts — looks to be on the verge of completion.

Blue Harvest Fisheries, a US scallop and groundfish supplier backed by New York City-based private equity Bregal Partners, has signed a purchase agreement to buy at least 35 vessels and skiffs and all of their associated permits from Carlos Rafael for nearly $25 million, documents obtained by Undercurrent News confirm.

The deal includes millions of pounds of quota for at least eight types of fish in the Northeast multispecies fishery, including cod, haddock, American plaice, witch flounder, yellowtail flounder, redfish, white hake, and pollock.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

NEW YORK: Effort to salvage juvenile scallops called off for lack of candidates

November 22, 2019 — An unprecedented effort by conservationists, baymen and the state to save a vulnerable population of juvenile scallops by transferring them to deeper waters has been called off after only a day because of a lack of mollusks to move.

In response to a scallop die-off, the state Department of Environmental Conservation moved quickly last week to approve a new Scallop Salvage and Relay permit to allow vulnerable scallops in an area of water near Orient Harbor to be transferred to deeper, safer waters, with the hope they’d survive and spawn next summer.

Stephen Tettelbach, an ecologist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s marine program, worked with the state and lined up five commercial scallop fishermen to dredge the area for juveniles to move earlier this week.

“The baymen went out, they dredged for hours and hours and got very few,” said Tettelbach, adding the numbers were not enough to continue the program. “There were still a good number of scallops, but not as many as we saw a month ago.”

Read the full story at Newsday

Biologists suspect New York bay scallops are latest victim of warmer waters

November 20, 2019 — The famed bay scallops of eastern Long Island came back after their near-death experience of brown tides only after years of a dedicated restoration effort. Now biologists are worried the fishery may be at risk with increasing water temperatures.

New York baymen are seeing the worst Peconic Bays scallop season in years, after summer 2019 water temperatures that reached a sustained July peak of 84 degrees in some places.

The scallops were devastated by severe brown tides for more than a decade starting in 1984 and were nurtured back with many years of work by scientists, baymen, aquaculture experts and volunteers. The shellfish face other threats like being eaten by cownose rays and other predators. But biologists think this situation is different.

“I do believe this one in dues to high water temperatures and low dissolved oxygen that may have coincided with spawning,” Long Island University professor Steve Tettlebach who works with the Cornell Cooperative Extension told National Fisherman. “So, the combination of these stressors is the most plausible explanation for the die-off of adults.”

The damage became evident during the Cornell fall scallop survey when workers found thousands of empty shells, and baymen came home largely empty-handed from the fall season.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

NEW YORK: A Hush-Hush Wind Powwow

November 15, 2019 — Details are scant, but a meeting between developers of the proposed South Fork Wind Farm and the New York State Public Service Commission to begin negotiations on a settlement took place on Friday morning at East Hampton Town Hall.

Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind and Eversource Energy, which jointly plan to construct and operate the South Fork Wind Farm some 35 miles off Montauk, had filed notice with the Public Service Commission in September to begin settlement negotiations in the commission’s review of their application to install the wind farm’s export cable in state waters and on the subterranean path to a Long Island Power Authority substation in East Hampton.

A meeting scheduled to take place on Oct. 8 at the commission’s offices in Albany was canceled after East Hampton Town and state officials objected to its location and to what an attorney representing the town said was unreasonably short notice.

Among the 52 parties that had registered to attend the meeting were town officials, including Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc and members of the town board, as well as members of the town trustees.

Read the full story at The East Hampton Star

PAUL STEIDLER: New York’s reckless gamble on offshore wind power

November 14, 2019 — Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s all-out push for offshore wind power to be a major electricity source for New York City and Long Island takes the region into uncharted waters, fraught with recurring blackouts and significantly higher electricity costs. This is bad for public safety and the economy.

In July, Cuomo said, “New York will lead the way in developing the largest source of offshore wind power in the nation.” Currently, America has just one offshore wind facility, generating 30 megawatts of power, enough for about 24,000 homes.

The governor, though, wants 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035. This is 300 times what is currently in use nationwide and 38% of New York’s current downstate electricity generating capacity of 25,007 megawatts.

Read the full story at New York Business

NEW YORK: Likely Scallop Die-Off Raises Concerns On Long Island

November 11, 2019 — Scallop season started this week, but fisheries on eastern Long Island say scallops in the Peconic Bay may have died off over the summer.

Roger Tollefsen, former executive director of the New York Seafood Council, an industry group in the Hampton Bays, says scallops depend on nutrients in the water to survive.

Harmful algal blooms can diminish the population, but Tollefsen says that some algae can help create a healthier ecosystem.

“We should be nurturing the good algae in our bays as opposed to simply trying to eliminate the ones which we call harmful.”

Read the full story at WSHU