Saving Seafood

Maryland, Virginia weigh cutting striped bass catches in 2020 as species declines

January 29, 2020 — Anglers who live for hooking a feisty striped bass are going to have fewer chances to do it in 2020 — and probably for at least a year or two afterward.

Prompted by a scientific finding that the East Coast’s most prized finfish are in trouble, Maryland, Virginia and the Potomac River are all moving to adopt new catch restrictions aimed at stemming the species’ decline.

But many anglers are complaining about the complexity, fairness and even the adequacy of the cutbacks under consideration, which range from a quota tuck of less than 2% for commercial fishermen in Maryland to a 24% reduction in fish removed by recreational anglers in Virginia.

The two states are taking somewhat different tacks to comply with a directive from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates fishing for migratory species from Maine to Florida.

Read the full story at Delmarva Now

A ‘long, creeping change’: As climate warms, Virginia fisheries struggle to adapt

June 24, 2019 — George Washington had few dietary preferences, save one: he was “excessively fond” of fish.

Luckily for the president, his perch at Mount Vernon afforded him an easy opportunity to indulge.

The Potomac, he recorded in 1793, was “well-stocked with various kinds of fish in all Seasons of the year, and in the Spring with Shad, Herring, Bass, Carp, Perch, Sturgeon, etc. in great abundance. … The whole shore, in fact, is one entire fishery.”

Today, Mount Vernon still overlooks the Potomac, but the species that call Virginia waters home are increasingly different due to something Washington couldn’t have foreseen: climate change.

“It’s hard to manage fisheries to begin with, [and] in the past we’ve always considered the climate stable,” said Patrick Geer, deputy chief of fisheries management for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. “But now that theory of a stable climate and environment has been taken out.”

As global air temperatures warm, so too do global waters. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the temperature of the ocean’s surface has risen an average of 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit every decade since the beginning of the 20th century. And the Chesapeake Bay is estimated to be warming even faster, at an average rate of 1.2 degrees every decade since the 1980s.

Increasingly, that is making environments inhospitable for fish. In reaction, populations on the East Coast are shifting northward and eastward, leaving commercial fishermen and states who have long relied on their presence with lighter nets — and fears of lighter coffers.

Some of those fears are justified. The classic cautionary tale is that of New England’s northern shrimp fishery, which crashed precipitously around 2012 and was closed in 2014 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the governmental body that oversees the management of fisheries in state waters from Maine to Florida. In February 2018, the ASMFC extended the moratorium to 2021 in an announcement that linked the collapse to warming ocean temperatures and broached the possibility of a future in which “the stock has no ability to recover.”

Such regional collapses may become more frequent in coming years, while at the same creating more favorable environments for other species.

“In any one region, some species will experience improving environmental conditions that may result in increased available habitat and increased species productivity, while other species will experience the opposite and perhaps decline in abundance,” the National Marine Fisheries Service declared in its 2015 Climate Science Strategy.

Or, as Geer put it, “For any given area and for any given species, there will be winners and losers.”

Read the full story at The Virginia Mercury

‘There’s going to be no fish to fight over at all’: The Chesapeake Bay’s rockfish population is falling

April 28, 2019 — It’s trophy season for Chesapeake Bay rockfish, the only few weeks on the calendar local anglers can hunt for the 40-pound specimens visiting the estuary to spawn. But this year, it’s not as celebratory as it sounds.

Three decades after an outright ban on fishing for the species properly known as Atlantic striped bass helped it recover from near-extinction, scientists, anglers and the commercial fishing industry are raising alarms that the bay’s supreme and delectable swimmers are again being overfished. And about half of the fish that anglers are killing aren’t even being eaten — they’re caught and thrown back, only to die from their wounds.

The concerns prompted Virginia to cancel its trophy season Tuesday, six days before fishing was set to begin in some Potomac River tributaries. Authorities there said emergency action was needed to allow as many of the females to spawn as possible.

Maryland officials said they have no plans to make a similar decision this spring. But commercial and recreational fishermen around the state’s rivers and creeks are nonetheless hoping, and bracing, for new restrictions to stabilize the striped bass population once again.

“I think most charter boat captains have resigned themselves to the fact that we’re going to have some changes next year,” said Mark Galasso, who operates Tuna the Tide charter service out of Kent Island.

Read the full story at The Capital Gazette

Virginia Cancels Trophy Rockfish Season, Urges Other States to Follow

April 24, 2019 — It’s official- there won’t be a trophy rockfish season in Virginia this spring. Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) has voted unanimously to enact an emergency closure because of worrisome new research about the striped bass population on the Bay.

Bay Bulletin reported in early April that VMRC’s biologists called for the spring season to be canceled. And on Tuesday, the commission voted 7-0 to eliminate the spring striped bass trophy season in the Bay from May 1 through June 15, the Coast from May 1 through May 15, and the Virginia tributaries to the Potomac River from April 29 through May 15. Starting May 16 through June 15 fishermen will be able to catch and keep two striped bass from 20 to 28 inches.

The emergency action comes after recent scientific research showed the rockfish population “has been below the sustainable threshold for the past six years and overfishing has been occurring sine 2010.”

Read the full story at Chesapeake Bay Magazine 

Striped bass fishing season could be canceled in Virginia as population declines

April 12, 2019 — Virginia officials are weighing whether to cancel this year’s fishing season for large rockfish in the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay out of concern for its dwindling numbers.

The rockfish season in Virginia will begin April 20 along the Potomac River tributaries, then days later in the bay. But indications that the population of the fish, also called striped bass, is declining raised concerns that further catches could have a long-term effect on its survivability.

“Striped bass aren’t doing as well as we thought,” said Ellen Bolen, deputy commissioner for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. “We’re taking fish out faster than they can reproduce.”

