Saving Seafood

In Pictures and Words: Bringing back North Carolina oysters after Hurricane Florence

January 21, 2019 — Over the past three to four decades many of the areas that were open to wild oyster harvests have been closed due to water quality concerns, often near the headwaters of creeks and rivers hit by pollutants from farms and industrial developments.

But oyster farms along the North Carolina coast are on the rise, and even after the devastating impact of Hurricane Florence on the shellfish industry, aquaculture represents the state’s hope in catching up with states like Virginia.

Last week, Port City Daily spent the day with two oyster farmers from Three Little Spats Oyster Company, who discussed the role of aquaculture in an industry that has seen wild oyster populations drop over the years, and their hope for Stump Sound’s resurgence as one of the state’s best regions for oysters and commercial fishing.

Read the full story at Port City Daily

Preparing For The Future of Ocean Farming

January 11, 2019 — Chris Schillaci looked out at a sea of mostly plaid shirts, stuffed behind rows of cafeteria-style tables, who had come together after a day outside.

“You can make a living and stay on the Cape with an acre oyster grant,” the aquaculture specialist for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries said.

The crowd of primarily oyster farmers looked back.

“Ok, maybe two acres,” he said with a smile.

Schillaci was speaking at an Ocean Farming Forum sponsored by SCORE of Cape Cod and the Islands, and the local office of the United States Department of Agriculture.

The idea? Bring farmers together to learn from one another and improve the industry. Much of the discussion revolved around the future of offshore shellfish and kelp farming, in deeper waters than most of the Cape’s traditional nearshore shellfish grants.

“Commercial fishing is a rapidly evolving business and Massachusetts has been a leader through old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity and an uncanny ability to adapt to a changing world,” said Melissa Sanderson of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, which co-hosted the event. “To stay at the forefront and grow small businesses and protect the ecosystem we all rely on, it’s vital to support current and new growers with technical, business, education and networking opportunities.”

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Oyster farming bills brewing in Virginia, Maryland legislatures

January 10, 2019 — Jockeying has already begun in Virginia over legislation to determine the fate of the state’s coal ash pits, and new oyster-related measures are in the works in both Maryland and Virginia as the two states’ lawmakers begin their annual legislative sessions today.

In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam last week declared his support of legislation that would require coal ash produced by the state’s power plants to be removed from unlined pits and either recycled or deposited in safer, lined landfills.

The byproduct of coal-fired electricity generation, the ash is laced with heavy metals and has been linked to cancer, respiratory problems and other illnesses. An estimated 30 million tons are being stored at sites near Chesapeake Bay tributaries.

Dominion Energy, which owns the sites, estimates that such a cleanup would cost billions of dollars. The Richmond-based company has long advocated leaving the ash where it is, capping it with a layer of soil and a synthetic liner. Legislators have delayed that plan for the last two years, though, amid opposition from environmental groups.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Fisheries on both VA, MD legislative agendas for 2019

January 3, 2019 — Oysters will be on the legislative menu in Maryland in 2019, while Virginia lawmakers will have menhaden on their plates. But for legislators gathering in both states in January, many of the environmental issues confronting them will be leftovers from previous years.

In Annapolis, environmentalists hope to capitalize on an infusion of dozens of newly elected legislators to push through bills that have failed to gain traction in years past. In Richmond, activists face a different situation, seeking to make headway in an election year, with all of the legislative seats up for grabs.

Here are some of the environmental issues lawmakers in each state can expect to face.

Maryland

Oysters: In the wake of a troubling scientific assessment of Maryland’s oyster population, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is seeking legislation to protect the five Bay tributaries selected for large-scale restoration from being reopened to harvest and to lay out a framework for the development of a new fishery management plan for the species.

A Department of Natural Resources stock assessment found in November that the number of market-size bivalves last season was half of what it had been 15 years earlier, and that the shellfish were being overfished in roughly half of the state’s waters. The assessment had been ordered by the General Assembly in 2017 after the DNR moved to open some state oyster sanctuaries to supplement a faltering commercial harvest. Lawmakers blocked the DNR move until the assessment was complete.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

URI and VIMS Researchers Show Aquaculture Oysters Can Limit Spread of Dermo in Wild Oysters

December 19, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Recent research carried out at the University of Rhode Island and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has found that growing farmed oysters can reduce disease loads in wild oysters.

This counter-intuitive finding is based on the fact that the primary killer of wild oysters is Dermo, a parasite that occurs naturally in the environment, and lives in the tissue of oysters.  The single celled parasite is harmless to humans, and has nothing to do with bacteria such as vibrio.

“The very act of aquaculture has positive effects on wild populations of oysters,” said Tal Ben-Horin, a postdoctoral fellow at the URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences. “The established way of thinking is that disease spreads from aquaculture, but in fact aquaculture may limit disease in nearby wild populations.”

Working with colleagues at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Rutgers University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Ben-Horin integrated data from previous studies into mathematical models to examine the interactions between farmed oysters, wild oysters and the common oyster disease Dermo.

Basically, Dermo is spread through an oyster reef when infected oysters die, and their tissues decay.  But aquaculture, particularly caged or bagged oysters off the seabed, act as filters, and take in the Dermo parasite, but they are harvested and sold before the parasite has any lethal effects.

The net result is that near oyster farms, the incidence of wild Dermo goes down.

According to Ben-Horin, diseases are among the primary limiting factors in wild oyster populations. There are few wild populations of oysters in New England because of Dermo and other diseases, and in the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay, wild oysters are managed with the understanding that most will die from disease.

“As long as aquaculture farmers harvest their product before the disease peaks, then they have a positive effect on wild populations,” Ben-Horin said. “But if they’re left in the water too long, the positive effect turns negative.”

The study’s findings have several implications for the management of wild and farmed oysters. Ben-Horin recommends establishing best management practices for the amount of time oysters remain on farms before harvest. He also suggests that aquaculture managers consider the type of gear – whether farmers hold oysters in cages and bags or directly on the seabed – when siting new oyster aquaculture operations near wild oyster populations.

This story was originally published by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

‘Just short of a crisis’: Tensions flare as Virginia halts oyster seed harvest in James

December 17, 2018 — Virginia fishery managers are taking the rare step of halting oyster seed harvests in the lower James River as they seek to protect the baby bivalves from overfishing.

Oyster seeds are wild-grown juvenile oysters, or “spat.” Many oyster farmers working in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries depend on regular shipments of fresh seed to replenish their lease areas.

The Virginia Marine Resources Commission expects to temporarily stop the catch before the season’s scheduled closure at the end of the year. Without the action, watermen almost certainly would surpass the fall quota of 40,000 oyster seed bushels taken from the river, officials said.

The commission also agreed to block out-of-state seed transfer permits, effective Oct. 31. Between half and two-thirds of the seeds collected from the James are typically sold to Maryland buyers, according to the commission, which will decide whether purchases can resume in the spring based on fall surveys of the river bottom.

The moves come after the commission cut off last year’s spring harvest — when as many as 80,000 bushels were up for grabs — with about a month left to go. That marked the first time since the cap was enacted in 2011 that the commission called on watermen to hang up their hand tongs.

“Basically, the quota did what it was supposed to do,” said Andrew Button, head of the commission’s oyster conservation and replenishment department. “It’s not really to limit anybody but a way to protect the resource.”

Read the full story at The Bay Journal

Why some Maine coastal communities are up in arms about aquaculture

December 10, 2018 — From oyster farms to cultivated seaweed and farm-raised salmon, aquaculture is often described as essential to the economic future of Maine’s fisheries in the face of a changing ecosystem. Warming waters from climate change are pushing lobster farther Down East and have shut down the shrimp fishery, and threats such as ocean acidification and invasive green crabs are harming Maine’s natural fisheries.

But opposition to several proposed projects suggests the hardest part of getting into aquaculture might be getting past the neighbors. All along the coast, neighbors argue that pending aquaculture ventures will create too much noise, use too much energy, attract too many birds and obstruct their opportunities for boating or lobstering. One questioned whether an oyster farm would make it hard for deer to swim from one point of land to another.

In Belfast, abutters to the land where Nordic Aquafarms hopes to put in a giant land-based farm to raise salmon have filed a lawsuit against the city, which they say hastily and secretly approved a zoning change the company needed to move forward.

In Brunswick, opponents of a proposed 40-acre oyster farm have hired not just attorneys, but a public relations expert, Crystal Canney, in the hopes of persuading the Department of Marine Resources not to approve the lease.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maryland oyster restoration project remains stalled by lack of federal funds

November 29, 2018 — Oyster restoration work in Maryland’s Tred Avon River appears likely to remain on hold for at least another year, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers still has no funding allotted through next September for reef construction in the Chesapeake Bay.

Restoration work in the Eastern Shore river began in 2015 and has so far relied overwhelmingly on federal funds. The Trump administration did not request funding for the project in its budget proposal for fiscal year 2019, but the Corps’ Baltimore District did ask for support through discretionary funds authorized by Congress.

While the Corps decided to provide $13 million in additional funding for various projects in the Bay region, including the use of dredged material to restore two vanishing Bay islands, it did not give the Baltimore District money to continue work in the Tred Avon.

“The District is certainly committed to continuing the program,” said Sarah Lazo, spokeswoman for the Baltimore District. But until funding becomes available, she said, it can’t go forward.

It’s not clear whether the oyster restoration funding request was denied by Corps headquarters or by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has final say on the Corps’ workplan for spending its discretionary funds. Corps headquarters provided no explanation for why District funding requests were not included in its workplans.

Since 2015, the Corps and its state, federal and nonprofit partners have completed the initial restoration of nearly 81 acres of river bottom in the Tred Avon, at a combined cost of $4.6 million. They have planted a total of 380 million hatchery-spawned seed oysters on reefs that are protected from harvest.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Gulf of Mexico Oysters are in Trouble, but There’s Hope and a Plan

November 28, 2018 — Oysters in the Gulf of Mexico have seen better days.

Aside from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010 — which killed between 4 and 8.3 billion adult oysters, according to NOAA — changes in freshwater flow along the Gulf and sedimentation caused by more frequent storms have taken their toll on the Gulf’s oyster population.

But all hope is not lost. In fact, there’s even a plan, according to a report by environmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

Compared to historic levels, an estimated 85 percent of the Gulf’s oyster population has been lost, and the impact ranges further than the $100-million-per-year market they provide.

Oyster beds in the Gulf are vital in improving water quality, providing protection from shoreline erosion and serving as a habitat for fish and wildlife.

The impact of waves, boat wakes and storm surge on the Gulf’s shoreline is reduced by oyster reefs. Reefs are also unique in that they can continue to grow to keep up with or even outpace sea level rise, according to an entry in the journal Nature, something hard sea walls can’t do.

Additionally, a single oyster can filter 50 gallons of water in one day. In places like Galveston Bay, a 130-acre reef containing 10 oysters per square meter would be capable of filtering about 260 million gallons of water each day. In comparison, Houston’s 39 wastewater treatment plants combined to filter 252 million gallons per day in 2009, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife.

Read the full story at The Weather Channel

Hurricane Florence crippled the seafood industry. Farmers must decide whether to rebuild.

November 21, 2018 — After Hurricane Florence, bags of dead oysters hung in the trees near Jimmy Morris’ oyster farm and hatchery.

Florence ransacked his Morris Family Shellfish Farms in Sealevel, north of Beaufort and Morehead City. Pummeling winds, historic flooding and power outages killed a year’s worth of shellfish seed, the early stage for 10 million oysters and 5 million clams, plus the better part of 1,000 cages of market oysters.

“There were oysters everywhere,” Morris said after the storm.

Florence hit North Carolina in September as a Category 1 hurricane, then stopped and stalled for days on the coast as it dumped trillions of gallons of rain. The rush of freshwater chased off fish, killed millions of oysters and crippled an industry still taking stock of its losses.

Read the full story at the Raleigh News and Observer