Saving Seafood

Seafood retailing “remains in flux” as supply-chain woes hamper sales

November 16, 2021 — Sales of frozen, fresh, and shelf-stable seafood in the United States returned to 2020 levels in October, but growth has been hampered by supply-chain issues, according to new data and insight provided to SeafoodSource.

“Twenty months into the pandemic, seafood retailing remains in flux,” 210 Analytics Principal Anne-Marie Roerink told SeafoodSource. “Continually changing consumer consumption and buying patterns, high inflation, and severe supply-chain constraints have yet to create a new and lasting balance of supply and demand.”Sales of frozen, fresh, and shelf-stable seafood in the United States returned to 2020 levels in October, but growth has been hampered by supply-chain issues, according to new data and insight provided to SeafoodSource.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

‘We went to zero’: Connecticut shellfishermen seeking pandemic rebound

September 1, 2021 — Bobbing up and down in 194 feet of water in Long Island Sound on Tuesday, lobsterman Mike Kalaman made a point to boast about his favorite fishing grounds to the delegation of state lawmakers aboard his boat, The Dark Horse.

Pointing to the waters just beyond one of his blue-and-yellow buoys, Kalaman showed Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff where the border between Connecticut and New York crossed the Sound, adding that the water on the other side of the imaginary line was generally more shallow and less attractive for lobsters.

“Connecticut is blessed to have all this deep water,” Kalaman said, gesturing across the area he has spent four decades fishing.

Duff joined three other state senators Tuesday morning for a tour aboard Kalaman’s 36-foot lobster boat and the oyster fleet operated by Copps Island Oysters in Norwalk to learn about Connecticut’s shellfish industry amid ongoing environmental threats and more recent disruption caused by the pandemic.

Norm Bloom, the owner of Copps Island Oysters, said the health of the industry has been boosted by long-term efforts to curb pollution and improve water quality in Long Island Sound.

Read the full story at CT Insider

The Americas’ First Ecosystem Managers

August 19, 2021 — The maritime fur trade, beginning in the 1700s and centered on the North Pacific Ocean, killed around one million sea otters and left the species fluttering on the verge of extinction with a global population as low as 1,000. On the west coast of Canada, the animal didn’t make it. The last sea otter was seen in the region in 1929, off Vancouver Island, British Columbia. But beginning in the 1960s, restoration efforts have turned back the clock on British Columbia’s sea otters. From an initial 89 sea otters relocated from Alaska, a population of 8,000 is now expanding in the province. Yet after generations of their absence, the surge in sea otters is stoking the resentment of some residents.

The trouble is, a sea otter consumes 25 to 30 percent of its own body weight every day. The otters’ voracious appetite can have dramatic ecological effects. It doesn’t help, either, that sea otters eat many of the same seafoods that humans in the area have long favored, such as crabs and clams, sparking conflict with shellfish fisheries and leading some to argue that the reintroduction effort has worked too well.

Now, a new study suggests that conservation efforts may have indeed overshot the mark—and the reason why is particularly interesting.

When thinking about restoring natural ecosystems, the goal for many would likely be to see a species rebound to its carrying capacity—that is, the maximum population a given habitat can support, free from human impact. So, for the sea otter, that would be to roll back the effects of colonization, the commercial fur trade, hunting, land development, and other pressures to a time when abundant sea otters may have dwelled on the coast, gorging on abalone and other shellfish. But taking that as your goal is to overlook the way Indigenous peoples extensively managed the sea otter population for thousands of years.

Led by Erin Slade, a graduate student at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, new research examining the sizes of mussels found along the coast challenges the assumption that late-Holocene sea otter populations would have ever been at, or even near, their carrying capacity.

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

Here’s why seafood prices are soaring this summer

August 6, 2021 — After experiencing broad declines last year amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the fishing and seafood sectors are still floundering due to the effects of supply chain issues, worker shortages and renewed consumer demand.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries wrote at the beginning of the year that coronavirus contributed to an “almost immediate” impact on seafood sector sales including lost sales at most aquaculture, aquaponics, and allied businesses and charter fishing operations.

Now, chefs and restaurant owners are speaking out on why pandemic woes have led to higher prices for their customers.

According to SeafoodSource, premium items are being taken off menus across the country because the delicacies are too hard or expensive to source.

Read the full story at Fox News

Seafood Prices Soar Amid Supply Chain Issues and Worker Shortage

August 5, 2021 — A post-Covid-19 economic inflationary surge has seafood places rewriting their menus—sans lobsters, scallops, crab and many fish dishes.

Prices have risen by as much as 50 percent in the last quarter due to a lack of fishers and truck drivers combined with climbing consumer demand, reports Christine Blank of SeafoodSource.com.

“The price we had to charge to be profitable was almost insulting,” Josue Pena, chef at The Iberian Pig in Atlanta, tells SeafoodSource.com. He was forced to remove the restaurant’s signature crab coquettes after crab prices nearly doubled.

Overall, the wholesale price of finfish and shellfish rose 18.8 percent from June 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reports Will Feuer of the New York Post. Halibut soared from $16 a pound to $28, while blue crab skyrocketed from $18 to $44—an increase of more than 140 percent.

Per Bloomberg’s Adam Jackson and Kate Krader, the jump in seafood prices is part of broader inflationary increase working its way through the economy as the United States continues to emerge from the pandemic. However, the seafood surge is also related to an employment shortage, port congestion, lack of product, rising prices and transportation issues.

“Distributors used to hustle and bustle to get your business,” Jay Herrington of Fish On Fire in Orlando tells Bloomberg. “You don’t get a delivery, or it’s a late delivery. Sometimes we have to go and pick it up.”

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine

Harmful algal blooms can be lethal for humans. Scientists wonder if they cause seabird die-offs, too

July 29, 2021 — Paralytic shellfish poisoning, caused by eating seafood contaminated with toxins from harmful algal blooms, can be deadly to humans. Now, using marine samples from Unalaska, scientists are trying to understand if those harmful algal blooms could also be responsible for seabird die-offs.

There’s not much data on how saxitoxin — a harmful compound produced by algal blooms that cause PSP — spreads through the larger food web. But in July, a group of biologists with the United States Geological Survey visited Unalaska to collect samples of plants and animals in hopes of learning more about how saxitoxin levels magnify and diminish as they move through the food chain, from phytoplankton to mussels and up to seabirds.

“We don’t really know how this toxin moves through the food web,” said Sarah Schoen, a USGS wildlife biologist that recently collected marine samples in Unalaska. “There’s still a lot of unknowns, but the more information we can collect about it, the more we’ll understand it.”

Schoen said the project started about five years ago when a major heat wave, known as “the blob,” hit the ocean. Around the same time, there was a die-off of an estimated million common murres — a northern seabird — from Alaska down to California.

Read the full story at KTOO

North Carolina commercial fishermen landed less seafood in 2020

July 23, 2021 — Commercial fishermen sold nearly 20% less fish and shellfish to North Carolina seafood dealers in 2020, a decline from the previous year that’s being blamed on the state’s stay-at-home order brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, a state agency said Friday.

A news release from the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries says commercial fishermen sold 42.9 million pounds of fish and shellfish last year, a 19% decline from 2019 and about a 23% decrease from the previous five-year average.

The decline was linked to a 41.3% decrease in hard blue crab landings from 2019 that may have been partly due to impacts from COVID-19. The division said it heard from several fishermen who said they found it difficult to move blue crabs at the beginning of the state’s stay-at-home order when many restaurants were closed.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Washington Hit With Historic Number of Vibrio Infections Following Major Heatwave

July 21, 2021 — The Washington Department of Health (DOH) linked the recent heatwave that left millions of shellfish dead to the historic number of vibrio cases the state has reported in July.

The state said the high temperatures and low tides of late could be the reason behind the increased rate of the disease that is related to consuming raw or undercooked shellfish. Particularly oysters contaminated with Vibrio.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Red Tide Spurs Closure Of Shellfish Areas Along Massachusetts Coast

July 20, 2021 — State regulators have closed down shellfish harvesting up and down much of the coastline “until further notice.”

In a notice distributed to shellfish constables, Division of Marine Fisheries Director Daniel McKiernan cited paralytic shellfish poison (PSP) as the cause of the closures. PSP is also known as red tide.

The affected towns are Amesbury, Beverly, Boston, Cohasset, Danvers, Duxbury, Essex, Gloucester, Hull, Ipswich, Lynn, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Marblehead, Marshfield, Nahant, Newbury, Newburyport, Peabody, Plymouth, Revere, Rockport, Rowley, Salem, Salisbury, Saugus, Scituate, Swampscott and Winthrop.

Read the full story at WBUR

Scallop harvest to decline again this year, but still strong

July 15, 2021 — Fishermen are harvesting fewer scallops off the East Coast as the population of the valuable shellfish appears to be on the decline.

Sea scallops are one of the most profitable resources in the Atlantic, and the U.S. fishery was worth more than $570 million at the docks in 2019. Fishermen harvested more than 60 million pounds that year.

But fishermen harvested about 43.5 million pounds in 2020 after a projection that they would collect more than 51 million pounds, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. They’re expected to harvest about 40 million pounds this year, NOAA said.

NOAA officials cautioned that the scallop population is not in peril, and 40 million pounds is still a lot of scallops. That is a higher number than any year from 2013 to 2015.

The decline in scallops stems from slowing growth in key fishing areas such as Georges Bank and the mid-Atlantic, and some disappointing production in the Nantucket Lightship Area off Massachusetts, said Teri Frady, a NOAA spokesperson. She said the fishery is still well within overfishing limits.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Seattle Times