Bolen’s group, which helps manage and oversee fish populations in the state, is expected to vote April 23 on an “emergency proposal” that would recommend canceling the trophy-size rockfish season, when anglers can keep rockfish that measure 36 inches or longer.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Overfishing assessment may lead Virginia to ban recreational fishing for striped bass

April 8, 2019 — The Virginia Marine Resources Commission is considering banning recreational fishing for trophy-sized striped bass this spring in the state’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay, its coastal waters and Potomac River tributaries because of indications that the species has been overfished.

Striped bass, locally called rockfish, are among the most popular species with regional saltwater anglers. Hundreds of charter captains and thousands of recreational fishermen target the fish throughout the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay region.

In Virginia’s spring trophy season, which is set to run May 1 through June 15, anglers are allowed one striped bass 36 inches or longer per day.

The commission is scheduled to take up the proposed ban at its April 23 meeting, with a proposed effective date for the emergency regulation of April 29. The rationale for the moratorium is an expected final determination in May by the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board that the large, mostly female rockfish that do most of the spawning are being overfished.

A preliminary assessment delivered to that board showed the estimated overall fishing mortality exceeded the established standard in 2017. Additionally, female spawning stock biomass (the estimated total weight of all spawning-size females) was 151 million pounds, significantly below the 202 million pound threshold.

Read the full story at The Free Lance-Star

Dolphins in Chesapeake Bay: Unusual, or No Big Deal?

August 18, 2017 — Earlier this summer, we started hearing reports of dolphins in the Chesapeake Bay. Some thought it was unusual, others said it was no big deal. So Joel McCord went searching for them for Chesapeake: A Journalism Collaborative.

Dr. Helen Bailey, who did her PhD work on bottle nose dolphins, says she heard reports of occasional sightings of the marine mammals when she came to work as an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science in Solomons.

But then the underwater microphones the lab was experimenting with began picking up the tell-tale squeaks and clicks of dolphins foraging in the Chesapeake and its tributaries. Now, the scientists are finding out the dolphins are pretty regular visitors to the bay.

“We were discovering that we were actually detecting dolphins quite frequently during June, July and August,” she said. “And so then put another hydrophone in the Potomac River and there we were detecting dolphins every day.”

She says they’ve been detected throughout the bay and many of its tributaries. But what drew them into the Bay?

“We think that they’re following the prey into the bay,” Bailey says. “And getting a better understanding of how that is working is really important to understanding the eco system.”

Read and listen to the full story at WVTF

Dolphins more common in Potomac than previously thought

July 19, 2016 — A waterfront house on Virginia’s Northern Neck promised to be a getaway for Janet Mann from three decades of studying dolphins, primarily in Australia’s Shark Bay.

But the day after Mann and her husband closed on the place in Ophelia, VA, four years ago, she spied an all-too-familiar sight from the shore where the Potomac River joins the Chesapeake Bay.

“I said, ‘Oh, look, dolphins!’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, no,’” Mann recalled. “I think we’ve given up on getting me away from my work.”

A professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University in the District of Columbia, Mann has since embraced the Potomac as the next frontier for her research. In fact, she’s turned that riverfront retreat into a field station for observing a surprising number of bottlenose dolphins that venture up the Bay’s second largest tributary every summer.

Though dolphins have been spotted occasionally in the Potomac for at least the last six years, Mann said she hasn’t met anyone outside of those who live near her summer house who realize how many of the marine mammals are visiting on a regular basis. Last year, she and her research team of students and other Georgetown faculty tallied nearly 200 different animals in just a two-week span.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Scientists worry that the Chesapeake’s natural shoreline is turning into a wall

December 26, 2015 — On the banks of the Potomac River, construction cranes that look like metal dinosaurs tower over Southwest Washington. They swivel in all directions, delivering concrete and other heavy material to workers building a large development behind a steel-and-concrete wall that holds back the water.

Within two years, the Wharf will begin emerging as a playground of trendy apartments, shops and entertainment venues. But below the river’s surface, animals that depend on vegetation in the water may continue to struggle, marine scientists say.

The Wharf is part of the great wall of the Chesapeake Bay. Because of development along the bay and its rivers, vast swaths of soft shorelines have been turned into stone. The spread of what scientists call “the armored shore” is depriving young fish, crabs and other organisms of food and shelter. And it is yet another reason why life in the bay is disappearing, according to new research funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Houses, offices, bike paths, marinas — and walls built to protect them from erosion and rising sea levels — are replacing marshy shores, uprooting plants that young fish, crabs and other organisms use for food.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

 

‘Ghost fleet’ offers treasure trove of wildlife, history in the Potomac

November 2, 2015 — NANJEMOY, Md. — Hidden beneath the waters of the Potomac River are dozens of sunken ships known as a “ghost fleet” that sailed from the Revolutionary War to after World War I, and now, thanks to the Chesapeake Conservancy, the public can experience these underwater ships and the unique ecosystem that has grown around them from their desktops.

The conservancy has teamed up with Terrain360, a Richmond, Virginia, company, to take panoramic shots of Mallows Bay and the more than 100 shipwrecks located there, piecing them together to create a virtual tour of the bay that you can find here.

The bay, tucked along the shores of the Potomac River in Charles County, Maryland, is home to the largest collection of historic shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere. But the sunken ships have also created a marine habitat full of fish, birds and other wildlife, which the conservancy hopes to protect.

Visitors to the bay will spot an engine rising from the mist. Trees growing from the hull of a sunken ship seem to form an island that’s shaped like a ship. And the rusty hull of another ship can be seen rising above the waterline further out from the shore. Nearby is a menhaden fishing boat dating to the 1940s that was used during World War II.

Read the full story at WTOP