Saving Seafood

MAINE: American Aquafarms buys shuttered Gouldsboro seafood processing plant

May 3, 2022 — American Aquafarms has purchased a former sardine cannery in Gouldsboro, indicating the company will likely continue to pursue a salmon farm in Frenchman Bay after being dealt a major permitting setback last month.

The sale of the Maine Fair Trade Lobster plant from East Coast Seafood to American Aquafarms closed Friday, according to East Coast Seafood CEO Bob Blais. American Aquafarms has said that it plans to use the 11-acre property in the village of Prospect Harbor for a hatchery and processing facility.

Thomas Brennan, American Aquafarms director of project development, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. On Friday, he said knew the company was heading in the direction of a sale, but didn’t have a firm closing date.

“It’s going to happen,” Brennan said. “It’s just a question of when.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Maine dam owner to make changes to try to save salmon

May 3, 2022 — The owner of hydroelectric dams in Maine said Monday it’s going to make changes to some of its operations to try to help save the final remaining wild Atlantic salmon in the United States.

The country’s last wild populations of the fish are found in a few Maine rivers. Salmon counters found fewer of the fish on one of those rivers, the Penobscot, last year than in any year since 2016.

Brookfield Renewable U.S. said Monday that it has begun shutdown procedures for dams on the lower Kennebec River to help the salmon migrate. The company is a subsidiary of a larger Canadian company that owns many dams in Maine.

Read the full story at AP News

US House pays tribute to Don Young by passing salmon task force bill

April 28, 2022 — The U.S. House of Representatives honored the late Don Young on Tuesday, 26 April, by passing legislation the longtime Alaska Republican congressman sponsored.

Young first won the state’s only House seat in 1973. He was the “Dean of the House,” a term given to the longest-tenured member in Congress. He died at age 88 on 18 March while traveling back to the state from Washington, D.C.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

MAINE: American Aquafarms project terminated

April 28, 2022 — American Aquafarms’ plan to raise 66 million Atlantic salmon in Frenchman Bay seems to be dead in the water. But the broad citizens’ coalition, which swelled to include all seven Frenchman Bay towns, the Downeast lobster fishery, Acadia National Park, MDI Biological Laboratory and several land trusts, has kept a steady spotlight trained on the issue for a year and is very much alive. 

In fact, Frenchman Bay United is prepared to challenge industrial-scale fish farming in Maine coastal waters in light of the departments of Marine Resources and Environmental Protection’s decisions late last week to terminate the Norwegian-backed company’s project that would have involved discharging 4.1 billion gallons of diluted wastewater into the 14-mile bay.  

For over a year Frenchman Bay United, a coast-wide coalition of four groups, has led an aggressive public campaign to oppose American Aquafarms’ proposed operation to farm salmon at 15-pen sites off Bald Rock Ledge and Long Porcupine Island. Its members offered scientific data suggesting the farm’s discharged wastewater would largely remain rather than exit Frenchman Bay and potentially harm fragile marine plants, ecosystems and the lobster, shrimp and scallop fisheries. They staged a 125-boat flotilla of lobster-fishing boats, kayakers and sailors last August in Frenchman Bay as a form of protest and other events to draw attention to the controversial project first proposed in mid-fall of 2020. 

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

ALASKA: Record 74 Million Sockeye Run Forecast for 2022, Low Return for Pinks, as Expected

April 26, 2022 — Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game has released their final “Run Forecasts and Harvest Projections for 2022 Alaska Salmon Fisheries and Review of the 2021 Season” and once again Bristol Bay is outdoing its own record of consistently massive returns.

The forecast for the statewide total salmon return is lower than last years by 800,000 salmon, but it doesn’t detract much from the forecasted run in the Bay.

The 2021 inshore Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run of 67.7 million fish is the largest total run on record — 64% above the 41.3 million average run for the latest 20-year period. It was also the third time on record that the sockeye run exceeded 60.0 million fish. Last year’s 42.0 million harvest was 15% above the 36.4 million fish preseason forecast and the third largest harvest on record. It was also the third time in the last 4 years that landings  exceeded 40.0 million fish.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Troubled waters: A massive salmon farm off the coast of Maine is stalled

April 26, 2022 — The summit of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in the northeastern U.S. state of Maine offers sweeping, unobstructed views of Frenchman Bay. Surrounded by islands and rocky shorelines, the bay is known throughout Maine for recreation and resources. But new projects may lie over the horizon. American Aquafarms, backed by Norwegian investors, planned to build the largest salmon farm in North America here, just on the edge of Acadia National Park. And lobstermen, like Jerry Potter, say they feared that if the project went through, the pristine waters of Frenchman Bay would never be the same.

“It’s going to ruin the ecosystem of the bay and ruin all the resources … mussels, shrimp, lobsters, crabs, everything,” said Potter, 76, from the nearby town of Gouldsboro.

American Aquafarms first proposed the salmon farm in 2020, in hopes that they would produce 30 million metric tons of salmon each year. The farm would also curb the U.S. reliance on imported seafood, according to Tom Brennan, the director of project management at American Aquafarms. The US currently imports 70-85% of its seafood, about half of which is produced through aquaculture.

But the massive project is now indefinitely delayed. On April 19, 2022, state officials terminated American Aquafarm’s application, citing that American Aquafarms failed to provide documentation that the egg source proposed to stock the pens would meet state requirements. In Maine, genetically modified fish cannot be used to stock salmon pens, however American Aquafarms proposed to work with the company that created the first genetically modified Atlantic salmon.

Brennan is shocked by the decision, stating that the company also included eggs from the USDA as a backup plan in the proposal. That facility was established to provide eggs to salmon growers in Maine, he adds.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Japan, Russia settle salmon quota amid tensions over Ukraine

April 23, 2022 — Japan and Russia have reached an agreement over Tokyo’s annual catch quota for Russian-born salmon and trout, the Japanese Fisheries Agency said Saturday, despite delays and chilled relations between the two sides amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The agreement on Japan’s quota for the popular fish in waters near disputed islands north of Hokkaido is a relief for Japanese fishermen who were worried about the prospects amid worsening ties between the two governments.

Japan and Russia concluded talks Friday, setting a catch quota of 2,050 tons for salmon and trout this year in Japan’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, the fisheries agency said in a statement. The quota is unchanged from last year, and Japan will pay 200-300 million yen ($1.56-2.34 million) in fees — depending on the actual catch — to Russia.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

American Aquafarms expected to take a ‘pause’ to figure out future of salmon farm

April 22, 2022 — The future of one of the most controversial aquaculture proposals in Maine history remains uncertain after its application was cut short by state regulators this week.

An official at American Aquafarms said the Norwegian-backed company that wanted to grow Atlantic salmon in nets pens in Frenchman Bay would likely consider its options following the Department of Marine Resources’ termination of its lease applications.

“The DMR response is perplexing to say the least, and the way it has been communicated is a surprise,” Thomas Brennan, American Aquafarms’ director of project development, wrote in a brief email Thursday. “I expect the company owners are taking a pause to understand what this all means for the future.”

The Maine Department of Marine Resources said Wednesday it would no longer review the company’s application for two 60-acre leases off Gouldsboro because American Aquafarms had failed to select an approved salmon egg source.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

AquaBounty salmon eggs cited as reason for Maine’s rejection of American Aquafarms permit

April 22, 2022 — The Department of Marine Resources (DMR) in the U.S. state of Maine rejected American Aquafarms permit application for a closed-net salmon farm specifically because its source for eggs – AquaBounty’s hatchery in Newfoundland, Canada – did not meet the state’s criteria for a qualified source.

According to DMR spokesperson Edward Hardy, the agency “terminated the applications of American Aquafarms after the company failed to fulfill its legal obligation to demonstrate an available source of fish to be cultivated at its proposed salmon farms in Frenchman Bay.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Innovative Fish Farms Aim to Feed the Planet, Save Jobs and Clean Up an Industry’s Dirty Reputation

April 20, 2022 — Carter Newell owns and operates one of the most productive mussel farms in the state of Maine. One frigid spring morning I joined him and his two-person crew on a short boat ride to the barge he calls Mumbles, a 60-by-24-foot vessel anchored that day in a quiet cove in the brackish Damariscotta River. Named for the Welsh seaside town where Newell once did research, Mumbles was tethered to a steel-framed raft hung with hundreds of 45-foot ropes, each thick with thousands of mussels in various stages of development.

I shivered in the piercing wind as a crew member stepped from Mumbles onto the shifting raft to identify mussel ropes ready for harvest. Newell remained on the barge to helm a 16-foot crane that hauled up the designated ropes, each heavy with a Christmas tree–shaped aggregation of roughly 3,000 mussels. An outsized brush then swept the bivalves off the ropes and into an enormous stainless steel bucket. Another machine funneled them into a heavy polyethylene bag the size of a baby elephant, from which they were poured onto a conveyor-belt apparatus to be scrubbed, sorted and bagged. Newell designed this ungainly Willy Wonka–esque apparatus over decades in a costly process of trial and error that faced—and ultimately overcame—several challenges, including protecting the mussels from turbulent seas and voracious eider ducks.

Read the full story at Scientific American