Saving Seafood

Rep. Walter Jones weighs in for North Carolina fishermen

November 2, 2017 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the office of Congressman Walter Jones:

Congressman Walter B. Jones (NC-3) is moving to help Eastern North Carolina fishermen who could be hurt by legislation pending before Congress. The bills threaten America’s domestic shark fisheries, and a significant piece of those fisheries is in Eastern North Carolina. They are sustainably managed and help support the economy in coastal North Carolina and other small fishing communities around the country.

The bills – H.R. 1456 and S. 793 – purport to be an attempt to stop the practice of shark finning (i.e. the process of removing fins at sea and discarding the shark). They seek to do so by banning the sale of fins, even those harvested legally here in the United States. However well-intentioned the bill sponsors may be, the fact is that shark finning has been illegal in the United States for many years. Advocates for the legislation have countered with the false allegation that the practice is still widespread. They publicly claimed that NOAA Fisheries had 500 cases of shark finning over the last several years. That number sounded impossibly high to Congressman Jones, so in August he asked NOAA Fisheries for the real number of federal shark finning violations assessed over the past five years. According to NOAA, the real number is not 500, it is 22. The Associated Press recently ran a story correcting the record on the ‘fake news’ claims distributed by the bill’s supporters. You can find that story HERE.

“If foreign countries are failing to manage their shark populations appropriately, they should change their ways,” said Congressman Jones. “But we should not put U.S. fishermen out of business in the process.”

This week, Congressman Jones urged U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to join him in opposing the legislation. The Commerce Department is home to the regulatory agency – NOAA Fisheries – which manages the domestic shark fisheries. As Congressman Jones pointed out to Secretary Ross in a letter, federal law mandates that the domestic shark fishery be managed sustainably. According to renowned shark scientist, Dr. Robert E. Heuter of Florida’s Mote Marine Lab, America has “one of the best systems in the world for shark fisheries management and conservation.” The proof can be seen in NOAA Fisheries own data. NOAA Fisheries’ 2015 coastal shark survey captured and tagged “more than 2,800 sharks, the most in the survey’s 29-year history.” The leader of the survey stated that NOAA Fisheries has “seen an increase in the number of sharks in every survey since 2001,” and the agency called the survey results “very good news for shark populations.”

“Mr. Secretary, you know how important good jobs are to America’s future,” said Congressman Jones. “The sustainably managed U.S. shark fishery helps many hard working people in Eastern North Carolina and across the country support their families and their communities. For the sake of the American fishermen who make this country great, I respectfully ask you to oppose these bills.”

Congressman Jones has long been a strong supporter and advocate for Eastern North Carolina fishermen.

Additional information on Jones’ backing of North Carolina fishermen can be found here.

 

Agency gave bad data to senator trying to stop shark finning

October 27, 2017 — A federal agency said on Thursday that it made a mistake with a key piece of data it gave to U.S. Sen. Cory Booker as he was building a case to shut down America’s shark fin trade.

Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, has cited more than 500 incidents involving complaints of shark finning in the U.S., dating back to January 2010, as cause to support shutting down the trade. But the number is actually 85.

Booker reached out to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration months ago to find out how often it investigates allegations of shark finning, an illegal practice in which a shark’s fins are removed and the shark is dumped back into the water, sometimes while it’s still alive.

An NOAA worker’s error involving a new case management system caused the mistake in the number of finning incident reports, said Casey Brennan, chief of staff for the NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement. He said the number of reports that led to charges was 26.

Saving Seafood, a fishing industry trade group, asked the NOAA to clarify the figures about shark finning incidents after seeing conflicting data on the agency’s website.

“Shark finning is a reprehensible activity that has been outlawed in the U.S. and is opposed by participants in the sustainable U.S. shark fishery,” said Robert Vanasse, executive director of the group. “Members of our coalition do not believe there is any need for Booker’s bill.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Washington Post

Footnote Error Leads to Dramatically Inflated Claims of Illegal Shark Finning from Sen. Booker, Oceana

October 26, 2017 (Saving Seafood) — The horrific practice of shark finning has been illegal in U.S. waters since 2000, and is vehemently opposed by all U.S. shark fisheries and participants in those fisheries. The Office of Law Enforcement at NOAA Fisheries is enforcing the current finning prohibition; US fishermen are in full compliance with the law.  There are very few incidents of this terrible practice on record in the United States.

