March 27, 2020 — The Southern Shrimp Alliance noted this week that Gulf of Mexico shrimp landings in February 2020 were 36.1% above historical averages.
The National Marine Fisheries Service Southeast Fisheries Center released February Gulf of Mexico shrimp landings earlier this week.
March 16, 2020 — Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, have started a three-year study of Atlantic cod and other commercial fish species in southern New England waters. The goal is to gather baseline data to address how offshore wind development in the region could impact fisheries.
An autonomous underwater glider is surveying areas in and around Cox’s Ledge. This area includes the South Fork wind-energy lease area south of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The glider has a hydrophone to detect fish spawning sounds and an acoustic telemetry receiver to detect tagged fish. The receiver will identify location and seasonal occurrence of hot spots for key commercial and federally listed fish species.
There is little information on Atlantic cod spawning specific to southern New England, according to project lead Sofie Van Parijs. Cod elsewhere are known to form large, dense spawning aggregations in predictable locations relatively close to shore, where they can be vulnerable to disturbance that might impact spawning success.
“Biological sampling will determine the population’s onset of spawning and track growth, maturity, age structure, and other life history parameters,” said Van Parijs, who heads the Passive Acoustics Research Group at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. “This information will help inform the starting date for our glider surveys each year. We will tentatively conduct these surveys from December through March this year and for longer periods in the subsequent two years.”
March 12, 2020 — A three-year study of cod and other commercial fish species is underway around New England offshore wind energy sites, part of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration effort to better understand how proposed turbine arrays will affect the environment and fisheries.
With universities and other partners, the agency’s National Marine Fisheries Service in December deployed a Slocum electric glider, a type of autonomous underwater vehicle that has proven highly successful in long-term oceanographic studies.
The glider’s instrument payload includes a hydrophone to detect the sounds of whales and of fish spawning, and an acoustic telemetry receiver to pick up signals from fish that have been captured and released with acoustic tags to track their movements.
Now surveying the area around Cox’s Ledge, the glider is covering an area that includes wind developer Ørsted’s planned South Fork wind energy area south of Rhode Island and east of Montauk, N.Y.
March 12, 2020 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:
Recent stock assessments by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determined that the bottomfish stocks in the Territories of American Samoa and Guam are overfished and the bottomfish fishery in American Samoa is undergoing overfishing. In October 2019, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council recommended that NMFS implement interim measures to address rebuilding of the stocks and overfishing in American Samoa. Today in Honolulu the Council additionally recommended that staff work with NMFS and the American Samoa Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources on consistent in-season monitoring and accountability measures; the training of bottomfish fishermen on electronic reporting; and the potential use of a temporal-spatial closure.
To develop the rebuilding plans for the overfished stock, select members of the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee and Advisory Panel will work with NMFS Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC) and Pacific Islands Regional Office to gather needed information. Public meetings will also be held in the two Territories to explore the range of potential management measures for the plans.
To address comments from fishermen that data used in the stock assessment were not accurate, the Council will work with the Territory agencies and NMFS on an outreach plan on the importance of accurate and robust data collection and the management efforts for the bottomfish fisheries in American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).
Another comment made by fishermen regards the current federal management of bottomfish as a single stock complex in each of the Territories. In response, the Council requested that PIFSC develop a new bottomfish benchmark assessment on a species resolution that is deemed appropriate during a data preparation workshop at the soonest time practicable. PIFSC was asked to also explore other modeling approaches and data sets aside from the creel surveys and commercial receipt books currently used (e.g., electronic self-reporting) and to engage fishermen throughout the stock assessment process. The Council will work with NMFS and Territory agencies to review the bottomfish management list and discuss the available options and regulatory consequences of adding and removing species from the list.
The Council today also specified annual catch limits (ACLs) for the CNMI and Guam bottomfish fisheries for fishing years 2020-2023. For the CNMI, the Council recommended an ACL of 84,000 pounds (a 39 percent risk of overfishing) and an annual catch target (ACT) of 78,000 pounds (34 percent risk of overfishing). For Guam, the Council recommended an ACL of 27,000 pounds (31 percent risk of overfishing), which allows the catch to be maximized while preventing overfishing and allowing the stock to rebuild within five years. Because data collection systems in Guam and CNMI do not allow for near-real time tracking of catches, the Council recommended a post-season accountability measure where the ACL for the succeeding year will be reduced by the amount of the overage determined by the three-year average of recent catch.
The Council meeting continues tomorrow at the YWCA Fuller Hall, 1040 Richards St., Honolulu, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, go to www.wpcouncil.org/meetings-calendars, email info@wpcouncil.org or call (808) 522-8220.
March 11, 2020 — An environmental nonprofit has moved closer to pursuing a lawsuit claiming the Trump administration is not providing enough protection for whales and sea turtles threatened by ship strikes near ports along California’s coastline.
