Saving Seafood

New Year Brings New Protections For West Coast Seafloor Habitat

January 2, 2020 — Along with the new year, the West Coast is getting new protections for corals and sponges that live on the seafloor.

Regulations starting Jan. 1 restrict bottom trawl fishing on about 90% of the seafloor off Oregon, Washington and California.

Bottom trawlers drag weighted nets along the seafloor to catch dozens of groundfish species, including lingcod, Dover and petrale sole and all kinds of rockfish. In the process, they can damage corals and sponges that live on the ground.

Ashley Blaco-Draeger with the environmental group Oceana said corals and sponges don’t recover easily from the damage because they grow very slowly.

“They only grow about a millimeter a year,” she said. “So once these structures are destroyed it can take hundreds or thousands of years for them to recover — if ever.”

Read the full story at OPB

Rule aimed at saving more sea turtles from shrimp boats gets mixed response

December 27, 2019 — A new federal rule aimed at protecting sea turtles from shrimping nets is getting mixed reactions from conservation groups.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has finalized a new rule that requires special metal grates known as TEDs, or turtle excluder devices, in more than 1,000 additional shrimping vessels in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. The TEDs create an opening in shrimp nets to allow trapped turtles to escape before they drown.

The rule requires all vessels longer than 40 feet to install the special metal grates by April 2021. NOAA estimates the rule will save nearly 1,160 threatened or endangered sea turtles each year along the U.S. coast from Texas to North Carolina. The additional metal grates will also reduce the bycatch of sharks, sturgeon and other fish, NOAA said.

The conservation group Oceana praised the rule as “a step in the right direction.” The rule was developed in response to a 2015 Oceana lawsuit alleging the federal government was violating the Endangered Species Act by failing to monitor the shrimping industry’s impact on sea turtles and set limits on the number of sea turtles that can be killed.

Read the full story at NOLA.com

Canadian fishery health declining, hamstrung by lack of rebuilding plans, new audit says

November 22, 2019 — The prospect for Canadian fish populations is dim, a new audit says, with fewer stocks healthy today than two years ago and plans in place to rebuild just six of the country’s 33 depleted stocks.

Oceana Canada’s 2019 fishery audit of 194 stocks relied on data from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It suggests that Canadian fishery managers aren’t working with the speed and urgency necessary to rebuild stocks, as required by amendments to the country’s fisheries act that were passed this summer. The proportion of stocks in a critical state rose from 13 percent two years ago to 17 percent today, while the proportion of healthy stocks fell from 35 percent to 29 percent today.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Latest regulations safeguard 140,000 square miles off the West Coast

November 19, 2019 — Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued final regulations to protect the seafloor habitat off the West Coast from bottom trawling.

The regulations cover 140,000 square miles and includes corals, sponges, rocky reefs and other important areas for marine life and ocean ecosystems. These safeguards for the living seafloor are in response to a vote by the Pacific Fishery Management Council in April 2018, which followed years of scientific input and advocacy by Oceana, which has an office in Monterey County.

Bottom trawling is described as the most damaging fishing method to seafloor habitats off the West Coast. Weighted nets are dragged to catch fish living near the seafloor and in doing so flatten, topple and crush delicate corals and sponges that provide habitat for these fish and other marine creatures.

The new regulations protect unique and important ocean areas off Washington, Oregon and California. Also included is the protection of deep-sea habitats beyond 3,500 meters depth (nearly 2 miles) below the ocean’s surface from all commercial bottom-contact fishing gear. In addition, the regulations increase fishing opportunities by allowing select re-openings in some historic fishing grounds where bottom trawling has been prohibited in recent years to recover overfished rockfish populations.

Read the full story at the Santa Cruz Sentinel

Bottom-trawling fishing severely restricted off West Coast starting in January

November 19, 2019 — The most extensive ban on bottom trawling — dragging weighted nets on the sea floor — became law Tuesday after fishing groups and environmentalists agreed to protect more than 140,000 square miles of seafloor habitat along the West Coast, including beds of lush coral around the Farallon Islands.

The new regulations, which will take effect Jan. 1 after being published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, will restrict fishing over 90% of the seafloor along the coast from Canada to Mexico, the largest contiguous area protected from bottom trawling in the world.

At the same time, about 3,000 square miles of sandy seafloor previously closed to fishing under the 2002 Rockfish Conservation Area rules were reopened after it was determined that rockfish populations had recovered in those areas.

“It’s monumental,” said Geoffrey Shester, the senior scientist for the conservation group Oceana, which has fought for years to limit bottom trawling, long considered the most damaging method of fishing in the ocean. “It puts the West Coast at the top of the barrel for global leadership in protecting our seafloor.”

Read the full story at the San Fransisco Chronicle 

Med countries commit to fight illegal fishing, preserve ecosystems

November 12, 2019 — The General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) — under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization — has moved to increase fisheries transparency, protect threatened corals, and preserve fish breeding grounds.

The enforcement of a package of measures will be vital to help revert the “overfishing crisis” of this sea, said NGO Oceana, since they will create areas where fish can reproduce safely and will hinder illegal fishing.

“Mediterranean countries have taken an important step to restore the abundance of this sea and protect some of its most vulnerable wildlife. Oceana urges them now to enforce these decisions and adopt robust compliance systems including sanctions, so that these decisions are truly effective. GFCM’s credibility will be at stake as long as the Mediterranean remains the world’s most overexploited sea,” said Pascale Moehrle, executive director for Oceana Europe.

Oceana particularly welcomed commitments to fight illegal fishing, protect corals and fish habitats, and comply with “fisheries restricted areas”, or FRAs.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

CALIFORNIA: Sides battle over Monterey Bay’s anchovy population

October 16, 2019 — A fishing industry group says it has new findings supporting its contention that there is a healthy population of anchovies, which is counter to a nonprofit’s lawsuit challenging how the number of anchovies are determined. Meanwhile, Monterey fishermen say there are tons of the little guys in the local fishery.

Gino Pennisi and Neil Guglielmo have been fishing out of Monterey for years, in Guglielmo’s case, since 1956. Both say anchovies are plentiful.

“They were so thick for a while you could walk up them,” Pennisi said, adding that right now they have moved north to Moss Landing and San Francisco. “They have tails; they move.”

But the nonprofit group Oceana argues the number of anchovies federal agencies state are not accurate and as a result can misstate the population and allow limits greater than the population would support.

Anchovies are critical to marine life in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Pelicans, sea lions and humpback whales all depend on the Northern Anchovy as a food source.

The California Wetfish Producers Association, a fishing industry trade group, on Thursday released data showing California anchovies are at record levels. The data was compiled by the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, a partnership of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Read the full story at The Monterey Herald

New Data Make Case for Anchovy Abundance as Oceana Lawsuit Continues

October 14, 2019 — The following was released by the California Wetfish Producers Association:

New, preliminary data from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) have provided further evidence that California’s anchovy population is now at record high levels. The data come amid a renewed lawsuit by the environmental group Oceana that seeks to unnecessarily reduce the already very limited amount of anchovy caught commercially in California.

The preliminary data from the Southwest Fisheries Science Center Larval Lab weekly report on September 16 show that the 2019 spring CalCOFI survey documented the highest abundance of larval anchovy off the coast of California ever recorded, nearly double the record amount from the mid-1960s. And this did not even include the tens of thousands of tons of anchovy that fishermen have reported in nearshore waters since 2015. This is the latest piece of evidence that the anchovy population is far more resilient than Oceana alleges.

Scientists have found that anchovy undergo large dynamic population swings naturally, even without fishing, and the precautionary fishing limits allowed have not harmed the ecosystem. But despite the latest evidence of anchovy abundance, Oceana is suing  to further limit California’s small anchovy fishery.

Members of the California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA) have long held that massive schools of anchovies, particularly in California’s inshore areas, have not been properly counted. CWPA has worked to confirm the observations of its members in cooperative surveys with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. These nearshore surveys add evidence to the preliminary CalCOFI data: there are tens of thousands of tons of anchovies in inshore California waters in addition to record abundance offshore. This explosion occurred in the presence of this small, historical fishery.

“There is an increasingly large body of evidence showing that anchovies are far more abundant than the allegations in Oceana’s lawsuit recognize,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of CWPA. “It’s why efforts to further restrict anchovy fishing are both unnecessary and harmful to West Coast fishing communities.”

However, Oceana again seeks stricter limits on the allowable catch of the central subpopulation of northern anchovy, which is currently set at 23,573 metric tons annually as a result of prior court rulings.  The fishery typically catches less than 10,000 metric tons annually of this legally allowed amount.

In August, CWPA filed to intervene in Oceana’s latest lawsuit, in order to participate in the proceedings and represent the interests of its members and fishing communities before the court. CWPA believes that the additional restrictions on the anchovy harvest being sought by the lawsuit are unnecessary, and would result in significant job loss and economic hardship for California’s wetfish fishermen and processors, and by extension, California communities and the state’s fishing economy.

“We believe that the evidence will show that anchovy is being managed precautionarily and with the conservation of the species in mind,” said Pleschner-Steele. “Best management practices and the best available science do not support the claims of overfishing made in the lawsuit.”

About the California Wetfish Producers Association

The non-profit California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA) was established in 2004 to promote sustainable fisheries and foster cooperative research. Voluntary membership includes the majority of wetfish harvesters and processors operating in California.

The North Atlantic right whale will soon be extinct unless something is done to save it, researchers warn

September 13, 2019 — The fate of the increasingly rare North Atlantic right whale has always been left up to humans.

Once hunted nearly to extinction, their population is sharply declining again. Any hope for their survival, researchers say, demands immediate action.

A new report from Oceana, a non-profit ocean advocacy group, says unless protections are put in place, the North Atlantic right whale will die out.

“At some point, if trends continue, recovery will simply become impossible,” researchers wrote.

There are only 400 of them left, and less than 25% of them are breeding females responsible for the species’ survival. At least 28 have died in the past two years, Oceana campaign director Whitney Webber told CNN.

It’s a sharp decline driven by fishing, boating and climate change that impacts their food supply, according to the report.

“We’re really not seeing the whales die of natural causes anymore,” she said. “They’re dying at our hands.”

Read the full story at CNN