Saving Seafood

RHODE ISLAND: Fishing Report: Hearing on menhaden set for Dec. 19 at URI

December 8, 2016 — Atlantic menhaden are an important forage fish for striped bass, bluefish, tuna and other species. Recreational anglers claim that fishing for these game fish is off when the quantity of forage fish is down. Additionally, Atlantic menhaden are filter feeders with each fish processing thousands of gallons of water filtering out plankton to help prevent algae blooms.

So if you want to impact regulations pertaining to this species, now is the time to become active. There will be an Atlantic menhaden public hearing to talk about important Fishery Management Plan issues on Dec. 19 at 7 p.m. at the Corless Auditorium at the URI Bay Campus, Narragansett. The hearing will address a new Public Information Document that is a predecessor to Amendment 3 to the Atlantic menhaden Fishery Management Plan that will be developed later this year.

NOAA’s website says Atlantic menhaden “play an important role in the ecosystem as both a forage fish for striped bass, weakfish, bluefish, and predatory birds such as osprey and eagles as well as serving as a filter feeder because they feed on phytoplankton and zooplankton at various life stages.”

So rather than just managing Atlantic menhaden to ensure they remain sustainable as a species, the PID aims to include ecosystem-based management measures to ensure that enough Atlantic menhaden are left in the water for other species to eat as forage fish as well as enough to fulfill their ecological role.

Atlantic menhaden are plentiful. A 2015 stock assessment for the resource relates they are in good condition, not overfished nor experiencing overfishing. The PID can be found on the ASMFC website at www.asmfc.org. Public comments can be made at the hearing and will also be accepted in writing until 5 p.m. on Jan. 4, 2017. Comments can also be emailed to comments@asmmfc.org (subject line: Menhaden PID).

Read the full story at the Providence Journal 

Fishing Report: Rhode Island Seafood brand catching on

December 2nd, 2016 — I love it when a plan comes together. And, Wednesday I had that feeling at the Rhode Island Seafood Marketing Collaborative meeting chaired by Janet Coit, director of the Department of Environmental Management.

Four years of meetings with fishermen, tourism and commerce representatives, scientists, fish processors, health department officials, chefs and restaurants owners to develop and implement a Rhode Island Seafood brand (seal) is starting to catch on. There’s no doubt in my mind that it will pay off with big dividends for the fishing industry and tourism in Rhode Island. Ultimately it is (and will be) a big shot in the arm for RI’s economy.

However, the big winners of this branding initiative will be Rhode Islanders. We get to dine out or eat at home more seafood that is grown and/or landed in Rhode Island as that is what the RI Seafood label means. Look for the RI Seafood label and you know the fish was grown and/or landed in Rhode Island.

Presenter after presenter at the Seafood Marketing Collaborative meeting shared success stories about implementing the RI Seafood brand. Highlights included:

A very successful Calamari Cook-Off in Narragansett in September where a 1,000 pounds of fresh Rhode Island calamari (donated by the industry) was prepared by area restaurants and chefs with thousands of people in attendance. RI lands more squid that any other port in the nation.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal 

Is Offshore Wind Safe? Fishermen Study Effects As First Farms In The US Set To Open Soon

November 30, 2016 — After years of setbacks, the first commercial American offshore wind farm is now just days away from producing electricity to the energy grid, while scientists and fishermen off the New England coast continue to assess the potential impact of turbines on the sea life in the area.

The pilot project, known as the Block Island Wind Farm, could change the way the 9,734 square-mile island powers itself but could also disrupt the fishing patterns in areas near the turbines—an unattractive prospect for local fishermen. Because of such an unprecedented undertaking, project fishermen have expressed concern that there could still be impending disruptions to their livelihoods.

“You don’t know what’s gonna happen once electricity starts flowing through the wires,” Anthony Ponte, a fisherman there, told Boston NPR affiliate WBUR in a report published Monday. Ponte said that he hadn’t noticed any issues yet.

Read the full story at the International Business Times

RHODE ISLAND: Assessing Environmental Impacts Of The Block Island Wind Farm

November 28, 2016 — The nation’s first offshore wind farm off the coast of Block Island will start producing electricity any day now. It’s a pilot project that will change the way the people on this small island power their homes and businesses. They’ve relied on importing diesel fuel up to this point.

Today we bring you a story about another group that has a stake in this project: fishermen. A small crew of fishermen has been working with scientists to gather data and learn how fishing will or won’t change around the wind turbines.

Every month for the past four and a half years, Captain Rodman Sykes has sailed out toward the Block Island Sound with his crew and a small group of scientists.

They tow a fish net and scrape the seafloor twice in three different locations: within the area of the Block Island Wind Farm and in areas close to it for reference.

“Mostly skates, there’s a sea bass and a few small scup, sea robins, dog fish,” Sykes says aloud as he stands over the fish to inspect them each time his crew brings up the net and releases the catch. “Not much else, but a good sample. So we’ll go on to the next station.”

While Sykes redirects his vessel to the next sampling area, scientists get right to work: sorting fish by species, taking their weight, and measuring their length.

Read and listen to the full story at Rhode Island NPR

 

Save the Summer Flounder Fishery Fund Data Proves Anglers’ Concerns

November 28, 2016 — The results of a recent collaborative study between researchers at Rutgers University and Stockton University of New Jersey, the University of Rhode Island, and Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, NY and Cornell University may hold the key to bold new management changes in the summer flounder fishery.

The research project, Sex and Length of Summer Flounder Discards in the Recreational Fishery, NJ to RI, spanned the 2016 summer flounder recreational season beginning May 23 and continuing through September 16. Samples were collected aboard for-hire recreational fishing vessels from selected ports in New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island, and were supplemented by a series of back bay, shallow water trips.

Samples were collected from stations ranging in depth from 5 to 95 feet and spanning a latitudinal range from just off the coast of Delaware to coastal Rhode Island. According to the survey results, sex-at-length data was collected for a total of 2,243 discard-sized fish and 842 legal-sized fish.

Researchers say lab analysis findings confirm prior observations that female summer flounder dominate the recreational catch, although it was also demonstrated that this does not hold below the legal size limit where fish smaller than the legal limit were predominately male. On average, across all ports, dates and depths, the sex ratio approximates 50:50 at 15.35 inches in length, with males dominant in the size classes less than that mark and females dominant above the 15.35-inch (39 cm) mark.

Read the full story at The Fisherman

Fishing Report: A new way to count fish

November 25, 2016 — Scientific surveys of fish are often done by trawling. This means towing a net and then hauling it up to count the catch. Estimates are then made about how many of each species are in a square mile. They are generally done in the same area for the same amount of time on a periodic basis.

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management does trawl surveys in Narragansett Bay, the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration and a regional fisheries commission do trawl surveys too. Fish managers and scientists simply do not have the resources to do a proper job with survey trawls in our coastal waters, never mind areas outside our territorial waters (200 miles). Large tracts of the ocean are not monitored so we have no idea what fish are in the water globally, never mind how many are being taken out.

But a reliable and inexpensive way to monitor fish populations is being developed by scientists. Philip Thomsen and his team from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, are developing a a far less costly way to count fish.

The team is examining fragments of floating DNA which fish slough off in slime and scales, or excrete into the water.

A Nov. 19 Economist blog post said scientists “Hope they are able to link the quantity of this ‘environmental’ DNA to those species’ abundances, as measured by a trawl survey that took place at the same time… Given the fragmentary nature of environmental DNA, they found it easier to recognize families than species (a family, in this context, is the taxonomic level above a genus; herring, sardines and shad, for example, all belong to the family Clupeidae). The trawls picked up fish from 28 families. The team found DNA from members of 26 of these in their samples, and also detected three families that had no representatives entangled in trawl nets.”

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

RHODE ISLAND: Fisheries Face Climate Peril, Aging Fleet

November 23, 2016 — As the guest speaker at Seamen’s Church Institute’s annual meeting on Monday, Nov. 14, Newport’s David Spencer, a lobsterman and president of the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation, reviewed the state of the commercial fishing industry in Rhode Island.

Spencer has run his 85-foot lobster boat Nathaniel Lee out of Newport’s State Pier since 1973, and graciously supplies free lobsters for Seamen’s annual Rock the Docks fundraiser.

“Back then, this was a vibrant fishing port, from south to north. It had many boats that docked here,” he said. “It was a good place to fish out of.”

Spencer said that all three Newport fish houses at that time had traps off Ocean Drive, near mooring docks that would be “awash in fish” with an almost daily, intricate choreography of dockworkers sorting and loading them all into trucks. “It was something to behold,” he recalled.

According to Spencer, present-day fleets gather quahogs, lobster, crabs, conch and a little known kind of shrimp in these waters. “It’s been a good opportunity for fishermen with smaller 20-foot boats,” with trawlers catching squid, butterfish, flounder, herring, black sea bass, and more. Improved netting allows turtles, cod, and other illegal species to escape.

Working “out front” in Rhode Island Sound waters and beyond, the lobster and crab fishery becomes one, “with an explosion of Jonah crabs, which has been a godsend for much of the fleet,” said Spencer. “There is a tremendous demand for these crabs,” which augment a depleted annual lobster catch.

Read the full story at Newport This Week

Advisory panel releases 3 proposals for whiting

November 18, 2016 — The New England Fishery Management Council, meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, this week, got an advance peek at three proposals that ultimately could limit access to the small-mesh multispecies fishery that includes whiting.

The three proposals, generated by the council’s whiting advisory panel and the whiting committee, will serve to provide the council with a fuller slate of alternatives, said Andrew Applegate, the council’s senior fishery analyst for small mesh multispecies.

Applegate stressed the analysis of the three proposals by the whiting plan development team is in the very early stages.

“We still have a lot of work to do, but we hope to present the council with something sometime next January,” Applegate said.

The initial discussion on the three proposals, Applegate said, “is just to update the council on our progress.”

The whiting fishery currently is an open-access fishery. The proposals to potentially limit access to the fishery are contained in Amendment 22 currently being developed by the council for the 2017 fishing season.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Double feature at New Bedford Heritage Fishing Center

November 17, 2016 — Dock-U-Mentaries continues its free monthly film series on Nov. 18, 7 p.m., at the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, 38 Bethel St., with “In History’s Wake: The Last Trap Fishermen of Rhode Island.” A new film by Markham Starr.

For as long as people have lived along RI’s meandering coast, the ocean at their doorstep has provided them with a ready supply of food. Faced with assaults from the broad Atlantic Ocean, fishermen from Rhode Island experimented with new designs, capable of withstanding the punishment delivered by wind and waves, eventually creating the unique floating trap system still in use today. While dozens of companies deploying hundreds of traps once fished the state’s waters, only four continue using this ancient but effective technique.

Following the film, the Center hosts the opening reception of its first gallery show: “New England Fishermen: The Photography of Markham Starr”.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Regulators to Discuss Localized Depletion of Herring

November 16, 2016 — CHATHAM, Mass. – The New England Fishery Management Council will meet in Newport, Rhode Island tomorrow and an organization that supports local fishermen will push for a buffer zone to move midwater trawlers further off shore.

The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is looking to move the large herring trawlers at least 50 miles from the Cape and Islands to protect the ecosystem and small-boat coastal fisheries.

The management council will discuss ways to address “localized depletion” in the herring fishery, which is a key source of food for whales and larger fish.

“Our concern is that they are depleting the forage species that we need for tuna, stripers, cod, haddock, dogfish, the whales – all of that stuff is the food chain and they are sucking up the lower end of it,” said Bruce Peters, an Orleans fisherman from the vessel Marilyn S.

Current regulations allow for the midwater trawlers to fish beyond three miles from shore from Provincetown past the Islands.

A vessel tracking program showed about a half dozen trawlers about three or four miles off the Coast of Orleans and Eastham along the back side of the Cape earlier this week.

“They have huge boats. They can go to Georges Bank. They can go offshore. They can fish herring pretty much anywhere,” Peters said. “Our small-boat fleets are 30 to 40-foot boats. We don’t have the luxury of being to go way, way offshore like that.”

Read the full story at CapeCod.com