Shellfish Archives - Page 15 of 21

The Texas Oyster Industry Is Now a Shell of Itself

April 27, 2018 — It’s the first day of Texas oyster season, and Galveston Bay is packed with so many boats that 33-year-old Captain Joaquin Padilla decides to post a video of them on Facebook, adding a side-eye emoji as comment. Padilla has been on the water with his little crew since sunup, steering his boat, the Miss Kosovare, in languid circles, dragging his dredge—a chain and metal basket about the size of a basking shark’s mouth—over the oyster reefs below. His is one of about 150 trawlers out this November day, harvesting bivalves from the limited wild reefs on the bottom of Galveston Bay, right in Houston’s backyard.

Out on the water, Padilla sticks with a smaller group of about ten boats that all belong to his buddies and family—his father, uncle, brother-in-law, and cousins all make a living oystering, too. Two of his friends, a pair of brothers—one in rubber overalls, the other in jeans—are working as his deckhands, pulling in the dredge and culling through hundreds of oysters as they crash onto the stainless-steel table before them.

Hammers in hand, the brothers clean and sort oysters more quickly than a droid could, loading their haul into giant pails on one end of the table, while pushing the undersized and dead ones back out into the water off the other. It’s arduous work—muddy, sweaty, and noisy from the diesel engine and the dredge’s clinking chain.

By 9 a.m. the Miss Kosovare has bagged the state-mandated 30-sack catch limit. Almost everybody on the water has. It’s easy enough work, not even late enough for the wind to come up and churn the bay to chocolate milk. Tejano music blasts from the deck on the ride back in to Prestige Oysters, where Padilla works. But there’s talk back on the docks. The fishermen are worried about the future. They know they have a rough season ahead.

They know the state, charged with protecting the threatened, finite resource that is our public reefs, has opened only 14 of the 34 shellfish classification areas along the Texas coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which has reduced the oyster population significantly. East Galveston Bay, a huge area where 150 boats typically could work for six months easy, has lost practically every single oyster.

This morning they’ve been fishing what the state calls TX 7, a portion of Galveston Bay that is, for the moment, full of market-sized oysters. But 150 boats on a two-by-two-mile stretch of water, not all of which is covered in oyster reef, is a lot of boats. How long the open sections will be able to provide three-inch oysters—the legal size for harvestable specimens in public waters during public season, which runs from November 1 to April 30—is anybody’s guess.

Read the full story at Houstonia

Maine: In new cautionary approach, Maine shellfish areas will be closed at first sign of toxins

April 11, 2018 — BOOTHBAY, Maine — Public health officials say they will use extreme caution to manage toxic algae blooms this year to prevent another expensive and potentially dangerous shellfish recall.

In the last two years, sudden toxic algae blooms of a previously unrecorded type of phytoplankton forced the Maine Department of Marine Resources to close huge sections of the Down East coast to shellfish harvesting and to issue rare recalls of tons of clams and mussels from as far away as Utah.

Recalls are bad for public health, business and Maine’s seafood brand, said Kohl Kanwit, head of the department’s public health division, during a workshop Tuesday for harvesters, seafood dealers, regulators and researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay.

“The risk is high; you never get 100 percent back” from a recall, Kanwit said. “It is really costly for the industry and bad all around.”

This year, the department isn’t taking any chances as it monitors for pseudo-nitzschia, a single-cell organism that can bloom unexpectedly and make domoic acid, a dangerous biotoxin that may cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, or ASP, in humans and animals. In serious cases, ASP can lead to memory loss, brain damage or even death. The first recorded ASP event, on Prince Edward Island in 1987, killed three people and made at least 100 sick.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Ocean Acidification Could be a Net Positive for Some Fish

March 30, 2018 — One of the consequences of pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is the changing chemistry of the world’s oceans. Until now, the ocean has acted as a big sponge, soaking up about one-third of the CO₂ released by human activities.

But now, scientists are watching a vast experiment unfold. All that carbon dioxide is triggering chemical reactions that is turning the oceans more acidic, which in turn is making life tough for lots of marine organisms. Oysters and other shellfish have been hit by die-offs in the Pacific Northwest and Gulf of Maine, while tropical reefs are dissolving faster than they can rebuild, according to a recent study in the journal Science.

Some researchers are seriously considering geoengineering to reverse the slow acidification of the ocean. Dissolving minerals like olivine or limestone into seawater would increase its alkalinity. (Remember the pH strip in your 10 gallon fish tank? Blue=alkaline, red=acidic.) Not only would that make it easier on marine life, but it would also allow the ocean-sponge to soak up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Two British scientists proposed this idea last year in a paper in the journal Reviews of Geophysics, predicting that with a bit more research (and money) it may be possible to capture hundreds of billions to trillions of tons of carbon without messing up the marine ecosystem.

But this kind of massive planetary experiment needs lots of small-scale work in the laboratory before it’s ready. So in the meantime, marine scientists are trying to find which species will come out on top in a more acidic ocean.

In Sweden, a group of researchers tested survival in an artificially acidic ocean. In a fjord, they built an enclosed, floating test tube they called a “mesocosm” and filled it with phytotoplankton, zooplankton, and tiny herring larvae. Then they turned up the dissolved carbon dioxide, tracking herring survival over time as the acidity increased.

A similar lab experiment with codfish, another important Northern European food fish, killed off the fish. “Our surprise is that we didn’t find that,” said Catriona Clemmesen-Bockelmen, a marine ecologist from the GEOMAR Helmoltz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, and a co-author on the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution. “Instead, we had a higher survival rate.” The herring, it seemed, liked the extra acidity.

Read the full story at Wired

Ocean Acidification Threatens Our Shellfish

February 2, 2018 — The Massachusetts legislature is current considering a number of bills regarding ocean acidification. If passed into law, the bills will establish a special commission or task force to study the effects of coastal and ocean acidification on coastal communities, fishing and aquaculture industries, and local commercially-harvested species. These bills come at a very critical time when what we do or don’t do next to address the effects of ocean acidification could very well alter the Commonwealth’s culture and economy.

What is ocean acidification?

Excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is driving climate change and along for the ride is increased global temperatures, rising sea levels, and increased storm intensity. We hear about it almost daily. But on a planet that’s 70 percent ocean, what’s happening below the waves? They call it global warming’s evil twin: ocean acidification.

Much like the atmosphere, the ocean is absorbing more and more carbon dioxide. As a result, ocean temperatures are not only rising, but the actual chemistry of the ocean is changing. Research estimates that the ocean has become 30 percent more acidic since the Industrial Revolution. In particular, the Gulf of Maine is especially vulnerable because its colder waters can absorb more carbon dioxide than other ocean areas. Massachusetts’ bays and sounds are among those waters impacted by ocean acidification.

Why do we need to act?

Ocean acidification should be very alarming to Massachusetts and its legislators because it poses a grave threat to the Commonwealth’s shellfish fisheries – the most valuable in the Commonwealth. Increased ocean acidity interferes with the ability of shell-forming organisms such as clams, mussels, and oysters to build and maintain their calcium carbonate shells. The planktonic larval stages of many species are also vulnerable, a concern for hatcheries and wild populations of shellfish.

Read the full story at TalkingFish

RHODE ISLAND: Sewer Line Break Forces Suspension of Shellfish Harvesting

Mount Hope Bay and a river flowing into the bay are closed to shellfish harvesting because of a sewer line break and overflow.

January 31, 2018 — PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Mount Hope Bay and a river flowing into the bay are closed to shellfish harvesting because of a sewer line break and overflow.

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management said Tuesday that Mount Hope Bay and the Kickemuit River will reopen Feb. 15, pending the outcome of tests for fecal coliform bacteria. The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries closed Mount Hope Bay in Massachusetts.

The Bristol County Water Authority made emergency repairs to a water main near a sewer line on Jan. 5.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News and World Report

Maine plans swifter protocols for shellfish monitoring

November 13, 2017 — No one knows the origin of an algae bloom that closed hundreds of miles of Maine coastline to shellfish harvesting this fall. Or why the microscopic phytoplankton responsible for it suddenly became so bountiful in the Gulf of Maine. Or even why it produces toxins in the first place.

What is known is that a toxic bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia, a common phytoplankton, caused a recall of 58,500 pounds of blue mussels in September – only the second shellfish recall in Maine’s modern history. To prevent another recall, the state is drastically reassessing its shellfish monitoring practices.

“I was confident we were going to be ahead of it. We knew a lot more, we were quicker to react to it, but we weren’t accounting for the fact that in less than a week toxins could go from barely detectable to over the (safety) limit.”

Next year, even a hint of toxic Pseudo-nitzschia in the water will trigger broad precautionary closures until the department knows shellfish are safe, an entirely new approach to biotoxin management, Kanwit said.

Read the full story at Central Maine

Aquatic limbo

November 5, 2017 — Fourteen years is a long time.

Consider, in 14 years children go from being unable to do much more than eat, sleep and relieve themselves to walking, talking, and giving serious consideration to driving a car.

Fourteen years is also the length of time of three-and-a-half presidential terms; more than long enough to change the direction of an entire country and the fates of hundreds of millions of people.

Fourteen years is also an interminably long time to wait if your livelihood is at stake. And yet, it took the New England Fisheries Management Council 14 years to develop regulations regarding the protection of fishing habitats. That, in and of itself, would not be so bad; after all, one would hope that those involved would take the time necessary to get the science right on an issue where so much is at stake.

But it has now been two years since those regulations were passed, and there is little indication that they are any closer to being implemented.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

NOAA Awards $1.7M For Harmful Algal Bloom Research To Protect Public Health From Toxins In Shellfish

Multi-year awards to focus on bloom prevention in seven states

September 20, 2017 — NOAA has announced nine research grants will go to organizations around the country seeking to better understand and measure the toxicity of harmful algal blooms, known as HABs.

In the first year, $1.68M will fund research for projects in Alaska, California, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Ohio and Virginia. The grants are administered by NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

NOAA funding enhances state and regional monitoring with advanced harmful algae detection capabilities, including shellfish toxin tests. (Credit: Washington State Department of Ecology Marine Monitoring Unit)

Grant recipients will conduct research to identify conditions that increase a bloom’s toxicity; model toxin movement from the water into shellfish, fish and marine mammals; and improve toxin monitoring and forecasts. The dense scum, strong odors and toxins produced by HABs can contaminate drinking water, trigger fisheries closures and disrupt tourism.

Read the full story at Water Online

Algae bloom forces suspension of shellfishing in parts of Down East Maine

It’s the second straight year that a bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia, a phytoplankton that can carry toxic domoic acid, has forced a closure along large parts of the coast.

September 15, 2017 — A marine algae bloom that can carry a potentially deadly neurotoxin has forced the suspension of shellfish harvesting in parts of Down East Maine.

The state Department of Marine Resources reported Thursday that it was monitoring an active bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia, an ocean phytoplankton that carries domoic acid, a toxin that can cause sickness, memory loss and brain damage in humans. It’s the second year in a row that a toxic Pseudo-nitzschia bloom has halted harvesting of mussels, clams and oysters along large parts of the coast.

Before 2016, there was no record of a toxic bloom of this type in the Gulf of Maine.

The department’s public health section found levels of domoic acid that exceeded health standards in shellfish tested between Mount Desert Island and Gouldsboro. That area has been closed to harvesting and the department enacted a precautionary closure from Deer Isle to Machiasport, almost a third of Maine’s coastline.

Department spokesman Jeff Nichols said officials were monitoring the situation closely. There is no indication that contaminated shellfish have made their way to consumers, he said.

“It is impossible to determine at this point if the concentrations of domoic acid will increase in other areas,” Nichols said. “But we know that the phytoplankton that produces it grows rapidly, so we are carefully monitoring the entire coast and will be able to rapidly detect harmful levels of domoic acid and take action to protect the health of Maine’s shellfish consumers.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

A Bacteria That Thrives In Warmer Waters Keeps Mass. Oyster Fisheries On High Alert

August 31, 2017 — Massachusetts loves its local oysters from places like Wellfleet and Duxbury. The state’s bivalve business is booming along with increased consumer demand. These days there’s no shortage of $1 oyster specials and oyster-centric restaurants around here.

But the ways oysters are harvested and handled have become more involved and challenging since 2013. That’s when bacteria linked to warming waters appeared in our marshes for the first time.

The result was an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness caused by Vibrio Parahaemolyticus — Vp or Vibrio for short. (To be clear, this is different from norovirus, which led to a closure of shellfish beds in Wellfleet last year.)

In response to the Vp bacteria’s emergence in New England, the state implemented a Vibrio Control Plan. Here’s how those state efforts to control bacterial infection have been affecting people in the oyster industry.

‘The Waters Are Warmer Than They Used To Be’

At Select Oyster Bar in Boston, you can find a rotating selection of Massachusetts oysters on-the-half-shell — Moon Shoal petites from Kingston, Ichabods from Plymouth and Wellfleet Puffers.

For about a dozen years Select’s chef-owner Michael Serpa has been serving mollusks in Boston establishments, including the cult-favorite Neptune Oysters in the North End. “I’ve seen a lot of oysters,” he told me, smiling.

Read and listen to the full story at WBUR