Saving Seafood

URI researchers awarded multiple grants to study aspects of aquaculture industry

October 10, 2019 — Several scientists at the University of Rhode Island have been awarded grants to study oyster genetics, breeding and diseases as part of a region-wide effort to support the growing oyster aquaculture industry in the Northeast and assist efforts to restore wild oyster populations.

“Wild and farmed oysters are facing major threats from water quality and disease,” said Marta Gomez-Chiarri, a URI professor of animal science who has studied oyster diseases in Narragansett Bay for more than 20 years. “Even though local water quality has improved in Rhode Island, oysters across the United States face localized threats from pollution and eutrophication while at the same time dealing with multiple factors of global ocean change, like ocean acidification, as well as changes in salinity and dissolved oxygen. We are only beginning to understand the effects of these multiple stressors.”

Gomez-Chiarri — along with URI Assistant Professor Jonathan Puritz and U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Dina Proestou — have teamed with shellfish geneticists and breeders from 10 other East Coast universities to form the Eastern Oyster Genome Consortium to develop genetic tools to accelerate selective breeding efforts. The consortium, in a proposal led by Rutgers University, has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to accelerate the pace of identifying the genes responsible for desirable traits like disease resistance.

Read the full story at The Westerly Sun

Record low Gulf Coast supply could jolt oyster prices

October 10, 2019 — This spring’s record-shattering flooding from the Mississippi River has wreaked historic havoc on oyster production in the Gulf of Mexico, which could reverberate for years to come with scant supply and hard-to-digest prices.

Louisiana, which bore the worst of the damage from too-low salinity and smothering algae blooms and historically accounts for 75 percent of Gulf harvests and 34 percent of U.S. harvests, is all but out of commission for this fall’s oyster harvest season.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The Baltimore Sun is wrong about Maryland’s oyster rules

September 30, 2019 — Recently, the Editorial Board of The Baltimore Sun weighed in on the issue of oyster management in the Chesapeake Bay, simultaneously insulting the hard-working men and women of the seafood industry and suggesting that the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is unwilling to protect the oyster (“Dwindling supply of Maryland oysters requires stronger response,” Sept. 17). As chairman of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, I take issue with both of these positions and several others blithely laid out for the members of Maryland’s General Assembly to devour with their oyster shooters and clam strips.

It does nothing to represent our side, the side that’s busy trying to make a living ensuring city folks have fresh, local seafood for their fundraising fêtes. For the record, DNR did not “cave” to watermen and seafood processors. They worked with stakeholders from the legislative, scientific, academic, seafood, business and nonprofit community to arrive at a plan to act now to use a multi-pronged strategy to increase the biomass of our iconic bivalve. We proposed several ways to reduce harvest pressure, one of many stressors to the oyster population, as did others. Ultimately, DNR came up with a plan for the coming season that left no one 100% satisfied. It’s called compromise. They are using an adaptive management strategy that will allow them to monitor scientifically what is working and what’s not and then modify their approach until they’ve arrived at a suite of actions that increase the oyster population.

Read the full story at The Baltimore Sun

MARYLAND: DNR secretary defends Oyster management plan and more from readers

September 30, 2019 — While increasing the oyster population and ensuring that “all Marylanders can enjoy the bivalves’ environmental benefits while improving the long-term outlook for the fishery,” is a goal we share, the guest column by Chesapeake Bay Foundation Executive Director Alison Proust tells only half of the story at best, and is deliberately misleading at worst (The Capital, Sept. 22).

CBF cherry-picked a portion of our analysis presented to the Oyster Advisory Commission in April and asserted that removing one day from the workweek would have “little conservation benefit.” Here is what the analysis actually states: “If implemented alone, given current behavior, one day reduction would have little conservation impact.” This is why we are imposing other measures, including a reduction in bushel limits as well as closing harvest areas. These measures together put us on a path toward a sustainable fishery in 8 to 10 years. CBF knows what DNR’s plan is.

The problem is that our plan doesn’t meet their political agenda. CBF pushed for legislation that mandated a stock assessment be conducted and an oyster management plan be developed, but unfortunately for them, the best available science doesn’t support their agenda.

Read the full story at the Capital Gazette

Senate Appropriations Committee Approves Oyster Restoration Funding In Chesapeake Bay

September 17, 2019 — The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved legislation for the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster restoration funding.

“A thriving oyster population is crucial to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and in turn, to the health of Maryland’s Bay economy,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Appropriations and Budget Committees. “These funds will ultimately support critical efforts to sustain our oyster population and preserve the Bay. I will keep working in Congress to fight for the investments necessary to protect the Bay, its wildlife, and the businesses Marylanders have built around it.”

Officials said the funding will aim toward rebuilding a healthy oyster population in Maryland.

Included within the legislation were provisions to provide $20 million to the Army Corps of Engineers for multistate ecosystem restoration programs for projects involving oysters in the Bay, provide an additional $70 million to the Army Corps Work Plan for project construction.

Read the full story at WJZ

Maryland proposes 30% cut in commercial oyster harvest

September 11, 2019 — Acting to curtail overfishing, Maryland natural resources officials proposed new oyster harvest restrictions Monday night that they said could reduce commercial landings by about 30% in the upcoming season.

The proposed cutbacks, which include shortening the wild harvest season, reducing the maximum daily catch and closing some reefs in the Upper Chesapeake Bay, are aimed at making the declining oyster fishery sustainable in eight to 10 years, according to officials with the Department of Natural Resources.

“We need to start trending in the right direction,’’ DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio said.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

ALABAMA: Climate and change: A different world, above and below Mobile Bay

September 4, 2019 — The salinity levels of water dictate what lives in and around it, and what doesn’t.

If there’s a lot of rain or a sudden surge of fresh water into a bay, salinity levels drop. If there’s a drought a surge of seawater from a major storm, salinity levels tend to rise. Climate change is already altering those balances.

And the changes wrought by those disruptions can be profound.

Earlier this year, heavy rains in the Midwest swelled the Mississippi River. To prevent flooding in New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carre Spillway, west of the city, twice this year. That sent a torrent of fresh water into the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi, west of Biloxi – and created a disaster along the oyster reefs in the area.

Read the full story at the Montgomery Advertiser

Options to rebuild oyster population in Maryland draw criticism

August 30, 2019 — Maryland watermen face potential cutbacks in their wild Chesapeake Bay oyster harvest starting this fall, as the state eyes new regulations aimed at eventually making the troubled fishery sustainable. But critics question whether the state is serious about ending overharvesting, and lawmakers could order a do-over.

Officials with the Department of Natural Resources told their Oyster Advisory Commission in August that they were considering reductions of up to 20% in the daily harvest limits and setting a shorter season, which has traditionally run from Oct. 1 through March 31.

They also suggested they might close some areas of the Bay to wild harvest for the coming season if available data indicates oysters are unusually scarce there or the areas were being heavily overharvested.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Maryland oysters are having a bad year, and here’s why

August 19, 2019 — People, aside from oyster researchers and farmers, likely won’t feel the impact for at least another 18 months.

But, eventually, everyone will know just how bad a year it has been for Maryland oysters.

Thanks to record levels of persistent rainfall throughout the bay watershed, salinity levels in the Chesapeake Bay have remained perilously low since May 2018. The absence of salt in the bay and its tributaries has been annihilating oyster spat production and oyster growth at hatcheries and farms around the region.

At the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Hatchery, the largest oyster hatchery in the state, the carefully controlled operation is on course to produce hundreds of times fewer larvae this year than it would during a regular season, its manager said. This is bad news both economically and as an indicator of bay health, which data shows has suffered greatly under the deluge.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Baltimore Sun

Efforts with scallops and oysters paying off in NJ

August 19, 2019 — Fisheries management has provided a model for how people can adjust their impact on the natural world to benefit themselves and the environment. Scallops have made New Jersey a leader in East Coast seafood landings, with Cape May the region’s No. 2 port behind New Bedford, Connecticut. And oysters, while slowly growing into a robust and lucrative industry, now also promise to clean coastal waters and help reduce flooding.

Years of federal fisheries managers allowing Atlantic sea scallops to thrive by limiting their harvest have yielded an abundance of this shellfish delicacy.

New data shows their harvest last year reached more than 58 million pounds, the highest since 2011 and the fifth highest since record keeping began in 1945.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City