Saving Seafood

Danger at sea — NY’s offshore wind power will kill whales, ground ships and more

April 11, 2025 — New York’s offshore waters are on the brink of a man-made disaster, one that threatens marine life, coastal economies and even national security.

The Empire Wind offshore wind project this week began construction in the New York Bight, a critical marine ecosystem and one of the busiest maritime zones on the East Coast.

The damage may be irreversible — and New Yorkers will be footing the bill.

This week, Empire started dumping thousands of tons of rock into the ocean to prepare for constructing huge monopiles, the foundations upon which its giant wind turbines will sit.

The rocks — 3.2 billion pounds of them, in just this first phase of a planned two-part installation — will destroy habitat, burying vital sand shoals that serve as spawning and nursery grounds for fish species like fluke, squid and scallops.

Entire fisheries and fishing communities from Massachusetts to North Carolina will be harmed.

Next month, Empire will start pile-driving the massive 180-foot monopoles into the seafloor.

The tremendous underwater noise and vibration will harm all marine life, especially endangered species like the North Atlantic right whale.

Read the full article at the New York Post

NEW YORK: New York’s wind farms on Long Island face uncertainty after President Trump halts lease sales, permits

April 8, 2025 — Smith Point’s Park Beach is where offshore wind energy will soon come ashore. Crews there are laying cables for New York’s second wind farm with 84 turbines 30 miles off Montauk.

“We have this untapped renewable resource, the wind… this is going to power millions of homes… with almost zero fossil fuel use,” Melissa Parrot, executive director of Renewable Energy Long Island said. “The planet is at stake. We see the glaciers melting… you see the storms, you see the floods… and the number one way to curb climate change is to stop our CO2 output, which is fossil fuel use.”

Hope has turned to uncertainty. On his first day in office, President Trump halted ocean wind lease sales and permits, ordering a full review. His strategy prioritizes oil, gas and coal to lower prices, he said.

“We have more energy than anybody and we are going to be unleashing it,” Mr. Trump said.

On the other end of of Long Island and on the flip side of the debate, Christina Kramer of Protect Our Coast – LINY applauds Mr. Trump’s decision. She turned against offshore wind when a transmission line was proposed on her Long Beach block. Her group argues wind energy is unreliable, costly and environmentally harmful.

Read the full article at CBS News

NEW YORK: Dire Straits: Montauk Inlet Emergency Dredging to Restore Safe Passage for NY’s Top Fishing Port

February 20, 2025 — So much sand built up in Montauk Inlet that commercial fishing boats bumped the bottom, ran aground, some large trawlers were forced to dock in Rhode Island, and surfers rode waves crashing over the shoals.

It was dire straits for the largest commercial fishing port in New York State until a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ dredge ship that arrived over Valentines Day weekend began the emergency project to make the inlet safely passable again. The arrival came two weeks after the agency secured funding for the project and surveyed the inlet to verify reports that shoaling made for dangerously shallow waters in parts of the inlet, especially at low tide.

“It’s been a really treacherous situation,” Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association in Montauk, told Dan’s Papers. “The month of January was pretty much a loss to the packhouses. The inlet was three feet in places.”

Read the full article at Dans Papers

NEW YORK: New York approves power line for Equinor offshore wind farm

February 14, 2025 — New York’s utility regulator on Thursday granted a unit of Norwegian energy firm Equinor permission to build and operate transmission facilities for the company’s Empire Wind 1 offshore wind farm under construction off the state coast.

The transmission line for the project runs about 17.5 miles (28.2 kilometers) from the boundary of New York State waters to a point of interconnection in Brooklyn, the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) said in a release.

Read the full article at Reuters

How Tearing Down Small Dams Is Helping Restore Northeast Rivers

February 4, 2025 — The glass eels, 3 inches long with skin so translucent it reveals the beating of their tiny hearts, writhe with unexpected strength in the palm of a hand. For a year they have ridden the tides from their hatching site, in the Sargasso Sea, to the mouth of upstate New York’s Saw Kill Creek, a narrow tributary of the Hudson River. That’s where a fyke net set out by biologists, counting migratory American eels as they seek clear and flowing creeks in which to mature, captures them.

Although not considered endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, American eels have for decades been tallied at historically low numbers throughout the Northeastern United States, the most heavily dammed region in the nation. Fishing regulators consider their stocks depleted. But they’re not the only species in trouble here. Alewife and blueback herring, shad, shortnose and Atlantic sturgeon, and Atlantic salmon are all on the decline in Northeastern river systems. In response, a range of government agencies, private landowners, and environmental groups have been collaborating to restore these populations — by removing the dams that block their passage.

Although dam removals have been happening since 1912, the vast majority have occurred since the mid-2010s, and they have picked up steam since the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provided funding for such projects. To date, 806 Northeastern dams have come down, with hundreds more in the pipeline. Across the country, 2023 was a watershed year, with a total of 80 dam removals. Says Andrew Fisk, Northeast regional director of the nonprofit American Rivers, “The increasing intensity and frequency of storm events, and the dramatically reduced sizes of our migratory fish populations, are accelerating our efforts.”

Read the full article at Yale Environment 360

NEW YORK: NY food bank netted huge haul of 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were alive

January 30, 2025 — A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish this month — but it came with a catch.

