Saving Seafood

Feds say pesticide won’t destroy species

March 9, 2022 — The Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded that the pesticide malathion does not jeopardize threatened and endangered species or their habitat.

In a much-awaited study that’s drawing sharp criticism from environmentalists, the federal agency backed off its most recent draft conclusion that the registration of malathion for use was likely to threaten 78 species and destroy or adversely modify 23 critical habitats (Greenwire, April 21, 2021).

“The Biden administration has squandered a historic opportunity to rein in the dangerous use of one of the world’s worst neurotoxic pesticides,” Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement today.

Burd noted that NOAA Fisheries recently released its own updated biological opinion that determined malathion and two other organophosphate pesticides jeopardize endangered U.S. salmon, sturgeon and steelhead species, as well as Puget Sound orcas.

Read the full story at E&E News

Report claims one-fifth of caviar and meat sold in key markets illegal

June 15, 2021 — A survey by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has revealed that the trade of caviar and sturgeon-based products in four key European countries continues to be plagued by illegal trading, hindering the recovery of seven of eight species of sturgeon in Eastern Europe that are on the brink of extinction.

WWF conducted a market survey within the European Union-funded LIFE project and published a resulting paper, “Sustainable Protection of Lower Danube Sturgeons by Preventing and Counteracting Poaching and Illegal Wildlife Trade,” laying out its findings. The research covered Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine – countries where sturgeon breed in the Lower Danube River and the northwestern Black Sea region. The Danube, along with the Rioni River in Georgia’s Caucasus, is one of two remaining rivers where migrating sturgeons reproduce naturally.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Dutch firm harnesses DNA, blockchain for sturgeon traceability solution

May 21, 2021 — A Dutch firm is harnessing blockchain and DNA to disable what it has identified as a burgeoning illicit trade in wild sturgeon passed off as farmed product.

Geneusbiotech, which describes itself as a “genomics specialist company,” has introduced a traceability solution for sturgeon and caviar sold in Europe in a three-year collaboration with the Berlin Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). The Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based company develops solutions for the food, luxury goods, and pharma sectors.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

‘E-ZPass for fish.’ What tracking sturgeon can tell us about this fragile species – and Delaware Bay

May 11, 2021 — This spring marks a decade since New Jersey’s Bureau of Marine Fisheries first deployed acoustic receivers to track the migratory patterns of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon in the Delaware Bay. For the researchers tasked with monitoring this fragile, prehistoric fish species, the past 10 years have been an exercise in hope — and occasional surprise.

“There are signs that the population has started a slow recovery,” said Brian Neilan, a senior fisheries biologist who leads the monitoring program for the bureau. “At least relative to the numbers when the [Atlantic coastwide] fishing moratorium on sturgeon went into effect in 1998.”

In mid-March, Neilan and his team deployed 19 acoustic receivers throughout the New Jersey side of the bay, from Cape May to Egg Island Point, in Cumberland County. The receivers pick up frequencies pinged from sturgeon and other fish implanted with radio tags that are similar to the microchips used for household pets. “It’s like E-ZPass for fish,” said Neilan.

On April 12, the first dataset was pulled from the receivers. Of the over 600 detections recorded, 66 came from just five sturgeon. “Those numbers are pretty on par for what we see during March and early April,” Neilan said. “May is typically when we get the most detections, because that’s when the sturgeon are using the bay the most, to go up to their spawning grounds in the river and then come back down and back out into the ocean.”

Like other depleted, culturally significant fish species in the Delaware Estuary, sturgeon are anadromous, meaning they spawn in fresh water, where they remain for the first couple years of their life before migrating to the ocean.

Read the full story at the New Jersey Spotlight

Wisconsin Official Traded Sturgeon Research Eggs for Caviar, Prosecutors Say

February 17, 2021 — The eggs, processed into tiny black pearls prized by the gastronomic world for their burst-in-the-mouth, briny flavor profile, were said by state fisheries employees to be needed for research on the sturgeon population in Wisconsin.

But prosecutors say the state biologist who oversees the traditional sturgeon spearing season in Lake Winnebago and its watershed, a rite of winter for fishing enthusiasts in the state, had acquired an expensive and illicit taste for the caviar that is made from the eggs.

The biologist, Ryan P. Koenigs, an employee of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources since 2008, accepted at least $20,000 in jars of caviar in return for supplying to a caviar processor eggs that had been collected under the guise of research, a criminal complaint filed last week in Winnebago County said.

The caviar-processing business is run by a former biologist for the state, according to prosecutors, who said it was one of several caviar processors that obtained sturgeon eggs as part of the bartering scheme. The former employee, who prosecutors said obtained 65 pounds of roe in 2015 that produced $100,000 in caviar, has not been charged.

In Wisconsin, state law requires the eggs to be returned to the person who speared the sturgeon, if requested, or discarded. Prosecutors noted that caviar produced from sturgeon eggs can sell for more than $100 an ounce.

Read the full story at The New York Times

OREGON: Federal plan for Columbia River system dams sees opposition

September 3, 2020 — A final plan impacting the Columbia River system released earlier this month has some anglers and conservationists still looking for more answers.

The Preferred Alternative in the Columbia River System Operational Final Environmental Impact Statement includes structural modifications to some of the dams to benefit passage of adult salmon, steelhead and Pacific lamprey.

Greg Haller, of Pacific Rivers, said the plan does not represent a major system overall and he is not convinced the spill option benefits juvenile fish.

“Going with a flexible spill agreement as a long-term solution is a bad choice,” he said. “Breaching the dams has been identified as the best thing for fish. I think they gave that analysis short shrift.”

Additionally, proposed operational changes in the upper basin would avoid adverse effects to resident fish, including federally protected bull trout and Kootenai River white sturgeon.

Read the full story at The East Oregonian

They were trying to save a species. Instead, scientists created a fish that’s part sturgeon, part paddlefish, all accident

July 22, 2020 — A group of Hungarian aquatic scientists was looking for ways to save the fish responsible for some of the world’s finest caviar from extinction.

Instead, they made a Frankenfish.

But their accidental hybrid, a fish that’s part American paddlefish and part Russian sturgeon, could benefit fish farming and the industry’s carbon footprint. And on their own, the fish are a marvel of biology.

Though they haven’t been formally named yet, fellow fishery researchers have given them the moniker “sturddlefish.”

The “sturddlefish” study appeared this month in the scientific journal Genes.

How it happened

The initial goal of the study was to encourage the critically endangered sturgeon to reproduce asexually. That isn’t quite how it went.

The Russian sturgeon, instead, hybridized with the American paddlefish, the first time the two have ever hybridized successfully in captivity. The paddlefish was originally meant to provide sperm — not its DNA — to help the sturgeon reproduce on its own.
The sturgeon isn’t so genetically different from paddlefish — they belong to the same group, Acipenseriformes. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, sturgeon and paddlefish both provide tasty caviar.

Read the full story at CNN

NOAA Science Supports Atlantic Sturgeon Recovery Effort in the Chesapeake Bay

December 31, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Atlantic sturgeon were once a highly valued fishery along the U.S. East Coast. Their populations declined dramatically in the late 1800s when they were overfished for their eggs for high-quality caviar. Four of the five distinct population segments—those in the Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, New York Bight, and South Atlantic—are now listed as an endangered species. These fish can be impressively large—up to 14 feet long and 800 pounds—but they are still vulnerable.

Habitat loss poses challenges for the recovery of the sturgeon population. Many places they need to live and reproduce are affected by degraded water quality or lack of the hard-bottom areas they need for spawning. Sturgeon can be injured or killed when hit by commercial and recreational boats. Virginia’s James River—occupied during the fall migration by a group of sturgeon—is frequently transited by shipping.

Scientists from the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office use sonar technology to map areas that could include sturgeon habitat. This helps them better understand the habitat features those places may offer. Sonar data can describe what the bottom is like in great detail—not just how deep it is, but whether it is sandy, muddy, rocky, or some other bottom type. After scientists gather the data, they create maps to identify areas that have hard, rough bottoms where sturgeon could spawn.

Read the full release here

Sturgeon, America’s forgotten dinosaurs, slowly coming back

July 10, 2019 — Sturgeon were America’s vanishing dinosaurs, armor-plated beasts that crowded the nation’s rivers until mankind’s craving for caviar pushed them to the edge of extinction.

More than a century later, some populations of the massive bottom feeding fish are showing signs of recovery in the dark corners of U.S. waterways.

Increased numbers are appearing in the cold streams of Maine, the lakes of Michigan and Wisconsin and the coffee-colored waters of Florida’s Suwannee River.

A 14-foot Atlantic sturgeon — as long as a Volkswagen Beetle — was recently spotted in New York’s Hudson River.

“It’s really been a dramatic reversal of fortune,” said Greg Garman, a Virginia Commonwealth University ecologist who studies Atlantic sturgeon in Virginia’s James River. “We didn’t think they were there, frankly. Now, they’re almost every place we’re looking.”

Following the late 1800s caviar rush, America’s nine sturgeon species and subspecies were plagued by pollution, dams and overfishing. Steep declines in many populations weren’t fully apparent until the 1990s.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

A ‘long, creeping change’: As climate warms, Virginia fisheries struggle to adapt

June 24, 2019 — George Washington had few dietary preferences, save one: he was “excessively fond” of fish.

Luckily for the president, his perch at Mount Vernon afforded him an easy opportunity to indulge.

The Potomac, he recorded in 1793, was “well-stocked with various kinds of fish in all Seasons of the year, and in the Spring with Shad, Herring, Bass, Carp, Perch, Sturgeon, etc. in great abundance. … The whole shore, in fact, is one entire fishery.”

Today, Mount Vernon still overlooks the Potomac, but the species that call Virginia waters home are increasingly different due to something Washington couldn’t have foreseen: climate change.

“It’s hard to manage fisheries to begin with, [and] in the past we’ve always considered the climate stable,” said Patrick Geer, deputy chief of fisheries management for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. “But now that theory of a stable climate and environment has been taken out.”

As global air temperatures warm, so too do global waters. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the temperature of the ocean’s surface has risen an average of 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit every decade since the beginning of the 20th century. And the Chesapeake Bay is estimated to be warming even faster, at an average rate of 1.2 degrees every decade since the 1980s.

Increasingly, that is making environments inhospitable for fish. In reaction, populations on the East Coast are shifting northward and eastward, leaving commercial fishermen and states who have long relied on their presence with lighter nets — and fears of lighter coffers.

Some of those fears are justified. The classic cautionary tale is that of New England’s northern shrimp fishery, which crashed precipitously around 2012 and was closed in 2014 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the governmental body that oversees the management of fisheries in state waters from Maine to Florida. In February 2018, the ASMFC extended the moratorium to 2021 in an announcement that linked the collapse to warming ocean temperatures and broached the possibility of a future in which “the stock has no ability to recover.”

Such regional collapses may become more frequent in coming years, while at the same creating more favorable environments for other species.

“In any one region, some species will experience improving environmental conditions that may result in increased available habitat and increased species productivity, while other species will experience the opposite and perhaps decline in abundance,” the National Marine Fisheries Service declared in its 2015 Climate Science Strategy.

Or, as Geer put it, “For any given area and for any given species, there will be winners and losers.”

Read the full story at The Virginia Mercury