Saving Seafood

Pollock Survey Begins in Eastern Bering Sea

July 16, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

For the past four decades, a team of scientists have conducted an acoustic trawl survey from a NOAA research vessel in the eastern Bering Sea. They collect acoustic measurements of fish abundance and distribution. They also sample fish by capturing them with trawl nets to groundtruth the acoustic signals to confirm the species. They also are able to learn more about the fish themselves—for example, their age, length, weight, and reproductive state.

Scientists believe using acoustic technology on saildrones to survey in the eastern Bering Sea will provide a reliable estimate of pollock abundance, based on past experience comparing the technology to ship-based surveys. It also helps that pollock are the dominant fish species in this area, minimizing the need to further sample with a trawl net to confirm species.

Since the standard surveys were cancelled this year due to COVID-19, data collected by the saildrones will fill a gap in the survey time series. Scientists use these survey data along with other data to assess pollock population abundance and trends (whether the stock is increasing or decreasing in size). The saildrone survey is expected to take two months to complete.

In late June, after some 40 days at sea, the three saildrones arrived at Unimak Pass, a 20-nautical-mile gap between Unimak Island and Ugamak Island that separates the North Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea. At this point the saildrones separated. Each saildrone will cover a third of the 600-nautical-mile-wide survey area, which is bordered by Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to the south and the edge of the eastern Bering Sea shelf to the west.

The saildrones will complete a series of north-south transects moving from east to west; the mission is designed to mimic a typical ship survey as closely as possible in the amount of time available. Each vehicle is equipped with a Simrad EK80 high-precision split-beam echo sounder to map fish abundance.

Read the full release here

Blockchain Will Let You Track Salmon From Sea to Dinner Plate

June 26, 2020 — Consumers around the world will soon be able to know intricate life details of the salmon they eat with a new blockchain initiative from top exporter Norway.

The Norwegian Seafood Association has partnered with International Business Machines Corp. and technology provider Atea ASA to gather data on how salmon is bred, stored and shipped, information that consumers will eventually access by scanning a QR code. That will help Norway’s suppliers differentiate their premium products from other exporters, curb origin fraud and cut waste.

“Blockchain lets us share the fish’s journey from the ocean to the dinner table,” said Alf-Goran Knutsen, chief executive officer of Kvaroy Arctic, a supplier that’s part of the initiative. “This is now more timely than ever.”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

ALASKA: GAPP exploring how to best position pollock during COVID-19 recovery

June 10, 2020 — The nonprofit trade group Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) is trying to determine the best way to market its fish during the coronavirus crisis, which has caused a massive shift in seafood buying preferences globally.

The issue was explored in the most recent webinar in the GAPP’s summer series, “Post-COVID Communications and the Wild Alaska Pollock Toolkit,” which took place on 5 June. According to Caryn Leahy, the vice president of global public relations firm Ketchum, who presented during the webinar, Alaska pollock is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the current situation.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

A new robot may help keep ships’ bottoms clean

June 1, 2020 — All ships suffer from fouling: the build-up below the waterline of shellfish, seaweeds and other organisms. This causes drag, which slows the affected craft and increases its fuel consumption. Regular hull cleaning thus makes a considerable difference to the profitability of shipping. It also results in a useful reduction in the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s merchant shipping—an industry that many environmentalists think is notoriously dirty and which could therefore do with burnishing its green credentials.

Roar Ådland, a shipping economist at the Norwegian School of Economics, in Bergen, says that a midsized oil tanker’s fuel consumption (and also, consequently, its emission of carbon dioxide) drops by around 9% after its hull is cleaned at sea—something that happens, on average, once every six or seven months. If the cleaning is done in a dry dock, which allows the process to be more thorough, that figure can be as much as 17%.

At the moment, cleaning at sea is done by teams of divers. In recent years, robots have sometimes been added to underwater cleaning crews, and have proved effective. Jotun, a Norwegian coatings company, and Semcon, a Swedish engineering firm, propose, however, to go one step further. They want to replace the divers completely with a machine. That machine, moreover, would not merely defoul a ship’s hull, but stop it fouling up in the first place.

HullSkater, as the consortium dub their invention, is a 200kg hull-crawling robot. It will reside permanently on-board ship, ready to be launched whenever the vessel is stationary—for example, when it is waiting in the roads outside a port for a berth to unload and load. To deploy the robot, it is first lowered overboard by a crane. Its four magnetic wheels, each of which is fitted with a motor, then clamp it to the hull and it can start trundling around. After this, the ship’s crew need do nothing. Wherever the vessel happens to be on the planet, the robot is piloted remotely by an operator on land, who may be half a world away, via a 4g phone connection.

Read the full story at The Economist

Lobstermen don’t need all the traps they use, research claims

May 29, 2020 — New research suggests that the U.S. lobster industry could place fewer traps in the water and still gain just as much profit. And that finding could play a role in the debate over what should be required of Maine lobstermen to reduce entanglements with endangered North Atlantic right whales.

The study was published this week in the peer-reviewed Marine Policy Journal. Lead researcher Hannah Myers, a graduate student at the University of Alaska’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Studies, examined landings and other data from lobster-fishing territory that crosses the international Hague Line between Nova Scotia and Maine.

Myers’ research might help to end an impasse between animal-rights activists who are looking to reduce entanglements injurious, if not fatal, to the whales and have said that Maine fishing lines are at least a statistically-significant threat to the creatures. Maine lobstermen criticize activists and researchers as advancing poorly-researched and economically damaging arguments to their way of life. A plan recently advanced by Maine fishermen was criticized by researchers as not going far enough, while Maine’s federal and state government leaders have called on the federal government to back down on encroaching upon Maine lobstermen.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Pop-up pots and the search for ‘whale-safe’ gear

April 2, 2020 — I lay becalmed one summer night trying to sail from Cutler, Maine, to Nova Scotia. I drifted in the dark, laying across the cockpit in my survival suit and listening for the thrum of a freighter that might run me downhill. Out of the inky black came a blast like a tire exploding, followed by a ringing like bellows, the sound of a great inhalation. It was a whale. I sat up, startled, but could see nothing. Right whales had been in the area that summer and frequented the channel where I lay adrift. They passed me for 15 minutes or so and then were gone.

The morning broke with the wind driving me right back to Cutler, through a carpet of lobster buoys. There are an estimated 3 million traps off the coast of Maine, ground zero for a $483 million dollar industry. Unfortunately, the last 400 North Atlantic right whales are an endangered species with a propensity to get tangled in the buoy lines of fixed-gear fishermen anywhere between Florida and Newfoundland. According to the New England Aquarium, 83 percent of these whales show signs of having been entangled at least once and 59 percent more than once.

While right whales also die from ship strikes and other causes, the environmental groups that are part of NOAA’s Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team are calling for eliminating rope in the water column.

Fixed-gear fishermen on the West Coast have a similar problem. A spike in humpback whale entanglements in 2014 and 2015 led the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity to sue the commonwealth of California in 2017, resulting in a settlement that will require fishermen to limit spring fishing and pursue a conservation plan that could include ropeless or “pop-up” gear, as they call it in California.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Exports crashing, Norway vows to maintain seafood supply

March 23, 2020 — Seafood producers in Norway, spanning both the wild-capture fisheries and aquaculture sectors, will strive to maintain supplies to domestic and overseas markets, with borders and air freight routes remaining open for the transport of goods, the country’s government has said.

Norway has taken drastic steps to halt the spread of COVID-19, with schools, cinemas, restaurants and bars told to close and citizens encouraged to stay at home as much as possible. However, the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries issued a formal letter on 14 March identifying the value chain supporting food production and delivery as critical functions to society.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Without a Brexit fisheries deal, herring and other North Sea species face dire future

March 20, 2020 — Taking back control of fisheries became one of the totemic issues uniting supporters of the campaign for the UK to leave the EU. The issue will again be high on the agenda when the negotiations over the future relationship between the UK and EU are able to take place.

This will turn on the principles of freedom of access to , and the rules governing how the EU’s total allowable catch is divided between member states. Both are enshrined in the EU Common Fisheries Policy, and the fishing quotas have been fixed since 1983. Referred to as “relative stability,” these permit a disproportionate amount of fishing in UK waters. Vessels from other EU member states are estimated to catch eight times as much fish from UK waters as the other way around.

The UK government has indicated that getting a better deal for British fishers will be a red line in the negotiations. In particular, it proposes that access to UK waters should be licensed and  shares should be negotiated annually based on “zonal attachments,” which are the proportions of international fish stocks that reside the 200-mile area off the coast of a country, known as the exclusive economic zone.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Coronavirus increasingly impacting Scotland’s salmon exports

March 16, 2020 — The controls that have been imposed in various markets to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic have made it difficult for some of Scotland’s salmon exporters to get products to customers, and the trade situation is likely to deteriorate before improvements are seen, the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation (SSPO) has said.

U.S. President Donald Trump extended a European travel ban to include the United Kingdom and Ireland on Saturday, 14 March. Cargo remains exempt from the ban, but the number of trans-Atlantic flights has dropped as a result, significantly reducing bellyhold cargo capacity from the market, according to Air Cargo News.

Read the full story at Seafood Source