Saving Seafood

Experts Prepare Plan to Capture Ill Orca as Last Alternative

September 13, 2018 — Federal biologists said Wednesday they are preparing a plan to capture and treat a sick, critically endangered orca if there is no other way to save her in the wild.

Officials said they will intervene and rescue the orca only if she becomes stranded or separated from the rest of her tightly knit group of whales.

They want the 4-year-old orca known as J50 to survive in the wild and contribute to the recovery of southern resident killer whales, without putting the rest of the orcas in her pod at risk.

“We don’t intend to intervene while she’s with her family. If we are presented with a situation where a rescue is the only viable alternative, we will rescue her,” Chris Yates, assistant regional administrator for NOAA’s protected resources division, told reporters during a call.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Researchers hope to get Maine green crabs on the menu

September 13, 2018 — Could deep-fried soft-shell green crabs be the next culinary sensation?

Researchers at Manomet, a Brunswick nonprofit, have discovered a culinary market for green crabs in Venice, Italy, that they think could carry over to U.S. restaurants.

Now they’ve received a $267,440 grant, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program, to see if the idea can be adapted to create a lucrative market for Maine fishermen.

A lucrative soft-shell green crab fishery has existed in Venice for over a century, Marissa McMahan, Manomet senior fisheries scientist, said. McMahan told Mainebiz that Venetian fishermen are getting $25 to $55 per pound for green crabs, depending on season and availability.

Manomet has worked with several volunteer fishermen to harvest soft-shell green crabs, which have been sold at $3 each to chefs at four restaurants: Brunswick Inn, Enoteca Athena and Henry and Marty, all in Brunswick, and at Salt Pine Social in Bath.

The chefs developed the crabs as a battered and deep-fried menu item, served whole.

“The chefs use the soft-shell green crab in the same way the use soft-shell blue crab,” McMahan said. “It hasn’t completely replaced blue crab on their menus because we don’t have the supply yet.”

The shells are soft enough that they become part of the food, she said.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford revives push to seize Northeast Fisheries Center

September 13, 2018 — Appealing to the new management team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, elected officials from New Bedford are newly appealing to relocate the Northeast Fisheries Science Center from Woods Hole to New Bedford, arguing the change will help the federal government to more effectively engage with members of an active fishing community.

In a letter Tuesday to Acting Administrator Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, officials cited media reports suggesting that NOAA had ruled out every possible location for the center except Woods Hole in Falmouth.

In asking for reconsideration, they also demanded the federal government release its “business case analysis” of potential locations in the Northeast.

“We believe that that by siting the facility in the undisputed center of the commercial fishing industry on the East Coast, the Administration could at last begin to break down barriers to communication, and repair the distrust that has plagued the relationship between the National Marine Fisheries Service and the fishing industry in the Northeast for decades,” fishing industry and South Coast lawmakers wrote in the letter.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford makes new push for fisheries center

September 12, 2018 — The nation’s top fishing port is renewing its efforts to get the government to move its fisheries center from Woods Hole to New Bedford.

“The fishing industry wants the regulators for the first time ever to be in New Bedford because they see the benefits of good science and cooperative research,” said Ed Anthes-Washburn, the director of the New Bedford Port Authority.

On Tuesday, elected officials, the Port Authority and members of the fishing industry sent a letter to NOAA seeking a new feasibility study, maintaining the city is the best location for the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, currently in Woods Hole.

The letter, addressed to Timothy Gallaudet, Ph.D., assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere for the Department of Commerce in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was also signed by representatives of fishing vessels from home ports in New Bedford and Fairhaven and parts of Maine, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Virginia and North Carolina.

This push isn’t entirely new. In March 2016, a letter addressed to NOAA said the agency had a rare opportunity to further the center’s mission and restore its credibility in fishing communities by moving to New Bedford.

NOAA spokeswoman Teri Frady confirmed Tuesday that in the latest study New Bedford was considered as a new location, but Woods Hole is the “preferred alternative” location recommended in the Business Case Analysis.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fishing Communities, Massachusetts Officials Call for New Science Center Home in New Bedford

September 11, 2018 (Saving Seafood) — Today, 18 Massachusetts elected officials joined hundreds of Northeast fishermen and businesses to urge NOAA to relocate its Northeast Fisheries Science Center from Woods Hole to New Bedford, Massachusetts.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, six Massachusetts state legislators, 11 members of the New Bedford City Council, the New Bedford Port Authority, and hundreds of fishermen, businesses, and vessels joined together in signing the letter. Signatories hail from across the East Coast, including from Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina.

According to the letter, addressed to Acting Administrator Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, moving the science center to New Bedford would place NOAA closer to the commercial fishing industry. A move would present NOAA with a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to improve relations and build trust with commercial fishermen.

“We believe that by siting the facility in the undisputed center of the commercial fishing industry on the East Coast, the Administration could at least begin to break down barriers to communication, and repair the distrust that has plagued the relationship between the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the fishing industry in the Northeast for decades,” the letter states.

The letter notes that the current science center in Woods Hole is located far away from the region’s major commercial fishing ports. The letter argues that this physical distance hinders engagement between NOAA and the industry.

In contrast, the Port of New Bedford has, for the last 17 years, been the highest grossing commercial fishing port in the United States, and is one of the hubs of Northeast commercial fishing.

“If the science center were located in New Bedford, the Administration could be assured that its personnel would have considerably greater opportunity for formal and informal interaction with industry stakeholders, and each side would get to know one another in ways and to a degree that have long eluded both,” the letter states.

The letter, from major fishing industry stakeholders inviting fisheries scientists and regulators to the nation’s top fishing port, marks a significant shift, and illustrates a desire among the fishing industry to engage with fisheries scientists. The letter concludes on a positive note, hoping that co-location would have the ability “to create conditions for a new era of respect, trust and cooperation.”

Read the letter here

Bountiful Bunker? Advocates Clash with Big Fish Oil in New York Harbor

September 10, 2018 — Advocacy groups are sounding the alarm on Virginia-based fishing fleets coming into the New York bight to harvest menhaden — a bait fish better known as “bunker” — but NOAA Fisheries says the species is not at risk of overfishing.

The boats work for Omega Protein, a company based in Reedville, Virginia, that runs the largest menhaden fishing operation on the east coast.

Menhaden are abundant now, but they’d been severely overfished in the past and advocacy groups like Menhaden Defenders and Gotham Whale are concerned about that happening again — especially since whales have returned to New York City waters. The cetaceans feed on menhaden, and fewer fish could mean fewer whale sightings, they say.

Advocates also worry about by-catch. The boats use huge purse seines that round up millions of fish at a time, and there’s concern that dolphins and other marine life could get caught up.

In a press release, Omega Protein charged that advocates are making “false statements” about their fleet, noting that there’s currently no concern about bunker overfishing and that their operations are completely legal. The company turns menhaden into commodities for fish oil supplements, dog food, fish meal, and other products.

Jennifer Goebel, a spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries, confirmed that there’s no current threat of overfishing for menhaden.

“There has been concern over the years from certain environmental groups regarding localized depletion in Chesapeake Bay, but studies have not found any evidence that localized depletion is occurring,” she said in an email. “The coastwide assessment shows the Atlantic menhaden stock is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.”

She added that Omega Protein “follow[s] the schools and right now, if those schools are off New York, that’s where an industry vessel could be fishing.”

Read the full story at New York Media Boat

 

Permit holders, processing workers included in pink salmon disaster money draft plan

September 10, 2018 — Under a draft plan released this summer, commercial fishermen in Southeast Alaska would get only a small portion of the $56.3 million appropriated by Congress to address a pink salmon disaster in 2016.

However, those who worked at seafood processing plants that year could be in line for some of the money as well.

A year and a half ago, the U.S. Commerce Secretary declared the 2016 pink season across the Gulf of Alaska a fishery failure due to unusual ocean and climate conditions. The state of Alaska and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have come up with a draft spending plan for how to allocate the money to fishermen, processors, municipalities and researchers.

The money will be paid out by an agency called the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission.

Sebastian O’Kelly is a lobbyist in the nation’s capital. His clients include the Petersburg borough and that commission. O’Kelly briefed the Petersburg borough assembly on the spending plan Monday.

“I wanna talk a little bit about the allocation and the break out and the criteria that will be used in distributing the relief because you will have fishermen, processors and the borough itself as active participants and recipients of this funding,” O’Kelly said.

Read the full story at KTOO

Impossible Choices: The Complicated Task of Saving Both Orca and Salmon

September 10, 2018 — Decades of politics and foot-dragging have stymied the recovery of threatened and endangered Chinook salmon, while an iconic population of killer whales that depends on them veered toward extinction. Now, a last-ditch effort to save the whales may also be what thwarts the recovery of Chinook.

The Southern Resident killer whales are dying. An extended family of 75 orcas living year-round in the sea surrounding the San Juan Islands near Seattle, their numbers never fully rebounded since aquariums that later became SeaWorld captured a third of them in the late 1960s.

And there are other culprits.

Cargo ships and whale-watching boats zip through the Salish Sea, adding noise that interferes with the whales’ ability to locate each other and their prey. The water they live in is toxic. The Puget Sound outside Seattle is tainted with flame retardant, and PCBs and pollutants gush from nearby rivers into the sea.

The Chinook salmon they eat to live are contaminated with mercury, lead and organic compounds like PCBs. The Washington state Department of Health advises humans to limit their consumption of Chinook salmon to eight ounces per week. But Southern Residents eat dozens of the fish per day.

Not only is their food toxic, there’s also less of it than ever before. Five populations of Chinook the whales depend on are listed as threatened; a sixth is endangered. And they’re smaller, declining in size by 10 percent since the late 1970s, according to research published February in the scientific journal Fish & Fisheries.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Scientists get break finding elusive beaked whales

September 10, 2018 — Scientists have found a reliable gathering place east of Cape Cod for the elusive and little-known True’s beaked whales, following a month’s effort this summer.

“It was huge for us,” Danielle Cholewiak, research ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, said. Cholewiak was chief scientist for the trip east of Georges Bank, on the edge of the continental shelf.

Only a dozen sightings of True’s beaked whale had occurred since 1913 when Smithsonian Institution curator Frederick True first identified and named the species from an animal stranded on a North Carolina beach. But the dedicated study in July 200 miles east of Cape Cod yielded dozens of sightings, acoustic recordings, genetic samples and photographs, Cholewiak said.

The repeated sightings of whales during the trip allowed scientists to begin a tracking database. The whales now named Elvis and Trident are the “founding members” of the North Atlantic True’s beaked whale photo identification catalog. With over 300 acoustic detections from a hydrophone towed 24 hours a day across the research area the scientists were able to map out where the animals were living, Cholewiak said. The first-time use on a True’s beaked whale of a suction-cup digital recording tag, for 12 hours, is expected to reveal new information about their movements and acoustic behavior.

“This is a 5- or 6-meter whale that we didn’t know anything about until now,” said Dee Allen, research program officer for the Marine Mammal Commission, who was on the trip. In its oversight role of other federal agencies, the commission wants to make sure that the best available science is used for decision-making. There is great value in new or more information on a species that is little-known, Allen said.

“It shows that it can be done,” Allen said. “We can continue to learn more about beaked whales.”

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Collaborative effort produces a new marine debris action plan for Washington

September 7, 2018 — Trash on our shorelines and in the ocean, also known as marine debris, is a persistent and growing global environmental issue. A lot is at stake particularly in Washington State, where outdoor recreation, shellfish harvests and aquaculture, and commercial, tribal and recreational fisheries are all economically and culturally significant. Marine debris interferes with the health of these important marine resources. Today September 5, 2018, local organizations and agencies released a marine debris action plan for the state, the result of a year-long collaborative process facilitated by NOAA’s Marine Debris Program.

The plan will facilitate and track actions that prevent and reduce marine debris throughout Washington, including Puget Sound, the Northwest Straits, Washington’s Pacific Coast, the Columbia River estuary and inland sources. To create the plan, 66 representatives from more than 40 entities participated in two workshops to compile and review current efforts, identify strategic gaps and recommend future actions. NOAA’s Marine Debris Program supported the effort by convening the planning committee, organizing and hosting the workshops and engaging the planning committee.

Read the full story at the San Juan Islander