Saving Seafood

Researchers aim to turn seafood byproducts into source of nutrition

November 30, 2021 –A research project led by Oregon State University has the potential to reduce food waste by utilizing seafood byproducts as a cheap, high-quality source of protein.

Oregon State has received a $333,777 grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research to study whether protein from byproducts such as fish heads, bones and skin left over after processing can be recovered and used as an ingredient in food or dietary supplements.

The seafood industry uses just 30% to 40% of what it harvests for human consumption, while the rest is either made into fishmeal or discarded in landfills.

“This research exemplifies a ‘no stone unturned’ approach to increasing global food and nutritional security through limiting food waste,” said Lucyna Kurtyka, the senior scientific program director with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research.

Read the full story at the Daily Astorian

 

Higher seafood prices could impact Thanksgiving spending

November 23, 2021 — A new survey shows that inflation that is sending seafood prices higher may discourage Americans from indulging during the Thanksgiving holiday.

The price of meats, poultry, fish, and eggs increased 11.9 percent in October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. As a result, 78 percent of consumers say rising prices will impact their Thanksgiving grocery shopping, and 37 percent expect higher costs to have a significant impact on their food spending, according to new survey data from Numerator. Fourteen percent of shoppers said they will not purchase turkey for Thanksgiving this year, while 16 percent said they will omit meat and seafood. And 21 percent said they will reduce the size of their Thanksgiving gathering this year due to rising prices.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Shrimp, finfish aquaculture recovering from COVID-19 impacts

November 23, 2021 — Both shrimp and finfish aquaculture continued to grow globally in 2021, but might experience flattening or slower growth in 2022, according to production surveys conducted by the Global Seafood Alliance.

In a presentation at the final day of the organization’s Global Outlook for Aquaculture Leadership (GOAL) conference on 17 November, Rabobank Senior Analyst Gorjan Nikolik said globally, the aquaculture sector’s production is slowly normalizing after disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Researchers look at direct seafood sales

November 15, 2021 — A team of researchers is looking to learn about the direct seafood market across the country in order to strengthen local food systems and coastal communities.

“Currently, there is a gap in national-level data on the domestic seafood system,” said Joshua Stoll, a marine policy professor at the University of Maine and one of the lead investigators for the project.

The collaboration between the school, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will help better understand how fishermen in the U.S. market their catch.

The agriculture sector has collected this kind of data for decades but the scale of the direct market, where fish is sold from fishermen directly to customers, isn’t clear.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Governor Mills announces $10M Maine Jobs & Recovery Initiative to support and strengthen Maine’s seafood industry

November 11, 2021 — Governor Janet Mills today announced that her Administration is investing $10 million in federal funds through her Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan to allow Maine seafood dealers and processors to upgrade their infrastructure.

The new Seafood Infrastructure Investment Program will launch early next year and will be administered through the Maine Department of Marine Resources. It will provide grants to Maine seafood dealers and processors to upgrade buildings, equipment, and utilities. These grants will help seafood dealers and processors increase the supply of Maine-harvested seafood; strengthen their ability to deliver to markets in Maine, across the United States, and around the world; and create and sustain jobs throughout Maine’s iconic seafood industry.

“Maine’s seafood industry – from our fishermen and lobstermen to our processors and our dealers – is a cornerstone of our economy, employing thousands of people up and down the coast and generating about two billion dollars every year,” said Governor Mills. “They work hard every day, and they have adapted with characteristic Maine grit and ingenuity to meet the challenges of the pandemic, but it hasn’t been easy by any means. Helping our dealers and processors upgrade their infrastructure will ensure the strength and vitality of this industry for years to come, will keep Maine people working in our waters and waterfronts, and will keep delivering Maine’s world-class seafood across the globe.”

Read the full story at the Boothbay Register

Report finds China becoming more secretive about its fishing subsidies

October 29, 2021 — A new study prepared for campaign group Oceana suggests 85 percent of China’s subsidies to its fleet are harming the sustainability of fish stocks.

The report, “China’s Fisheries Subsidies Propel Distant-Water Fleet,” found that while China has reduced its fuel subsidies to the distant-water fleet, it is becoming more secretive about releasing data on direct and indirect subsidies to fishing firms.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Study affirms bright future for blue economy

October 25, 2021 — Contrary to popular belief, the fishing industry is not dead.

And UMass Amherst’s Gloucester Marine Station has the numbers to prove it.

According to a study conducted by the marine station and presented at the Cape Ann Museum to city and state leaders on Friday, blue economy jobs grew faster than the regional economy as a whole from 2004 to 2020 as the number of people working the blue economy grew by 19.5% on the North Shore.

Over this period, all industries in the region had a growth of 12.2%.

“The strength of our North Shore Blue Economy is a combination of mature and emerging specialized industry clusters and opportunities in both traditional maritime industries and technology-based industries not always perceived as being connected to the ocean,” Katie Kahl, an assistant professor of sustainable fisheries and coastal resilience at UMass Amherst, wrote in the executive summary of the study.

The blue economy, as The World Bank defines it, is the “sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs and ocean ecosystem health.”

This includes coastal tourism and recreation, living resources, marine transportation, marine construction, ship and boat building and repair, and offshore minerals.

The focus area of the study included Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester, Essex, Beverly, Ipswich, Salem, Marblehead, Swampscott, Nahant, Lynn, Peabody, Danvers, Wenham, Hamilton, Rowley, Newbury, West Newbury, Newburyport, Salisbury and Amesbury.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Holiday outlook strong for US retail and foodservice, but economic headwinds pose challenge

October 25, 2021 — The outlook for both retail and foodservice spending is strong for this holiday season and into 2022, but grocery stores are likely to see a bigger boost than restaurants, according to research firm NPD.

Nearly a third (29 percent) of Americans plan to spend more on holiday-related shopping than they did last year, according to new NPD research. Total holiday spending will rise 3 percent during the traditional November and December holiday shopping season, and 5 percent when the season is expanded to include October and early January, NPD found.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

A test to diagnose psychopaths can help identify fish behaviours that could benefit aquaculture

October 19, 2021 — Personality profiling is not unique to criminology. The method is used to identify health risks, aid personnel recruitment, develop education programs and build dating apps. Despite this wide range of applications, there is one thing all these approaches have in common: they are almost exclusively used on humans.

Biologists recognize that animals have personality traits that are consistent across time. However, animal behaviour is often studied in large groups of animals so that data can be collected to investigate wide-scale trends. This means the need to build detailed personality profiles on an individual scale is uncommon.

Unless, as demonstrated by the case of Jack the Ripper, there are unknown individuals within a population that exhibit a rare behaviour and are avoiding detection.

Cleaner fish remove and eat parasites from the skin of other fishes. Some species of cleaner fish are used in salmon aquaculture to help control parasitic sea lice. Lumpfish are a commonly used cleaner fish, and millions of juveniles are released into salmon farms each year. However, only a minority of lumpfish (around 20 per cent) actually clean salmon of sea lice, while the rest either ignore salmon or compete for pellet food.

It is unclear why only certain lumpfish clean salmon and observing this behaviour is exceedingly rare. As part of a research team at the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research at Swansea University, my colleagues and I tried to solve this mystery by following the same logic as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.

We designed a series of behavioural tests to build detailed personality profiles of lumpfish, in hope of identifying the individuals that showed cleaning behaviour. This involved testing for variation in activity, aggression, anxiety, boldness and sociality of individual lumpfish over repeated sessions, and then recording how these individuals interacted with salmon.

Read the full story at The Conversation

 

Sustainable Fisheries Partnership makes its seafood metrics system free to use

October 13, 2021 — Sustainable Fisheries Partnership’s Seafood Metrics system is now available as an open-access subscription service to retailers, foodservice operators, and supply-chain companies. The system was previously only available to SFP partners.

SFP’s Seafood Metrics is a global system that tracks and monitors seafood sourcing and evaluates a company’s sourcing performance. The expansion of the program is a response to an increased interest across the supply chain in better tracking and management of key data elements (KDEs) that increases the transparency of their seafood sourcing.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource