Saving Seafood

Fishing Boats ‘Going Dark’ Raise Suspicion Of Illegal Catches, Report Says

March 12, 2018 — A new report raises concerns that when fishing vessels “go dark” by switching off electronic tracking devices, in many cases they are doing so to mask the taking of illegal catches in protected marine parks and restricted national waters.

In the report released Monday by Oceana, an international conservation group, authors Lacey Malarky and Beth Lowell document incidents of fishing vessels that disappear from computer screens as they shut off collision-avoidance beacons near restricted areas, only to have them reappear days or weeks later back in legal fishing grounds.

“This practice of vessels going dark is really widespread on a global scale,” Malarky tells NPR.

Malarky and Lowell used Global Fishing Watch, which aggregates automatic identification system, or AIS, signals to give an unprecedented view of global fishing activity. AIS signals can be viewed by the public through such websites as Vesselfinder.com.

Yet another system, known as Vessel Management System, or VMS, is not available to the public but is used by countries to monitor their fishing fleets. However, “some countries can’t afford it — developing countries like those in West Africa,” Malarky says. “So, a lot of developing countries rely on AIS to monitor their fishing fleet.”

Read the full story at NPR

 

Report suggests offshore drilling is a ‘bad deal’ for Florida

March 9, 2018 — Oil drilling along Florida’s coast could put at risk almost 610,000 jobs and $37.4 billion in economic activity, according to a new report by an ocean advocacy group.

Nationally, the nonprofit Oceana’s new economic analysis found that the Trump administration’s offshore drilling plan would threaten more than 2.6 million jobs and almost $180 billion in Gross Domestic Product for only two years’-worth of oil and just over one year’s-worth of gas at current consumption rates.

“From ocean views scattered with drilling platforms, to the industrialization of our coastal communities, to the unacceptable risk of more BP Deepwater Horizon-like disasters — expanding offshore drilling to new areas threatens thriving coastal economies and booming industries like tourism, recreation and fishing that rely on oil-free beaches and healthy oceans,” Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana, said in a statement. “Coastal communities and states are outraged by this radical plan that threatens to destroy our clean coast economies.”

Oil industry officials disputed the findings, saying their industry has operated safely alongside commercial fishing, tourism and other industries for decades.

Oceana’s report was based on the most recent available data for ocean-dependent jobs and revenue from tourism, fishing and recreation in Atlantic and Pacific coastal states, as well as Florida’s Gulf coast, and compares them to the “undiscovered economically recoverable oil and gas reserves in those states.”

Read the full story at Florida Today

 

Blockchain Could Help Restaurants Make Sure the Seafood You Order Is Actually What You Get

March 6, 2018 — Fraud runs rampant in the seafood industry, but blockchain (the technology supporting the growing cryptocurrency market) could help ensure the fish you order in a restaurant is the fish that finds its way onto your plate.

In 2016, Oceana, an ocean conservation advocacy group, compiled a report drawing from 200 published studies on seafood fraud. Based on their findings, a whopping 20 percent of seafood is not labeled correctly. The problem extends to all corners of the globe and at all levels of the supply chain, from the people catching the fish to those distributing and selling it.

The seafood mislabeling infractions detailed in the report ranged from the relatively minor (a restaurant advertising wild salmon but serving a cheaper farmed salmon) to the downright disturbing: sushi chefs purposely mislabeling endangered whale meat as fatty tuna in order to smuggle it into the U.S.

The consequences of mislabeling pop up in global health, the economy, and conservation efforts. According to the Oceana report, the best way to combat them is by increasing traceability. The report asserts that a more detailed and transparent record of information about the fish as it moves along the supply chain could help decrease instances of mislabeling.

Blockchain could provide this record.

Tracking Seafood
Though most commonly associated with money, blockchain’s utility isn’t limited to the world of finance. At its core, the technology is simply a secure, transparent way to record transactions. A number of companies are looking for ways to apply it to the seafood supply chain.

In April 2017, Intel released a demonstration case study showing how Hyperledger Sawtooth, a platform for creating and managing blockchains, could facilitate seafood supply chain traceability. That study used sensors to track and record information about a fish’s location, temperature, and other characteristics as it moved from boat to restaurant.

In January 2018, the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) announced their appropriately named Blockchain Supply Chain Traceability Project. Through that project, the WWF and their partners are cracking down on illegal tuna fishing by recording every step along the supply chain on a blockchain.

“Through blockchain technology, soon a simple scan of tuna packaging using a smartphone app will tell the story of a tuna fish — where and when the fish was caught, by which vessel and fishing method,” said WWF-New Zealand CEO Livia Esterhazy in a press release. “Consumers will have certainty that they’re buying legally-caught, sustainable tuna with no slave labor or oppressive conditions involved.”

Of course, getting everyone along the supply chain to agree to a new recording system might not be easy, and that’s why a blockchain-based seafood solution like Fishcoin could be useful. The idea behind that project is to reward people all along the supply chain for providing valuable data directly to those at the end of it.

For example, fishers in developing nations might send a restaurant or grocery store information on the seafood they caught. This triggers a smart contract that transfers a certain number of Fishcoins into those fisher’s crypto wallets. The fishers can then exchange those Fishcoins for something of value to them, such as prepaid cell phone minutes.

Most of these projects are still in the development stages, but should they take off, it could have far-reaching implications for global health, the economy, and, of course, your dinner plate.

Read the full story at Futurism

 

Seafood group wants next Magnuson-Stevens Act to do away with “overfishing”

February 16, 2018 — A consortium of groups with ties to the seafood industry is calling for the U.S. Congress to pass a Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization bill that gives the Regional Fishery Management Councils greater flexibility to achieve their objectives, but they also looking for federal officials to change how a couple of items are termed.

Saving Seafood’s National Coalition for Fishing Communities is asking Congress to do away with the term “overfishing,” claiming it’s not accurate to base a stock’s condition on just its fishing mortality. In its place, the 24-member group wants to new MSA law to call fishstocks “depleted.” They made their recommendation in a letter to U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

“The term ‘overfished’ is perceived negatively and can unfairly implicate the industry for stock conditions resulting from other factors,” the group wrote.

Gib Brogan, a campaign manager with Oceana, said the effort behind depleted is an attempt by commercial fishing interests to escape a “negative perception and culpability for the state” of stocks.

“Modern fisheries science already accounts for the ‘other factors’ that may decrease the abundance of fish in the oceans,” Brogan said.  “When these ‘other factors’ have been accounted for in the underlying science, fishing remains as the source of mortality and it is entirely appropriate to keep the focus on fishing by using ‘overfished.’  If these other factors are not being appropriately considered, that should be resolved through the assessment for affected fish stocks, not a blanket change in terminology.”

Along with several other commercial fishing groups, the coalition is also calling for the new act to do away with the 10-year rebuilding requirement and giving the regional councils more flexibility in determining the timeframe needed to bolster stocks. The group also suggests moving from “possible” to “practicable” when it comes to those rebuilding periods.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Rep. Moulton: NOAA cuts ‘recipe for disaster’

February 16, 2018 — President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cuts more than $1 billion from the agency that manages the nation’s fisheries and coastal ecosystems, explores space and forecasts weather and changing environmental conditions.

On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Salem criticized the proposed cuts, saying the proposed 14 percent decline reflects the administration’s shallow understanding of the importance of NOAA’s programs to coastal communities, maritime industries and the national resources the agency is tasked to protect.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Moulton said of the withering budget cuts.

A spokeswoman at NOAA’s Gloucester-based Greater Atlantic Region Fisheries Office said the agency would have no comment on the budget proposal.

Still, the numbers remain unnerving — and the opposition more unified among a disparate band of conservationists, fishing stakeholders and political forces — when the cuts within the cuts are explored.

Local groundfishermen, already buffeted by heightened regulation, shrinking quotas and climactic changes, fear the cuts will kill any possibility that NOAA will continue reimbursements for portions of their at-sea monitoring costs in 2018.

Conservationists, such as Oceana, have railed against the deep cuts in ocean-funded research, such as the 33 percent cut in the National Ocean Service.

“The president’s proposal would cripple NOAA, the nation’s premier agency for ocean management and research,” Oceana said in its statement responding to the Trump budget proposals. “Major NOAA programs would suffer massive cuts.”

Read the full story at Salem News

 

D.B. Pleschner: Is court the right place to determine ‘best available science’?

February 12, 2018 — A U.S. District Court judge recently ruled that the federal government’s catch limit for California’s central stock of anchovy — currently 25,000 metric tons — is far too high.

But instead of weighing all the facts, the judge ignored them, shunned the established precedent of deference to federal agencies’ scientific determinations and instead endorsed the flawed arguments of the advocacy group Oceana.

So what happened?

It’s a well-accepted fact that the anchovy population on the West Coast has extreme natural variations in abundance, even without fishing. To account for these wild swings, scientists reduced the overfishing limit of 100,000 tons by 75 percent, setting the annual catch limit at 25,000 metric tons. The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistical Committee approved the numbers as “best available science” and the National Marine Fisheries Service agreed, recognizing that the anchovy resource ranges from peaks of more than two million tons to orders of magnitude lower and quickly jumps back up again.

In California, the anchovy fishery declined in the 1980s due to adverse market conditions and landings have averaged less than 10,000 tons a year ever since. But this fishery is still important because it keeps the local fleet on the water and processing plant doors open when no other fish are available.

Regardless, environmentalists began lobbying the council in 2015 to curtail California’s anchovy catch limit after one advocacy group funded a new research paper that reassessed the basis for anchovy management — a 1991 study based on egg and larval data that represented long-term average biomass abundance, not a single-year stock assessment. Because the reassessment had virtually no adult anchovy biological data from recent years to correlate, the authors had to make assumptions. They concluded that the anchovy population had collapsed, with current biomass estimated at only about 15,000 tons coast-wide.

But other scientists challenged the findings, in part because the new estimate excluded Mexico where a substantial portion of the stock resides, and it also omitted nearshore waters where fishermen were reporting masses of anchovy.

Richard Parrish, retired from NMFS after decades of experience with anchovy, critiqued the paper and stated, “The biomass estimates in the paper cannot be used to estimate the 2016 biomass of the northern stock of anchovy…” He continued, “Clearly, with northern anchovy a five-year-old biomass estimate is not significantly better at estimating current biomass than a 25-year-old biomass estimate.” That statement was included in the Administrative Record (AR) for the Oceana lawsuit, but the judge ignored it.

In 2016, the council sponsored a data-poor workshop where internationally recognized scientists reviewed the new egg-larval analysis along with other available data and also rejected the study’s findings. As one member said, “The estimate did not pass the straight face test.”

Here’s why: the new assessment did not consider anchovy fishery landings, which in 2015 totaled about 64,000 tons, only 17,000 tons in California (still under the 25,000 ton catch limit) and the rest from Mexico. As Parrish pointed out, “Clearly, the absolute minimum biomass estimate for 2015, assuming that the fishery caught every last anchovy in the population, would be 64,114 tons. If fishermen took 50 percent of the biomass, based on recorded landings, the estimate would be 128,000 tons and if they took only 20 percent of the biomass, the estimate would be 320,000 tons, massively above the study’s assertions.”

Read the full opinion piece at the Santa Cruz Sentinel 

 

Deep-sea coral habitat south of Cape slated for protection

February 6, 2018 — The New England Fishery Management Council voted last week to protect deep-sea coral from the effects of fishing across a large stretch of ocean located about 100 miles south of Nantucket.

“The main reason why the council wanted to take this action and protect them from fishing is they are long-lived and very sensitive to disturbance. They can easily be broken and take a long time to recover,” said Michelle Bachman, who works for the council and is the group’s habitat plan development committee chairwoman. “We know they have a special ecological connection to other species like invertebrates and fish.”

Once approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the 25,153 square miles of ocean will join a 38,000-square-mile coral protection area off the Mid-Atlantic, and another protected area off the Southeastern U.S. covering, in total, nearly 100,000 square miles of the Atlantic continental shelf ecosystem.

Deep sea corals are found all over the world at depths of between around 130 to 10,000 feet. Most occur at between 1,000 and 2,600 feet, according to what Florida State University researcher Sandra Brooke told The Pew Charitable Trusts. They exist in a twilight – sometimes pitch black – world where photosynthesis isn’t possible. Northern coral don’t form reef structures, but include individual “plants,” fans, trees, that can be brightly colored, 10 feet across and live hundreds to thousands of years, growing slowly.

“Although the council could have chosen stronger protections, the measure marks a major expansion of coral habitat shielded from dredging and dragging,” said Peter Baker, who directs ocean conservation efforts in the Northeast for The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Few fishermen set pots or tow nets or dredges where coral live on the steep canyon walls that descend from the table top of Georges Bank, but even an accidental jostling by a lobster or crab pot or line or a misplaced tow could cause irrevocable damage. Fishermen told the council they didn’t tow gear below 1,600 feet; the measure protected coral below the 2,000-foot contour established by the New England council last week. The lone exemption was for the red crab fishery, which has relatively few participants, said Bachman.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Opponents, supporters react to Trump’s offshore drilling plan

February 6, 2018 — Environmentalists, fishermen, and state governments are signaling their opposition to the Trump administration’s proposed plan to reopen the ocean off Cape Cod and New England to oil and gas exploration.

“We are skeptical of anything the Trump Administration is doing in the marine environment or anything they are proposing to do,” said Conservation Law Foundation Vice President Priscilla Brooks.

A 2016 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report estimated nearly 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 327 trillion tons of natural gas existed in mostly unexplored areas of the U.S. continental shelf. The new push for fossil fuel exploration and recovery was announced Jan. 4 with the unveiling of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. It is part of President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to make the U.S. more energy independent.

Currently, offshore fossil fuel exploration is controlled by a BOEM plan finalized near the end of the Obama presidency. Obama invoked a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to give what he said would be permanent protection from drilling to the continental shelf from Virginia to Maine.

But there were doubts that Obama’s use of the 1953 law would hold up in court, and the new plan is meant to replace the current one. International Association of Drilling Contractors President Jason McFarland hailed the inclusion of the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and an expansion of Gulf of Mexico drilling areas as an important step in achieving the goal of U.S. energy dominance in the world.

“IADC has long argued for access to areas that hold potential for oil and gas development,” McFarland wrote in comments last month, citing a U.S. Energy Information Administration estimate of a 48 percent growth in worldwide energy demand over the next 20 years. “The number and scale of the recoverable resources is large, and can lead to thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in investment.”

But the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association and the various fishermen’s associations have panned the proposal. Last week, the New England Fishery Management Council approved a comment letter to BOEM that requested Mid-Atlantic and Northern Atlantic lease areas be excluded from the exploration and drilling.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Regulators vote to protect more corals in Atlantic

February 1, 2018 — The New England Fishery Management Council has approved a deep-sea coral protection amendment that will close a wide swath of the continental slope and canyons south of Georges Bank to almost all bottom-tending fishing gear in waters deeper than 600 meters.

The omnibus deep-sea coral amendment, approved by the council Tuesday, will protect 25,153 square miles of deep sea corals and was hailed by conservationists and environmentalists despite the fact that their alternative proposal would have protected even more area off the coast of New England.

“Today’s action is a strong step toward coral conservation, however it was unfortunate that the council did not select the stronger option that was available to them,” Gib Brogan, Oceana’s fisheries campaign manager, said in a statement. “The council missed the opportunity to approve a plan that would have truly stopped the expansion of current fishing and would have protected more corals.”

The deep-sea coral amendment, which requires NOAA Fisheries review and approval, covers 75 percent of the known corals within the designated area, 75 percent of the area’s most suitable habitat for soft corals and 85 percent of the area’s canyon slopes pitched at greater than 30 degrees.

It protects four seamounts and 20 deep-sea canyons.

If approved by NOAA Fisheries, the designated protection areas will be closed to all bottom-tending gear, including mobile gear such as trawls and dredges and all fixed gear such as traps and gillnets.

The lone exception, approved by the council, allows the Atlantic deep-sea red crab pot fishery to continue harvesting in the area.

Fishermen, however, will be able to continue fishing with bottom-tending gear from the Massachusetts coast to the designated protected areas, unless they are in areas already restricted by regulations apart from the coral amendment.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

New England fishing panel votes to protect more sea corals

January 31, 2018 — New England fishing officials approved a proposal Tuesday aimed at protecting large swaths of deep-sea corals in the Atlantic from harmful fishing gear.

The New England Fishery Management Council approved the protection of deep-sea corals located in more than 25,000 square-miles located south of Georges Bank, an area that includes four seamounts and 20 deep-sea canyons, said Janice Plante, a spokeswoman for the council.

The council, which met in Portsmouth, N.H., is charged with managing fishery resources from 3 to 200 miles off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

If the measure is implemented, the entire zone would be closed to nearly all bottom-tending fishing gear, which includes trawls, dredges, traps, and gillnets, with one exception. The council allowed an exemption for the Atlantic deep-sea red crab pot fishery, said Plante.

The council had already adopted coral protection zones for the Gulf of Maine last June.

Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service will review the proposed coral protection zones in the Gulf of Maine and the area south of Georges Bank. The service still has to approve and implement the coral protection proposal, a process that could take several months.

“Given the ecological importance and vulnerability of corals, the overarching objective of this amendment is to identify and protect deep-sea corals in the New England region,” said Plante in a statement. “The council’s desire is to balance coral conservation with commercial fishing usage of coral management zones.”

The moves would help “freeze the footprint of destructive fishing as well as protect deep-sea coral areas from current fishing efforts,” according to a statement from the conservation group Oceana.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe