Saving Seafood

Good Management can Lead to a More Sustainable Future

March 30, 2016 — A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows that there is a triple bottom line, that abundance, catch and profit can all be increased by reforming fisheries management in places where it has not been reformed. It provides the most comprehensive estimates of the status of global fisheries and shows that the large fish stocks of the world that provide 95% of global catch on average are at about the abundance that would produce long term maximum yield, and fishing pressure on average is below traditional targets. Less than 20% of fish stocks appear to be overfished by U.S. standards.

Comment by Ray Hilborn, University of Washington, @hilbornr:

The paper by Costello and others (including myself) Global fishery prospects under contrasting management regimes that appeared March 28 in PNAS, provides the most comprehensive assessment of the status and potential of global fisheries. Its key finding is that when stocks are overfished, most can recover within 10 years if the appropriate management measures are taken. This means that globally we could have more catch, more fish in the ocean and more profit. Most of the potential for this “triple bottom line” comes from Asia where fisheries are both large, and at present, mostly unmanaged. We must distinguish between fisheries that are reformed and those that are poorly regulated and remain in a race to fish.

Diving deeper into the estimated current status of fish stocks, we find it depends greatly on the size of the stock. Although the paper examined the status of 4,324 individual stocks, just 719 of them provide 96% of the catch. From the perspective of catch, profitability, and fish in the ocean, it is the 719 that are critical and feed us.

Read the full story at CFood

MISSISSIPPI: ‘Nobody wants a menhaden’ mayor tells supervisors

March 21, 2016 — PASCAGOULA — Moss Point Mayor Billy Broomfield defended his city’s major industry, Omega Protein, to Jackson County supervisors on Monday.

He said the menhaden fishery would be hard hit if the county follows through with plans to ask the state to restrict menhaden fishing in the Mississippi Sound to one mile off the Jackson County coast. Harrison and Hancock counties already do that.

The restriction is in part to stop by-catch and overfishing.

Read the full story at Sun Herald

4 simple steps you can take to eat sustainable seafood

March 8, 2016 — Eat more locally caught seafood. Many of the fish we eat are at risk of being overfished or harmed because of destructive fishing practices. At the same time, there are plentiful fish in our waters, specifically in the Gulf of Maine, which stretches from Nova Scotia down to Cape Cod. When we expand our tastes and eat more local, underutilized species, such as Acadian redfish, Atlantic pollock, dogfish, whiting, and Atlantic mackerel, we relieve pressure on overfished species, reduce our dependence on imports (about 90 percent of the seafood we eat is imported), and provide living wages to local fishermen.

Specifically ask for local. When buying seafood in the market or ordering it at a restaurant, always inquire if it’s local.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Scientists say ocean warming is driving lobsters northward

March 2, 2016 — It’s too early to know what Maine’s 2015 lobster landings will look like, but there’s no doubt that the number will be huge.

In 2014, the last year for which the Department of Marine Resources has figures, Maine’s fishermen landed more than 123 million pounds of lobster — the third year in a row that landings topped 120 pounds — worth a record $457 million.

While last year’s numbers aren’t in, fishermen and dealers talk about a bonanza fishery, and mild weather saw the fishery stay active into December.

In a sense, the landings are unsurprising.

According to a 2015 Atlantic States Fisheries Management Commission stock assessment, the abundance of lobsters in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank showed a meteoric rise starting in 2008 and is now at an all-time high. In southern New England, though, the story is completely different.

From a peak in 1997, the southern New England stock fell swiftly to a point where, by 2004, it was well below what scientists consider the threshold of sustainability. Things leveled off briefly; then the resource began an ongoing plunge again in 2010.

According to last year’s assessment, the Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank stock is not depleted and is not being overfished. The estimated lobster population from 2011 to 2013 was 248 million lobsters, which is well above the abundance threshold — a red flag for fisheries managers — of 66 million lobsters.

In contrast, in the years 2011 to 2013, the southern New England stock was depleted at an estimated 10 million lobsters. The “red flag” abundance level is 24 million lobsters.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Slave Labor on the High Seas

February 20, 2016 — Shocking revelations about the international fishing industry’s reliance on slave labor have caused many people to question the origin of the shrimp or tuna they eat. The disclosures have also led the United States to take some important new steps to clamp down on the use of indentured workers and discourage other unlawful activities on the high seas.

President Obama is expected to sign legislation that effectively bans American imports of fish caught by forced labor in Southeast Asia. The bill, passed by Congress this month, would close a loophole in the Tariff Act of 1930 that prohibits imports made by convicts or forced labor but exempts such goods if American domestic production could not meet demand. Now that is expected to end. The president recently signed an agreement allowing officials to deny port services to foreign vessels suspected of illegal fishing.

In another useful move, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this month said it would improve how seafood is tracked from catch to market by imposing new reporting requirements on American importers, who purchase from overseas sources 90 percent of the seafood that humans and pets consume in the United States. These new requirements would affect 16 species, including cod, snapper and some tuna, and are intended to protect species that are overfished or at risk of being overfished by cracking down on illegally caught or mislabeled fish.

Read the full editorial at The New York Times

EDDIE WELCH: Scallop regulators threaten fishery by opening Nantucket Lightship

February 18, 2016 — A recent controversial decision to open select scallop grounds off the coast of New England to certain select fishing groups undermines sustainable scallop management, and threatens the future health of one of the region’s most valuable resources. On Dec. 3, the New England Fishery Management Council allotted one component of the fishing fleet 300,000 pounds of scallops for harvest from an area of the Atlantic known as Nantucket Lightship. Proposed by council member and Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance CEO John Pappalardo, this allotment would open Nantucket Lightship too early, and goes against the principles that have made scallop management so successful.

For the past two decades, the scallop fishery has been a resounding success thanks to a system known as rotational management. Under this system, scallopers are allowed into certain areas to harvest scallops, while other areas are left off-limits to allow the scallops in them to grow and repopulate. This has ensured that the region’s scallop population is healthy and stable, that no areas are fished prematurely, and that scallops are not overfished. By creating an exception to this system that favors certain interests, the council is jeopardizing one of the greatest success stories in U.S. fisheries management.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Ocean Trust Endorsement of NOAA Assessment

February 1, 2016 – The following was released by Ocean Trust:

Ocean Trust strongly endorsed the recent release of NOAA’s peer-reviewed self-assessment that shows the standards of the United States fishery management system under the Magnuson-Stevens Act more than meet the criteria of the United Nation’s Food And Agriculture Organization’s ecolabelling guidelines. These same guidelines serve as a basis for many consumer seafood certification and ranking schemes.

“The NOAA assessment offers a model for assessing the sustainability of fishery management systems,” noted Thor Lassen, President of Ocean Trust and co-developer of the assessment methodology. “The thoroughness of the assessment by NOAA validates not only the sustainability of US fisheries, but the potential to move towards certification of management systems instead of individual fisheries.”

The assessment evaluated the US management system using the “FAO Evaluation Framework to Assess the Conformity of Public and Private Ecolabelling Schemes with the FAO Guidelines for the Ecolabelling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries,” but focused on the conformance of management systems as a whole rather than that of individual fisheries.

The initiative to assess fish management systems was based on discussions and finding from a series of “Science & Sustainability Forums” (2010-2014) convened by Ocean Trust and the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists which concluded that:

  • Sustainability is best defined by the management system, not a snapshot of the stock status (overfished) or fishing level (overfishing) at any point in time, but the capacity of the system to respond to changes in stock levels or impacts via management measures.
  • Effective management systems will include adequate responsive action to end overfishing, avoid irreversible harm, and produce sustainable fisheries, and
  • Sustainability, although often gauged on a fishery-by-fishery basis, is actually the result of a well-designed and implemented management system.

NOAA Fisheries staff participated in the Science and Sustainability Forum in Reston, Virginia in February 2012. Following the forum, NOAA Fisheries initiated a project to evaluate the U.S. federal fishery management system against the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Guidelines for the Ecolabelling of Fish & Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries.

2012 Knauss Fellow Dr. Michelle Walsh led the NOAA Fisheries effort and collaborated closely with Thor Lassen of Ocean Trust.

The assessment examined three forms of evidence for management program conformance with twenty-four key criteria that addressed the management structure, status of stocks and ecosystem impacts as dictated by “FAO Guidelines.” The structure and methodology of the framework approach was developed in collaboration with Ocean Trust and guidance from former FAO Directors to ensure conformance with “FAO’s guidelines.”

The evaluation process was presented at the American Fisheries Society, Managing Our Nations Fisheries Conference, Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee Meeting, and at the 2014 FAO Committee on Fisheries Meeting in Rome. The process was also peer-reviewed by the Center for Independent Experts (CIE) and published as a NOAA Technical Memorandum on January 28, 2016. www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/publications/feature_stories/2016/fisheries_assessment.html

During this same time period Ocean Trust worked with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and later the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission to assess management systems in the Gulf of Mexico. The results of both assessments demonstrate that:

1. Management systems can be assessed to FAO standards providing major efficiencies in assuring the sustainability of products from those systems. When serious issues arise or as warranted, fishery-by fishery assessments can be conducted as needed.

2. The assessment process can address both national and state programs. For the Gulf, the assessment confirmed the use of adaptive management practices with modern and well-accepted management techniques to sustain its key fisheries over multiple generations.

3. If the processes within a management system are deemed to be adequate to sustain individual fisheries, then the products from those fisheries should be deemed sustainable (i.e., recognized in the market-place) as is often stated by NOAA regarding US fisheries.

“We need to be realistic when looking at fisheries in the US and abroad, the vast majority of which have not been certified because of the impractically and cost under the current certification programs,” concluded Lassen. “We have to rationalize the process and be open to efficiencies offered by a broader approach that focuses on evaluating management systems.”

Ocean Trust will moderate a panel on “Rationalizing Seafood Sustainability” during the 2016 North American Seafood Expo Conference Session Tuesday, March 8th 10:30-12:00 where representatives from Ocean Trust, NOAA, American Institute of Fishery Biologists and others will present their findings and conclusions regarding the sustainable management of seafood.

View a PDF of the release

Daniel Pauly Feeds Media the Wrong Story About Global Fisheries Decline; Other Scientists Object

SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton – January 25, 2016 — Last week the media was full of a new round of global fishery disaster stories, prompted by an article in Nature Communications by Daniel Pauly & Dirk Zeller affiliated with the Sea Around Us project.

Pauly and Zeller state that FAO global fisheries data has underestimated prior catch, and that therefore if this is taken into account, the decline in fish catch from the peak in the late 1990’s is not 400,000 tons per year, but 1.2 million tons per year.

“Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another,” said Pauly to the Guardian newspaper.  As a result, a new round of handwringing ensued about global overfishing.

But, the facts don’t support Pauly’s interpretation.  Catch rates are simply not a suitable measure of fisheries abundance.  In fact, declines in catch rates often are due to improvement in fisheries management, not declines in abundance.

Over at cfood, a number of scientists specifically rebutted the premise of Pauly’s article.

Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington says:

This paper tells us nothing fundamentally new about world catch, and absolutely nothing new about the status of fish stocks.

It has long been recognized that by-catch, illegal catch and artisanal catch were underrepresented in the FAO catch database, and that by-catch has declined dramatically.

What the authors claim, and the numerous media have taken up, is the cry that their results show that world fish stocks are in worse shape than we thought. This is absolutely wrong. We know that fish stocks are stable in some places, increasing in others and declining in yet others.

Most of the major fish stocks of the world, constituting 40% of the total catch are scientifically assessed using a mixture of data sources including data on the trends in abundance of the fish stocks, size and age data of the fish caught and other information as available. This paper really adds nothing to our understanding of these major fish stocks.

Another group of stocks, constituting about 20% of global catch, are assessed using expert knowledge by the FAO. These experts use their personal knowledge of these fish stocks to provide an assessment of their status. Estimating the historical unreported catch for these stocks adds nothing to our understanding of these stocks.

For many of the most important stocks that are not assessed by scientific organizations or by expert opinion, we often know a lot about their status. For example; abundance of fish throughout almost all of South and Southeast Asia has declined significantly. This is based on the catch per unit of fishing effort and the size of the individuals being caught. Estimating the amount of other unreported catches does not change our perspective on the status of these stocks.

In the remaining fisheries where we know little about their status, does the fact that catches have declined at a faster rate than reported in the FAO catch data tell us that global fisheries are in worse shape than we thought? The answer is not really. We would have to believe that the catch is a good index of the abundance.

Figure 1 of the Pauly and Zeller paper shows that a number of major fishing regions have not seen declines in catch in the last 10 years. These areas include the Mediterranean and Black Sea, the Eastern Central Atlantic, the Eastern Indian Ocean, the Northwest Pacific and the Western Indian Ocean. Does this mean that the stocks in these areas are in good shape, while areas that have seen significant declines in catch like the Northeast Atlantic, and the Northeast Pacific are in worse shape?

We know from scientific assessments that stocks in the Mediterranean and Eastern Central Atlantic are often heavily overfished – yet catches have not declined.

We know that stocks in the Northeast Pacific are abundant, stable and not overfished, and in the Northeast Atlantic are increasing in abundance. Yet their catch has declined.

Total catch, and declines in catch, are not a good index of the trends in fish stock abundance.

Michael Kaiser of Bangor University commented:

Catch and stock status are two distinct measurement tools for evaluating a fishery, and suggesting inconsistent catch data is a definitive gauge of fishery health is an unreasonable indictment of the stock assessment process. Pauly and Zeller surmise that declining catches since 1996 could be a sign of fishery collapse. While they do acknowledge management changes as another possible factor, the context is misleading and important management efforts are not represented. The moratorium on cod landings is a good example – zero cod landings in the Northwest Atlantic does not mean there are zero cod in the water. Such distinctions are not apparent in the analysis.

Also David Agnew, director of standards for the Marine Stewardship Council, said:

It is noteworthy that the peak of the industrial catches – in the late 1990s/early 2000s – coincidentally aligns with the start of the recovery of many well managed stocks. This point of recovery has been documented previously and particularly relates to the recovery of large numbers of stocks in the north Pacific, the north Atlantic and around Australia and New Zealand, and mostly to stocks that are assessed by analytical models. For stocks that need to begin recovery plans to achieve sustainability, this most often entails an overall reduction in fishing effort, which would be reflected in the reductions in catches seen here. So, one could attribute some of the decline in industrial catch in these regions to a correct management response to rebuild stocks to a sustainable status, although I have not directly analyzed the evidence for this. This is therefore a positive outcome worth reporting.

This opinion piece originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

 

Auto-aquaculture? Conference in Woods Hole explores possible uses for robots and automation to reduce costs

January 12, 2016 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Yogesh Girdhar wowed the room with a video of what looked like a small shoebox awkwardly paddling underwater.

What Girdhar, a post-doctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, called a “curious robot” had none of the cachet of the sleek autonomously operated torpedoes, high-tech miniaturized laboratories, or parasite-zapping lasers that had already been displayed at a conference held Monday at the institution’s Quissett Campus to explore the role of robots and automation in aquaculture.

But his clumsy looking creation filled a need in the minds of many at the conference. As it paddled along, its software played the favorite childhood learning game — one of these things is not like the others — picking out a small coral head sticking up from the sand and zeroing in on it. The program, Girdhar said, would help a free-swimming vehicle, patrolling inside a fish cage far out to sea, recognize and investigate anomalies such as dead fish, a hole in the net, even evidence of disease. It could then notify its owners that something was wrong, prompting additional investigation.

It’s the kind of innovation conference organizers hope will make offshore aquaculture more cost effective.

“Open-ocean aquaculture is a high-cost way of producing fish that hasn’t really taken hold yet,” said Hauke Kite-Powell, a WHOI researcher in marine policy. “The challenge is to make it cost-competitive with near-shore aquaculture.”

With the world population projected to climb from 7 billion in 2011 to 9 billion by 2040, the demand for food, especially protein, will also soar. A diminishing water supply, droughts and less arable land are squeezing agriculture and land-based meat production.

Unfortunately, the one resource people once believed was limitless, wild fish, has proven to be all too finite. Mismanagement, overfishing, climate change and other factors have depleted fish stocks worldwide.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Times

Gulf of Maine lobster stock at an all-time high

January 4, 2016 — A recent lobster stock assessment shows the population of the state’s famous bottom-dwelling crustacean at record highs in the Gulf of Maine.

Through data collected by fishery-dependent and fishery-independent sources, the stock assessment gives fishermen and scientists a picture of the condition of the economically important stock.

According to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the 2015 benchmark stock assessment for lobsters shows the stock of crustaceans in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank is not depleted and overfishing is not occurring.

However, the situation for the stock in southern New England is far less clear, with abundance estimates appearing to decline dramatically since the late 1990s to record-low levels.

Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Director of Communications Tina Berger said stock assessments for lobsters and other species are not done every year since it often takes a couple years to compile the data. The last assessment done for lobsters was released in 2009.

Read the full story at the Lincoln County News