LocalCoho, a soon-to-close salmon farm in the small upstate city of Auburn, wanted to give 40,000 pounds of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, a mother lode of high-quality protein that could feed thousands of families.

But the fish were still alive and swimming in the farm’s giant indoor tanks. The organizations would need to figure out how to get some 13,000 salmon from the water and then have them processed into frozen fillets for distribution to regional food pantries.

And they’d need to do it fast, before the business closed for good. LocalCoho is ceasing operations this Friday.

Thanks to dozens of food pantry volunteers willing to help staffers scoop up the salmon, the team was able to empty the tanks in a matter of weeks and cold pack tons of fish for shipment to a processor.

“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit,” said Brian McManus, the food bank’s chief operations officer. “I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”

Tackling food waste has been a daunting challenge for years both in the U.S. and around the world. More than one-third of the food produced in the U.S. is never eaten and much of it ends up in landfills.

Read the full article at The Associated Press

Second Circuit ends glass eel fishing season for Unkechaug Indian Nation

January 28, 2025 — A 17th century treaty does not grant a New York state-recognized Indigenous tribe unequivocal fishing and whaling rights, a Second Circuit panel ruled Tuesday.

The Unkechaug Indian Nation, which began harvesting baby eels in 2010, filed a complaint in 2018 against New York environmental regulators after facing criminal prosecution for harvesting critically overfished glass eels outside of their reservation.

The tribe’s argument relied on a treaty — which stems from an order issued in 1676 by New York’s colonial governor Sir Edmond Andros — that prevented interference in the tribe’s fishing practices out of fear the tribe would revolt against Long Island settlers.

But the Second Circuit panel said the treaty is not binding because it predates the formation of the United States and has not been ratified by Congress in the centuries since.

“It is undisputed that the Andros order was not made during the Confederal period,” U.S. Circuit Judge Sarah A.L. Merriam, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote for the panel. “Indeed, it predates the Confederation by nearly 100 years.”

The tribe said the treaty applies, despite being made under British rule, because of a constitutional clause that asserts all “debts and engagements” created before the adoption of the Constitution should be valid under U.S. law.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service 

NEW YORK: Environmentalists Outraged Over Hochul’s Horseshoe Crab Bill Veto

December 27, 2024 — Environmentalists are outraged over Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent decision to veto the Horseshoe Crab Protection Act, which prohibits the taking of horseshoe crabs from New York waters. The legislation would have allowed the populations to recover and ensured the survival of the important species, advocated said.

In her veto message, Hochul wrote: “This bill would prohibit the taking of horseshoe crabs for commercial or biomedical purposes and also extend the authority of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to manage crabs.”

She added: “DEC has significant rules and regulations regarding commercial and recreational fishing in the state and adheres to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission management plans to ensure healthy coastal fishery resources. DEC has already announced four lunar closures for the upcoming year to address concerns about overharvesting the horseshoe crab population.”

Also, Hochul said: “This bill could have unintended consequences on the management of other species such as whelk and eel, and could harm the commercial fishing industry and impair advancements in the biomedical field. While this bill is well-intentioned, the management of marine species is better left to the experts at DEC.”

She urged the legislature to restore DEC’s specific authority to regulate crabs, and said she was “directing DEC to evaluate and implement further administrative measures to protect this species pursuant to its broad authority to protect and regulate the state’s marine resources. Therefore, I am constrained to veto this bill.”

Read the full article at The Patch

NEW YORK: There May Be Hope Yet for Peconic Scallops

November 15, 2024 — Over the past five-plus years, Peconic Bay scallops have suffered mass die-offs blamed on an infectious parasite, but researchers at the Cornell Cooperate Extension have found a source of scientifically informed hope: genetic diversity.

Harrison Tobi, an aquaculture educator with the extension’s Bay Scallop Restoration Program, put it plainly for nonscientists: “Basically, they’re inbred in the Peconic.”

To understand the findings, Mr. Tobi discussed when the parasite was first identified in Argopecten irradians, or Peconic Bay scallops, in 2019: The “fishery collapsed by almost 99 percent,” resulting in losses of over $1 million annually since then.

“First off, it’s what we call a novel parasite, which means it was literally never discovered before,” Mr. Tobi said at the Southold laboratory. “Its genetics are brand-new to the scientific world.”

After the collapse, the Cornell Cooperative laboratory sent samples to Stony Brook University’s marine animal disease laboratory, led by Bassem Allam. “That is when we first discovered the parasite,” Mr. Tobi said.

There is no way to know how long it might have been present. “It’s like Schrodinger’s cat: We can’t really say it was or it wasn’t there because we didn’t test for it,” he said. Most likely, it had been present for some time, as it was also found in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

US East Coast states select firms to run offshore wind development compensation fund for fishers

November 12, 2024 — A coalition of U.S. East Coast states have selected two firms to manage the Offshore Wind Fisheries Compensation Fund, a mitigation program built to compensate commercial and recreation for-hire fishers for revenue lost due to offshore wind developments.

The fund is a collaboration between the governments of 11 East Coast states – Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina – to provide financial compensation for economic loss caused by offshore wind projects along the Atlantic Coast. The states launched a competition earlier this year to select an administrator to run the new fund.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource