Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford dock collapses on waterfront, the third failure in two years

April 25, 2025 — For the third time in less than two years, a hunk of dock fell into New Bedford Harbor on Wednesday afternoon, again raising red flags about neglected port maintenance. The collapse injured no one but dropped a metal shed into the water.

The asphalt-surface dock and the shed dropped into about 20 feet of water late Wednesday afternoon outside the Sea Watch International processing plant along Antonio Costa Avenue, said Gordon Carr, executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority.

He said it happened when no one was around, at about 3:30 p.m. The sunken storage shed had stood in an area that had been blocked by Jersey barriers since a neighboring section of the dock collapsed a year ago.

Carr said there was a “small sheen” on the water Wednesday, but it was not clear what, if anything, was in the shed and if anything spilled into the water.

“There’s a boom out there now to contain” any possible contamination, he said, referring to a long, floating tube used to corral spills of oil and other substances on the water. He said representatives of Sea Watch, a clam and quahog operation that uses that pier to unload catch, were trying to figure out what was in the shed.

Read the full story at The New Bedford Light

Sea Watch founder Barney Truex passes at age 70

August 23, 2022 — Leroy “Barney” Truex, a New Jersey surf clam fisherman who built Sea Watch International into the fishery’s biggest integrated harvesting and processing business, died Aug. 11 at age 70.

A lifelong resident of Mayetta, New Jersey, Truex grew up on the shore of Barnegat Bay with its traditional small-boat bay clamming fishery. In the mid-20th century entrepreneurial fishermen were building an offshore surf clam and ocean quahog industry. Truex went to work with his father Leroy Truex as a deck mate on surf clam vessels at age 16.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

New Study Develops Method to Age Ocean Quahog, Longest-Lived Species in the Ocean

April 21, 2022 — The following was released by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries:

Ocean quahogs are some of the longest-lived animals in the world, with the oldest specimens in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic regularly recorded at over 200 years old. But even though they are famous for their longevity, many details about the age structure of ocean quahogs—such as how it affects estimates of recruitment, biomass, and growth—are still not well understood. A newly published study finds that ocean quahogs have recruited continuously for over 200 years on Georges Bank, off the East Coast of the U.S., while also providing new tools to researchers and fisheries managers to better understand the species.

Funded by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS), the study collected a large sample of ocean quahogs—gathering over 600 specimens—and recorded relevant information on them, including age, length, and sex. Researchers then took that information to develop what’s known as an “age-length key,” which charts the probability of an animal of a given age being a specific length.  The key can be used to determine the distribution of ages in a population based on the simple determination of the distribution of lengths.

Currently, ocean quahog models used for management are based on the length of the ocean quahog, rather than its age. Like trees, ocean quahogs can be aged by counting the growth rings that form over time, in this case on its outer shell. But because the process of directly determining an individual ocean quahog’s age is time-consuming and impractical for most larger surveys, length has been used instead as a proxy for age.

The age-length key resulting from this study, given the size of the sample of ocean quahogs collected, is a robust data set that can be consulted to quickly estimate ages of thousands of quahogs using only animal lengths. A reliable age-length key improves the potential to introduce more age-based data into ocean quahog management, making it more consistent with how other species are managed.

“Because ocean quahogs are so long-lived, getting a method to quickly and accurately estimate their age is critically important,” said Kathleen Hemeon, of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. “Having this kind of age and length data available can help change the way we manage the species.”

In addition to developing a more comprehensive age-length key, the study had other notable findings that are important in furthering our understanding of ocean quahogs. In the ocean quahogs sampled, the study confirmed that ocean quahogs are a sexually dimorphic species, with female ocean quahogs generally larger than males. It also found that recruitment, or the number of new ocean quahogs that are successfully born into the population every year, has been an annual occurrence since the late 1800s, which is notable given their long lifespans and suspected delayed maturity. In its sampling, the study collected the oldest ocean quahog on record in Massachusetts, at 261 years old.

“This study addresses a conundrum that has bedeviled quahog fishery managers for many years – namely, whether recruitment occurs consistently, or only sporadically in cycles some thirty years apart,” said Tom Alspach, of Sea Watch International, a seafood company based in Maryland. “This evidence of consistent annual recruitment can remove a level of uncertainty from management decision-making, leading to greater confidence in more generous quota setting, with a direct positive impact on industry.”

About SCEMFIS

SCEMFIS utilizes academic and fisheries resources to address urgent scientific problems limiting sustainable fisheries. SCEMFIS develops methods, analytical and survey tools, datasets, and analytical approaches to improve sustainability of fisheries and reduce uncertainty in biomass estimates. SCEMFIS university partners, University of Southern Mississippi (lead institution), and Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, are the academic sites. Collaborating scientists who provide specific expertise in finfish, shellfish, and marine mammal research, come from a wide range of academic institutions including Old Dominion University, Rutgers University, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, University of Maryland, and University of Rhode Island.

The need for the diverse services that SCEMFIS can provide to industry continues to grow, which has prompted a steady increase in the number of fishing industry partners. These services include immediate access to science expertise for stock assessment issues, rapid response to research priorities, and representation on stock assessment working groups. Targeted research leads to improvements in data collection, survey design, analytical tools, assessment models, and other needs to reduce uncertainty in stock status and improve reference point goals.

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