Saving Seafood

Public Comment Sought on EIS for New Gulf of Alaska Groundfish Bycatch Management Program

SEAFOODNEWS.COM By Peggy Parker — July 15, 2015 — In yesterday’s Federal Register, the National Marine Fisheries Service, in consultation with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, announced their intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on a new bycatch management program for trawl groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska.

The proposed action would create a new management program that would allocate allowable harvest to individuals, cooperatives, and other entities that participate in GOA trawl groundfish fisheries.

The program is intended to improve stock conservation by imposing accountability measures for taking target, incidental, and prohibited species catch, creating incentives to eliminate wasteful fishing practices, providing mechanisms for participants to control and reduce bycatch in the trawl groundfish fisheries, and to improve safety of life at sea and operational efficiencies.

The EIS will analyze the impacts to the human environment resulting from the proposed trawl bycatch management program.

NOAA Fisheries and the Council say an EIS may be required for this bycatch management program because some important aspects of the proposed action on species and their users may be uncertain or unknown. Thus, the agency and the Council are initiating scoping for an EIS in the event one is needed.

NOAA Fisheries and the Council want public comments to identify the issues of concern and help determine the appropriate range of management alternatives for the EIS. Comments should also focus on the environmental, social, and economic issues to be considered in the analysis.

NMFS will accept written comments through August 28, 2015.

You may submit comments electronically at www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=NOAA-NMFS-2014-0150 [2].

Or send written comments to Glenn Merrill, Assistant Regional Administrator, Sustainable Fisheries Division, Alaska Region NMFS, Attn: Ellen Sebastian. Mail comments to P.O. Box 21668, Juneau, AK 99802–1668.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

Observer program for lobster boats on the wane

July 15, 2015 — The number of scheduled observer trips aboard Cape Ann lobster boats and others throughout Massachusetts have fallen off dramatically since the contentious Gloucester meeting last month where NOAA outlined plans to increase observer coverage for the Northeast lobster fishery.

Beth Casoni, executive director of the Scituate-based Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, said her discussions with the association’s membership revealed a significant drop in the number of lobstermen being contacted to schedule observer coverage on a future trip.

“I’ve been asking every fisherman from everywhere whether they’re getting called like before and they’re all telling me the same thing, that it’s pretty quiet,” Casoni said. “We’re pretty pleased with that.”

The same is true around Cape Ann, according to Arthur “Sooky” Sawyer, longtime Gloucester fisherman and lobsterman who now serves as the president of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association.

“There hasn’t been anyone contacted around here since the meeting,” Sawyer said.

The June 4 meeting at NOAA’s regional headquarters in the Blackburn Industrial Park provided the first glimpse of the rabid opposition among lobstermen to expanding the Northeast Fisheries Observer Program throughout the New England lobstering industry and as far down the East Coast as Maryland.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

 

 

NEW JERSEY: Shellfish mother lode found off Cape May

LOWER TOWNSHIP, N.J. (Press of Atlantic City) — July 10, 2015 — It may be fortunate that nobody has asked Dvora Hart to count the Atlantic sea scallops recently captured by camera images off the New Jersey coast.

Hart, a mathematical biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, knows numbers. She could count that high. The problem: It would take awhile.

“Ten billion is my best guess. It’s probably conservative and it’s very preliminary,” said Hart.

It’s being called one of the biggest scallop sets ever recorded, eclipsing one in 2003 fishermen harvested for years. The estimate of 10 billion is only for the most concentrated area, scallop grounds called the Elephant Trunk just southeast of Cape May covering more than 1,500 square nautical miles. The set actually extends as far north as Long Island and Block Island and as far south as the Delmarva Peninsula. Hart is still working on the overall numbers.

“The big concentration is southern New Jersey, a little north of Cape May, down to Delaware. You start to see them at 35 meters and the highest density is 50 to 60 meters. They drop off at 70 to 80 meters,” said Hart.

NOAA’s underwater camera recorded about 4 million images off the Mid-Atlantic coast earlier this year. Each picture is one square meter of ocean floor and Hart was seeing up to 350 scallops per image. Hart, the chief scallop assessment scientist with NOAA, puts that into perspective.

“Normally we’d see one scallop per square meter, which is actually good recruitment. We had a wide range of more than 100 per square meter and several places where they were on the order of 350 per square meter. This is an extreme event. It’s pretty amazing,” said Hart.

The find is great news for the Port of Cape May, where scallops are still the No. 1 catch but recent East Coast harvest cutbacks, about 20 percent averaged over the last two years, hurt the industry.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

 

Coral bleaching threat increasing in western Atlantic and Pacific oceans

July 6, 2015 — As unusually warm ocean temperatures cover the north Pacific, equatorial Pacific, and western Atlantic oceans, NOAA scientists expect greater bleaching of corals on Northern Hemisphere reefs through October, potentially leading to the death of corals over a wide area and affecting the long-term supply of fish and shellfish.

While corals can recover from mild bleaching, severe or long-term bleaching kills corals. Even if corals recover, they are more susceptible to disease. Once corals die, it usually takes decades for the reef to recover — but recovery is only possible if the reefs are undisturbed. After corals die, reefs degrade and the structures corals build are eroded away, providing less shoreline protection and less habitat for fish and shellfish.

“The bleaching that started in June 2014 has been really bad for corals in the western Pacific,” said Mark Eakin, NOAA Coral Reef Watch coordinator. “We are worried that bleaching will spread to the western Atlantic and again into Hawaii.”

Earlier this year, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch four-month Coral Bleaching Outlook accurately predicted coral bleaching in the South Pacific, including the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Fiji, and American Samoa. It also recently predicted the coral bleaching in the Indian Ocean, including the British Indian Ocean Territory and the Maldives.

Coral bleaching occurs when corals are stressed by changes in environmental conditions such as temperature, light or nutrients. The coral expels the symbiotic algae living in its tissue, causing the tissue to turn white or pale. Without the algae, the coral loses its major source of food and is more susceptible to disease. Scientists note, however, that only high temperatures can cause bleaching over wide areas like those seen since 2014.

In fall 2014, Hawaii saw widespread coral bleaching for the first time since 1996. If corals in Hawaii bleach again this year, it would be the first time it happened in consecutive years in the archipelago.

Warmer ocean temperatures in 2014 also dealt a blow to coral nurseries in the Florida Keys, where scientists are growing threatened coral species to transplant onto local reefs. Coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean have weathered repeated and worsening coral bleaching events for the past thirty years. The NOAA Coral Reef Watch monitoring team says that more bleaching so soon could spell disaster for corals that have yet to recover from last year’s stress.

“Many healthy, resilient coral reefs can withstand bleaching as long as they have time to recover,” Eakin said. “However, when you have repeated bleaching on a reef within a short period of time, it’s very hard for the corals to recover and survive. This is even worse where corals are suffering from other environmental threats, like pollution or overfishing.”

NOAA’s bleaching prediction for the upcoming months supports the findings of a paper published in the journal Science last week that examined the threat to marine ecosystems and ecosystem services under two different carbon dioxide emission pathways.

“The paper reports that even if humans limit the Earth’s warming to two degrees C (3.8 degrees F), many marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, are still going to suffer,” said Eakin, an author on the paper. “The increase we are seeing in the frequency and severity of bleaching events is part of why the climate models in that paper predict a dire future for coral reefs.”

The NOAA Coral Reef Watch program’s satellite data provide current reef environmental conditions to quickly identify areas at risk for coral bleaching, while its climate model-based outlooks provide managers with information on potential bleaching months in advance. The Coral Reef Watch mission is to utilize remote sensing and in situ tools for near-real-time and long term monitoring, modeling and reporting of physical environmental conditions of coral reef ecosystems.

The four-month Coral Bleaching Outlooks, based on NOAA’s operational Climate Forecast System, use NOAA’s vast collection of environmental data to provide resource managers and the general public with the necessary tools to help reduce effects of climate change and other environmental and human caused stressors.

Read the story from NOAA

New GIS Shapefiles of Delaware Reef Special Management Zones Available on NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Region Website

July 9, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA:

NOAA Fisheries announces the publication of new GIS shapefiles for the Delaware Reef Special Management Zones that go into effect today.

More information on these Special Management Zones is available in the Federal Register notice, supporting documents on our website, and in our web story.

We will continue to add new shapefiles and geospatial data to our GIS website as they become available.

Questions about GIS? Please contact Dean Szumylo via email at dean.szumylo@noaa.gov.

 

What If the Oceans Were National Parks?

June 29, 2015 — ASPEN, Colo. — Next year will mark the centennial of the U.S. National Park Service. In the 100 years since it was established, the national parks have become one of America’s most popular federal programs. Now, marine scientists and conservationists want to do for the oceans what the National Park Service did for the land.

When the National Park Service was proposed, “it was a really crazy notion,” said Jane Lubchenco, prominent marine scientist and former administrator of NOAA, to an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “It was so far from people’s thinking that wilderness was important to protect in and of itself.” Parks and other wilderness now define the American landscape, Lubchenco said. Today, she said, we think about the oceans the way we thought about wilderness 100 years ago, when few Americans had ever visited Yosemite or Yellowstone.

“Fourteen percent of land—all around the world, all countries—is set aside in some kind of protected status,” Lubchenco said. The equivalent for oceans? 3.4 percent, according to the World Database on Protected Areas. And of that, Lubchenco pointed out, only one percent is fully closed off from extractive activities such as fishing.

Half a century ago, we thought the oceans were too big to fail, said Sylvia Earle, Lubchenco’s co-panelist. “But under the surface, it’s shocking.” Earle, NOAA’s first female chief scientist, is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. The oysters of Chesapeake Bay, she said, have declined to one percent of their historic population, because of factors such as overfishing and pollution. “How long till we get to the point where we can eliminate whole categories of wildlife?” she asked.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

 

The Scallop Scoop: Survey Forecasts A Banner Year In Atlantic

July 1, 2015 — Scallop fishermen off the East Coast could soon see one of their biggest bumper crops ever. A federal survey in waters off Delaware is predicting a boom in the next couple of years for the nation’s most valuable fishery.

Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks for young sea scallops on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This year, when they stuck their camera in the water, they got a huge shock, says Dvora Hart, a research analyst with NOAA’s Fisheries Service.

“We were seeing concentrations of several hundred per square meter, and to give a perspective on that, one per square meter is actually a high concentration,” says Hart.

Hart estimates they saw about 10 billion scallops off Delaware and southern New Jersey alone — probably due to increased spawning at a closed fishing area farther north. The closure of the fishing area gave the scallops more time to spawn — which they do each spring and fall. The larvae floated downstream and became the billions of scallops Hart saw in the mid-Atlantic this year. Closures like this are designed to boost spawning but “some years have more luck than others,” Hart says.

Read the full story at NPR

 

Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology Rule is Now Final

June 29, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA:

NOAA Fisheries today announced that it is finalizing regulations to implement the Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology Omnibus Amendment developed by the Mid-Atlantic and New England Fishery Management Councils. NOAA Fisheries published a proposed rule on January 21, 2015, with a comment period open through February 20, 2015.

This amendment will go into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register, July 30, 2015.

Under federal fisheries law, NOAA Fisheries is required to establish a standardized bycatch reporting methodology to assess the amount and type of bycatch occurring in all federally managed fisheries.

This amendment was developed, in part, to respond to a U.S. District of Columbia Court of Appeals mandate. The amendment adds various measures to improve and expand on the Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology previously in place for 13 fishery management plans for fisheries operating in New England and Mid-Atlantic federal waters.

Read the final rule, as filed in the Federal Register, and the supporting documents for this final rule.

Questions? Contact Jennifer Goebel, Regional Office, at 978-281-9175 or Jennifer.Goebel@noaa.gov.

 

Saltonstall-Kennedy (SK) Proposals Recommended for Funding under the FY14/15 Program

June 29, 2015 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

NOAA Fisheries Chief Eileen Sobeck announced Friday that the agency is recommending funding for 88 marine fisheries research projects via the 2014-2015 Saltonstall-Kennedy (SK) Grant Program. According to the announcement, awards totaling $25 million represent the most significant amount of funding ever granted by NOAA under the decades-old program. The complete list is available at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/mb/financial_services/skhome.htm.

Check here for a detailed list of Greater Atlantic Region (Maine to North Carolina) projects that, according to Regional Administrator John Bullard, comprised 38 percent of the total awards nationwide.

The announcement adds that application approval and funds obligation is not final. Divisions of NOAA and the Department of Commerce, NOAA’s parent agency, must still give final approval for the projects. Successful applicants will receive funding in the near future.

 

NOAA recommends $900K for UMass Dartmouth fisheries research

June 26, 2015 — WASHINGTON – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recommended a dozen Massachusetts-based marine research programs receive funding this year including more than $900,000 for UMass Dartmouth to conduct four projects whose aim is to  improve the cost-effectiveness and capacity of programs to observe fish.

Some of the money will be used to maximize fishing opportunities and jobs; increase the quality and quantity of domestic seafood; and improve fishery information from U.S. territories.

The programs will be conducted through the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program.

The Department of Commerce must still sign off on the projects before applicants will receive funding.

Read the full story at New Bedford Standard-Times