Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: Shellfish mother lode found off Cape May

LOWER TOWNSHIP, N.J. (Press of Atlantic City) — July 10, 2015 — It may be fortunate that nobody has asked Dvora Hart to count the Atlantic sea scallops recently captured by camera images off the New Jersey coast.

Hart, a mathematical biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, knows numbers. She could count that high. The problem: It would take awhile.

“Ten billion is my best guess. It’s probably conservative and it’s very preliminary,” said Hart.

It’s being called one of the biggest scallop sets ever recorded, eclipsing one in 2003 fishermen harvested for years. The estimate of 10 billion is only for the most concentrated area, scallop grounds called the Elephant Trunk just southeast of Cape May covering more than 1,500 square nautical miles. The set actually extends as far north as Long Island and Block Island and as far south as the Delmarva Peninsula. Hart is still working on the overall numbers.

“The big concentration is southern New Jersey, a little north of Cape May, down to Delaware. You start to see them at 35 meters and the highest density is 50 to 60 meters. They drop off at 70 to 80 meters,” said Hart.

NOAA’s underwater camera recorded about 4 million images off the Mid-Atlantic coast earlier this year. Each picture is one square meter of ocean floor and Hart was seeing up to 350 scallops per image. Hart, the chief scallop assessment scientist with NOAA, puts that into perspective.

“Normally we’d see one scallop per square meter, which is actually good recruitment. We had a wide range of more than 100 per square meter and several places where they were on the order of 350 per square meter. This is an extreme event. It’s pretty amazing,” said Hart.

The find is great news for the Port of Cape May, where scallops are still the No. 1 catch but recent East Coast harvest cutbacks, about 20 percent averaged over the last two years, hurt the industry.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

 

Bill to limit Maine scallop harvest comes up short in state legislature

July 3, 2015 — A Washington County legislator says he will try again next year to persuade the Legislature to limit the harvest of Maine scallops.

The fishing industry this year resisted a bill proposed by Rep. Robert Alley, D-Beals, and it later died in committee in April. He had proposed legislation to create a limit of 90 pounds a day per person on wild-caught Maine scallops so future generations, he said, would still be able to harvest them.

Maine scallops are favored in culinary circles, typically fetching several dollars more per pound than other Atlantic scallops. This past scalloping season, they frequently sold for more than $20 per pound. They are harvested by drag boats or divers, and the fishery has been recovering after a collapse in the mid-2000s; the state’s 2014 catch was the most since 2000.

Alley said he will try to sell scallop fishermen and the public on the idea again next year.

“Some of the young kids that are coming out of high school, they don’t have a job, period, and they don’t have anything to look forward to as far as having a job,” said Alley, a lobsterman. “I’m looking out for the kids who want to have a job and stay here.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

The Scallop Scoop: Survey Forecasts A Banner Year In Atlantic

July 1, 2015 — Scallop fishermen off the East Coast could soon see one of their biggest bumper crops ever. A federal survey in waters off Delaware is predicting a boom in the next couple of years for the nation’s most valuable fishery.

Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks for young sea scallops on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This year, when they stuck their camera in the water, they got a huge shock, says Dvora Hart, a research analyst with NOAA’s Fisheries Service.

“We were seeing concentrations of several hundred per square meter, and to give a perspective on that, one per square meter is actually a high concentration,” says Hart.

Hart estimates they saw about 10 billion scallops off Delaware and southern New Jersey alone — probably due to increased spawning at a closed fishing area farther north. The closure of the fishing area gave the scallops more time to spawn — which they do each spring and fall. The larvae floated downstream and became the billions of scallops Hart saw in the mid-Atlantic this year. Closures like this are designed to boost spawning but “some years have more luck than others,” Hart says.

Read the full story at NPR

 

US scallop prices expected to increase through season on short imports

June 24, 2015 — US prices for Atlantic sea scallops are likely to rise throughout the rest of the season, on a lack of available imports as well as potentially smaller landings than had been anticipated.

Terry Molloy, general manager of Chesapeake Bay Packing, backed by two other sources, told Undercurrent News that with landings reasonably good at the mid-June point, this was likely to be the lowest prices the market will see.

“Prices are likely at their lowest now – the only thing likely to affect them now is quality,” said Molloy. “I don’t anticipate any softening in prices from this point; increases are likely, but as for when and by how much, it’s too early to say.”

One of the other sources agreed, adding he expects pricing to increase on a weekly basis for the remainder of the season.

Current pricing, steady for a few weeks now, puts 10/20 count averaging in the low to mid $10 per pound range, U12s at $14, and U10s at $15, said Molloy.

These prices were backed by a second source based, like Molloy’s Chesapeake Bay Packing, in Newport News, Virginia. These prices, to the boat, are typically $0.25 lower than those paid in New Bedford, Massachusetts, said this source.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Georges Bank vote sparks more debate between fishermen, environmentalists

June 21, 2015 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The world of Northeast American fisheries may have felt a seismic shift in the wake of the three-day meeting last week of the New England Fisheries Management Council. But it is much too soon for either side in the endless fishery management debate to claim a victory.

Major non-profit environmental organizations are lamenting the decision by the council to recommend reopening 5,000 square miles of Georges Bank, an area known as the Northern Edge, to fishing after a closure of two decades.

Peter Shelley, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation, charged that the council ignored years of scientific data and analysis and “caved to industry pressures” regarding Georges Bank. (The council did approve four other areas of habitat protection.)

“The council hammered the final nail into the coffin of what could have been a landmark victory for ocean habitats protection in New England,” Shelley wrote on his organization’s web site.

Dr. Sarah Smith, a member of the Fisheries Solutions Center at the Environmental Defense Fund, wrote The Standard-Times in an e-mail, “We are disappointed that the council chose short-term economic gains for a few over the long-term health of the fishery, particularly struggling stocks such as Georges Bank cod and yellowtail flounder.

“The Council’s preferred alternative overlooks our best scientific information, and perhaps most troubling, would virtually eliminate protection for sensitive areas that serve as critical habitats for juvenile cod and other groundfish.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

 

Scottish Fishermen’s group claims new seabed controls threaten livelihoods

June 22, 2015 — New limits on trawling and sea-bottom dredging threaten jobs in a £50 million a year rural industry, the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation has warned, as a row between the Scottish Government and a key Scottish exporting sector threatened to escalate.

 The SFF say that restrictions on the £40m west coast langoustine fishery and £8m scallop fishery due to take effect from October, would close 880 square kilometres of inshore waters in the South Arran and Wester Ross Management Protection Areas (MPAs) to scallop dredging and impose economically-damaging restrictions on a further 1500 square kilometres of prime fishing grounds.

The federation claims that draft conservation orders for four west coast MPAs, announced earlier this month, go far beyond what had been agreed during months of talks with civil servants.

The SFF has demanded urgent talks with fisheries minister Richard Lochhead, now expected to take place next week.

SFF president Ross Dougal told the Sunday Herald that, following months of negotiations with the Scottish Government and its environment quango Scottish Natural Heritage, the federation reached what it believed to be an acceptable compromise.

Read the full story at the Herald Scotland