Saving Seafood

River herring, hurt by dams and climate, might be endangered

September 5, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — The federal government is reviewing the status of a pair of river herring species to see if the little fish should be listed under the Endangered Species Act because of factors including dams and climate change.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is looking at the health of the alewife and blueback herring populations. The fish live in rivers from Maine to Florida, and conservationists have long made the case that their declining populations pose a major problem for the health of ecosystems along the East Coast.

The herring species are estimated to be at about 3 percent of their historical abundance, fisheries service biologist Tara Lake said in August. The damming of rivers and the creation of other obstructions, she said, has reduced their access to habitat to 5 percent of its historic amount.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Westerly Sun

ALASKA: Stakeholders voice preferred changes to federal fisheries act

August 31, 2017 — SOLDOTNA, Alaska — Sportfishing groups and advocates want to see the federal government separate the management of sport and commercial fishing in the upcoming renewal of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

The act, originally passed in 1976 and co-sponsored by the late Alaska U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, establishes the management system for federal and state fisheries in marine waters.

Under the law, the state has authority over waters from the mean high tide line out to three nautical miles offshore, and federal government has authority over waters from 3–200 nautical miles offshore, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, oversees the fisheries in federal waters.

Last reauthorized in 2006, the act is up for renewal and potential amendment. Sen. Dan Sullivan, who chairs the Senate Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee, chaired a field hearing for the act at Kenai Peninsula College on Wednesday, hearing from more than a dozen witnesses on three panels and discussing potential changes to the act.

The hearing on the Kenai Peninsula was the first of the field hearings on the reauthorization.

Panelists with interests in the sportfishing industry repeatedly emphasized that commercial fishing and recreational fishing are two distinct activities and asked for recreational fishing to be considered in management decisions.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Oceana Loses Court Battle on Mid-Atlantic & New England Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology

August 28, 2017 — WASHINGTON — As part of its efforts to prevent overfishing, Congress has directed the National Marine Fisheries Service and regional councils to establish methodologies for collecting and reporting data on fish that are caught but subsequently discarded. Such discards are known as bycatch. In response to the congressional directive, the Northeast region adopted its Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology in 2015. Oceana, Inc., a nonprofit organization focused on protecting the oceans, filed suit, claiming that the adoption of this methodology violates the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

In March 2015, the National Marine Fisheries Service approved a new version of the Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology, which is set forth in Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology: An Omnibus Amendment to the Fishery Management Plans of the Mid-Atlantic and New England Regional Fishery Management Councils, AR 6438-7511. NMFS then promulgated a final rule implementing the amendment in June 2015. United States District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle has ruled that Oceana has not identified any feature of the 2015 SBRM that violates the MSA, APA, or NEPA.

The following is excerpted from an article published Friday by Courthouse News Service:

Federal regulators ducked a conservation-minded challenge Thursday concerning rules meant to minimize fishing bycatch.

The National Marine Fisheries Service adopted the rules in question two years ago, with approval from the D.C. Circuit.

Though the rules requires fishing vessels to occasionally have a biologist document the amount of fish caught and discarded, the group Oceana complained in a federal complaint that the infrequency of such observation undermines its efficacy as a serious check on fishing abuses.

U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle sided with the agency Thursday at summary judgment, saying the issue comes down to how the Fisheries Service allocates its funding for NMFS, short for standardized bycatch reporting methodology.

“There is no funding trigger that needs to be adequately defined, nor a discretionary procedure for which the agency must set out an identifiable standard,” the ruling states. “Since there is no impermissibly vague funding trigger, the agency’s funding allocations to the SBRM are not reviewable.”

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

NMFS Institutes More Swordfish Research Off Florida, Praised by EDF

August 16, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Dr. David Kerstetter of Nova Southeastern University will receive an exempted fishing permit (EFP) from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to conduct research in the East Florida Coast Pelagic Longline Closed Area. Dr. Kerstetter will be working alongside Atlantic swordfish fishermen in an effort to “improve understanding of encounter rates of juvenile swordfish and species like sharks, bullfishes and sea turtles in order to find the best ways to reduce their mortality.”

According to Katie Westfall, senior manager of highly migratory species advocacy for EDF’s Oceans Program, fishermen have already made sacrifices to help the Atlantic swordfish population rebound. However, this project will help by collecting data from fisheries that “interact with imperiled highly migratory species.”

“The project will also pioneer an approach to link catch data with oceanographic data, allowing researchers to learn over time where and when species will occur in order to help fishermen avoid bycatch of sharks, billfishes, and sea turtles,” Westfall added. “This has the potential to be transformative by dramatically minimizing unnecessary deaths of protected species while improving the catch of healthy target species like swordfish.”

Westfall is hopeful that the research will help “pave the way to responsibly increasing yield in domestic fisheries and strengthening revenues for American seafood businesses.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Warming Waters, Looming Crisis

It’s no fluke: Fish populations are on the move, chasing cooler marine temperatures. At Rutgers, scientists track their alarming migrations.

August 11, 2017 — In Malin Pinsky’s lab, they keep the unicorn blood in the fridge. It sits alongside dozens of small, white boxes, each containing a snippet of fin or other tissue from the clownfish and summer flounder that, together, may help Pinsky and his colleagues determine the answer to a critical question about the world’s changing oceans. In fact, the unicorn blood—so dubbed by lab manager Michelle Stuart because, Pinsky explains, “it’s expensive and it works magic”—is actually a stew of enzymes used to purify DNA from those fish samples.

The DNA helps Pinsky and his team at Rutgers University in New Brunswick track the movement of fish species over time. What they are finding is likely to have major implications for the commercial and recreational fishing industries in New Jersey and around the world.

For decades, scientists have observed a northward shift in the ranges of many land-based animals in response to a warming climate, among them birds and butterflies. In addition, some mountain-dwelling species, like the pika, a cousin of the rabbit native to the Western United States, have moved to higher altitudes, chasing the cooler temperatures to which they have adapted over millions of years of evolution. Among these observations are scattered reports of the same thing happening in warming ocean waters.

As a marine biologist, Pinsky had read the reports. Concerned about how widespread the changes might be, he and his colleagues ran the first stage of an ongoing research project from 2011 to 2013. The results were startling. “Not only are many species of marine animals, from cod to flounder to lobster, moving to new locations,” says Pinsky, “but it’s happening very rapidly, and it’s affecting a wide range of fisheries, both commercial and recreational.”

Analyzing data collected annually by the National Marine Fisheries Service and its partners, Pinsky’s lab launched the website OceanAdapt, which charts the changing ranges of a wide variety of marine species, regionally and nationally. The site’s graphs depict changes in latitude and sea depth. On a species-by-species basis, those changes are not particularly striking; it’s long been known that fish move around a lot from year to year. But when considering the marine life community as a whole, one observes an indisputable trend northward and downward (to greater depths).

Read the full story at New Jersey Monthly

NOAA rejects bid to list tuna as endangered

August 9, 2017 — The Trump administration on Tuesday chose not to list the Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species, rejecting a petition by the largest global conservation group that the U.S. is a member of, with France, South Korea, Australia, and several other countries.

The Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service announced the decision after a 12-month review of the request that started under the Obama administration.

In response, environmentalists are organizing an international boycott of sushi restaurants, decrying what they say is the startling reversal of the agency’s original intent to list the tuna under the Obama administration.

The agency said that it looked at all factors affecting the bluefin tuna’s habitat, and based “on the best scientific and commercial data available … and after taking into account efforts being made to protect the species, we have determined that listing of the Pacific bluefin tuna is not warranted,” the agency said in a notice published in the Federal Register.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature had petitioned the U.S. government to list the tuna after assessing “the status of Pacific bluefin tuna and categorized the species as ‘vulnerable’ in 2014, meaning that the species was considered to be facing a high risk of extinction in the wild,” the notice read.

Read the full story at the Washington Examiner

Dr. Brian Rothschild: Congress Must Make Magnuson Recognize Existence, Content of National Standards in Fishery Plans

Dr. Brian Rothschild

August 9, 2017 — The following was written by Dr. Brian Rothschild, and was published in the June/July issue of Fishery News:

Four years and counting, the stalled reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (MSFCMA) is impeding the progress of U.S. fishery management.

In December 2013, a reauthorization draft was distributed to the 113th Congress. Since that time various versions of the bill have been shuffled between the House and the Senate. The most recent version—”Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act”—was introduced to the 115th Congress on January 3, 2017 by Congressman Young as H.R. 200. On February 10, it was referred to the Subcommittee on Water, Power, and Oceans.

H.R. 200 is a step in the right direction. It builds flexibility into fisheries stock-rebuilding schedules by replacing the current law’s formulaic and impracticable rebuilding strictures. It recognizes, at least implicitly, that stocks that are at a historically low level of abundance should be designated as “depleted”, not as “overfished” and addresses, albeit weakly, improvements in research planning.

However, H.R. 200 only scratches the surface of needed reform. It falls short in failing to recognize the operational quartet that fundamentally shapes fisheries- policy implementation. This quartet consists of the interactions among 1) the “plain language of the law”, 2) the record of “legislative history”, 3) guidelines issued by the agency (NOAA), and 4) day-to-day implementation actions by NMFS.

Given this framework, it is crucial to realize that even the slightest ambiguity or equivocation in the reauthorized law will propagate uncertainty and substantial costs to the over-all economic and social performance of our fisheries.

Let’s look at an example. To begin, it is necessary to recognize that the MSFMCA is based upon 10 National Standards. So, it is only logical that reauthorization language should use the National Standards as a point of departure.

But, in H.R. 200 the National Standards are virtually ignored. This is problematic because reference to, and possible revision of, the National Standards is necessary to improve fishery policy. Not doing so creates substantial opportunity for ambiguity and equivocation.

To further exemplify, two key concepts in National Standard 1 involve: (1) overfishing and (2) optimum yield.

(1) There are many different types and shades of overfishing, so what kind and how much overfishing are we preventing?

Arriving at a determination of overfishing depends on the choice of model (there are several). The magnitude of a overfishing “value” generally differs among “models”. For example, overfishing can be defined in the context of production models, age-structured production models, or yield-per-recruit models, each of which gives a different view of stock status. It is also often the case, amidst this profusion/confusion, that all of these definitions are just simply ignored and replaced by arbitrary “proxies” that rely upon highly uncertain age-structured production models.

Consider also that two different forms of overfishing are well-known: “stock overfishing” and “recruitment overfishing”. Each is determined on the basis of different information requirements. Each has different conservation content.

Stock overfishing can be determined on the basis of data at hand e.g. landings and fishing effort, and has— despite its wide use in managing fish stocks—very little conservation importance. Alternately, determining whether recruitment overfishing exists requires several years of data—and despite its conservation importance— it is seldom done.

So, when we change “overfished” to “depleted”, how do we interpret the status of all the fish stocks previously designated as overfished or at risk to overfishing, definitions that would no longer be relevant? How do we manage stocks that are at a low level of abundance because they are truly depleted by fishing, in contrast to stocks that are depleted by environmental change? Also, there does not appear to be a universally acceptable way to distinguish fishing-depleted from environment- depleted.

(2) Optimum has a specific technical meaning. It refers to something that we want to maximize. The question arises as to what we are maximizing and over what time frame. On one hand, the extant version of the law gives some clues, but following these clues only leads to deeper uncertainty and ambiguity. First, it is clear that the intent of the extant law is to somehow maximize “a quantity of fish”. But it could be “a quantity of fish” that provides the “greatest overall benefit to the nation”, or it could be “maximum sustainable yield as reduced by economic, social, or ecological factors”, or it could be “rebuilding the fishery to an MSY level”.

And, in any event, a little thought might indicate that maximizing a quantity of fish may not be a good idea in general. For example, there are many other measures of performance that are better measures than a quantity of fish and yet optimizing these other measures seems to be virtually ignored.

A relevant example is that optimization, as it is practiced under the current law, is taken to mean that biological productivity is maximized, subject to economic and social constraints. Yet, perhaps a better and different approach would be to maximize economic and social productivity, subject to biological constraints!

So, the reauthorization of the MSFCMA gathers dust. During four decades since its original authorization in 1976, fisheries management has had its bright spots and dark patches. Future dark patches can be considerably reduced by making sure that the elements underpinning the operational quartet in the reauthorization are, at the very least, well-defined and feasible to attain. The consonance among the plain language of the law, the intent of Congress, the regulations and the actual implementation of the Act needs careful scrutiny. “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” The time is right for fishery policy to come out of hibernation.

About Dr. Brian Rothschild: Dr. Rothschild is the Montgomery Charter Professor of Marine Science and former Dean of the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Prior to joining the University of Massachusetts, Professor Rothschild held professorships at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington. He has had faculty or visiting scientist affiliations with the University of Hawaii; Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami; Institut fur Meereskunde, University of Kiel; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Harvard University.

 

Jim Lovgren: Managers responsible for summer flounder mismanagement

Fisherman Jim Lovgren

August 9, 2017 — The following was submitted to Saving Seafood by Mr. Jim Lovgren:

Earlier this year New Jersey was found to be out of compliance by the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission (ASMFC) in regard to the proposed recreational catch specifications for summer flounder, or fluke. The ASMFC, which jointly manages summer flounder with the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC), had recommended an increase in the recreational size limit for summer flounder to 19 inches for New Jersey. New Jersey fishery management representatives balked at that proposal and instead presented an alternative proposal that would keep the size limit at the present 18 inches but with a shorter season which would still meet the same conservation goals as the Commission’s plan.

The Commission denied this alternative and declared New Jersey out of compliance, an action that would result in the shutdown of the summer flounder fishery, both recreational and commercial, sometime later this summer. Unfairly, this shutdown would have occurred after the recreational season was over, and would only impact New Jersey’s commercial fishermen, who are already struggling with a 50% cut in their quota over the last two years.

New Jersey appealed the ASMFC’s finding of non-compliance to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who on July 11th announced that he agreed with New Jersey, and found its proposed specifications would meet the mandated conservation goals as well as the Commission’s regulations would. The Commission responded with a “sky is falling” press release objecting to the Secretary’s decision, and setting up New Jersey as the fall guy for the so-called collapse of the stock.

Even though I firmly disagree with the assertion that the summer flounder stock is in trouble, fishery managers need to examine their past mistakes in managing the species. It is their mismanagement that has caused the recreational industry to target only the largest breeders in the biomass, killing the large females that produce the most viable eggs, while at the same time causing millions of fluke to be discarded dead every year because they do not meet the stringent length requirements.

Fifteen years ago, as a member of the MAFMC, I stated that the constant increasing of the recreational size limit was at some point going to do more damage than good. I said then that I believe that once you reach a size limit of 16 or more inches that the effects of discarding would nullify any effect a higher limit had on reducing the catch. At that time, with a possession size limit of 16 inches, I estimated a five-to-one discard-to-catch rate. That has since climbed to twenty-to-one in some areas, meaning that to catch a single “keeper” an angler will discard 19 smaller fish.

Obviously many of those twenty fish will die, and the National Marine Fishery Service is sticking with a 10% mortality rate for those discards. I personally know of nobody who believes that percentage to be correct, and mortality may well be as high as 50%.

Regardless of what the real mortality rate is, at 10% with a twenty-to-one keeper rate would lead to millions of dead fish annually, and hundreds of thousands of disaffected anglers, who now disregard the regulations because they find them ridiculous. I urged the Council/Commission to do the math and to find the number where discard mortality negates any benefits from increasing the size limit. They never did.

I have been commercial fishing for over forty years and summer flounder is my primary target. The stock reached a historical high about five years ago, and has since declined slightly according to my fishing experience. The last two years I’ve noted a small decline in my catch per unit of effort (CPUE), but this year I have seen the best recruitment of 14 and 15 inch fish I have seen in at least five years. This past month my CPUE has been the best ever, resulting in short day trips of 5 hours dock to dock for my 500 pound trip limit: one two-hour tow, and go home. The two-month season lasted two weeks thanks to the ease of catch, combined with the recent reductions in quota. The summer flounder stock is still near the historic high level of spawning stock biomass, yet the fishing industry is allowed to catch only 20% of the landings that were common 35 years ago with a lower spawning stock biomass.

There is no shortage of summer flounder, only some angry stock assessment scientists who’re still mad that the fishing industry hired their own scientist a few years back to do his own independent stock assessment using the same NMFS data. The scientist, Dr. Maunder, discovered the science was wrong. Coincidentally the fishing industry has hired their own scientists on the east coast for two other fisheries, scallops and monkfish. In both those fisheries the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s stock assessment science was found to be inaccurate, resulting in a higher quota for the species. So it seems like there is a pattern regarding the NEFSC that indicate the quotas have been set too low.

This brings up the National Academy of Science’s review of all of the fishery management plans that underwent rebuilding after being found to be overfished since the Sustainable Fisheries Act was implemented in 1996. They discovered that in the whole country twenty stocks underwent rebuilding plans that were later found to have not needed them, causing reductions in quota, closures, and putting people out of business. Amazingly, the study found that of those twenty stocks ten of the wrong assessments originated in the NEFSC. There are 6 Fishery Science Centers in the U.S. and no other one had more than two mistakes. Not included in the study were butterfish and menhaden, which were erroneously declared overfished after the study was concluded, which were also wrongly assessed by the NEFSC. That makes 12 out of 22 stocks wrongly assessed by the NEFSC, which is clear incompetence in anybody’s book. These mistakes cost the American public hundreds of millions of dollars, yet no one was held accountable, and the results were swept under the rug.

A decade before the National Academy of Science study, “Trawlgate” occurred, where it was discovered that a trawl survey vessel had been towing their net around for at least two annual surveys with one tow cable shorter than the other. As a result, a trawl survey advisory group was formed, of which I was a member, and designed a new net for the new survey vessel that was soon to be deployed. This net was going to use two different sweeps, a large “rock hopper” sweep for the Gulf of Maine with 12 inch rubber “cookies,” while a smaller 4 inch “cookie” sweep would be used in the Georges Bank and Mid Atlantic regions due to their sand/ mud bottom habitat. The 4 inch cookie sweep is the industry standard size and is designed to catch flatfish and other demersal species. The large rock hopper just rolls over flatfish.

At the same time, the NEFSC cancelled their annual winter trawl survey which was designed to catch flatfish, explaining that by using the new 4 inch cookie sweep in the spring and fall surveys they should get accurate data on flatfish. Within months of the winter survey cancellation they decided that they would only use the large rock hopper sweep throughout the whole of the survey area, resulting in the abandonment of the trawl survey advisory panel, as industry members quit in disgust.

With that track record in mind, we return to Dr. Maunder, who discovered that although summer flounder stock assessments were performed for over 40 years, no one noticed that males rarely grew bigger than 17 inches, and that fish bigger than 18 inches are almost all female. Not taking this important basic biological fact into consideration in doing a stock assessment is going to lead to very inaccurate spawning stock biomass numbers, and hence, another wrong assessment. How embarrassing, of course doing the science right resulted in an increased quota. NMFS has been trying to get those fish back ever since.

So congratulations to Secretary Ross for his well-reasoned decision. As for the Commission and the Council, get your act together and develop a management plan that does not target all the spawning stock biomass, while creating an enormous discard problem, think about a slot limit or total length, ideas that have been suggested for decades, and ignored.

About Mr. Jim Lovgren: Mr. Lovgren is the Captain and owner of the F/V Shadowfax out of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, targeting whiting, fluke, and squid. He is a third generation fisherman who was raised and still resides in Brick, New Jersey. Mr. Lovgren’s grandfather, who was a lifelong fisherman himself, came to New Jersey from Sweden after World War I. Mr. Lovgren has been active in fishery management issues for decades. He currently holds the position of the Director at the Fisherman’s Dock Cooperative, is a Board of Trustee member for Clean Ocean Action, is on the board of directors for the Garden State Seafood Association, and is President of the Ocean County Farm Bureau. Additionally, he has served as the Director of the New Jersey Seafood Harvesters’ Association. Mr. Lovgren has also served on several state and regional fishery advisory councils and served two terms on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council. In addition to the various councils and boards he has served on, Mr. Lovgren has also presented on Fishing Responsibility for Dogfish at the Responsible Fishing Workshop in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2006, Mr. Lovgren received the Highliner Achievement Award for lifetime service to the fishing industry.

Federal Court Sides With American Samoa Over Large Vessel Protected Area

August 3, 2017 — PAGO PAGO, American Samoa — The federal court in Honolulu has denied the US National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) motion for reconsideration, to amend the court decision issued this past March that found that the NMFS 2016 rule to reduce from 50 to 20 miles the Large Vessel Prohibited Area (LVPA) in territorial waters “was arbitrary and capricious”.

MOTION DENIED

“The court has considered the Motion for Reconsideration as a non-hearing matter,” according to the one-page decision issued this past Monday. “After careful review of the motion, supporting and opposing memoranda, and the relevant legal authority, the Motion for Reconsideration is hereby denied.”

According to the decision, a written order by the court will follow, that will supersede this ruling. It’s not clear when the written order will be rendered by the court.

BACKGROUND

Besides NMFS, other defendants in the case were the US Commerce Department, and NOAA fisheries. NMFS issued a 2016 LVPA rule which became effective on Feb. 3, 2016.

Plaintiff is the Territory of American Samoa, through the Governor’s Office, or ASG. The major focus of the plaintiff’s lawsuit, filed in March 2016, centered around the two Deeds of Cession — 1900 Deed of Cession for Tutuila and Aunu’u islands and the 1904 Deed of Cession for Manu’a islands — with the United States.

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

Senate Subcommittee Holds First Hearing to Guide Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization

August 2, 2017 — The Magnuson-Stevens Act, the primary law regulating fisheries in federal waters, is in need of reauthorization, and Senate Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard on Tuesday held the first in a series of hearings to guide that process. And, unsurprisingly, the issue of climate change made waves.

Chris Oliver, assistant administrator of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, and John Quinn, chairman of the New England Fishery Management Council, pushed for a variety of changes, ranging from management of mixed stocks to more flexibility in how the Council Coordination Committee can monitor and collect data. But it was Sen. Richard Blumenthal who made the strongest case for change by criticizing the current system for failing New England’s fishing fleet and leaving the region’s fishermen “angry and frustrated beyond words.”

Because of climate change, Blumenthal said, fish that New England fishermen have traditionally sought were pushed north and fish from southern waters moved into New England. But catch limits for certain fish haven’t been adjusted to meet the reality facing New England fishermen, forcing them to return quota-exceeding fish to the ocean. Billions of dollars in profits are being lost, Blumenthal said, while fishermen from southern states come to New England waters to catch their migrating fish. “There is something profoundly unfair and intolerable about the situation,” he added. “In my view, it violates the present law.”

Quinn responded by pointing out that parts of the New England fishing industry are booming but agreed that groundfish fishermen are struggling. While the CCC’s process is to collect as much data as needed to produce accurate stock assessments, Quinn said they didn’t have “a simple solution for rising water temperatures or the ocean acidification,” which are the roots of the shifting fish populations.

Read the full story at Politico