Saving Seafood

Gulf Coast Looks to Maintain, Restore Oysters

November 26, 2018 — The oyster dressing is safe this year.

Since the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, 4 billion to 8.3 billion subtidal oysters were estimated to be lost across the Gulf coast. Many states are struggling.

Louisiana is the only state producing at a level at or higher than before the spill, according to Seth Blitch, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of Coastal and Marine Conservation in Louisiana.

“Oysters Gulfwide are kind of in a bad spot, but Louisiana is actually sort of the bright spot in terms of commercial production of oysters. Louisiana produces more oysters than any other state in the country, which is good,” Blitch said.

TNC recently released a report on oyster restoration in the Gulf.

According to the report, there’s been about a 50 percent to 85 percent oyster loss throughout the Gulf when compared to historic levels.

The oyster industry pulls about $220 million to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The decrease could affect not only oyster harvesters but restaurants and industries that use the shell, such as using it to supplement chicken feed.

Read the full story from The News-Star of Monroe at U.S. News and World Report

Hurricane Harvey Didn’t Stop These Fish From Mating

November 20, 2018 — Every summer, a symphony of grunts, croaks and roars echoes below the surface of the western Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico to signal the launch of spotted seatrout spawning season.

Last year, the noisy process—which finds males vibrating their air bladders in hopes of attracting fertile females eager to mate—coincided with the onslaught of Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm that made landfall in Texas on August 25. And as JoAnna Klein reports for The New York Times, a series of recordings captured by microphones placed at popular spawning grounds across Aransas Bay reveals just how persistent the trout are in their pursuit of reproductive success: Not only did they spawn on the days preceding and following the storm, but also on the day the eye of the hurricane passed directly over their habitat.

“These fish are resilient and productive, even in the face of such a huge storm,” lead author Christopher Biggs, a marine ecologist from the University of Texas at Austin, says in a statement. “On land, it was complete destruction, but these fish didn’t seem disturbed.”

The researchers’ findings, published in Biology Letters earlier this month, emerged largely by chance. Biggs tells Eos’ Jenessa Duncombe that he and his colleagues initially set out to study the fish’s breeding patterns, including where and how they spawn. Trout reproduction is best observed via aural methods, as the waters these fish call home tend to be too murky for visual analysis, so the researchers set up 15 underwater recording stations between April and June 2017.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine

 

Restoration projects seek to fight “tragic” decline in Gulf of Mexico oyster population

November 19, 2018 — Last week, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources officially moved to cancel the state’s wild oyster season, which would have run from November through April.

Exploratory dives at oyster harvesting grounds had revealed a continued steep decline in the number of oysters in the state’s waters. Last year’s season was curtailed after fishermen harvested just 136 110-pound sacks of oysters, down from 7,000 sacks in 2013, according to the Associated Press.

Scott Bannon, director of the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said the findings revealed the apparent collapse of the region’s oyster ecology.

“It’s tragic, to be honest,” Bannon told AL.com.

Numerous factors have dealt blows not just to Alabama’s oyster grounds, but those of the entire Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, hurricanes, disease, and changes in freshwater flows to Gulf rivers and streams have collectively damaged the fishery to the point where up to 85 percent of the gulf’s original oyster reefs no longer remain intact.

According to a new report by The Nature Conservancy, “Oyster Restoration in the Gulf of Mexico,” this dramatic decline has damaged the stability and productivity of the Gulf’s estuaries and harmed coastal economies.

Seth Blitch, the director of coastal and marine conservation in Louisiana for The Nature Conservancy, told SeafoodSource the oyster habitat and the oyster fishery “is not in a particularly good place right now,” which could spell bigger problems for the region.

“Oysters, to me, are a great proxy to a lot of things,” he said. “If oysters are doing well, that’s a good indication of good water quality and of the health entire near-shore estuarine system. When oysters start to fail, that’s good indication there are larger issues at play.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Reef restoration projects aim to bolster Texas’ record-low oyster population

November 16, 2018 — With oyster populations in Texas at historic lows, The Nature Conservancy is launching two new reef restoration projects that look to appease commercial fishermen and environmentalists alike.

Using funds from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement, the group plans to develop 110 acres of reef in Galveston Bay and Copano Bay, near Rockport. Half of each reef will be designated as a marine sanctuary where the molluscs — which have significant economic and environmental benefits — may grow. The other half will be open for commercial fishing.

Construction of the new reefs is expected to begin this winter, with harvestable portions ready as soon as 2021.

Laura Huffman, regional director of The Nature Conservancy in Texas, said these projects show a new approach to oyster reef restoration, with the compatibility of building harvestable reefs at the same time as growing a healthy habitat.

Read the full story at KPRC 2 Houston

Recent studies say fish oil could boost your heart

November 16, 2018 — Heart disease is the leading killer in America, and San Antonio is no exception.

But as the Washington Post reports, two recent major studies point to the possibility that medications derived from fish oils could help protect people from heart attacks, strokes and other types of cardiovascular ailments. These are medications, not supplements.

The long-term studies involved two drugs derived from omega-3 fatty acids. Both studies found the drugs, if taken appropriately, made a significant difference for people with diabetes or heart disease.

Read the full story at the San Antonio Express

Louisiana inside red snapper limit; Florida, Alabama go over

November 5, 2018 — If Chad Courville didn’t physically show how upset he is with recent catch data posted for each of the five Gulf states, his words certainly did during Thursday’s Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission monthly meeting in Baton Rouge.

Courville, one of the commission’s seven, took note of a report indicating Florida’s recreational fishermen caught 113.5 percent of its allowed red snapper catch during its 40-day season. Alabama’s report was 100.2 percent.

“The MRIP numbers are insane,” Courville said, mentioning the federal Marine Resources Information Program data showing Alabama might have taken as much as four million pounds of snapper and its state agency reported on pounds of red snapper during the recreational season.

Meanwhile, Louisiana, using its highly accredited and federally approved LA Creel system, showed its state anglers took 99.2 percent of its allowed 700,000-pound-plus red snapper allowed limit. Mississippi reported at 95.6 percent while Texas’ numbers are not final because the Lone Star State continues to hold its state waters open to red snapper catches.

Read the full story at The Advocate

 

After decades of rescuing stranded sea turtles, NOAA’s Galveston lab plans to scale back

October 22, 2018 — The sea turtle was almost dead, stranded at the high tide line on a Galveston beach.

It had a thick coating of algae growing on its outer shell. Its body was thin, its eyes sunken. It wasn’t moving.

A beachgoer spotted the creature earlier this month and called a hotline for reporting stranded sea turtles. As soon as the phone rang, the NOAA Fisheries laboratory in Galveston sprang into action.

An employee collected the 40-pound turtle from the beach and brought it back to the lab. It was a Kemp’s ridley turtle — a critically endangered species — and it didn’t look good.

“It was basically one step away from being comatose,” said Ben Higgins, who manages the sea turtle program at the Galveston lab. “At one point, the staff came and got me and said, ‘We think it might be dead.’”

But it wasn’t dead. The NOAA staff put the turtle in a van and drove it to Houston. By the next morning, the turtle was sprawled out on an exam table at the Houston Zoo, letting senior veterinarian Dr. Joe Flanagan prod at it with purple-gloved fingers. The turtle got X-rays, blood work and a full physical exam.

The diagnosis: Dehydration and a touch of pneumonia.

“We got it just in time,” Higgins said. “It was very close to leaving us.”

But with some squid in its system and a prescription for antibiotics, the turtle was taken back to Galveston to recover in NOAA’s lab.

It’ll spend the winter in the lab, getting food and medicine and a heated tank. And if all goes well, it will be released back into the Gulf of Mexico sometime after the winter, when it can survive in the wild again.

