Saving Seafood

Trump administration opts not to pursue appeal of driftnet ruling

April 23, 2019 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has decided against appealing a federal judge’s ruling that NOAA Fisheries illegally withdrew a proposal that would have placed hard caps on the bycatch of protected species caught in California’s swordfish drift gillnet fishery.

On Monday, 15 April, when its brief was due to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the administration instead filed a notice to dismiss its appeal voluntarily. As a result, NOAA Fisheries will begin talks with the Pacific Fishery Management Council to determine the limits that should be placed on such species as humpback whales, loggerhead turtles, and leatherback turtles.

The PFMC initially worked with key stakeholders to establish caps on nine species, and NOAA Fisheries published the draft review for implementation in October 2016. However, eight months later, after Trump was elected president, the agency reversed its course.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Science on your side: The trappings of fish fraud

April 18, 2019 — Seafood fraud and mislabeled seafood is a permanent topic in the sustainable fisheries space and has been driving the demands for product traceability. Since 2011, Oceana has led the discourse on fish fraud by publishing sixteen reports on the subject.

Oceana Canada’s 2018 report exposed some important shortcomings in the Canadian seafood system and offered constructive, achievable mandates for reducing seafood fraud domestically, but the study collected data from a biased sample and only presented results that supported a narrative of rampant fraudulence.

Oceana collects seafood samples at restaurants and retail outlets, DNA tests them, then matches the DNA results to government labeling guidelines. The sampling focused specifically on cod, halibut, snapper, tuna, salmon and sole because these species historically, “have the highest rates of species substitution.” This nonrandom sampling is consistent with previous seafood fraud studies from Oceana.

Of the 382 seafood samples tested in Canada, 168 (44 percent) were found to be mislabeled.

None of the red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus), yellowtail or butterfish tested was appropriately labeled. Tuna was mislabeled 41 percent of the time, halibut 34 percent, cod 32 percent and salmon 18 percent.

Fundamental to the interpretation of the Oceana Canada 2018 study’s results is the understanding that the samples were selected to find fraud, not to measure the actual extent of fraud across the entire seafood supply chain. Oceana disclosed this in the report. However the press release it issued for this report, and subsequent headlines from other news sources, such as “At least one quarter of the seafood you buy is a lie” from the site IFL Science, created a different narrative.

Aside from the sampling criticisms, the analysis of specific species was especially flawed.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Report finds ‘alarming unaddressed deficiencies’ in US offshore oil drilling

April 18, 2019 — Even as the Trump administration has taken steps to expand offshore oil drilling, a new report shows that thousands of oil spills are still happening and that workers in the oil and gas industry are still dying on the job.

The report comes from Oceana, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring the oceans, which has sued the federal government to stop seismic airgun blasting in the Atlantic Ocean. The blasting is the first step needed to allow offshore drilling, when seismic airguns are used to find oil and gas deep under the ocean. Every state along the Atlantic coast has opposed the blasting, worried that spills could hurt tourism and local fisheries. Some scientists say the testing could also hurt marine life, including the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale. The group tied its report, released Thursday, to the ninth anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to show what has been happening since the government promised to hold the industry accountable to higher safety standards.

Read the full story at CNN

Federal appellate court upholds NOAA Fisheries’ definition of bycatch

April 18, 2019 — A panel of federal appellate judges has upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled on NOAA Fisheries’ method for assessing bycatch in New England fisheries.

The ruling, which was announced on Friday, 12 April, in the District of Columbia chambers of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, allows NOAA Fisheries to use statistical sampling to determine the amount of bycatch. It stems from a 2011 court case where judges ruled the agency did not establish methodology standards to assess the number of other species caught and discarded when harvesting selected fish.

In both instances, environmental group Oceana pursued the lawsuit.

After that decision, NOAA Fisheries decided to utilize human observers on vessels. In most cases, the observers were trained biologists who reported on a vessel’s harvest. However, since it was too expensive to place an observer on every vessel, the agency created a statistical formula that allocated the observers in a fashion that reduced bias. This enabled NOAA Fisheries officials to build fishery-wide assessments based the observers’ findings.

Oceana filed the subsequent suit in July 2015 and argued that the sampling method implemented violated the Magnuson-Stevens Act. In addition, it claimed that observers were only counting the bycatch of species under management plans within the agency.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The fish you’re eating in London might not be what it’s labelled

April 16, 2019 — When biology professor Jennifer McDonald got the DNA results back from her students’ experiment on fish, a high number of the fish were not what was said on the label.

As part of a class experiment at Fanshawe College, her students were sent to grocery stores and sushi restaurants in London to collect fish samples.

The class extracted the DNA and compared how many samples were actually what they claimed to be.

Of the 16 samples, they were able to sequence nine of them due to varied success rates.

Seven of the nine were misidentified, McDonald said.

“Yeah, it was a pretty high number,” she said.

A piece of fish that was labelled as red snapper came back as tilapia, something McDonald said happens all the time.

“That really wasn’t surprising. It was disappointing but not surprising,” she said. “Same with a piece of fish that was supposed to be white tuna. That is very often actually escolar and mislabelled as white tuna.”

What did surprise McDonald was when tilapia was passed off as red tuna.

“A fish like tuna has a very characteristic taste it has a very characteristic texture and for a place to actually be fooling people into thinking that they’re eating tuna when they’re really being served tilapia was really really surprising,” she said.

Read the full story at CBC News

NGO outcry as latest EU report shows little improvement in ending overfishing

April 12, 2019 — Environmental NGOs have decried a new European Commission report, claiming it shows species such as sardine, hake, and cod could suffer commercial extinctions in European waters in the short term.

The 2019 report by the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) led Oceana to state that overfishing is “plaguing EU seas”. Around 40% of Atlantic stocks and 87% of Mediterranean ones are found to be fished unsustainably, it said.

“As the 2020 deadline for ending overfishing is fast approaching, scientists confirm, with just months to go, the EU countries are still nowhere near reaching the legal obligation of the common fisheries policy (CFP).”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

CALIFORNIA: Restrictions on overfished sardines in Monterey Bay create financial hardships for fishermen

March 28, 2019 — Sardine fishermen in Monterey Bay are facing a fifth straight year of restrictions on the amount they will be permitted to catch, creating financial hardships for the commercial industry.

A new draft assessment from the National Marine Fisheries Service indicates a sardine population of 27,547 metric tons. According to the Fisheries Service, any tonnage below 50,000 metric tons is considered “overfished.” That’s a 98.5 percent collapse since 2006.

The restriction, which would essentially cancel the 2019-2020 commercial sardine season, must be applied when populations drop under 150,000 metric tons, said Geoff Shester, senior scientist with the Monterey office of Oceana, a marine environmental watchdog group.

“The crash of Pacific sardines has been difficult to watch,” Shester said. “We’ve witnessed dramatic starvation effects to ocean animals.”

The collapse is a result of overfishing, Shester said. Sardine populations go through natural cyclical fluctuations, but to see numbers this low is caused from over-fishing.

Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, was not available to comment Wednesday, but she told the Monterey Herald following the 2018 assessment that “fishermen are seeing more sardines, not less, especially in nearshore waters.”

Read the full story at the Santa Cruz Sentinel

CALIFORNIA: Dramatic sardine population decline means likely West Coast fishing ban

March 27, 2019 — There won’t be any boats pulling bulging nets of fresh sardines out of the ocean along the West Coast this year after another dramatic decline in population virtually guarantees a ban on the commercial take of the tiny schooling fish.

The northern Pacific sardine population, stretching from Mexico to British Columbia, has plummeted 98.5 percent since 2006, according to a draft stock assessment released this week by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

It means regulators have no choice but to ban sardine fishing for the fifth straight year starting July 1 from Mexico to the Canadian border.

“We’ve been urging for an overhaul to the way sardine are managed for the last seven years,” said Geoff Shester, a senior scientist with Oceana, an ocean conservation advocacy group. “It is critical to hold fishery managers accountable for exacerbating this modern-day sardine collapse and seek management changes to use best available science to learn from our mistakes.”

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

Latest Oceana seafood fraud report takes aim at SIMP, but misses mark

March 20, 2019 — The intention of Oceana’s most recent report was to call for an expansion of the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP). SIMP is an electronic traceability program designed to reduce fraud in the import of seafood into the United States. The program was created under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 and is managed by U.S. Customs and NOAA. Currently, SIMP requires importers to maintain records for shrimp, abalone, Atlantic cod, blue crab, dolphinfish, grouper, king crab, Pacific cod, red snapper, sea cucumber, sharks, swordfish, and tunas, detailing how they were caught or harvested and tracking the products until they reach the U.S. The program however does not extend past the importation stage – once it is in the domestic supply chain, the traceability systems end. Oceana is using their latest report as advocacy for including all seafood species (not just the ones listed above) and to extend traceability further into the supply chain past the point of importation.

Oceana sought to expose the limitations of this program by, “launching a nationwide investigation of some popular seafood types not covered by the program.” “Oceana employees and volunteers collected more than 400 samples from over 250 locations in 24 states and the District of Columbia, including restaurants, large grocery stores and smaller markets.”

Same critique of Oceana’s approach to seafood fraud

There were 29 different seafood “types” collected, but no criteria for how they chose these “types” other than they were not found in the SIMP program. Oceana used DNA testing to match the results with the label as per FDA guidelines. If something was labeled as simply “seabass”, but was more specifically Patagonian tooth, that label was considered incorrect and fraudulent. The same can be said for a label that read “snapper” but was not specific to explain which exact species. This is a critical decision by Oceana because it raises the incidence of seafood mislabeling found in restaurants where menu descriptions are often more general than in retail settings. Indeed, samples obtained in this study from restaurants were mislabeled 26% of the time compared to retail 16% of the time. As for seabass and snapper, they saw rates of mislabeling at 55% and 42%, respectively.

Oceana also attempted to exaggerate its results around catfish. Swai (Pangasius bocourti), a species of catfish, and channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) are two major seafood imports to the US, typically from East Asia. Some of these imported catfish species have been associated with low sustainability ratings and health concerns; there is no doubt that this is a tricky labeling situation for the FDA to monitor. But there is already a strict labeling law that requires all imported catfish species – even true channel catfish – to be labeled differently. “Catfish” can now only be on labels of US caught or farm raised catfish products, even if it is the exact same species, as is the case with channel catfish imports. This law was enacted as an economic buffer a few years ago to protect the US catfish aquaculture industry. To this end, Oceana found only 7% of catfish labels to be incorrect. To me, that is a pretty low rate for one of the most consumed seafoods in the country, but Oceana framed this result much differently.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

 

A California battle over swordfish — and gill nets

March 19, 2019 — Conservationists are pushing a $1 million effort this summer to change the way swordfish are caught off the California coast by phasing out the use of gill nets. They are the mile-long nylon nets used to catch swordfish but that also ensnare other species, causing conservation organizations to seek an end to their use.

Commercial fishermen can use gill nets now, with a drift gill net shark and swordfish permit from the Department of Fish and Wildlife. But a new California law will officially ban gill nets as of January 2023.

The law requires the department to establish a voluntary “permit transition program” that will reimburse fishermen for giving up the use of gill nets. The state has set aside $1 million in public money for the program and an additional $1 million will be sought in private donations.

The law requires the state to establish a volunteer “permit transition program” by March 31, 2020, which will serve as the mechanism for the reimbursement program.

“California is one of the last places globally that still allows these wasteful fishing nets to be used, so it’s high time the Golden State transitions to cleaner, more sustainable fishing gears to provide a domestic swordfish product to Californians and visitors alike who enjoy local seafood products, said Ashley Blacow-Draeger, a spokeswoman for the ocean-conservation organization Oceana.

Read the full story at Capitol Weekly