Saving Seafood

Sediment diversion project could drastically alter Louisiana shrimp, oyster fisheries

March 18, 2021 — A U.S. Corps of Engineers environmental impact statement for the planned USD 2 billion (EUR 1.67 billion) Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project acknowledges it will drastically alter the south Louisiana shrimp and oyster fisheries.

“Moderate to major, adverse, permanent direct and indirect impacts are anticipated on shrimp fisheries in the project area due to expected negligible to minor, permanent, beneficial impacts on white shrimp, and major, permanent, adverse impacts on brown shrimp abundance,” an executive summary of the report, issued on 5 March, stated.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

CALIFORNIA: The San Francisco Bay Once Teemed With Oysters. What Happened?

March 5, 2021 — Oysters are a controversial food.

Some people slurp them down by the dozen, while others would rather go hungry for days than be forced to eat a single slimy specimen.

As one KQED staffer put it: “No matter how fresh they are, no matter where they come from, no matter what is put on them, it reminds me of being congested and having snot just slide down my throat.”

Bay Curious listener Joseph Fletcher falls into the first category: The San Francisco resident loves oysters and has been wondering if he’ll ever get the chance to eat one grown in San Francisco Bay.

“Will oysters ever make a comeback in the bay and return to the numbers they had back in the days before the Gold Rush?” Fletcher wanted to know.

There’s one type of oyster that’s indigenous to the San Francisco Bay, and that’s the Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida). It’s named after Olympia, Washington, though these small, tangy oysters can be found up and down the west coast from Alaska all the way down into central Mexico.

Read the full story at KQED

Maryland oyster industry may be forever altered by COVID-19 pandemic

March 3, 2021 — The pandemic-impacted oyster season has been difficult for the industry in Maryland, causing farmers and watermen to rethink how they sell their product and changing how programs conduct oyster restoration.

After restaurants reduced their capacity and a stay-at-home order was issued last spring, restaurant sales essentially went to zero within a matter of a week, said Scott Budden, founder of Orchard Point Oyster Co. headquartered in Stevensville, Maryland.

Pre-pandemic, Orchard Point Oyster Co. would primarily sell to restaurants, either directly to the chef or through regional distributors and wholesalers. Since April, they have transitioned to directly selling to the public, through local pickups and cold shipping, Budden said.

Read the full story at Delmarva Now

How much is a clam worth to a coastal community?

February 25, 2021 — Researchers have developed a method to estimate the value of oyster and clam aquaculture to nitrogen reduction in a coastal community. Nitrogen is a nutrient that comes from many different sources, including agriculture, fertilizers, septic systems, and treated wastewater. In excess it fuels algal growth, which can affect water quality and human health.

As a result, a growing number of communities are required to follow regulations to reduce the amount of nitrogen they release. Shellfish are an option that can be a valuable part of a community’s nutrient management plan.

In a study in Environmental Science & Technology,  biologists, economists, and modelers from NOAA Fisheries, NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, and Stony Brook University used a transferable replacement cost methodology to estimate the value of oyster and clam aquaculture to nitrogen reduction in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Growing bivalve shellfish, including oysters and clams, provides direct economic benefits to a community by supporting jobs and making fresh local seafood available to consumers. It also provides ecosystem services—benefits that nature provides to people—including habitat for native species and improved water quality.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Once destined for raw bars, 5 million oysters are being rerouted to coastal restoration efforts

February 24, 2021 — On a recent cold, clear January afternoon, only the occasional customer shuffled in to buy bags of mollusks from Parson’s Seafood, along New Jersey’s southern coast. The place belongs to  fifth-generation shop owner Dale Parsons, one of 15 or so dedicated commercial shellfish farmers in the region. Most of them are “hurting bad,” he said, since the pandemic shuttered the buck-a-shuck eateries and raw bars that purchase the bulk of their lumpy, thick-shelled product.

Outside and down the pier, Parsons loaded 10,000 or so muddy oysters in plastic bushel baskets into his skiff, and another 10,000-plus in a second boat helmed by his employees. Under waxy blue skies, they nosed out into Tuckerton Creek, motoring around a raft of mallards diving in marsh grass, past tight clusters of shuttered summer homes built on stilts, and out into the dazzling sun reflecting off lower Barnegat Bay. The plan was to dump both loads overboard.

The dumping, though, would serve a purpose. Parsons’ oysters had been purchased by the Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration initiative (SOAR), a seven-state program co-coordinated by the Pew Charitable Trusts and The Nature Conservancy, in partnership with various state agencies, NGOs, and universities.

At the end of its first phase, begun last October and slated to wrap up later this year, SOAR will have spent $2 million on 5 million oysters from 100 oyster farms in New Jersey, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Washington state. The purpose, from SOAR’s perspective, is to bulk up 20 reef restoration projects and hopefully push some of them into “exponential growth phase,” where they rapidly create habitat for more oysters and other marine species, clean the water, and mitigate coastal flooding.

Read the full story at The Counter

REPORT: CLIMATE CHANGE A MAJOR THREAT TO RECREATIONAL FISHING

February 24, 2021 — A new report by fly fishing industry leaders brings to light what scientists have long known: that fishing is suffering from the effects of climate change—and offers solutions.

The American Fly Fishing Trade Association and its nonprofit AFFTA Fisheries Fund released the report last week, which acknowledges, “Climate change is significantly affecting ocean ecosystems, the abundance and distribution of fish, and the nature of saltwater fishing.”

AFFTA sees the effects of climate change and overfishing as principal threats to fisheries that the fly-fishing industry has long fought to address. This blue-ribbon report offers a systematic approach to strengthen marine fisheries conservation and management, support recreational fisheries, and lead to more abundant marine fisheries in all U.S. ocean waters.

Though the report looks at these issues on a national scale, it offers many recommendations that apply to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, from warming of upland coldwater brook trout streams to effects on oyster shells and loss of shoreline habitats. One particularly applicable example is the report’s commitment to work with coastal states to increase the size and distribution of seagrass beds, by improving water quality and planting grasses. It notes that coastal ecosystems like marshes and grassbeds are capable of absorbing carbon at rates up to four times those of forests on land.

Read the full story at Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Brexit: UK fishermen fear losing their homes as export ban bites

February 22, 2021 — Since 1 January, the European Union has stopped British fishermen from selling oysters, scallops, clams, cockles and mussels, known as live bivalve molluscs (LBM), that are caught in so-called “Class B” waters.

The government says it is seeking an “urgent resolution”, while the European Commission told Sky News the ban, on health grounds, applies to all third countries and “is not a surprise” to the UK.

The Sailors Creek Shellfish company in Falmouth, Cornwall, has seen 99% of its business disappear.

Read the full story at SkyNews

MASSACHUSETTS: Report: Shellfish industry under threat as oceans grow more acidic

February 11, 2021 — Carbon emissions and wastewater are making the ocean more acidic, an accelerating chemical reaction that could threaten the ability of young scallops, oysters and lobsters to survive to maturity, according to a report published by the Massachusetts legislature on Tuesday.

A coalition of scientists, conservationists and representatives from the seafood industry found that a third of mollusks could be wiped out within 80 years if ocean waters continue to acidify at current rates. The effect on lobsters and crabs is less clear, though they are suspected to be more resilient.

“We’re running out of time before the consequences of ocean acidification become truly catastrophic,” said State Rep. Dylan Fernandes, a Democrat from Cape Cod who co-founded the coalition.

The group’s 84-page report says that oceans have been acidifying since the industrial revolution by soaking up excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When the gas dissolves, it triggers a chain reaction that raises acidity and saps the ocean of carbonate ions that shellfish use to grow their shells, making them more vulnerable to predators and bruising waves.

It’s hardly the first time scientists have predicted doom for New England’s seafood industry, but the report found rising ocean acidity is threatening scallops, the very species that fishermen in New Bedford and other nearby ports turned to to survive an earlier ecological catastrophe: the overfishing of cod.

Read the full story at The Public’s Radio

MASSACHUSETTS: Panel: Ocean acidification threatens lucrative shellfish sector

February 10, 2021 — As a result of climate change and direct human factors, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Massachusetts are becoming more acidic, making them a less friendly habitat for the shellfish that drive a key industry here.

With no action, many of the scallops, clams, mollusks and lobsters at the bottom of the ocean in the Gulf of Maine will begin to dissolve by 2060 and new ones will struggle to form, imperiling an industry that supports thousands of people in the Bay State, a special commission said in a report Tuesday.

The Special Legislative Commission on Ocean Acidification recommended that Massachusetts establish a broad ocean acidification monitoring system and funnel more money into existing programs that address some of the things that are making the ocean more acidic, like residential and agricultural runoff, septic discharges and the deterioration of natural wetlands.

“Ocean acidification poses a serious threat to the Massachusetts state economy, and a potentially existential threat to coastal economies that rely heavily on shellfishing,” the commission wrote in the conclusions of its report. “Massachusetts should act to combat ocean acidification now, rather than later. Ocean acidification is expected to worsen significantly before the end of the century. Actions taken now will ultimately be more cost-effective and valuable than actions taken when significant damage has already occurred.”

Global carbon dioxide emissions absorbed by the ocean and nutrient pollution of waterways drive the pH level of areas of the ocean down, making the waters more acidic and limiting certain ions that help clams, oysters, scallops, mussels and lobsters form their protective shells.

Read the full story at WHDH

MAINE: Local fisherman tests the waters with oyster venture

February 10, 2021 — Chris Kane’s small oyster farm in Western Bay is off to a successful start. A local lobster fisherman for the last 15 years, Kane was recently granted a limited purpose aquaculture license to try his hand at growing the tasty bivalve.

Farming oysters not only can help supply fresh products to meet market demand but can also help keep the waters and the surrounding environment clean. Oysters eat naturally occurring plankton and algae and an adult oyster can also filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day.

“Since people started farming oysters, I have heard that there are now wild growing populations of oysters, which is good,” said Kane.

Last year, Kane applied for a limited purpose aquaculture (LPA) license from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) to grow oysters. LPAs differ from a standard aquaculture lease in that their term is only for one year and the cultivation space is limited to up to 400 square feet. It didn’t take long for the DMR to approve Kane for a LPA license.

“You have to do the paperwork and you can’t just apply to put one anywhere,” said Kane, adding that “it took me a while to really pick a good site out.”

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American