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NEW YORK: Hundreds of undersized lobsters found in New York City supermarkets

January 23, 2023 — Authorities in the U.S. state of New York have discovered hundreds of undersized lobsters for sale in several New York City supermarkets.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) Division of Law Enforcement conducted an inspection of an unidentified supermarket in the borough of Queens on 24 December, 2022, and found 128 undersized live lobsters for sale. On 26 December, 245 undersized lobsters were found for sale at a market in the borough of Brooklyn. Both supermarkets were issued violation notices, according to a DEC press release, with each violation coming with a fine of between USD 400 and USD 600 (EUR 368 and EUR 552). The lobsters were confiscated and donated to a food pantry in New York City.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

New monitoring rules for Northeast fishermen aimed at better data

January 23, 2023 — Changes to U.S. rules about the monitoring of Northeast commercial fishing activities are going into effect this month with a goal of providing more accurate information about some of the nation’s oldest fisheries.

The U.S. mandates observers to work onboard fishing boats to collect data and make sure fishermen adhere to rules and quotas. The relationship between fishermen and observers is sometimes difficult, and fishermen have long complained the monitoring program heaps costs on them.

The National Marine Fisheries Service has adopted new monitoring rules for Northeast fishermen of groundfish, like haddock and flounder, to try to improve the accuracy of the data. The fishermen harvest some of the most popular seafood species in the country, and the data are used to craft fishing regulations.

Read the full article at wbur

 

David Goethel: A grievous assault on the lobster resource

November 4, 2021 — In recent years, the federal government in the form of the National Marine Fisheries Service has been expanding restrictions on fin fishermen throughout the U.S.  In the Northeast every aspect of a fishing vessel is controlled by regulation, from the size of the mesh in a net, to where and when and what you can fish for, to who is on your vessel and when you can leave the dock.

This has caused the fishing industry to shrink and the fin fishermen in New Hampshire have dwindled down to a handful.  During my lifetime, the fishermen in New Hampshire have had one commercial fishing organization.  We all meet together and work out our differences.  Compliance in all the New Hampshire fisheries is high and conflicts are few. After all, we are a community out on the ocean and need to work together.

Read the full opinion piece at the Portsmouth Herald

 

Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life

January 22, 2019 — Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean.

The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three-dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie.

The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration’s plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies have been given permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades. The surveys haven’t started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.

And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor.

Read the full story at The New York Times

NOAA: 2017 whale entanglements worse than average, improvement over 2016

December 7, 2018 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report on Thursday, 6 December that indicates 2017 was a worse than average year for the entanglement of large whales, but an improvement over numbers in recent years.

That news was of a worse-than-average year was also tempered by the fact that of the large whales entangled, right whales had fewer entanglements in the U.S. Northeast than in previous periods. The most frequently entangled large whale species in 2017 was the humpback, which accounted for 49 of the 76 entanglements, according to NOAA.

Right whales accounted for only two of the 76 entanglements, according to NOAA.

Read the full article at Seafood Source

Whale entanglements exceeded average in 2017, report says

December 7, 2018 — The number of large whales entangled in U.S. waters was a little worse than usual in 2017, but entanglements of right whales and in the Northeast were down.

In a report released Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed 76 large whales were found entangled in fishing gear or marine debris in U.S. waters in 2017. Six of the 76 entangled whales were found dead, 45 were presumed to be alive but still entangled, four had freed themselves and 21 were freed by good samaritans or members of the national Large Whale Entanglement Response Network.

“Entanglement in fishing gear or marine debris is a very serious conservation and welfare issue,” said Sarah Wilkin, a national stranding and emergency response coordinator and one of the authors of the NOAA Fisheries report. “It can kill or seriously injure large whales. Entanglements that involve threatened or endangered species can have significant population level effects as well.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

New England Council eying more monitoring of some fisheries

November 16, 2018 — The New England Fisheries Management Council wants to standardize future industry-funded monitoring incorporated into other fisheries beyond the Northeast multispecies groundfishery and the scallop fishery.

The council is soliciting public comment on a proposal to increase industry-funded monitoring in certain fisheries “to assess the amount and type of catch and reduce uncertainty around catch estimates,” according to the summary of the proposed rule published in the Federal Register.

The proposal specifically would increase industry-funded monitoring in the Atlantic herring industry, as well.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily News

CONNECTICUT: Fishing limits are too onerous, fishermen tell Rep. Joe Courtney

April 25, 2016 — STONINGTON, Conn. — U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, spoke with local fishermen Friday who shared their ongoing concerns about federal fishing regulations that limit the numbers of fish they can haul.

The regulations, which are intended to restore fish stocks, have forced local fishermen to throw back thousands of fish that are usually dead already, they said.

Mike Gambardella, owner of Gambardella Wholesale Seafood, who called the gathering of area fishermen, said if catch limits don’t change, he’ll be forced to close his business.

At the moment, Gambardella’s operation is only allowed to bring in 10 black sea bass per day, which he said is absurd. And since 2010, the state’s quota for summer flounder has gone down more than 100,000 pounds.

Gambardella showed Courtney photos of a local fisherman who brought in thousands of sea bass in one tow. The fisherman was then forced to pick 10 of them to keep and had to throw the rest back.

“These federal regulations are really in bad shape,” he said. “Something has got to change, or I’ll have to close my doors.”

Read the full story at The Westerly Sun

New York Times spotlights perils faced by Atlantic scallop fleet

April 18, 2016 – In an April 15 story, the New York Times described in detail the challenges faced at sea by members of the limited access scallop fleet. The story covered the rescue of the Carolina Queen III, which ran aground off the Rockaways Feb. 25, during a storm with waves cresting as high as 14 feet. The following is an excerpt from the story:

Scallop fishing may not conjure up the derring-do of those catching crabs in the icy waters of the Bering Strait or the exploits of long-line tuna fisherman chronicled on shows like “The Deadliest Catch.” But the most dangerous fishing grounds in America remain those off the Northeast Coast — more dangerous than the Bering Sea, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From 2000 to 2009, the years covered by the agency’s data, 504 people died while fishing at sea and 124 of them were in the Northeast.

The scallop industry had the second-highest rate of fatalities: 425 deaths per 100,000 workers. Among all workers in the United States over the same period, according to the C.D.C., there were four deaths per 100,000 workers. The size of the crew and the time at sea contribute to the dangers.

Drew Minkiewicz, a lawyer who represents the Fisheries Survival Fund, said that since 2010, the number of vessels permitted to fish for scallops has been limited, and with fewer unregistered ships at sea, there have been fewer accidents.

The Atlantic sea scallop — Placopecten magellanicus — has been popular since the 1950s, when Norwegian immigrants first scoured the seas south of New Bedford, Mass. The supply could swing between scarcity and plenty, but in the 1980s huge algae blooms known as brown tides appeared several years in a row and threatened to destroy the scallops’ ecosystem on the East Coast. Even after those tides passed, the industry almost did itself in by overfishing. Only after regulations were passed in the 1990s and the industry banded together with the scientific community to improve fishing techniques did the fisheries rebound.

Now, scalloping along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to North Carolina is among the most lucrative fishing in the world. In 2014, the catch was estimated to be worth more than $424 million.

The industry operates under strict guidelines, many aimed at ensuring sustainability of the fisheries. To fish some areas with known scallop beds, a permit is needed, and the haul is capped. Open-sea fishing, on the other hand, is restricted only by the annual 32-days-at-sea limit.

The clock is always ticking.

“We get so few days to go out, we have to find every efficiency to maximize our days at sea,” said Joe Gilbert, who owns Empire Fisheries and, as captain of a boat called the Rigulus, is part of the tight-knit scalloping community.

In preparation for the Carolina Queen’s voyage, the crew would have spent days getting ready, buying $3,000 in groceries, loading more than 20,000 pounds of ice and prepping the equipment on the twin-dredge vessel.

The vessel steamed north from the Chesapeake Bay, traveling 15 hours to reach the coast off New Jersey, where the crew would probably have started fishing. Then the work would begin.

It is pretty standard for a crew to work eight hours on and take four hours off, but in reality it often is more like nine hours on and three off. If you are a good sleeper, you are lucky to get two hours’ shut-eye before heading back on deck.

The huge tows scouring the ocean bed for scallops dredge for about 50 minutes and are then hauled up, their catch dumped on deck before the tows are reset and plunged back into the water, a process that can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

While the dredge did its work, the crew on duty on the Carolina Queen sorted through the muddy mix of rocks and sand and other flotsam on the ship’s deck, looking for the wavy round shells of the scallops.

“The biggest danger is handling the gear on deck,” Mr. Gilbert said. “It is very heavy gear on a pitching deck, and you get a lot of injured feet, injured hands.”

Once the scallops are sorted, according to industry regulations, they must be shucked by hand.

The crew spends hours opening the shells and slicing out the abductor muscle of the mollusks — the fat, tasty morsel that winds up on plates at a restaurants like Oceana in Midtown Manhattan, where a plate of sea scallops à la plancha costs as much as $33.

A single boat can haul 4,000 pounds in a day.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Herring, Haddock Fishermen at Odds as Regulators Seek Peace

January 26, 2016—PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Fishing regulators are trying to broker peace between two of the most economically important fisheries in the Northeast, herring and haddock.

One of the areas where fishermen seek the two species is Georges Bank, a critical fishing ground off the New England coast. Atlantic herring are important as bait and sometimes as food, while haddock are a staple of New England’s fish markets and seafood restaurants.

Herring fishermen often accidentally capture haddock as bycatch, and they are allowed a “catch cap” of the fish in Georges Bank every year. They exceeded it last year, as they have in other recent years, and regulators closed a large section of Georges Bank to herring fishing until May 1, 2016.

Some herring fishermen have requested higher bycatch limits or other changes to the rules, but haddock and other groundfishermen frequently opposed changes. Haddock are an important money-maker for fishermen of bottom-dwelling species because they are much more abundant in Northeastern waters than cod, which have collapsed off of New England.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times

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