On March 2, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a “notice of intent to sue,” in which it demanded that the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Coast Guard change how they protect marine life within the next 60 days or face legal action.
Ships near the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the nation’s two busiest ports, are on a voluntary slow-down program to reduce the striking of whales and curtail air pollution. But data from marine mammal experts and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate voluntary compliance has not sufficiently reduced the number of ship strikes.
“Ship strikes kill far too many endangered whales off California’s coast, and the Trump administration can’t keep ignoring a deadly threat that’s only getting worse,” said Brian Segee, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We want good science to determine how shipping lanes are placed and managed. Ships simply don’t need to kill as many whales and sea turtles as they do.”
March 10, 2020 — The Maine Fishermen’s Forum took place in Rockport, Maine, last week. The hot topic of the event? The National Marine Fisheries Service’s pending North Atlantic right whale policy.
State and federal regulators are calling for the Maine lobster industry to change up their gear in order to protect the endangered right whale. These measures include reducing the number of vertical ropes in offshore waters and using weak or breakaway ropes. But lobstermen disagree with the actions, arguing that Canadian fishermen and ships are the ones killing the whales —not them.
March 9, 2020 — Federal fishing regulators found themselves in the hot seat at this year’s annual Maine Fisherman’s Forum as the lobster industry sounded off about looming right whale rules that threaten to upend the country’s most valuable fishery.
Phillip Torrey, a sixth-generation lobsterman from Winter Harbor, told regulators it was unfair to ask Maine fishermen to give up any more than they already have to protect the endangered whale without proof that they are the ones causing them harm.
“If you could show us that we were killing right whales, we would do whatever you asked,” Torrey told regulators. “If it was a a court case, no district attorney in the world could put us to trial because they’d say they have no evidence against us, Maine fishermen.”
Torrey was one of more than 150 people who turned out to see the National Marine Fisheries Service field questions about its right whale policy, like why impose fishing restrictions on the $485 million-a-year lobster industry when data shows that it is Canadian fishermen and ships that are killing whales.
Fishing gear entanglement is the cause of most known right whale deaths or serious injuries, said Regional Administrator Michael Pentony. The agency is issuing draft regulations for the lobster industry this summer because it represents at least 90 percent of the gear in U.S. whale habitat, he said.
March 6, 2020 — US importers of Mexican shrimp and other seafood should soon be prepared to present documentation certifying that any of the products they are bringing over the border do not match a list of roughly five species caught in the upper Gulf of California using multiple gear types.
The US’ National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced Wednesday that it will ban the import of virtually all Mexican shrimp and other fish caught in that region of the country over concerns about the endangered vaquita porpoise. An effective date has not yet been set, but it is expected to be within a month and require importers to maintain a “certification of admissibility” that is signed by a Mexican government official establishing that the products being shipped are not from the upper Gulf of California’s:
March 5, 2020 — The Trump administration agreed Wednesday to determine by this summer whether it will extend federal wildlife protections to Hawaii’s cauliflower coral reef.
The agreement, filed in federal court in Honolulu, comes after the Center for Biological Diversity sued claiming the National Marine Fisheries Service fails to protect the coral under the Endangered Species Act.
In its federal complaint, the conservation group said Hawaii’s cauliflower coral has been devastated by ocean warming.
Warming oceans have caused widespread bleaching of the coral, whose populations declined by 36% between 1999 and 2012, according to the conservation group. A global coral-bleaching between 2014 and 2017 killed millions of coral on hundreds of reefs from Hawaii to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.
March 2, 2020 — Fishermen affected by the 2018 Pacific cod and Chignik sockeye disasters will soon have access to about $35 million in relief funding.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross allocated about $65 million to fisheries disaster relief, about $35 million of which is for Alaska, according to a Feb. 27 announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Within Alaska, about $24.4 million will go to the Pacific cod fishery disaster and about $10.3 million to the Chignik sockeye fishery. The funding was appropriated when Congress passed the 2019 Consolidated and Supplemental Appropriations Act.
Fisheries disasters can be declared under the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Management and Conservation Act when natural disasters or management actions significantly negatively impact stakeholders’ ability to participate in a fishery.
In the case of the Pacific cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska, scientists are linking the decline in stock abundance to environmental causes; in Chignik, the salmon decline seemed to be linked to poor environmental conditions for sockeye that summer.
Both disaster requests had already been granted, but the amount of funding that the fisheries would have allocated to them was yet to be determined. The National Marine Fisheries Service determines how much funding to allocate to fisheries based on commercial revenue loss information.
Affected fishermen will be able to apply for funding to help with infrastructure projects, habitat restoration, state-run vessel and fishing permit buybacks, and job retraining, according to the announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.