Saving Seafood

Native fishermen from US claim Canada’s DFO illegally removed lobster traps

October 24, 2023 — Native fishermen in the U.S. state of Maine claim officials with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans recently took unwarranted and unauthorized action against them.

According to Henry Bear – past general manager of the Maliseet Nation’s commercial fishing fleet on Grand Manan Island, and past Maliseet Tribal Representative to the Maine House of Representatives – the DFO took unwarranted action against Maine-based Passamaquoddy and Maliseet fishermen by confiscating lobster traps. The fishermen were lobstering in Canadian waters of the Saint Croix River and of Passamaquoddy Bay – which form part of the border between New Brunswick, Canada and Maine in the U.S. – when the DFO reportedly confiscated the traps.

Read the full article at Seafood Source

Joint US-Canada IUU surveillance operation uncovers more than 3,000 illegal shark fins

October 17, 2023 — A joint operation between the U.S. and Canada recently completed a high seas patrol to detect illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in the North Pacific, and discovered more than 3,000 illegally possessed or stored shark fins.

The joint operation, dubbed Operation North Pacific Guard, ran earlier this year. It was the first time that Canada took the lead in the mission, which has taken place each year since 2019.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Study finds creation of marine protected area in Mexico did not reduce commercial catches

May 31, 2023 — A study recently published in Science Advances providing before and after assessment of the impacts of Mexico’s Revillagigedo National Park claims there have been no negative consequences for the fishing industry.

The study, performed by a team of U.S. and Mexican researchers, found evidence that Mexico’s industrial fishing sector had no economic losses five years after the creation of the national park. Revillagigedo National Park was created in 2017 and protects 148,087 square kilometers of ocean south of the Baja California peninsula in the Pacific Ocean.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

US, Russia eyeing development of Arctic fisheries

April 12, 2023 — The U.S. and Russia are each moving to investigate opening up commercial fisheries in the Arctic, following fish stocks that have shifted northward due to climate change.

Currently, there is a ban on fishing in the Arctic, after nine nations and the European Union signed the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement – officially known as Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean – in 2018. After ratification, the agreement went into effect on 25 June, 2021 and bans fishing in the Central Arctic until at least 2037. The treaty limits fishing in the high seas area of the Arctic to research trips only and can be extended in five-year increments by unanimous consent.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Canada, U.S. fail to reach agreement on quota for shared haddock stock in 2023

January 6, 2023 — Canada and the United States have, for the first time, failed to agree on a shared quota for the transboundary haddock stock on the Georges Bank fishing grounds off southern Nova Scotia.

The two countries have jointly managed the haddock fishery — and two other straddling stocks — since 2000, but were unable to reach a consensus for the 2023 haddock quota.

“While Canada and the U.S. tried to negotiate a shared haddock total allowable catch … our countries will be setting our own total allowable catch independently of the other,” wrote Kathy Cooper-MacDonald, senior advisor, Fisheries Management in Maritimes Region on Dec. 28.

The disagreement centred on the size of the quota cut.

“Everybody agreed that a large reduction was required, but the size of large is not defined,” said Alain d’Entremont, president of Scotia Harvest, operator of a groundfish fleet and processing plant in southwestern Nova Scotia.

He is a Canadian industry representative and co-chair of the Transboundary Management Guidance Committee, which helps negotiate quotas.

“I don’t think we’ve caused irreparable damage to the agreement.”

Read the full article at CBC News

Fisheries minister angling for joint Canada-U.S. management of depleted Atlantic mackerel stock

December 8, 2022 — Canada is lobbying the United States to add Atlantic mackerel to transboundary fish stocks jointly managed by the two countries on the East Coast — but so far has not landed an agreement.

The appeal comes after Canada imposed a total moratorium on all commercial mackerel fishing in 2022  to rebuild the depleted shared stock. The Americans kept fishing, albeit with a reduced quota.

Minister raised concern with U.S. counterpart

“We don’t support the fact that we had closures because the stock was in critical condition and the United States were fishing essentially that same stock,” Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans Minister Joyce Murray told a parliamentary committee Friday.

Murray’s remarks are a more public stance on what has been a quiet effort by Canada to persuade the United States to jointly manage a species both countries say is in trouble.

Murray said she expressed her concerns in a virtual meeting earlier on Dec. 2 with her U.S. counterpart, Richard Spinrad, who leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA.

Murray said Spinrad was sympathetic.

“He wants to invoke the precautionary principle, which in my view, wasn’t happening adequately. We agreed that we share our approach to this and in two months there will be meetings between NOAA and DFO to discuss our assessments and build a better approach to rebuilding mackerel.”

Read the full article at CBC

Wind turbines will affect base of ocean food chain, study predicts

December 7, 2022 — Atmospheric wakes trailing behind offshore wind turbines will change oceanographic and marine ecosystem conditions in the North Sea as more and larger turbines are built there to meet Europe’s energy needs, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature.

The paper by researchers Ute Daewel, Naveed Akhtar, Nils Christiansen and Corinna Schrum of the Institute for Coastal Systems in Germany used numerical modeling to show how wind wakes may change local conditions.

Those systems could be moved by plus or minus 10 percent, not just within turbine arrays but over a wider region, the team wrote. That includes “primary production:” the generation of nutrients at the base of the marine food chain.

The Nov. 24 publication of their paper, “Offshore wind farms are projected to impact primary production and bottom water deoxygenation in the North Sea,” is the latest from scientists investigating how larger-scale offshore wind projects may alter ocean conditions and ecosystems.

As in Europe, U.S. researchers too are looking at how wind wake and ocean currents flowing for miles behind turbines will change the seasonal stratification of cooler water close to the bottom, peaking in summer and turning over in fall and spring.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

China fishing fleet defied U.S. in standoff on the high seas

November 1, 2022 — This summer, as China fired missiles into the sea off Taiwan to protest House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island, a much different kind of geopolitical standoff was taking shape in another corner of the Pacific Ocean.

Thousands of miles away, a heavily-armed U.S. Coast Guard cutter sailed up to a fleet of a few hundred Chinese squid-fishing boats not far from Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. Its mission: inspect the vessels for any signs of illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing.

Boarding ships on the high seas is a perfectly legal if little-used tool available to any sea power as part of the collective effort to protect the oceans’ threatened fish stocks.

But in this case, the Chinese captains of several fishing boats did something unexpected. Three vessels sped away, one turning aggressively 90 degrees toward the Coast Guard cutter James, forcing the American vessel to take evasive action to avoid being rammed.

“For the most part they wanted to avoid us,” said Coast Guard Lt. Hunter Stowes, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer on the James. “But we were able to maneuver effectively so that we were safe the entire time.”

Still, the high-seas confrontation represented a potentially dangerous breach of international maritime protocol, one the U.S. sees as a troubling precedent since it happened on the Coast Guard’s first-ever mission to counter illegal fishing in the eastern Pacific.

Read the full article at the Associated Press