Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Woman Among the Baymen

October 23, 2015 — “Clam Power” read the T-shirt on the sturdy woman carrying gear from her pickup to her no-frills work boat tied to a ramshackle dock in Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island.

The woman, Flo Sharkey, 72, works full time on the bay, and on Wednesday morning, she and her son, Paul Sharkey, 36, a bayman himself, loaded rakes, hip waders and bushel baskets into the boat and headed out through Swan Creek into the open bay.

People who make their living on these waters are known as baymen, and it’s a dwindling profession. A woman doing it for a living is nearly unheard-of.

Ms. Sharkey said she knew of no other baywomen. Her sister and mother could hold their own on the water but elected not to make it their life’s work.

Ms. Sharkey has often kept side jobs — these days, she moonlights as a school custodian — but clamming has been her mainstay on the Great South Bay, just off Fire Island.

“Years ago, this was the most productive bay in the country, except for the Chesapeake, for crabs, clams and fish,” Ms. Sharkey said as the boat bounded across the shimmering flat water toward a shallow spot. “But then came the brown tide, the road runoff and fertilizer off people’s lawns.”

With those factors affecting the abundance and health of the clams, much of the bay is now off limits for shellfishing. Weaker market prices and the ever-rising cost of living are other reasons that there were a mere two other clam boats off in the distance, compared with the hundreds that would have been seen years back.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Snapper bill could kill fishing jobs

October 23, 2015 — The following opinion piece appeared on The Hill and was written by Shane Cantrell, Buddy Guindon, Glen Brooks and Brett Veerhusen:

The commercial and charter fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico and throughout the United States, are unified in opposition to H.R. 3094 (Gulf States Red Snapper Management Authority Act).

Every year tens of millions of Americans enjoy fresh caught seafood from their favorite restaurants and grocery stores, and millions of tourists travel to the coasts for a day of fishing on charter boats. Fish and shellfish are public resources, and our four fishing industry organizations work hard to provide the American public with sustainable access to the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico and other coastal regions of our nation.

Together, our organizations and the thousands of fishermen we represent have embraced science and management tools that promote conservation and sustainable fishing practices, reduce wasteful by-catch, operate safer and more stable small businesses, and protect fishing and shore-side jobs. We strive for sustainability, accountability, and access to some of the world’s best seafood; and we do so through active and progressive campaigns that bring fishermen, stakeholders, and regulators together to solve problems.
H.R. 3094 poses a clear and imminent threat to our jobs, our fishing communities, and the red snapper resource that we have helped rebuild to some of the highest levels on record.

H.R. 3094 creates loopholes that will erode the commercial red snapper fishery and access to red snapper by millions of American consumers. Commercial management of red snapper in the Gulf is a success story – overfishing was stopped, wasteful discarding was all-but-eliminated, and fishing businesses and jobs are profitable and stable. This is all due to the core conservation and management protections that are afforded to us under federal law (the Magnuson-Stevens Conservation and Management Act). H.R. 3094 allows the Gulf States to take away nearly 10% of the commercial quota every year without conferring with the Congressionally-approved and stakeholder-comprised Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (Gulf Council). To add insult to injury, H.R. 3094 deceives the public by claiming it will not change the IFQ shares in this fishery. However, those who developed this language fail to point out that the “shares” are a percentage of the whole commercial allocation, and that any reduction in commercial allocation will reduce the quota associated with the shares. Commercial fishermen don’t keep what they catch – it goes to American consumers who purchase red snapper from restaurants and grocery stores.

Read the full opinion piece at The Hill

 

Aquaculture on the rise in coastal North Carolina

October 22, 2015 — NEW HANOVER COUNTY, N.C. – Nearly all of southeastern North Carolina’s waters are now open for shellfish harvesting after heavy rains and floods left most areas polluted earlier this month.

Not only are oysters one of the state’s most popular shellfish to eat, but the shells themselves can be used as hardworking landscape material, in the form of driveways and patios.

Oyster shells make up many of the paths at Colonial Williamsburg to to get around. But starting October 1, a new law went into effect prohibiting contractors from using the shells in commercial landscaping.

The new law is an effort to increase the state’s oyster shell recycling program, where the shells are used to rebuilt oyster reefs.

“Oysters happen to be one of the few species that when we harvest it, we take the habitat right along with it, so we are trying to put that back into place,” said UNC-Wilmington’s Troy Alphin. “Larvae oysters depend on the adult oyster shell for settlement, and they have a very narrow window for settlement in their life span, only a couple of weeks. So if the shells are not in the water, they are not available for the larvae to settle on, these larvae will die. What we are trying to do is make sure the shells are back in the water as soon as we can they will be available for the next generation of oysters.”

At a summit earlier this year, North Carolina ecologists, scientists and politicians announced new efforts to make North Carolina the “Napa Valley of Oysters.”  One way that can be accomplished is by developing new oyster sanctuaries, something that Virginia and other states have already done.

A healthy oyster population is linked to the overall health of coastal fisheries.

Read the full story at WECT6

 

Most southeastern North Carolina waters back open for oyster season after bacteria levels fall

October 22, 2015 — WILMINGTON, North Carolina — Nearly all of southeastern North Carolina’s waters are now open for shellfish harvesting after heavy rains and floods left most areas polluted earlier this month.

The StarNews of Wilmington (http://bit.ly/1GVKMiM ) reports that bacteria found throughout most waters prompted the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries to declare most areas off-limits to oyster harvesting earlier this month, even though harvesting season technically opened Oct. 15.

Read the full story at StarNews

 

 

MAINE: Pembroke company seeks to make Washington County the ‘clam capital of Maine’

October 19, 2015 — It’s a crisp sunny morning in early October in the Washington County town of Pembroke and Tim Sheehan walks briskly across an empty parking lot to greet me. He’d been expecting good news about clam flats in northwestern Cobscook Bay being reopened, but instead of a parking lot full of diggers delivering clams to Gulf of Maine Inc., the seafood business on Route 1 he co-owns with his wife, Amy, there’s just a quiet sunlit absence.

The flats had been closed for almost a week after an historic rainfall on Sept. 30 forced Maine’s Department of Marine Resources to close the entire coast to shellfish harvesting. Even though he knows the closures are a temporary and necessary precaution — until water quality testing determines there’s no longer a risk of runoff pollution contaminating soft shell clams and mussels in the tidal flats — it’s still hard for Sheehan to accept another blank day on his company’s ledgers.

“I’m a dealer, our business depends on clams,” he says.

He’s not alone in that frustration on this bright Tuesday morning. By mid-morning, a dozen or more clammers had sent text messages asking Sheehan if the flats were open yet. Others had pulled up to his seafood warehouse in pickup trucks — some more than once as the sun advanced towards high noon — wondering the same thing.

“Still no word,” Sheehan tells them. Weathered faces nod impassively. They’ve been through this drill before. A full-time clammer, Kittery or Pembroke no difference, is always waiting for something — the tides to change, DMR closures to lift, prices to go up and tiny seed clams to grow to harvestable sizes.

By his own admission, patience doesn’t come easily to Sheehan, who says by nature he’s driven to solve problems. It’s been a hallmark of the wholesale seafood business he and his wife created three years ago, when they realized the scientific specimen business they incorporated in 2002 — whose sales had plummeted with the recession — wasn’t coming back fast enough to keep them in Washington County.

Read the full story at Maine Biz

 

MARYLAND: Down year seen for oysters

October 8, 2015 — Watermen dredging the muddy bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries for oysters may not haul in the bounty that some recent years have produced, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources cautions as a new season gets underway.

“We’ve had good harvests the last couple years,” said Chris Judy, the department’s shellfish division director. But “we will no longer enjoy the spotlight on our oysters because other oysters are going to enter the market in a stronger way this year.”

The season kicked off Oct. 1, as it always does, but largely in name only. The same nor’easter that chewed at Delmarva’s beaches and rained out a weekend of activities at the beginning of the month kept most watermen off the water. But they were out in force after the skies cleared.

“It looks like we got the whole state of Maryland working on one bar off Tangier Island,” said Greg Price, a waterman based out of Chance in Somerset County. “I counted 55 boats this morning.”

Those freshly caught oysters are already finding their way into refrigerator cases.

“At first it was a little dreary because of the storm, but we’re booming now,” said Miranda Taylor, manager of Ocean Highway Seafood and Produce in Pocomoke City.

Read the full story at Delmarva Now

 

The Economist: Particle biology

October 10, 2015 — Filter-feeding bivalve molluscs, such as mussels, oysters, scallops and clams, are a useful and tasty source of protein. They can, though, also be harbingers of illness. A filter-feeder lives, as the name suggests, by trapping and consuming particles (mostly bacteria and single-celled algae) suspended in water it pumps through its body. If those particles are themselves toxic, they can seriously discomfort, and occasionally kill, a human who eats a mollusc that has been feeding on them.

The most common culprits are algae called dinoflagellates and diatoms, several species of which make potent toxins. These algae often multiply into spectacular blooms along coastlines. Even in the absence of such a bloom, though, they can be abundant enough to cause problems. For this reason, in most places in the rich world at least, bivalves intended for sale have to be tested before they go to market. That involves taking samples to a laboratory, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. What is needed is a simple test that can be carried out on-board a ship. And Waqass Jawaid, of Queen’s University in Belfast, thinks he has one.

One way of screening shellfish is pretty crude. This is to inject a mouse with a sample and see if it gets ill— a procedure no longer used in Europe, but still permitted in parts of America. The alternative, a mix of chromatography and mass spectrometry, is more sensitive, but requires expensive equipment and trained staff. Dr Jawaid’s method, which he and his colleagues report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, employs antibodies to create a system similar to a pregnancy test.

Read the full story at The Economist

 

MASSACHUSETTS: 15th Annual Wellfleet Oysterfest

Saturday and Sunday
October 17 & 18 2015
10 a.m – 5 p.m. 

The 15th annual Wellfleet OysterFest is next weekend. Come join us for a weekend full of hometown flavor and big time fun!

Highlights this year include:

  • 84 Artisans, 32 food vendors and 17 marine, environmental non-profits and community organizations.
  • Live Music performed by CrabGrass; The Daggers; the Rip it Ups with special guests like Steve Shook, Jordan Renzi, Rayssa Rabeiro, Sarah Burrill and Mac Hay; The Catie Flynn Band; Chandler Travis Philharmonic; and Sarah Swain and the Oh Boys.
  • The Family Fun Area will feature educational activities, crafts, moon bounces, clowns, face painting and performances geared for the young at heart – Cape Cod African Dance and Drum, Treavor the Juggler, The Elbows, the Keltic Kids and fortune teller Sufi Lin!
  • The event’s signature tasting program,  Taste the Terroir and Merroir, and cooking demos by local chefs such as Philippe Rispole and Sarah Chase, and featuring the beloved oyster will be held at Wellfleet Preservation Hall.
  • Educational programs will be held at the Wellfleet Public Library and offered by our partners, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service, Green Harbors Boston, and Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.
  • Walking tours will be offered by Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary staff. A tour of the Wellfleet Oyster Propagation site will also be offered by the lead research scientist.
  • Thanks to a partnership with Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) and the Woods Hole Film Festival, film screenings will be held at WHAT on Friday and Saturday evenings.
  • The Wellfleet Recreation Department will host activities such as the popular Shuck n’ Run, the Tennis and Pickle Ball Round Robin, the SK8 Competition and a sunset a dance party.
  • And of course, the Annual Oyster Shucking Competition!

Admission is $5 for one day, $8 for two days and children 12 and under are free. Tickets may be purchased at the event or in advance online. Click here to purchase tickets now!

Click here to register for one of the exciting culinary programs or for a detailed Schedule of Activities.

Learn more about the Wellfleet Oysterfest

On Prince Edward Island, a Seafood-Dining Excursion

July 29, 2015 — PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND — “Which one should we try first?,” my husband asked, staring at the three equally enticing kinds of clams before us. The picturesque Gulf of St. Lawrence glistened on a sunny August evening on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and our 6-year-old daughter was running around on the grounds of the resort we were visiting for the afternoon called the Sundance Cottages.

But our attention was on the clams.

There was a raw quahog variety spiked with Tabasco and two soft-shell versions, one sautéed in oil and salted butter and the other puffing with an aromatic chorizo and white wine steam.

We had spent the better part of the afternoon on a beach nearby digging dozens of these shellfish from the sand and raking them from the water with the help of Stephen Flaherty, a handyman at Sundance who takes people clamming, including nonguests like us.

Finding them was only the start. Linda Lowther, a former owner of Sundance who offers cooking classes, had invited my husband and me into her home for a lesson on how islanders like to eat the mollusks, and now we were sitting at her kitchen table looking at the fruits of our half-day’s work.

It was one of several foraging trips we took during our summer break to the 175-mile-long, crescent-shaped province that’s famous for its picturesque setting of more than 90 beaches, rolling hills and sandstone cliffs and the abundant seafood in surrounding waters, including oysters, clams, cod, lobster and mussels. Agriculture, too, is big, with close to 1,500 mostly family-run farms growing a variety of produce and crops.

Restaurants were the obvious way to enjoy this bounty, but I had heard that the island was rife with opportunities to enjoy it through foraging, a tradition that locals practice. Given my primarily pescetarian diet, it was a particularly appealing proposition, and on our visit, we canvassed the area to find nearly everything we ate.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Conservationists Making Headway In Rebuilding Oyster Populations in New Jersey Barnegat Bay

July 30, 2015 — BARNEGAT BAY NJ — A team of animal conservationists have begun re-establishing the local colony of oyster in New Jersey by releasing more than a million seedlings of the shellfish, known as spat, off of Barnegat Bay.

Members of the American Littoral Society sent off around 1.5 million oyster spat in Ocean Gate, which were then taken to an artificial reef system located around a quarter-mile off of the township of Berkeley known as Good Luck Point.

The group was joined by several other volunteers on boats in taking the seedlings to the reef, where they released the oysters into Barnegat Bay before returning to shore.

The goal of the Littoral Society with the oyster colony is to improve the quality of the water in the bay through the shellfish’s natural ability to filter out impurities and pollutants in the ocean.

The group also believes that by bolstering the number of oysters found in Barnegat Bay, the creatures can help strengthen the shoreline against the effects of devastating weather occurrences such as Superstorm Sandy. The hard shells of oysters and the raise profile and irregular shape of their beds can considerably reduce the impact of storm surges waves on the bay’s shoreline.

The presence of the oyster colonies also boosts the local boating and recreational fishing industries as it provides habitats for other sea creatures such as crabs and fish.

Read the full story at the Tech Times