Saving Seafood

Feds allege 2 men illegally trafficked baby eels in N.J.

January 22, 2018 — Two men were indicted this week on multiple federal crimes alleging they illegally trafficked young, high-priced American eels to sell to dealers or exporters.

Joseph Kelley and James Lewis, of Maine, illegally harvested young eels, which are called elvers, in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and sold them to dealers or exporters, the U.S. Justice Department alleged.

Young eels, also known as “glass eels,” can regularly fetch $1,300 per pound, according to The Boston Globe. When the 2011 Japan tsunami devastated Japan’s eel fisheries, prices reached $2,600 per pound.

“Harvesters have turned to the American eel to fill the void resulting from the decreased number of Japanese and European eels,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

But due to concerns about overfishing, every state in the U.S. except for Maine and South Carolina outlaws eel fishing, and it’s heavily regulated in those two states.

Read the full story at NJ.com

 

US appeals court: Feds erred in Hawaii fishery expansion

December 29, 2017 — HONOLULU — Federal agencies were wrong to allow Hawaii’s longline swordfish industry to expand fishing efforts while allowing the hooking or entangling of more endangered sea turtles, a U.S. appeals court ruled.

The panel of judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to consider scientific data that showed the loggerhead turtle population would significantly decline when it set limits for the industry. The judges also said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service illegally allowed the industry to kill protected migratory birds.

Swordfish longline fishing involves hundreds of baited hooks on miles of line. The practice can ensnare birds, turtles and other marine life.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald

 

Elver trafficking sting yields more jail sentences, another guilty plea

December 15, 2017 — Operation Broken Glass, an interagency sting of a national elver trafficking ring based in Maine, has yielded two more jail sentences and a guilty plea this week.

Yarann Im, a 35-year-old Portland seafood dealer, was sentenced to six months in jail for illegally trafficking 480 pounds of elvers, which are also known as glass eels or juvenile American eels, following a hearing Thursday in federal district court in Portland. Im pleaded guilty in 2016 to buying more than $500,000 worth of eels, or almost a million individual elvers that had been illegally harvested in Virginia, North Carolina and Massachusetts, and selling them abroad.

Thomas Choi, a 76-year-old seafood dealer from Maryland, was sentenced Thursday to six months in prison with a $25,000 fine for trafficking in $1.26 million of elvers.

On Tuesday, Maine fisherman Albert Cray pleaded guilty to trafficking elvers, admitting to harvesting them illegally in New Jersey and selling them to a Maryland dealer, who then exported them from the United States to buyers in Asia. In 2013, Cray admitted to trafficking more than $250,000 worth of illegally harvested elvers, according to a statement of facts filed with Cray’s plea agreement.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Fishermen, researchers try to outsmart bait-robbing seabirds to save them

October 24, 2017 — When commercial fishermen spool out long lines in pursuit of sablefish— better known to consumers as black cod — seabirds looking for an easy meal dive to steal the bait off the series of hooks.

Some unlucky birds get hooked and drown as the line sinks to the deep. And when the drowned bird is an endangered species such as the short-tailed albatross, it triggers scrutiny.

“Just one was all it took. Yeah, just one,” said Amanda Gladics, a coastal fisheries specialist with Oregon Sea Grant. “Because they are endangered there is a lot of scrutiny on every single time any of those albatrosses are caught in a fishery.”

Gladics and colleagues from Oregon and Washington went to sea to determine the best tactics to avoid bycatch and published those in the journal Fisheries Research.

The paper recommends either fishing at night or deploying bird-scaring streamers on a line towed from a mast.

Read the full story at KTOO Public Media 

 

$13M settlement proposed for Buzzards Bay oil spill

October 20, 2017 — BOSTON — More than 14 years after a barge spilled 98,000 gallons of oil into Buzzards Bay, state and federal officials have announced a proposed settlement that would require the transportation company in charge of the vessel to pay more than $13 million for the damage done to migratory birds and their habitats.

In April 2003, a Bouchard Transportation Co. barge traveling to the power plant on the Cape Cod Canal in Sandwich struck rocks south of Westport. The crash ruptured the barge’s hull and spilled thousands of gallons of oil into the bay, damaging salt marshes, beaches, and hundreds of birds such as loons, sea ducks, terns and shorebirds.

The settlement proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island was filed in U.S. District Court, where it must be approved before being finalized.

If the settlement is approved, it would bring the total amount of money paid to resolve claims filed by the Natural Resource Damages Trustee Council, a group composed of several state and federal agencies, up to $19 million. Bouchard previously paid $6 million for claims on shoreline resources, piping plovers, and other damage recovery efforts.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Secretary Zinke signs Secretarial Order to Support Sportsmen & Enhance Wildlife Conservation

Order seeks to expand access on public and private lands and to promote hunting and fishing among youth, veterans, and minority communities

September 15, 2017 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the Department of the Interior:

Today, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke signed Secretarial Order 3356, which will support and expand hunting and fishing, enhance conservation stewardship, improve wildlife management, and increase outdoor recreation opportunities for all Americans. Secretarial Order 3356 is an extension of Secretarial Order 3347, issued on Zinke’s first day, March 2, 2017. That order identified a slate of actions for the restoration of the American sportsmen conservation ethic, which was established by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The new order comes days after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a survey that found there are 2.2 million fewer hunters in America now than in 2011. The order seeks to improve wildlife management and conservation, increase access to public lands for hunting, shooting, and fishing, and puts a new and a greater emphasis on recruiting and retaining new sportsmen conservationists, with a focus on engaging youths, veterans, minorities, and other communities that traditionally have low participation in outdoor recreation activities.

“Hunting and fishing is a cornerstone of the American tradition and hunters and fishers of America are the backbone of land and wildlife conservation,” said Secretary Zinke. “The more people we can get outdoors, the better things will be for our public lands. As someone who grew up hunting and fishing on our public lands – packing bologna sandwiches and heading out at 4AM with my dad – I know how important it is to expand access to public lands for future generations. Some of my best memories are hunting deer or reeling in rainbow trout back home in Montana, and I think every American should be able to have that experience.

“Today’s Secretarial Order is the latest example of how the Trump Administration is actively moving to support hunting and other forms of outdoor recreation on public lands. This means finding ways to expand hunting and fishing on public lands, improving access, and taking necessary actions to facilitate the enjoyment of these time-honored activities by any member of our society.”

Read the full release at the Department of the Interior

Poached eels: US strikes at illegal harvests as value grows

Law enforcement authorities have launched a crackdown on unlicensed eel fishermen and illicit sales along the East Coast.

August 7, 2017 — BREWER, Maine — Changes in the worldwide fisheries industry have turned live baby American eels into a commodity that can fetch more than $2,000 a pound at the dock, but the big demand and big prices have spawned a black market that wildlife officials say is jeopardizing the species.

Law enforcement authorities have launched a crackdown on unlicensed eel fishermen and illicit sales along the East Coast.

Although not a well-known seafood item like the Maine lobster, wriggling baby eels, or elvers, are a fishery worth many millions of dollars. Elvers often are sold to Asian aquaculture companies to be raised to maturity and sold to the lucrative Japanese restaurant market, where they mainly are served grilled.

But licensed U.S. fishermen complain poaching has become widespread, as prices have climbed in recent years. In response, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies are investigating clandestine harvesting and sales.

Operation Broken Glass, a reference to the eels’ glassy skin, has resulted in 15 guilty pleas for illegal trafficking of about $4 million worth of elvers. Two people are under indictment, and more indictments are expected.

In Maine, more than 400 licensed fishermen make their living fishing for elvers in rivers such as the Penobscot in Brewer and the Passagassawakeag in Belfast every spring. They say law enforcement is vital to protecting the eels and the volatile industry.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WTOP

Will banning trade in fins help endangered sharks? Experts are divided

July 21, 2017 — Dave Ebert pulls up an image on his computer screen. The object in the picture is shaped like an oversize arrowhead, thin, yellowish, and fraying at its edges. It’s a dried shark fin, the key ingredient in the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup. Border officials confiscated it from someone entering the U.S.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Office of Law Enforcement in Burlingame, California, sent the image to Ebert to identify exactly what species of shark the fin came from. If Ebert determines that it belonged to a species listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an agreement to ensure that international trade of certain species doesn’t threaten their survival, the FWS will consider law enforcement action against the fin’s owner.

Ebert knows how hard it is to police this international trade, in hopes that fins that end up in restaurant kitchens have been sustainably fished. Yet he and many other shark conservation experts are skeptical about a bill before Congress, called the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act of 2017. Congressmen Ed Royce (a Republican from California) and Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan (an Independent from the Northern Mariana Islands) introduced the bill on March 9.

If the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act passes, it would terminate the possession and trade of shark fins in all 50 U.S. states and 16 territories. Already 11 states, including California, and three territories have bans in place.

Activists and advocacy groups often cheer these bans. However, many experts say that they are not the best way to help overfished shark populations recover or to stop finning-at-sea, a practice where fishers cut off a shark’s fins and throw the rest of its body overboard, often still alive but doomed. Instead, experts argue that better tracking to determine whether fins come from a stable population and whether the sharks were finned or caught whole, followed by trade restrictions on unsustainably caught fins, represent the best steps toward saving threatened shark species. Some go so far as to argue that a U.S. trade ban may do more harm than good, by crushing a domestic industry that exports sustainably caught fins to markets in Asia and allowing less-sustainable fisheries to take up the slack.

In February 2016, the journal Conservation Biology published a study reporting survey responses from 102 shark researchers from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. The survey asked whether the researchers supported a range of 11 different international policies, including fishing quotas, bans on finning-at-sea, listing species on CITES, and banning the trade in shark fins. Banning the fin trade, though supported by about 60 percent of the researchers, was the second least-popular option. By contrast, more than 90 percent backed the idea of sustainable fishing using strict catch quotas, the most popular choice.

“Full utilization of sharks taken in sustainable fisheries would logically require that some of the fins get used,” one of the scientists wrote in the survey. Another added: “A nationwide ban on shark fishing is unwarranted. There are populations that are capable of supporting a sustainable fishery.”

U.S. shark fisheries are already heavily regulated to protect species that, as top predators, are vital to the health of marine ecosystems. In 1993, the federal government started limiting the species and number of sharks caught. Since then, regulations have become more stringent. In 2000, officials banned shark finning in U.S. waters due to ethical and environmental concerns. Sharks are typically slow to mature and produce few offspring, making it hard to know whether the regulations have helped. However, recently some coastal shark populations have shown signs of recovery. A study published in the journal Fish and Fisheries in February found that most formerly over-exploited shark species along the U.S. east coast and in the Gulf of Mexico were on the rise, following the implementation of careful management in the 1990s.

Read the full story at Mongabay

SEAN HORGAN: Interior Secretary visits, talks lobsters, monuments

June 18, 2017 — It certainly was a happening time in Boston this past weekend, what with the Sail Boston 2017 spectacle out in the harbor and beyond, as well as Dead & Company doing two nights at Fenway Park, Father’s Day and the royal visit by new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Friday.

The visit by Zinke, who was on a four-day New England jaunt that included a tour of the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine, merely ratcheted up the already incendiary debate over the means used to designate the monuments and the value of the monuments themselves.

The Obama administration earlier removed Cashes Ledge, which sits about 80 miles off of Gloucester, from consideration as a possible site for the new national marine monument, so the local debate now centers on the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.

The monument, which encompasses roughly 4,900 square miles in an area south of Cape Cod, was designated last year by the Obama administration through the use of the Antiquities Act.

Now the Trump administration is reviewing all of the national monument designations since 1996 that cover more than 100,000 acres with an eye toward potentially reversing some or all.

On Friday, Zinke met with U.S Fish and Wildlife Service officials and officials from the New England Aquarium about marine wildlife around the monument. He then held a listening session with lobstermen and fishermen about the impact of the monument designation on their industry.

Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental groups held a rally at the Statehouse supporting the monument designations and urging the current administration to retain the protected areas.

This has evolved into an absolute zero-sum game and the divisions in this debate seem almost insurmountable. It’s hard to imagine anyone on either side willing to drop their swords in the name of compromise. They’re just too dug in.

Read the full opinion piece at the Gloucester Times

Interior secretary visits Mass. to review marine monument

June 19, 2017 — Editor’s Note: At the request of the Department of the Interior, Saving Seafood’s National Coalition for Fishing Communities helped facilitate a meeting between Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and over 20 representatives of the commercial fishing industry. The meeting also included staff members from the offices of Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI):

Capping off a four-day New England tour, US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke visited Boston Friday to meet with local scientists and fishermen in his review of the East Coast’s only — and highly controversial — marine monument.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, located approximately 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, covers more than 4,000 square miles. It includes three underwater canyons and four seamounts — mountains rising from the ocean floor —housing dozens of deep-sea corals and several species of endangered whales.

Former president Barack Obama proclaimed the area the country’s first marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean in September 2016. The Antiquities Act, signed into law in 1906 by national parks champion Theodore Roosevelt, grants presidents unilateral authority to establish national monuments on federal land.

But now, under President Trump, the fate of the underwater zone is in doubt.

Trump signed an executive order in April directing Zinke to review all national monuments designated over the past 21 years, calling the practice of using executive authority to designate such monuments an “abusive practice.”

Zinke met with scientists from the New England Aquarium and the Massachusetts marine monument’s superintendent from the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the morning, before heading to a roundtable with local fishermen.

“Right now, I’m in the information collection stage, so everything is on the table,” Zinke said.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe