Saving Seafood

NOAA Fisheries Announcing a New Text Alert System

April 18, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

You can now sign up to receive text alerts from us. Our new text alert system has more functions, including the ability to choose the topics that interest you, and to unsubscribe and subscribe by text. If you previously received our texts, and want to continue getting them, you must sign up for this new system.

On your smart phone, our texts will come from “468311 NOAA-GAR” and will include a short message, plus a link to more information.

You can sign up online or by texting “468-311 NOAA–GAR” and adding the keyword for the topic that interests you. You can only subscribe to one topic at a time.

For more information, contact Olivia Rugo at 978-675-2167.

Federal appellate court upholds NOAA Fisheries’ definition of bycatch

April 18, 2019 — A panel of federal appellate judges has upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled on NOAA Fisheries’ method for assessing bycatch in New England fisheries.

The ruling, which was announced on Friday, 12 April, in the District of Columbia chambers of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, allows NOAA Fisheries to use statistical sampling to determine the amount of bycatch. It stems from a 2011 court case where judges ruled the agency did not establish methodology standards to assess the number of other species caught and discarded when harvesting selected fish.

In both instances, environmental group Oceana pursued the lawsuit.

After that decision, NOAA Fisheries decided to utilize human observers on vessels. In most cases, the observers were trained biologists who reported on a vessel’s harvest. However, since it was too expensive to place an observer on every vessel, the agency created a statistical formula that allocated the observers in a fashion that reduced bias. This enabled NOAA Fisheries officials to build fishery-wide assessments based the observers’ findings.

Oceana filed the subsequent suit in July 2015 and argued that the sampling method implemented violated the Magnuson-Stevens Act. In addition, it claimed that observers were only counting the bycatch of species under management plans within the agency.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Canadian-U.S. Lobstermen’s Town Meeting: U.S. and Canadian lobstermen have a whale of a problem

April 17, 2019 — Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher sure knows how to quiet a room.

On April 5, about 100 members of the U.S. and Maine lobster industry — fishermen, dealers, scientists, and regulators — gathered for the 15th Canadian-U.S. Lobstermen’s Town Meeting at the Westin Portland Harborview Hotel in Portland. There they heard Keliher announce that he’d just received an email from NOAA Fisheries announcing that, in order to protect endangered right whales, “the U.S. fishery will likely have to be reduced 60 to 80 percent.”

It’s a testament to the cardiac health of Maine and Canadian lobstermen that the statement didn’t produce a mass heart attack, especially since it came during a discussion of what fishing restrictions might be imposed by NOAA Fisheries this spring to meet the demands of the federal Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection acts.

What almost everyone in the room heard, though, wasn’t all that Keliher said. Thanks to a snafu with the microphone, the audience missed the beginning of the NOAA statement that said “whale mortalities” from U.S. fisheries would have to be reduced by “60 to 80 percent,” not the fisheries themselves.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

Officials: No Sardine Fishing Off California This Year Due to Steep Population Decline

April 17, 2019 — West coast regulators have voted unanimously to ban commercial sardine fishing for the fifth straight year after a recent evaluation of the northern Pacific stock revealed a steep decline.

The ban on commercial sardine catch spans the entire length of the U.S. West Coast. The 2019 season would have opened July 1.

A new assessment of northern Pacific sardine stocks by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates populations of the small silvery fish have declined more than 98 percent since 2006.

Not all fishermen agree with the decision to keep the sardine fishery shuttered.

Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, said NOAA’s sardine survey under-counts the fish, and that the fishermen she hears from are noticing a comeback.

“They are so frustrated because they drive by school after school after school and they can’t fish,” Pleschner-Steele said. “This is their livelihood and they have families and they are losing their jobs.

Read the full story at KQED

Dams still biggest impediment to Atlantic salmon recovery

April 16, 2019 — Addressing the problems caused by dams is still the biggest challenge facing the recovery of the Atlantic salmon.

That’s at the core of a presentation a federal fisheries biologist is scheduled to deliver to a regulatory board on Tuesday in Connecticut. Dan Kircheis of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be speaking to the New England Fishery Management Council during its meeting in Mystic.

Atlantic salmon were once abundant in U.S. rivers, but now they only return to a handful in Maine. They’re on the endangered species list in America. Kircheis will be talking about a recovery strategy for the fish on Tuesday.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Connecticut Post

Pace of Bering Sea Changes Startles Scientists

April 15, 2019 — The Yupik Eskimo village of Kotlik on Alaska’s northwest coast relies on a cold, hard blanket of sea ice to protect homes from vicious winter Bering Sea storms.

Frigid north winds blow down from the Arctic Ocean, freeze saltwater and push sea ice south. The ice normally prevents waves from forming and locks onto beaches, walling off villages. But not this year.

In February, southwest winds brought warm air and turned thin sea ice into “snow cone ice” that melted or blew off. When a storm pounded Norton Sound, water on Feb. 12 surged up the Yukon River and into Kotlik, flooding low-lying homes. Lifelong resident Philomena Keyes, 37, awoke to knee-deep water outside her house.

“This is the first I experienced in my life, a flood that happened in the winter, in February,” Keyes said in a phone interview.

Read the full story at NBC Los Angeles

Baby fish have started eating plastic. We haven’t yet seen the consequences

April 15, 2019 — Not long agoI went snorkeling in the Pacific Ocean, a half mile off the southwest coast of Oahu. The flanks of the Hawaiian island are steep there, and the bottom quickly disappeared beneath us as we motored out to the site. Looking back, I could see the green slopes of the Waianae Range rising to 4,000 feet behind the beach. Normally the mountains shield the water here from the trade winds. But on that day a breeze created a light chop that nearly obscured what I had come to see: a thin, oily slick of surface water, rich in organic particles, in which newborn fish were feeding and struggling to survive their first precarious weeks.

Plunging my face into the sheen, I found myself looking inside a fish nursery: The water was dotted with life you would ordinarily never notice. Fish eggs drifted like tiny lanterns, their yolk sacs glowing in the sunlight. Fish larvae small as ladybugs darted about. A sergeant major damselfish the size of a dime appeared huge by comparison as it fluttered past. Below us, a school of 12-inch, bigeye scad—like mackerel but with enormous eyes—fed on everything that had the misfortune of being small.

My guides that day, oceanographer Jamison Gove and fish biologist Jonathan Whitney of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Honolulu, are nearly three years into a research project that aims to make sense of this chaotic scene. The larval stage is the “black box” of fisheries science: Fertilized eggs go in, and young fish come out—but what happens inside remains sketchy. The larval fish are so small and fragile they’re exceedingly difficult to study. The overwhelming majority will never become adults. Yet fish populations around the world, and the animals that eat them, depend on just how many larval fish make it, and in what condition.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Feds declare Gulf whale species endangered

April 15, 2019 — Federal officials today declared a tiny group of Bryde’s whales in the Gulf of Mexico endangered, facing threats including oil and gas exploration and development.

“They’re the only year-round baleen whales that make their home in Gulf of Mexico, and (they) have a unique and very important role in the ecosystem,” said Laura Engleby, a marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries’ service.

A Republican congressman from Florida and a marine mammal scientist in Massachusetts applauded the decision to protect the whales. There probably are about 33 of them in a deepwater area called the DeSoto Canyon, Engleby said. If there are any in the southern Gulf, she said, the total including the known population is probably less than 100.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Daily Comet

Tuna Fishermen Say Agencies Rejected Input on New Rules

April 12, 2019 — Representing large net-fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean, the American Tunaboat Association filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming government fishery regulators left industry experts in the dark about a forthcoming biological opinion that could limit commercial tuna operations.

The complaint, filed by Baker Botts attorney Megan Berge in Washington, D.C., federal court, names as defendants Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS.

According to the lawsuit, NMFS is preparing a biological opinion that could impose new permit requirements and limits on tuna fishery operations in the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the American Tunaboat Association says it was denied the ability to provide input during an informal phase of the assessment process.

The fishing advocacy group claims the NMFS violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not allowing it to review any drafts or provide first-hand, expert recommendations for the developing opinion that could directly impact its members.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Marine Mammals of Maine Founder Lynda Doughty Honored at Stranding Network Banquet

April 12, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Lynda Doughty of Marine Mammals of Maine was honored on Wednesday, April 10 by NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Region Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Stranding Programs with its David St. Aubin Award of Excellence for work with stranded seals during an Unusual Mortality Event that began in July 2018.

From July to September, Lynda and her team responded to more than 800 live and dead seals along southern and midcoast Maine, and continue to closely monitor local populations for further evidence of Phocine Distemper Virus.

Read the full story at NOAA