Saving Seafood

Dire drought warning: California says ‘nearly all’ salmon could die in Sacramento River

July 9, 2021 — The drought is making the Sacramento River so hot that “nearly all” of an endangered salmon species’ juveniles could be cooked to death this fall, California officials warned this week.

In a brief update on the perilous state of the river issued this week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife made a dire prediction about the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon and its struggles against consistently hot weather in the Sacramento Valley.

“This persistent heat dome over the West Coast will likely result in earlier loss of ability to provide cool water and subsequently it is possible that nearly all in-river juveniles will not survive this season,” the department said.

Given that the salmon generally have a three-year life cycle, a near-total wipeout of one year’s run of juveniles “greatly increases the risk of extinction for the species,” said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The winter-run salmon endured two years of severe mortality during the last drought as well.

Read the full story at The Sacramento Bee

Ship speed limit sought to protect endangered whales in Gulf

May 12, 2021 — A speed limit for ships in part of the Gulf of Mexico south of the Florida Panhandle is needed to protect the few remaining endangered whales there, environmental groups said Tuesday.

The groups asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service to set a 10-knot (11.5 mph, 18.5 kph) speed limit in an area covering about 11,500 square miles (30,000 square kilometers) off Florida and Alabama.

Shipping interests did not immediately answer requests for comment on the petition, which also asks NOAA Fisheries to make all shipping detour around the whales’ core habitat at night.

The federal agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation, spokeswoman Allison Garrett said.

“One of the rarest, most endangered whales on the planet is in our backyard, and we have a responsibility to save it,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups.

Read the full story at The Star Tribune

Supreme Court won’t hear fishermen case against ocean monument

March 23, 2021 — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a fishing group that challenged the creation of a large federally protected area in the Atlantic Ocean.

The group sued to try to get rid of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which became the first national ocean monument in the Atlantic when President Barack Obama created it in 2016. The area consists of 5,000 square miles off New England, and it is home to fragile deep-sea corals.

The fishermen sued in federal court saying the establishment of a protected zone where they have historically fished for lobsters and crabs could hurt their livelihoods. Federal district and appellate courts ruled that the monument was created appropriately by Obama, who used the Antiquities Act to establish it.

The high court denied a request to take a look at the case. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the creation of a national monument was “of no small consequence,” but the petitioners did not meet the criteria to bring it before the Supreme Court.

Roberts also wrote that the court has never considered how such a large monument can be justified under the Antiquities Act, which President Theodore Roosevelt created more than a century ago to preserve artifacts such as Native American ruins. Roberts wrote it’s possible the court could be presented a better opportunity to consider that issue in the future.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

US Supreme Court turns down marine monuments challenge, for now

March 23, 2021 — Conservationists earned a victory on Monday, 22 March, when the U.S. Supreme Court opted against taking a case that questioned the establishment of national marine monuments. However, Chief Justice John Roberts strongly hinted the court may welcome future challenges of a similar ilk.

The Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association had asked the nation’s top court to consider its case against the federal government and its use of the Antiquities Act to establish marine monuments, which then-President Barack Obama used to create the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in 2016. While the court decided that the lobstermen’s case did not warrant consideration, Roberts took an unusual step in issuing a statement raising issues about the scope of the monuments.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Oceana, NRDC call for expansion of Seafood Import Monitoring Program

March 8, 2021 — Marine sustainability non-governmental organization Oceana public on 3 March calling for the expansion of the U.S. Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) and for mandatory full-chain traceability requirements for all seafood sold in the United States.

The report, “Transparency and Traceability: Tools to Stop Illegal Fishing,” criticizes the current limitations of SIMP, in that the law currently applies to just 13 types of imported seafood and traces them to the U.S. border, not beyond. Extending SIMP to cover all seafood species sold in the United States, and requiring that all be covered by full-chain traceability from boat to plate, would reduce species mislabeling and help in the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, Oceana said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Noise Pollution in Our Oceans: Can We Turn Down the Volume for Marine Life?

February 24, 2021 — Unlike light, noise is a long distance traveler and can go astonishing distances through the water.  In 1943, the sound fixing and ranging (SOFAR) channel, a horizontal layer of water in the ocean at which depth the speed of sound is at its minimum, was discovered. The SOFAR channel was capable of transmitting low-frequency, long-wavelength sound waves produced by an explosion near the Bahama Islands to receivers stationed near the coast of Africa. Sound waves in the narrow SOFAR channel that are traveling at minimum velocity can go as far as 15,000 miles or more.  Unfortunately for those that live in the ocean, this means their world has become loud – very loud.

On February 5, 2021, Duarte et al., published “Noise Pollution: The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean” in the journal Science. A soundscape is an acoustic environment and a wide variety of noises make up the soundscape under the world’s oceans. Weather conditions, like storms, wind or rain falling, and geological processes, such as earthquakes or undersea volcanoes, are geophony; the natural sounds that animals and organisms make, such as vocalizations, calls, trills, fins flapping, etc., are biophony. And then there are humans – the sounds we and our human activities contribute to the soundscape are called anthrophony.

One of the most widely recognized incidents representative of the impact of human sound on marine life is the March 2000 stranding of seventeen marine mammals (16 of them whales) in the Bahamas. The animals had beached themselves in and around the islands, some with bleeding ears; six of them were dead. After learning that this had occurred very shortly after US Navy destroyers were using sonar in training exercises nearby, government scientists launched an investigation. An interim report released in December 2001 concluded that the strandings were caused by several factors, but admitted the sonar pings likely dazed the mammals, causing confusion and disorientation.

Read the full story at The National Law Review

Trump plan to allow seismic blasts in Atlantic search for oil appears dead

October 2, 2020 — The Trump administration’s plan to drill off the Atlantic Coast for the first time in more than half a century is on the brink of collapse because of a court development Thursday that blocked the first steps to offshore oil and gas exploration, as well as the president’s recent actions that undermine his own proposal.

Opponents of the drilling declared victory on Thursday after the government acknowledged that permits to allow seismic blasting in the ocean — the first step toward locating oil deposits for drilling — will expire next month and not be renewed.

Nine state attorneys general and several conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit early last year to block seismic blasting, arguing it could harm endangered whales and other marine animals. The court battle dragged out so slowly that, in the meantime, time ran out on the permits.

Donna Wieting, director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a court declaration, released Tuesday, that her agency “has no authority to extend the terms of those [permits] upon their expiration. Further, NMFS has no basis for reissuing or renewing these [permits].” The five companies that were granted permits would have to restart the months-long process leading to approval or denial, Wieting said.

Also on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel of South Carolina held a telephone conference with all parties of the lawsuit to determine how to move forward. The judge is expected to declare the case moot because the seismic mapping cannot occur without the permits, said Michael Jasny, who was on the call and is director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Why everything you’ve heard about ‘ropeless’ crab fishing gear is false

August 26, 2020 — Is the so-called “ropeless” fishing gear the silver bullet for solving the perceived problem of marine mammal interactions in California’s crab fisheries?

Several profit-driven environmental groups, including Oceana, would like the public and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to believe these baseless claims.

That’s because these groups are ramping up efforts to force California’s historic and economically most important fishery — which helps create $400 million annually for working families — to adopt expensive, impractical and unproven new fishing gear which would force most crab fishermen out of business.

But the problem is that neither the science, nor any other reliable data, support their false claims. “Ropeless” gear is not a silver bullet — in fact, it’s actually dangerous — and ironically, it still has ropes. Nor are marine mammal populations currently at any significant risk.

Francine Kershaw, staff scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, has misleadingly asserted that “off the West Coast, the number of deaths of humpback whales caused by entanglements are now high enough for the population to slip into decline.”

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman

Environmental Groups, Fishing Advocates Clash over Marine Monument Suit

June 29, 2020 — In response to a June 5 order by President Trump that would open a national marine monument 150 miles off the coast of New England to commercial fishing, the National Resources Defense Council and other entities have come together to file a lawsuit to protect the region.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument was established in an area that was previously open to commercial fishing, supporting fish, red crab, squid, and lobster harvests. The monument was designated in 2016 by President Barack Obama as a way to protect the habitat “for a wide range of species, from endangered whales to Atlantic puffins to centuries-old deep-sea corals,” according to the N.R.D.C.

A group called Saving Seafood has fired back, issuing a June 17 statement of its own that said the marine monument had been established “without appropriate stakeholder consultation” in the first place. The environmental conservation community “chose the politically expedient route, and used their contacts and clout in the Obama administration to circumvent the scientific and public process. What they are now discovering is that what one president might create with the stroke of a pen, another president might take away.”

Read the full story at The East Hampton Star

Seismic surveying proposal in Atlantic raises Bay concerns

March 25, 2019 — The Atlantic Ocean is staring down the barrel of an air gun, and its blast could reverberate into the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite outcry from coastal communities and most East Coast states, the Trump administration is moving forward with allowing five companies to perform seismic surveys offshore from Delaware Bay to central Florida.

Environmental groups and many marine scientists fear that the tests’ loud, repeated blasts, which are used to detect oil and gas deposits deep beneath the ocean floor, could upend an underwater ecosystem that relies on sound for communication.

“The ocean is an acoustic world,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s marine mammal protection program. “Whales, fish and many other species depend on sound to survive. The extensive blasting that the Trump administration has authorized would undermine marine life on an enormous scale.”

The NRDC joined several environmental groups in a federal lawsuit filed in South Carolina in December, challenging the administration’s approval of the seismic surveys a month earlier. On Feb. 20, the conservation groups asked the judge in the case to block the seismic tests from going forward while the litigation is pending. The National Marine Fisheries Service decision allows the companies to “incidentally harass” marine mammals during the tests.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal