Saving Seafood

NORTH CAROLINA: Fish wars swirl around NC’s diminishing southern flounder

September 12, 2015 — Not the prettiest nor the most elusive of fish, the flat, oval-shaped southern flounder is nonetheless a tasty staple along the North Carolina coast, whether it’s caught by fishing rod or purchased in a seafood market or restaurant.

These days the southern flounder is making waves that reach all the way to the state capital, pitting recreational anglers against commercial operators, setting a regulatory commission’s members against one another and their staff, and prompting legislators to wade into a controversy that is the territory of the executive branch. Accusations of political threats and retaliation abound.

The controversy centers on how extensively the flounder is being over-fished. Conservationists and recreational anglers say the fish is so popular that its numbers are in danger of being depleted, and point out that the catch has dropped by 60 percent in the past 20 years. But commercial fishermen say the two groups are being alarmists and are trying to take a shortcut around the process that is in place to regulate fishing.

The state Department of Environment and Natural Resources notes that the smaller catch could be caused in part by stricter regulations. Commercial anglers have succeeded in convincing the environmental agency to reverse its initial support for temporary limits, and have brought a halt to the proposed rewrite of the regulations.

The stakes are large: Ninety-six percent of all the southern flounder that went into commercial markets in the United States in 2013 came from North Carolina waters. Last year, 1.7 million pounds were caught that sold to dealers for $4.8 million.

Read the full story at the The News & Observer

 

DANIEL OVANDO: The Oceans are Not Running Out of Fish

August 3, 2015 — There’s a saying in fisheries, loosely based on a phrase by the scientist John Shepard, that managing fisheries is just like managing a forest, except the trees are invisible and keep moving around. It’s no surprise then that there’s a lot of confusion about the state of global fisheries. In this post I’ll try to dispel some of this confusion by addressing some common misconceptions, and in doing so talk about some of the research I and others at the Bren School have done in this area.

Fisheries are often talked about in the context of disaster, collapse, and crisis (e.g. this recent post in the Economist). What does the science really tell us though? Let’s take a close look at two of the most common references used to support the claim that global fisheries are in poor shape. Chances are you’ve heard something to this effect: “Global fisheries will collapse by 2048″. This incredibly persistent statement can be traced back to a 2006 paper by Boris Worm and several others titled “Impacts of biodiversity loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services“. They used a database of fishery catches as their indicator of overfishing, marking a fishery as “collapsed” if catches dropped below 10% of the highest catches ever recorded for that fishery. Using this metric, they an increasing trend in the number of collapsed fisheries over time, and noted as a thought experiment that if that trend continued, 100% of fisheries would be collapsed by 2048. This prediction of a future without fish gained a tremendous amount of attention, and is still commonly reported in the media.

This predicted collapse of global fisheries was strongly criticized and largely rejected within the fishery science community on the basis of two major problems. First, Worm’s prediction relies solely on catch data. The reported amount of fish caught in a season can decline for many reasons besides declining abundance, such as changes in reporting criteria, implementation of regulations that change how fish are caught, or shifts in consumer demand. More reliable data on the biomass of fish in the oceans did not reflect the trends of increasing numbers of fisheries collapses seen in the catches alone. Second, the prediction of 100% fishery collapse ignored some important economics. If more and more fisheries were collapsing, the costs of fishing should rise as fish become more scarce. For most species, this would result in a decrease in fishing effort well before the fishery is driven to extinction, albeit at overfished population levels (though some species such as bluefin tuna may respond differently, with prices increasing faster than costs as the species becomes rarer).

Read the full story at the Bren Research Blog

 

OCEANA AGAIN SUES NOAA OVER BYCATCH MONITORING

July 29, 2015– WASHINGTON — Oceana, the maritime environmental group that successfully sued NOAA Fisheries in 2011 over its bycatch rules, is challenging the federal regulator of the nation’s fisheries over its newest bycatch rule for the Northeast region.

Oceana again sued NOAA Fisheries on Wednesday, claiming the current bycatch reporting rule finalized last month for the region — in part, as a response to Oceana’s earlier legal victory — is underfunded, uniformly inadequate for providing accurate information and in violation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The 43-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., claims the new bycatch rule “leaves loopholes that would guarantee that observer coverage will never meet its performance standards, ultimately failing to fix current insufficiently low levels of monitoring in the region,” Oceana said.

The group’s lawsuit said NOAA’s new Statistical Bycatch Reporting Method (SBRM) “fails to address the fundamental legal flaws” identified in its previous lawsuit and “effectively doubles down on the Fisheries Service’s decade-long practice of under-funding and marginalizing its bycatch monitoring systems.”

That under-funding, Oceana said, impedes NOAA Fisheries’ ability to generate statistically reliable data needed to assess the impact of bycatch on individual fisheries.

The lawsuit draws a direct connection between faulty bycatch monitoring and overfishing. It specifically targets NOAA Fisheries’ bycatch monitoring performance in New England and among the Northeast multispecies groundfish fleet.

“New England in particular has been plagued for decades by lax monitoring and overfishing,” said Oceana Assistant General Counsel Eric Bilsky. “The failure to monitor catch and enforce catch limits is in part responsible for the collapse of the New England groundfish fishery, including the historically important Atlantic cod populations of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

NEW JERSEY: Massive reduction in allowable flounder catch a possibility

July 18, 2015 — There is one topic and one topic only dominating the discussions going on at bait shops, on docks and aboard boats this past week. That is the genuine possibility of a massive reduction in next year’s allowable summer flounder catch in New Jersey. The proposal for an upwards of 43 percent slashing of the catch was disclosed by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), citing overfishing and a huge decrease in the flounder stock. The decision can be challenged by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, but the final say still belong to NOAA.

This year’s quota is 18.45 million pounds, with 60 percent of that going to the commercial fleet, the rest to recreational anglers. The proposal for next year has the allowable catch down to 10.5 million pounds.

Now, if you talk to just about anyone who has fished for summer flounder this season, the last thing they will they will tell you is there is a shortage of fish. They may be undersized and have to be thrown back but finding fish is not a problem this season.

South Jersey already has what I think are overly strict flattie regulations, especially when compared with neighboring Delaware. Such a huge reduction in the number of fish you can bring back home, coupled with strict sea bass catch restrictions, quite possibly will wreck much of the state’s charter and party boat fleet. A large percentage of anglers who pay to fish in New Jersey come from Pennsylvania and if the rules make it nearly impossible to catch enough fish for dinner, the ride to Delaware ports is not much of a hardship.

Read the full story at The Mercury

 

DON CUDDY: Spreading misinformation about our fisheries

July 15, 2015 — Anyone knowledgeable about the commercial fisheries of the United States will find nothing original in the op-ed piece recently submitted to the New York Times by the environmental organization Oceana.

Even its title ‘A Knockout Blow for American Fish Stocks’ is misleading. American fish stocks are healthy. NOAA’S annual report to Congress, submitted at the end of 2014 showed that only twenty-six of the three hundred and eight fish stocks assessed were subject to overfishing.

‘Overfishing’ occurs when too many fish are removed from a population to produce maximum sustainable yield. As a scientific term it is quite misleading, carrying, as it does, the clear implication that low stock assessments result solely from fishing pressure; whereas ‘overfishing’ can result from a number of other factors, such as changes in water temperature or salinity, degraded habitat and increased predation.

NOAA also maintains an ‘overfished’ list; comprising any stock whose biomass is such that its capacity to produce its maximum sustainable yield is in jeopardy. Only thirty-seven of two hundred and twenty eight stocks found themselves on that list. Hardly a knockout. No new stocks were added to the list in 2014. In fact, three were removed from the previous year, according to the NOAA report.

The Oceana piece also asserts that recent estimates determined that New England cod stocks were at three to seven percent of target levels. As fishermen in the Gulf of Maine can attest, most of that bottom is now taken over by lobster gear and neither the fishermen nor the NOAA survey vessel can tow through that. So nobody can determine with any certainty how much cod might be out there; not to mention the fact that if a fisherman sees cod in the water he goes someplace else. Why? Because the introduction of fishing sectors and catch shares in New England have made cod a commodity, like pork bellies. The result is best illustrated by New Hampshire fisherman Dave Goethel’s plight. He has a photo showing 2000 pounds of cod that his 40-foot boat caught, after a one-hour tow on a research trip last December. If sold, the cash value at the dock would have brought him $3,000. But to lease those 2,000 pounds of cod would have cost him $4500. That’s what you call a knockout. In a multispecies fishery you need some cod quota, even if you are targeting haddock or other groundfish species and so the lease price keeps going up. That is one reason why the percentage of fishing quota actually caught in the New England groundfishery in 2013-2014 was only 33 percent of the allowable catch limit. Because of regulatory constraints fishermen are now avoiding fish that allegedly are not there.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times