On August 1, 2017, U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) chaired a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, & Coast Guard regarding the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA).  During the hearing, Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) asked Chris Oliver, NOAA Assistant Administrator for Fisheries and head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, to keep him informed on NOAA investigations of shark finning allegations. Sen. Booker introduced a bill earlier this year designed to prevent people from possessing or selling shark fins in America.

Leading up to his question, Senator Booker stated the following. “You know that shark finning was first outlawed in U.S. waters in 2000. And a loophole in that original law was closed by the Shark Conservation Act of 2009. I recently asked your office how many shark-finning investigations NOAA has opened since January 1, 2010. I was shocked to find out that since 2010, NOAA has investigated over 500 incidences of alleged shark finning. As of April, there were seven shark finning cases that were open but not yet charged.”

Sen. Booker’s statement, that NOAA advised him of over 500 instances of alleged shark finning immediately sparked incredulity in the commercial fishing industry, because in June 2016, in an article by Ally Rogers, a communications specialist for NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE), entitled OLE Working Hard To Identify, Prevent Incidents of Shark Finning, Illegal Shark Fishing, NOAA stated that during the ten year period from 2006-2016, 40% of the “nearly 80 shark-related incidents” referred to “fins that were not naturally attached to the shark carcasses.”  That works out to fewer than 32 incidents involving shark fins in a decade, or on average no more than 3.16 per year.

Saving Seafood asked NOAA how it could be that the agency told Senator Booker that they had “investigated over 500 incidences of alleged shark finning” in the past 7.5 years.

While the information NOAA provided in response to Senator Booker’s staff was not entirely inaccurate, a footnote was attached to the wrong sentence, making it possible for a reader to misinterpret the over-inclusive information provided.

In the NOAA case management system, there were 526 reports that contained the word “shark” in some form or another.  This could include a number of legal and illegal activities including inspections, boardings, a legal or illegal take of a shark, by-catch, harvesting sharks during a closed season, and unpermitted shark fishing activities, to name a few.  Any report that came into NOAA with the word “shark” in it, would have appeared as an incident in the numbers provided to Senator Booker.

In fact, of those 526 reports, only 85 were incidents that referred to “shark fins” or “shark finning”.  Of those 85 incidents, only 26 resulted in charges that could be a criminal complaint, a summary settlement, a written warning, or a Notice of Violation and Assessment (NOVA).  So, in the past 7.5 years, with an annual average of 2.6 million pounds landed sustainably from Federally managed shark fisheries, there has been on average just 3.5 incidents per year resulting in charges. And that is consistent with the earlier data.

In 2016, just ahead of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week,” Senator Booker, and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-California) joined with actor Morgan Freeman and the environmental group Oceana to introduce the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act (S. 793/H.R. 1456, in the current Congress).  The ban is opposed by leading shark scientists David Shiffman of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Robert Hueter, Director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.  Delegate Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan (I- Northern Mariana Islands), and Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) are also original co-sponsors.

Oceana, the Humane Society International, Wild Aid, and COARE have used the inaccurate information in support of the shark fin ban, erroneously arguing that even “in U.S. waters, our anti-finning law does not effectively stop shark finning.”  In a recent blog post, Lora Snyder, Campaign Director at Oceana, Iris Ho, Wildlife Program Manager at Humane Society International, Peter Knights, Executive Director at WildAid and Christopher Chin, Executive Director at COARE, reference “government records cited during recent Congressional testimony” to make the claim that “more than 500 alleged shark finning incidents… have taken place in U.S. waters since January 2010.”  They go on to extrapolate from that number, stating “That is approximately five cases every month.”

In fact, over the past decade, there have been fewer than four incidents per year.

Oceana hired The McGrath Group, headed by six-term former Congressman and President of the National Republican Club Ray McGrath to lobby for the bills, spending $20,000 with the GOP firm between July 1 and Sept 31 this year.

Fishermen can catch slightly fewer dogfish in 2018

October 19, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — Fishermen will be allowed to catch slightly less of a species of shark that has become a more frequent target of commercial harvesting in recent years.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has approved a quota of about 38.2 million pounds of spiny dogfish for the 2018 fishing year, which starts May 1. That is about 900,000 pounds less than the quota for the current year.

It’s also more than dogfish harvesters usually catch, though they’ve been catching more recently.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Virginian-Pilot

Commercial Fisherman Reviews Shark Fishing Research

October 12, 2017 — Meet Mark Twinam of St. Petersburg, Florida, who fishes from Madeira Beach for large coastal sharks such as hammerhead, lemon and bull sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s part of a group of fishermen who help NOAA research sharks in exchange for landing and selling a small quota of sandbar sharks. Twinam fishes from his 40-foot single-engine boat, the Captain Tate, named for his son, who he proudly says is getting a doctorate in economics although he fished with Twinam as a boy. “I pretty much cured him of fishing. He decided schoolwork wasn’t so bad.”

How did you get into shark fishing?

I started fishing after high school, went grouper fishing, then fished with longlines for tuna and swordfish. There was a bycatch (unintentional catch) of sharks, and we thought we’d like to sell them. We caught some sharks off Tampa Bay in the 1980s and that was around the time the government was encouraging fishermen to go shark fishing. I’ve been doing it off and on ever since.

How is the shark fishing business these days?

Practically nonexistent. The fishing effort today is not even five percent of what it was in the 1980s. The quotas are strict, not many people participate although we’re filling the quota. Then there’s the research fishery. These are the only fishermen allowed to land sandbar sharks. I’m involved with the research. We take an observer on our boat; they count sharks, measure them, and collect other biological information. We get paid by selling the sharks we catch.

What are the major challenges in the shark fishing business?

The biggest challenge is the propaganda from environmentalists who say that everyone in the world is cutting the fins off and throwing the sharks back alive. This is not what we’re doing in the U.S. We follow the law, land sharks with fins attached, and sell both meat and fins. This year, we’ve had a tremendous challenge because environmentalists persuaded the California Legislature to ban the buying, selling and trading of shark fins. California was our biggest market for fins and a connection to the Hong Kong market. Now the price, if you can sell them, has dropped from $32 per pound to $14.

Read the full interview at the Fishing Wire

Copepods: Cows of the Sea

October 6, 2017 — If you look very closely at a glassful of water from a bay or the ocean, you would probably be surprised by the life inside. You might see miniature crustaceans the size of the period at the end of this sentence or baby crabs and fish that spend only a short span of their lives this small. These creatures are zooplankton, aquatic animals that drift with the currents.

It’s the Little Things 

These tiny animals form the basis of the food web of estuaries, coastal waters, and oceans. Zooplankton feed on microscopic plant-like organisms called phytoplankton, which get their energy from the sun. Tiny crustacean zooplankton called “copepods” are like cows of the sea, eating the phytoplankton and converting the sun’s energy into food for higher trophic levels in the food web. Copepods are some of the most abundant animals on the planet.

Fish such as anchovies cruise through the water with their mouths wide open, filtering copepods and other zooplankton from the water. Anchovies and other planktivores (plankton-eaters) are prey for bigger animals, like tuna, sharks, marine mammals, and seabirds.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries GARFO

Thousands of Sharks, Other Sea Life Mysteriously Die in San Francisco Bay

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife isn’t dedicating any funding toward determining the cause, says resources are needed elsewhere

October 5, 2017 — As many as 2,000 leopard sharks have mysteriously died in the San Francisco Bay over the past few months. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife says determining the cause is not a priority for the state since the sharks are not threatened or endangered, however, scientists say additional research and resources are crucial since the threat is now believed to be preying on other marine life.

“This year is unusual in that there has been a large number of other species that have also been dying,” said Dr. Mark Okihiro, a research scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “This pathogen can tackle a variety of different species … we’ve had a much more diverse group of fish that have been found dead in the San Francisco Bay.”

At least 500 bat rays, hundreds of striped bass, 50 smooth-hound sharks and about 100 halibut died in the bay between February and July, according to Okihiro’s estimates.

Tiny Organism Blamed for Massive Shark Die-Off

Similar shark deaths in the area date back 50 years and have gone unexplained. Okihiro, however, now believes a parasite may be behind the mysterious die-off that has plagued the Bay Area.

“We’re pretty confident at this point,” Okihiro said. “It’s called Miamiensis avidus … it’s a small single celled organism. It’s very similar to the common amoeba.”

Okihiro regularly performs necropsies on stranded sharks found along the bay and says researchers at UC San Francisco helped him identify parasite DNA in a large number of those shark samples.

Read the full story at NBC Bay Area

Could a Shark Fin Ban Actually Be Bad for Sharks?

Two scientists have argued that the United States’ proposed shark fin ban may not have the intended benefits.

September 26, 2017 — At first blush, a proposed national ban on shark fins in the United States would seem like a good thing for sharks. Shark fishing has been blamed for the decline in a number of shark species, and specifically fins, which typically find their way into shark fin soup, create their own problems. Since the fin is the most valuable part of a shark, some fisherman use a practice called “finning”—already banned in the U.S.—where the fins are removed from the shark (sometimes while still alive) and then the rest of the animal is disposed of. Banning the fins all together sounds like a simple way to end all these issues once and for all. However, in a paper published this month in the journal Marine Policy, marine scientists David Shiffman and Robert Hueter present a different argument: such a ban actually “would undermine sustainable shark fisheries.”

According to the office of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, over 100 scientists have come out in support of the bill he introduced this past March seeking to ban shark fins. But of course, there are two sides to every story, and according to the Associated Press, Shiffman and Hueter essentially state that when it comes to shark fishing, America is one of the few places that actually practices sustainability, so why mess it?

“Removing that from the marketplace removes a template of a well-managed fishery,” Shiffman told the AP. “It’s much easier for us to say, here’s a way you can do this.” His paper also suggests that since the U.S. is such a small part of the worldwide shark fin trade, a ban in the U.S. would simply be made up for by more fishing elsewhere.

Read the full story at Food & Wine

Shark fin bans might not help sharks, scientists say

September 25, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — As lawmakers propose banning the sale of shark fins in the U.S., a pair of scientists is pushing back, saying the effort might actually harm attempts to conserve the marine predators.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced a bill this year designed to prevent people from possessing or selling shark fins in America, much to the delight of conservation groups such as Oceana. But marine scientists David Shiffman and Robert Hueter said this approach could be wrongheaded.

Shiffman and Hueter authored a study that appears in the November issue of the journal Marine Policy, saying the U.S. has long been a leader in shark fisheries management and that shutting down the U.S. fin trade entirely would remove a model for sustainability for the rest of the world.

The U.S. also is a minor contributor to the worldwide shark fin trade, and countries with less regulated fisheries would likely step in to fill the void if America left the business altogether, Shiffman said.

“Removing that from the marketplace removes a template of a well-managed fishery,” Shiffman, a shark researcher with Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said. “It’s much easier for us to say, here’s a way you can do this.”

Shark fins are most often used in a soup considered a delicacy in Asia. Shark fins that American fishermen harvest are often shipped to Asia for processing.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Bangor Daily News

A US ban on shark fins is a bad idea, say researchers

September 22, 2017 — Earlier this year, United States senators put forth S.793, a bill they’ve named the “Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act”. With the noble goal of protecting shark populations, which are in decline all over the globe, the document proposes a total ban on the buying or selling of shark fins in the US. Sounds like an unambiguously good thing, right? Well, the straightforward answer to a problem is not always the best one – and some shark researchers worry that this approach could do more harm than good.

In a recently published paper, shark researchers David Shiffman and Robert Hueter argue that banning trade in fins would not prevent many shark deaths at all – but it might hinder successful conservation practices, and sow confusion by misrepresenting the true threats to these animals. What they recommend instead is prioritising the continued sustainable management of shark fishing.

The finning issue

Let’s start with the broad problem: sharks are in trouble. And losing them is a threat not only for the ecosystems in which they serve important roles, but also for economies all over the globe that rely on them for food, including the United States. Worldwide, many populations are dwindling, their decline driven largely by overfishing, including hunting for meat, bycatch, as well as the lucrative fin trade, which supplies demand in some countries for a delicacy known as shark-fin soup.

This fin trade has led to a phenomenon called shark finning. As the bill describes, “Shark finning is the cruel practice in which the fins of a shark are cut off on board a fishing vessel at sea. The remainder of the animal is then thrown back into the water to drown, starve, or die a slow death.” This practice is not only cruel, but also wasteful – in contrast with conservative shark-fishing practices that make use of meat and parts from the entire body.

Shark finning has actually been banned in the US since the 1990s, but as long as the animal’s body is not discarded at sea, fishers are generally free to do what they will with the fins; indeed, these are typically harvested along with the meat. The new bill, however, presented by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, proposes a total ban on possessing, transporting, selling or purchasing shark fins, under threat of a fine of up to $100,000 or more.

Read the full story at Earth Touch News