Saving Seafood

NOAA: Lobsters will look for cooler water

July 24, 2020 — Cape Cod is known for its lobsters as much as for its oysters and quahogs. But it’s getting too warm in these waters for the tasty crustacean.

Researchers have projected significant changes in the habitat of commercially important American lobster and sea scallops on the Northeast U.S. continental shelf. They used a suite of models to estimate how species will react as waters warm, and it suggests that American lobster will move further offshore and sea scallops will shift to the north in the coming decades, a recent statement from NOAA Fisheries warned.

Findings from the study were published recently in Diversity and Distributions. They pose fishery management challenges as the changes can move stocks into and out of fixed management areas. Habitats within current management areas will also experience changes — some will show species increases, others decreases, and still others no change.

“Changes in stock distribution affect where fish and shellfish can be caught and who has access to them over time,” said Vincent Saba, a fishery biologist in the Ecosystems Dynamics and Assessment Branch at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and a co-author of the study.

Read the full story at Wicked Local

Ocean Acidification Threatens Bivalve Industry

July 9, 2020 — Worldwide, ocean levels are rising at an accelerated pace. Cape May County is feeling the effects of exacerbated weather events, as a result.

Yet, there is another drastic change affecting the oceans – a decrease in the water’s pH levels. This is a change that industry leaders and scientists fear will drastically affect the county, namely its bivalve (aquatic invertebrates with a hinged shell) industry that is, as marine and coastal sustainability expert Dr. Daphne Munroe said, “At the heart of the economy in this region.”

As carbon is released into the atmosphere, it was once speculated that the ocean’s tendency to absorb emissions would be a net positive, as it spared the Earth’s atmosphere from the worst of the emissions. Dr. Feely, senior scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said, “[It’s] a huge service the oceans are doing that significantly reduces global temperature.”

However, scientists are coming to realize that the ocean’s absorption of carbon emissions comes at a great cost, and that the long-term effects of an ocean that has absorbed great amounts of carbon emissions mean that ecosystems will ultimately suffer.

Read the full story at the Cape May County Herald

NORTH CAROLINA: Hard-Hit Oyster Growers Ineligible For Aid

June 23, 2020 — Oyster sales in North Carolina and other coastal states throughout the country tanked when restaurants halted dine-in service in March as part of the effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.

“Everyone – East Coast, West Coast – once COVID-19 shut down restaurants pretty much all growers saw their sales drop between 95 and 100%,” said Chris Matteo, East Coast Shellfish Growers Association North Carolina representative. “Restaurants are our primary client. Most high-end and middle-tier restaurants aren’t normally involved in the takeout business. Even the ones that did pivot to takeout, people just generally aren’t comfortable buying or selling raw shellfish for takeout. The market collapsed.”

Oyster farmers are among the ranks of numerous American growers who’ve experienced tremendous crop losses as a result of the pandemic. Yet oysters are not on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s list of specialty crops, leaving shellfish farmers out of the running to receive federal aid afforded other farmers, including the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, or CFAP.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online

Maryland’s wild oyster harvest doubles from last year

June 16, 2020 — Despite having fewer days to work, Maryland watermen harvested nearly twice as many wild oysters last season as they did the previous year, state officials report. Even so, a new study finds the state’s population of bivalves is in much better shape now than it was two years ago, with abundance up and overfishing down.

As a result, state fisheries managers say they’re weighing whether to maintain catch restrictions put in place last season or relax them for the next wild harvest season, which normally begins Oct. 1.

Data presented Monday night to the Department of Natural Resources’ Oyster Advisory Commission indicates that the overall abundance of adult, market-size oysters in Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay has rebounded considerably since 2018 and is now at the fifth highest level since 1999.

Preliminary figures indicate the wild harvest last season topped 270,000 bushels, a nearly 90% jump from the 145,000 bushels landed in the 2018–19 season.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Oyster Reef Restoration Efforts Could Use Your Help—And Your Oyster Shells

May 28, 2020 — A couple of centuries ago, oysters were ridiculously prevalent in the Chesapeake Bay, which stretches nearly 200 miles from Havre de Grace, Maryland to Virginia Beach, Virginia. At that time, more than 17 million bushels of everyone’s favorite bivalve were pulled from its waters every year, but that number has since dropped by 98 percent due to a depressing combination of overfishing, degradation of their habitats, and water pollution.

But part of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s mission to “Save the Bay” includes a number of oyster restoration programs, including small-scale oyster farming and “oyster gardening,” which allows amateur aquaculturists to spend a year caring for baby oysters, which are then transplanted onto protected reefs when they’re a year old. These restored reefs not only help to increase the oyster population, but they also provide food and shelter for a variety of fish and other marine life.

In order for an oyster to live past the larval stage, it has to find a solid object to attach to. Once it’s safely anchored, it can put its energy into feeding itself and growing its own shell. It also happens that the best things that baby oysters—also called spat—can attach themselves to are the discarded shells of other oysters.

Read the full story at Food & Wine

NJ’s Multibillion-dollar Fishing Industry has Reason to be Concerned About Turbines

May 19, 2020 — Scallops. Black sea bass. Squid. Oysters. New Jersey’s coastal fisheries harvest millions of dollars worth of seafood annually from the state’s bountiful coastal waters, but some in the industry fear an ill wind is blowing.

From Cape May to Sandy Hook, 313,990 acres of Atlantic Ocean have been leased to three energy companies, with plans to erect soaring wind turbines visible from the Jersey Shore. The worry from some in the New Jersey fishing industry is the green energy will limit access to fisheries, exacerbate the danger they face and hurt profits.

Read the full story at Seafood News

VIRGINIA: Northam administration says federal fisheries relief ‘falls woefully short’

May 12, 2020 — Virginia’s waters are unusually still this spring.

Ordinarily, May 1 is the start of the charter boat season, a day that sees convoys of boats head out from the ports of coastal Virginia for deeper waters where fish are sought by daytrippers. By then, crabbing and oystering, which usually begin in March, are in full swing. So are the commercial fisheries, many of which operate year-round.

Not so this year. Like so many other industries, fisheries, whether commercial or recreational, have been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. And while U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on Thursday announced $300 million in relief funding for fisheries around the nation, Virginia’s top natural resources official says the state’s $4.5 million allocation is nowhere near enough to stem the tide of losses.

“This funding falls woefully short of even beginning to address the devastating impacts fisheries and aquaculture businesses have suffered due to COVID-19,” said Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Matt Strickler in a statement. “The fishing industry in Virginia supports thousands of jobs and generates millions in revenue. The administration must release more funding to help our coastal communities and businesses.”

Read the full story at The Virginia Mercury

The story of Louisiana and its oyster farmers who have no place to sell their crop

May 12, 2020 — Natalie Gerdes’ family owns Casamento’s, the Uptown restaurant famous for its oysters and tile decor. The restaurant switched to takeout when the coronavirus stay-at-home order began in mid-March, but it has seen a 75% drop in business, Gerdes said.

“We’re just trying to get by,” she said. “Some days are a struggle.”

Few people are ordering raw or chargrilled oysters these days, and those who do are mostly regulars, Gerdes said. “I’m sure that a lot people would prefer to eat them here and have the experience,” she said.

More than almost any other food, oysters tend to be consumed in restaurants. And that means oyster farmers are struggling mightily to keep their businesses afloat while restaurants are closed or running at limited capacity. The pandemic is just the latest blow inflicted on an industry already reeling from environmental disasters.

Most Louisiana oyster farmers lease areas of the sea floor from the state. The farmers plant “cultch” — a hard material for oyster larvae to latch onto — and harvest the oysters when they mature.

The crop is sold to processors, who sell to distributors, who sell to restaurants. When the restaurant industry screeched to a halt, processors froze the product they had on hand. With freezers full of oysters, they stopped buying.

Read the full story at NOLA.com

With Restaurants Shuttered, Oyster Farmers Face Market Collapse

May 11, 2020 — Oysters are a resilient species with ragged shells that will cut your hands when you try to pry them open, and adaptable insides that change from male to female and back to reproduce. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years, popping up in the Triassic period; they have survived human gluttony — in the 1800s, New Yorkers ate about 600 oysters per person every year — and, more recently, environmental degradation. Now, they and the people who farm them are facing a challenge they didn’t foresee: the coronavirus pandemic.

Of oysters, Roger Williams wrote, “This the English call hens, a little thick shell fish which the Indians wade deep and dive for.”

Valued more for their shells, which were used to make lime, in the early 1700s they were often chucked into kilns whole. By 1734, Rhode Island outlawed the practice, and people began harvesting them from estuaries and salt ponds for eating.

They soon realized what they had been missing out on, and developed a voracious appetite for the briny bivalve, so much so that by 1766 our predecessors’ hunger had to be checked, and a statute was instituted restricting harvesting to protect them.

Then, in 1798, the first oyster farm in Rhode Island was created, and the Ocean State’s aquaculture heritage was born — though it faced troubled waters.

Read the full story at EcoRI

Fisheries in Maryland, Virginia losing millions due to COVID-19 shutdowns

May 6, 2020 — Fisheries along the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia are, like many other fisheries in the country, facing an economic crisis as restaurant shutdowns cause decreases in demand.

The region’s two most iconic fisheries – blue crab and oysters – are both being hit by COVID-19-based restaurant closures that caused a rapid drop in demand. Restaurants account for 70 percent or more of the demand for the two species, with retail channels unable to make up the demand gap.

Read the full story at Seafood Source