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
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
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
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
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
October 12, 2021 — Frozen and fresh seafood sales reached nearly USD 5.5 billion (EUR 4.8 billion) in sales for the first nine months of 2021, with fresh sales leading the way in dollar and volume growth, according to new data.
Fresh seafood sales spiked 3.9 percent by value and 2.9 percent by volume and frozen seafood sales grew 2 percent by value, but shrunk 2.4 percent by volume through the first three quarters of 2021, according to research firms IRI and 210 Analytics.
October 5, 2021 — Major U.S. hospitality supplier Aramark is committing to increase local seafood sourcing in New England via a partnership with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI).
Coinciding with the start of National Seafood Month, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.-based Aramark said in a press release that all of its higher education, healthcare, and business dining accounts in New England will pursue several local sustainable sourcing goals over the next three years.
September 24, 2021 — The latest in a long line of transportation snags affecting the seafood industry is gridlock at ports in the U.S. state of California, which has created supply chain woes for importers of products from China and other major seafood-supplying nations.
A record-breaking 73 ships were waiting at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on 20 September, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, per The Wall Street Journal, with the average wait time for ships to get into Los Angeles extending out to 8.5 days, also a record.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
September 22, 2021 — A new timetable for introducing full import controls for animal-based goods, including seafood products, being imported from the European Union to the United Kingdom has been laid out by the U.K. government.
The revised timings will give businesses more time to adjust to new border control processes, the U.K. government said in a press release. The “pragmatic new timetable” will see full customs declarations and controls introduced on 1 January, 2022, as previously announced, although safety and security declarations will now not be required until 1 July, 2022.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
September 17, 2021 — The following was released by the Marine Stewardship Council:
Now in its third year, the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) Ocean Stewardship Fund is open to applications for 2022, offering over £1 million in grants dedicated to support sustainable fishing worldwide. The MSC invites fisheries, scientists, NGOs, and postgraduate students to apply for grants of up to £50,000 each, available across four different strands of funding.