Saving Seafood

Researchers help salmon farmers confront threat to their industry

February 3, 2017 — It’s a mystery that has puzzled University of Maine assistant professor of marine biology and aquaculture Heather Hamlin and the salmon farming industry in New England: the decline in egg survival.

The survival rate of fertilized salmon eggs had been as high as 80 percent. But beginning in 2000, salmon embryos began dying in large numbers and the average survival rate fell to around 50 percent.

Previous studies have shown that a range of factors can negatively impact egg quality and production, including nutrition, stress, temperature and the endocrine status of the female. Until recently, businesses such as New Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture, which runs farming operations at several sites in Maine, knew little about why some of its eggs were dying and others were surviving, despite having come from same strain females, cultured under similar conditions.

Now a UMaine study has found that two hormones may play significant roles in achieving an 80 percent embryo survival rate. Hamlin and LeeAnne Thayer, a UMaine Ph.D. candidate in marine sciences, wrote about their findings in the journal Aquaculture Research.

Read the full story at Phys.org

Scientists, fishermen can set the stage for a new way to protect the Gulf of Maine

January 23, 2017 — There’s long been an undercurrent of mistrust between fishermen who make their livelihoods from the Gulf of Maine and the scientists whose surveys and calculations determine the amount of fish they can catch.

That, in part, is because it can seem as if fishermen and scientists are talking about two different Gulfs of Maine when they discuss the size of the cod population.

Scientists document a groundfish stock in perpetual decline with an outlook that doesn’t seem to have changed much in response to increasingly restrictive limits on the amount fishermen can catch. They note a species that has struggled to recover after more than a century of overfishing and now faces the added challenge of rebuilding in an area of the ocean that’s warming faster than 99 percent of the rest of the world’s oceans. Indeed, researchers from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine and elsewhere have found that warming waters reduce the number of new cod produced by spawning females and reduce the likelihood that young fish will survive to adulthood.

Fishermen, meanwhile, report something different.

“This is uncalled for,” Joseph Orlando, a cod fisherman who fishes off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, told NPR in 2014 after regulators cut the Gulf of Maine cod fishing season short that year. “There’s more codfish out there. There’s always been.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Eel farmer wants to keep Maine’s wriggly gold close to home

December 1, 2016 — SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — Sara Rademaker wants to give the East Coast’s most valuable eels a much shorter commute from river to sushi roll.

Baby eels, also called elvers, are at the center of a lucrative business in Maine, which is home to the only large-scale fishing operation for them in the country. Fishermen sold them for more than $2,000 per pound last year, and they typically are sent as seed stock to Asian aquaculture companies so they can be raised to maturity and processed into sushi and other food products.

But Rademaker, a Maine aquaculture farmer, is looking to change all that and keep more of the state’s valuable baby eels closer to home. She’s operating a small eel farming operation in South Bristol, Maine, that raises the elvers so they can be sold live and fully grown to local restaurants.

Rademaker launched American Unagi in 2014 and sold her first eels to Maine sushi restaurants this summer. She is hoping to scale up production in the coming years.

“The local food movement is shifting toward seafood,” she said. “Having products that are produced local, that have traceability, that can show they are sustainable is going to be important.”

Eel aquaculture in America is underdeveloped, as most of the business takes place in Asia and Europe. Rademaker buys her elvers locally from purchasers who acquire them from Maine fishermen, and she is raising her eels at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center. She said she expects to sell more than 2,000 pounds of the eels within two years.

Maine is one of only two states with an elver fishery; South Carolina’s fishery is much smaller.

Rademaker has set an ambitious goal. America’s entire wild-caught eel fishery, which is mostly centered around Maryland, only yields between 800,000 and a million pounds of eels per year. Wild-caught older eels, which make up most of the fishery, are worth much less than the baby eels Maine fishermen take from rivers and streams.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Herald & Review

MAINE: This lobsterman’s boat was sunk 3 times in 7 weeks. He says he knows who did it.

October 17th, 2016 — Tony Hooper, who has lobstered out of area harbors on and off for years, says he knows who sank his 35-foot lobster boat, Liberty, three times in seven weeks: a fellow fisherman operating out of Port Clyde, one of three villages that constitute this peninsular town that extends 15 miles south of Rockland.

The fisherman, Hooper alleges, turned a routine dispute over the placement of lobster traps into an ongoing drama that’s turned heads up and down the Maine coast. “The guy has a personal grudge against me, and I don’t know why, because I’ve never done anything to the guy,” Hooper says. “He’s just a young, arrogant kid who didn’t like it when I called him out for messing with my traps.”

Boat sinkings are rare in the Maine lobster fishing community, but when they occur they often result from disputes between lobstermen from different harbors over fishing turf. But sinking the same lobsterman’s boat three times in quick succession – once on the very night it was repaired and put back on its mooring – is extremely rare.

“I’ve never heard of such a case ever,” says James Acheson, a University of Maine anthropologist who for 40 years has studied the ways lobstermen defend their territories and wrote the seminal book on the subject, “The Lobster Gangs of Maine.” “I would emphasize that this is very, very unusual and very serious, and no fooling matter. There’s real hate behind this.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald 

With shellfish bait in short supply, alternative being tested

September 26th, 2016 — Lobster and crab fishermen have baited traps with dead herring for generations, but an effort to find a synthetic substitute for forage fish is nearing fruition just as the little fish are in short supply, threatening livelihoods in a lucrative industry.

With about $1 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, a small company has developed “OrganoBait,” a hockey puck-shaped product packed with an artificial attractant crabs and lobsters love.

Commercial fishermen have long experimented with alternative baits. They have tried other fish species, processed slabs of horseshoe crab, even cow hide and pigs feet. Some products remain on the market; many have gone quickly.

No one has made commercially successful synthetic bait, and even animal-based alternatives don’t always gain market acceptance, said Bob Bayer, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Maine who studies lobsters and has worked on attractants for 30 years.

“If somebody comes up with a good one, it will be used,” Bayer said. “If it’s effective and cost-effective.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Providence Journal 

Warming waters threaten young lobsters, study finds

SOUTH BRISTOL, Maine — The Gulf of Maine’s lobster population, which has boomed even as climate change and overfishing have hurt other commercial species, could suffer if water temperatures keep rising, according to a University of Maine study.

The study suggests that, as the Gulf of Maine continues to grow warmer, the state’s $495 million lobster industry — by far the most valuable commercial fishery in Maine — could face the same kind of population decline that has affected urchins, scallops, groundfish and shrimp. Overfishing greatly reduced harvests for many of these species, but warming waters have been identified as an impediment to recovery.

The new lobster study, conducted by UMaine’s Darling Marine Center and by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, indicates that larvae reared in 66-degree water had a distinctly higher mortality rate than those cultivated in the water 5 degrees cooler, the temperature now typical in the western Gulf of Maine. Water temperatures in the western Gulf of Maine are expected to rise 5 degrees by 2100.

The study looked only at larval lobsters, which spend all their time floating, and not at juveniles or older lobsters that live on the ocean floor.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Invasive green crabs are scuttling from dilemma to delicacy

August 15, 2016 — A marine biologist, an art conservator and a group of fishermen from Georgetown are trying to use traditional Venetian fishing methods to turn the invasive green crab into a gourmet dish known in Italy as moleche.

Moleche is the name of the young, soft-shelled Venetian crabs that are caught, sorted and held in floating cages and harvested daily, right after they shed their hard outer shell. They are dipped in milk or egg, floured and fried, served up six or eight at a time for about two dozen euro in upscale eateries across the Veneto region of Italy.

Their nearly identical American cousins are reviled in Maine for decimating clam flats and threatening the state’s $23 million industry, as well as preying on other mollusks such as mussels and scallops. They can be caught with nets or traps, including the shrimp traps that now lie fallow here in Maine.

The real art of the moleche (moe-le-che) fishery, however, is about spotting the subtle signs of a molt about to happen in time to catch them before they hide or are eaten by a predator, including their fellow crabs.

Scientists at the University of Maine at Machias had studied the moleche possibility of the green crabs once before, and concluded the crabs did not give any external clues to their molts and thus could not be harvested commercially. But as the invasion marched on, and efforts to eradicate the crab failed, scientists on Prince Edward Island decided to give it a second look. So did marine biologist Marissa McMahan, a Northeastern University Ph.D. candidate from a Georgetown lobstering family who lives in Phippsburg.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

NOAA recommends millions in grants to study salmon, cod, shrimp, lobster

June 14, 2016 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced its support for more than USD 11 million (EUR 9.8 million) in recommended grants to study or improve the nation’s fisheries as part of its Saltonstall-Kennedy grant competition.

The grants, which still must be approved by the NOAA Grants Management Division and the Department of Commerce’s Financial Assistance Law Division, and are contingent upon adequate funding availability, include projects in seven categories: aquaculture, fishery data collection, bycatch reduction, climate change adaptation, marketing, socio-economic research and territorial science.

All areas of the United States, including overseas territories, have projects that have been recommended.

In Alaska, they include a proposed University of Alaska, Fairbanks study of halibut bycatch management (USD 297,995, EUR 264,877) and an Alaska Department of Fish and Game analysis of pink salmon productivity (USD 249,998, EUR 222,222).

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com

Changing ecosystem, disease challenge lobster industry

June 14, 2016 — In the past decade, the Gulf of Maine has seen an increase in the number of lobsters and a higher demand for lobsters in international markets, which have translated into a boom for Maine’s lobster industry. Recently, however, there have been concerns about what effect a changing climate and disease threats may have on the lobster population off the coast of the state.

As water temperatures rose in the Atlantic off the coast of southern New England and Maine, lobster landings off the coast of Maine rose from under 40 million pounds in 1981 to 140 million in 2013, according to data from Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

By contrast, landings in southern New England went from just over 20 million pounds in 1997, to less than 5 million pounds in 2013.

That change in population is both a boon and a benefit to the lobster economy Down East.

“In New England, we’re sort of straddling the adverse and the positive effects, if you will, of a warming climate,” said Richard Wahle, a marine researcher at the University of Maine. “The fishery has all but collapsed in southern New England, whereas not too much farther north, just into the Gulf of Maine, we’re seeing record abundance of lobsters.

“Things have just really taken off in the past 10-15 years” in the eastern part of Maine, Wahle continued.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Sara Rademaker is letting little eels get big in Maine

May 31, 2016 — SOUTH BRISTOL, Maine — “They are like little torpedoes,” Sara Rademaker says, looking down at a tank full of year-old eels in a feeding frenzy.

Her tone is fond, almost as if the eels wiggling in and out of a submerged laundry basket were a basket of lively kittens, but this is all business. Rademaker is doing what no one has tried to do in Maine before – grow out elvers to eels for the commercial food market.

Rademaker is a young woman, but has 12 years of farming and aquaculture experience. A graduate of Auburn University in Alabama, she’s worked with subsistence farmers in Uganda as part of a U.S. AID project and farmed tilapia in Ghana. She’s taught middle school students how to farm tilapia and lettuces.

Three years ago she began studying European and Asian systems for growing elvers into eels in contained areas, asking herself the question, why not here in Maine, the biggest source of American baby glass eels in the country?

Although she’s just starting her third year developing her eel aquaculture system, she’s gearing up to bring her first eels to market this summer, with plans to tap into the local sushi market to begin with.

“She’s already so far ahead of anyone else in the state,” says Dana Morse, a UMaine Cooperative Extension associate professor and researcher based at the Darling Marine Center. “It’s impressive.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald