Saving Seafood

Wholesale fish prices drop as restaurants cut back

March 17, 2020 — Prices for lobsters and other fish are seeing sharp drops as export markets see declines and restaurants have cut back on orders as customers hunker down amid the coronavirus outbreak, Long Island fish dealers say.

Meanwhile, the decision to limit restaurants and bars to delivery and takeout only is rippling across the wholesale fish market, leading one large East End fish seller to tell local baymen to stop fishing altogether until demand catches up with supply.

The wholesale price for lobsters, normally anywhere from $12 to $15 a pound this time of year, have fallen under $8, dealers say. Other normally pricey fish such as tuna and swordfish are also taking a dive, as restaurants in New York City cut back on orders because of stay-at-home customers, or city residents who have left to summer homes in the Hamptons.

If there’s any silver lining right now, said Nino Locascio, co-owner of Mastic Seafood in Mastic, it’s the walk-in retail market in Suffolk, where business has remained brisk. He also sells wholesale to local restaurants, and that business is down “dramatically,” he said.

Read the full story at Newsday

N.Y.’s plan to fast-track renewables could get ‘ugly’

February 26, 2020 — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to speed up approvals of renewable energy projects is launching the state’s climate ambitions into a new phase that could cause an uproar in rural communities.

The legislation, presented as an amendment to the Democratic governor’s budget on Friday, could be a bellwether for officials in other states looking to fast-track costly and often controversial energy developments to meet their own carbon-cutting goals.

At the heart of the New York bill is a plan to remove wind and solar power from the state’s traditional energy permitting process, developed for natural gas plants and approved by Cuomo almost a decade ago.

Wind and solar projects would no longer face scrutiny from the state’s environmental and utility regulators, instead receiving permits from a new office housed within an economic development agency.

But by trying to pave the way for developers, the governor’s overhaul could incense locals in several rural counties, many of them located near the shores of lakes Erie and Ontario or along the border of Pennsylvania. The bill must still pass both chambers of the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Last week, county officials near Niagara Falls were considering ways to block vast new wind turbine projects, with one legislator lamenting that the state’s incentives for wind and solar were “destroying our communities,” according to Niagara Frontier Publications.

Read the full story at E&E News

Orsted updates South Fork wind farm plan amid concerns about delays

February 19, 2020 — Danish energy giant Orsted has filed an update to the construction and operation plan for its proposed South Fork wind farm, amid doubts by opponents and a state lawmaker that it will hit its contracted December 2022 completion date.

The proposed South Fork Wind Farm, a joint venture of Orsted USA and Eversource, last year announced plans to update its construction and operations plan for the project, which would be located in federal waters 30 miles from Montauk Point. Despite the filing last Friday, a federal website lists the project review status as “paused.”

It’s uncertain how comprehensive the revised construction plan is, or specifically what’s in it. Asked for details, Orsted spokeswoman Meaghan Wims would say only that the updated plan includes wider turbine spacing of “1 nautical mile by 1 nautical mile.”

Nor would she say whether the update would impact permitting or construction timelines. Delays in a federal review of a separate project by rival developer Vineyard Wind have pushed its scheduled completion beyond its planned date in 2022.

“We continue to monitor developments at the federal level,” Wims said in a statement. “While it is too early to say the exact impact that those delays may have on our timeline, we are watching the federal permitting process closely.”

Read the full story at Newsday

Climate Change Is Reshaping Atlantic Fisheries and Sending This Fluke Fight to Court

February 19, 2020 — By his own account, Anthony DiLernia is a guy who can make friends with any angler. For 45 years he’s run a fishing charter boat out of New York Harbor, and he’s served as a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishing Council on and off for almost as long.

But get DiLernia on the subject of Paralichthys dentatus, aka summer flounder, aka fluke, and his voice gets territorial in a harbor kind of a way. What steams him are the wide variances in the amount the fish the federal government permits each state to catch. The uneven allocations are the reason that Southern fishermen routinely travel hundreds of miles to the waters off Long Island to trawl for fluke that local fishermen are forbidden to catch.

These state quotas, which are meant to prevent a species from being fished out of existence, are based on patterns of where the fish were brought in to docks in the 1980s. Back then summer flounder were clustered off Cape Hatteras, which explains, in part, how Virginia and North Carolina together get more than 50% of the annual quota, whereas New York gets only a little more than 7%.

But anyone who spends any time with a net knows warming waters have been pushing fluke steadily north. “You know all those critters who used to live down South? Guess what? They’ve moved to the Bronx,” DiLernia said.

“Our guys will be fishing right along their guys 80 miles off Long Island,” he said with indignation rising in his voice. “We catch more than a couple hundred pounds, and we have to throw the rest back—which is a total waste. Meanwhile, they are filling their freezer and driving back to North Carolina. With diesel fuel. What do you think that does to the environment?”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

NEW YORK: Peconic Bay scallops die-off tied to newly detected parasite

February 4, 2020 — The catastrophic die-off of Peconic Bay scallops in eastern Long Island waters may be tied to a previously undetected parasite that can infect the kidneys of adult and juvenile scallops, state regulators reported Friday.

The specific parasitic organism, known as coccidian parasite, was discovered in kidney tissue of all 32 scallops collected and sampled from Shelter Island’s Hay Beach last November, the state Department of Environmental Conservation said. Some scallops had “extensive damage” to renal tubes, enough to kill the most heavily infected, the DEC said.

The agency, working with Stony Brook University’s Marine Animal Disease Laboratory, said the parasite “represents a significant threat” to the scallops, but cautioned that “further research is needed” to study how widely the parasite may have been dispersed, its life cycle and rate of infection before it can be said with certainty that it was the direct cause of the die-off.

“This is a new factor that scientists think may have a prevalent effect,” a DEC spokeswoman said.

Biologists last year theorized a combination of factors may have spurred the catastrophic collapse of Peconic Bay scallops, which saw mortality rates of from 90% to 100% in many eastern waterways.

Read the full story at Newsday

Inside New York’s Push to Be ‘Center of Gravity’ for US Offshore Wind

January 22, 2020 — In the race for American offshore wind jobs, New York got an uncharacteristically late start.

Unlike Rhode Island, New York has no turbines spinning in the water. It does not have a ready-and-waiting offshore wind port facility, like Massachusetts, nor large amounts of free harborside space as in Virginia or Maryland. To the extent the burgeoning U.S. offshore wind industry has a capital today, most would nod toward Boston.

But the Empire State has plenty of advantages, and it’s making up for lost time.

Over the past year, New York solidified its position as not only the most important U.S. offshore wind market but also ranking among the most important in the world. Having nearly quadrupled its offshore wind target, New York now claims the largest in the nation — 9 gigawatts by 2035 — along with several of the biggest projects currently underway.

Sites like the once-forgotten South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and the proposed Arthur Kill Terminal on Staten Island may soon transform into major renewable energy hubs.

Read the full story at Green Tech Media

Maine seaweed harvest set record in 2018, but court rulings cloud future

January 17, 2020 — Seaweed, or sea vegetables, have been on a growth trajectory for the past 10 years. What started as a small industry has blossomed into a sustainable economic engine for coastal communities from New York to Maine, who have faced slowdowns in other once-dominant fisheries.

“Five percent of Maine’s aquaculture lease and limited-purpose aquaculture LPA holders (47 individuals) also hold a commercial lobster fishing license. Out of those 47, 12 of them farm kelp. Out of 60 total kelp farmers in Maine, that’s 20 percent,” says Afton Hupper of the Maine Aquaculture Association. “Lobstermen are already equipped with much of the gear required to start a kelp farm,” adds Hupper. “It is a good way to diversify and supplement their income.”

In Maine, harvest of all seaweed species peaked in 2018, with 22 million pounds, according to Maine Department of Marine Resources data. But a recent Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling has meant changes to the rockweed industry. Until this year, wild rockweed (Ascophyllum nodosum) — with landings consistently making up more than 95 percent of all landings statewide — was harvested along coastlines. Last year, it was valued under $1 million at the docks.

But now, permission from landowners is required to harvest, since the court determined rockweed in the intertidal zone to be the landowner’s private property. Maine landowners now have a say in how rockweed is harvested, as well as the opportunity to benefit from the industry.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

The Complicated Role of Iron in Ocean Health and Climate Change

January 6, 2020 — One brisk day in April 2013, as he drove with colleagues along the southern coast of Patagonia, Mike Kaplan spotted a geologist’s treasure trove—an active gravel pit with freshly exposed walls. He pulled over, grabbed the backpack full of digging tools stowed in the car trunk and walked into the large hole.

To Kaplan’s south lay the Southern Ocean, stretching toward Antarctica. Strewn around him was evidence of Earth’s most recent ice age: heaps of crushed rock and gravel released by one of the many glaciers that had once covered North and South America. Standing in the pit, Kaplan spotted what he was looking for: a layer of fine gray silt deposited by ice sheets roughly 20,000 years ago.

A geologist at Columbia University in New York, Kaplan has spent over a decade collecting the sediments that make dust, and studying how that dust, launched from earth to air to sea, influences Earth’s climate, past and present. Dozens of intriguing samples have made their way home with him, stowed in his suitcase or shipped in a duct-taped cardboard box. As he scraped the dark gray sediment into a plastic bag, he felt a rush of anticipation. Given the sample’s location, he thought that it might be just what he needed to test an aspect of a controversial idea known as the iron hypothesis.

Read the full story at the Smithsonian Magazine

New York board OKs large wind farm despite local prohibition

December 18, 2019 — A New York board has approved plans to build 27 wind turbines despite a new local intended to block the project. The state’s Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environment approved the 124-megawatt Calpine wind farm in eastern Broome County on Monday. A new zoning law adopted by the town of Sanford effectively banned the project but board Chairman John Rhodes said environmental impacts would be minimized, based on plans by developer Calpine. The state Public Service Commission says the decision demonstrates how the state is working to achieve Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s goal of a zero-emissions electricity sector by 2040.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WENY

Resilient New England Coral Is Teaching Us about the Future of Reefs

December 16, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Dave Veilleux and Sean Grace lean over trays lined with thumb-sized coral colonies, varying in color from white to brown to a mix of white and brown. An instrument called a fluorometer beeps, and they move on to measure photosynthesis in the next colony. In the background, you can hear the constant flow of seawater from Long Island Sound, and the whir of the carbon dioxide system hard at work.

Grace chairs the Biology Department at Southern Connecticut State University, and Veilleux runs the shellfish hatchery at NOAA Fisheries’ Milford Laboratory. The two have known each other for 15 years, since Veilleux was Grace’s first graduate student. They’ve teamed up again to study the effects of ocean acidification on New England’s only hard coral species, the appropriately named Astrangia poculata, or northern star coral.

Northern star coral is considered a model for investigating coral response to environmental change. Researchers want to pinpoint what makes this hardy coral uniquely able to thrive in harsh conditions. This may provide ideas on how to help boost the resilience of more delicate tropical coral species. The Milford Lab has two state-of-the-art ocean acidification experimental systems built for carbon dioxide exposure studies, making it an ideal setting for this research.

Read the full release here