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle

Committee votes to let states receive more money from offshore drilling

September 14, 2018 — A House committee voted Thursday to increase the money coastal states receive from offshore oil and natural gas drilling off their coasts.

The bill, from Rep. Garrett Graves (R-La.), would give Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama half of the fee and royalty payments that companies give the federal government to drill for oil and gas in a set of new wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

That would be an increase from the current 37.5 percent, which last year amounted to 0.4 percent of the government’s total income from offshore drilling going to Louisiana last year, or $11 million, Graves said.

At a meeting of the House Natural Resources Committee, Graves framed the issue as one of shoring up states’ coasts. All of the money Louisiana gets from offshore drilling goes to coastal resilience, and Graves said his bill would mandate a quarter of the money go for that purpose for all four states.

“We’ve got to stop the stupidity of spending billions of dollars after disasters instead of millions before,” Graves said.

The panel passed the bill by voice vote after an intense debate over whether Gulf states should get special treatment for the drilling that occurs off their shores.

In one exchange, Rep. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), the panel’s top Democrat, wanted the money to go to all coastal states for resilience, not just the Gulf of Mexico ones.

Read the full story at The Hill

Red snapper: Unusual experiment in Gulf of Mexico may ripple nationwide

August 8, 2018 — An unusual experiment playing out in the Gulf of Mexico is not only helping defuse the nation’s most politically charged fishing dispute but also advancing a new way of managing one of the country’s most popular pastimes.

Federal regulators and the five Gulf states – Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas – are sharing oversight of red snapper, the reef fish prized by private anglers and seafood lovers across the United States.

Congress last year created the two-year pilot program, known as the “experimental fishing permit” program. It grants states the day-to-day authority to manage red snapper seasons for recreational fishing in U.S. waters as far as 200 miles from the shoreline. Normally, state jurisdiction extends to no more than 9 miles off the coast.

The catch: States are in charge but they must follow strict federal fisheries rules and close the season once they’ve reached their quota.

For environmental groups, it means tougher protections apply to the entire red snapper habitat, including state waters. For the federal government, it’s a chance to test ways of counting fish in an attempt to settle once and for all just how many there are swimming around the Gulf. And for recreational anglers, it means more time to fish for red snapper in federal waters that in recent years have had short seasons.

“We definitely have to get away from the federal government telling us how many fish we can catch,” said Justin Lee Fadalla, 31, a private boat angler from Mobile, Ala. who supports the change. “We really need the state (managing) and actually doing these research trips. They know how many snapper are out there. When you go out and catch your limit in 10 minutes, there’s not a shortage of red snapper.”

Read the full story at the Abilene Reporter News

TEXAS: Houston Chef Chris Shepherd Named Gulf Seafood Foundation’s Helping Hands Hero

August 6, 2018 — Great seafood chefs across the country know the importance of the quality seafood fishermen provide for their customer’s tables. One Houston chef stands above the others in his support of the Gulf fishermen providing seafood to his restaurants. James Beard Award winning chef Chris Shepherd, the culinary torchbearer behind Houston’s acclaimed restaurants One Fifth, Hay Merchant and UB Preserv, has been named the Gulf Seafood Foundation’s first-ever recipient of the organization’s “Helping Hands Award.”

“Shepherd is not only a remarkable chef, but also an outstanding humanitarian who believes helping others is an important part of daily life,” said Jim Gossen, chairman of the Gulf Seafood Foundation. “The Southern Smoke Foundation he established has aided other charitable organizations, as well as individuals in the Houston area affected by Hurricane Harvey.  The support that he and the Southern Smoke Foundation has given to our organization is going entirely to help our Gulf fishermen.”

The Southern Smoke Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Shepherd. It donated $10,000 to the Gulf Seafood Foundation’s “Helping Hands” program, a response to give all fishermen across the Gulf work gloves as a small reminder that they were not forgotten after the 2017 hurricanes that struck from Texas to Florida.

Read the full story at Gulf Seafood News