Saving Seafood

NORTH CAROLINA: North Carolina weighs habitat protections, fishing licenses

August 19, 2026 — North Carolina fisheries managers will consider advancing new coastal habitat protections and setting the number of commercial fishing licenses available for the coming year at the Marine Fisheries Commission meeting on August 19-20 in Raleigh.

Commissioners are scheduled to vote on whether to release a proposed 2026 amendment to the state’s Coastal Habitat Protection Plan for public and advisory committee review. The action would not adopt the plan or create new fishing restrictions but could set the stage for a broader habitat rulemaking process beginning in 2027, according to the Island Free Press.

The draft amendment calls for further consideration of how fishing gear and other activities affect submerged aquatic vegetation, or underwater grass beds, as well as deep-water oyster recovery areas. Any regulations developed through that process would require additional commission approval and public review.

North Carolina’s coastal waters have historically supported nearly 200,000 acres of submerged aquatic vegetation, which provides spawning, nursery, and feeding habitat for commercial and recreationally important species. The draft says those grass beds are declining by more than 1 percent annually as water clarity, warming temperatures, and sea-level rise affect coastal waters.

The proposed habitat work would also overlap with upcoming reviews of the state’s shrimp and bay scallop fishery management plans. Marine Fisheries staff are recommending delaying the bay scallop review until 2027 so it can move forward alongside the shrimp review and habitat rule development.

If the amendment is released for review, the commission would consider comments from the public and advisory committees before the plan returns for possible final action in November.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MAINE: They wanted to restore wild oyster reefs to the Maine coast. Could it be done?

August 19, 2026 — A team in Phippsburg has been working for nearly a decade to get wild oysters to regenerate in Maine’s cold, turbulent waters.

On a sticky August morning in Phippsburg, Cait Cleaver, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Colby College, crouched along a section of rocky shoreline that framed a circular expanse of deep green seawater. She gently brushed aside strands of thick seaweed to reveal a large oyster nestled between two boulders.

“We’ve got 50 percent algae cover, acorn barnacles, and 100 percent rock,” Cleaver reported to her summer intern. “And we’ve got one live 55-millimeter American oyster!”

Less than three inches long, the oyster didn’t look like much. But it was evidence of something Cleaver and her team had been looking for for years: a wild oyster that had successfully grown from free-floating larva and survived the winter.

For the past seven years, Cleaver has helped run The Basin Oyster Project, a collaboration initially started by The Nature Conservancy. The project’s long-term goal is to restore wild oysters up and down the Maine coast. More immediately, that means getting oysters to survive and spawn on their own in the Basin, a deep, protected saltwater inlet on the New Meadows River, creating a self-sustaining reef.

Wild oysters were once prevalent along the coast of Maine, but had largely disappeared by the early 1900s, victims of overharvesting by European settlers, pollution and rising sea levels, which brought in cold water and predators. The state has been trying to re-establish oyster populations in Maine since the late 1940s, but they have struggled to take hold at scale.

Read the full article at the Maine Monitor

ALABAMA: ‘A thousand cuts’: What’s lost when we lose Alabama coastal marshes?

August 17, 2026 — “No marsh, no seafood.”

That’s the old adage about the impact of losing marsh habitat, said Blair Morrison, science and monitoring program lead with the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program.

While most Alabama residents think of marshes as providing crucial habitat for shrimp, crabs, red snapper and other culturally significant foods, marshes provide a wider suite of services for the coast and the state at large that would be sorely missed if marshes were gone.

“We can’t directly attribute anything to marsh loss directly,” Morrison said, “but it is one of those cumulative effects of, the more marsh that you lose, you’re more likely to see certain issues with water quality, nutrient impairment, loss of habitat and species. It is very much kind of an intertangled web of, if you lose habitat, you’re losing an entire suite of services.”

Read the full article at AL.com

MARYLAND: Governor Wes Moore announces state surpassed pollution reduction goals under Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement

August 13, 2026. — Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced the state has successfully met or surpassed nearly all of its pollution reduction targets set under the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement.

Based on the most recent information from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s pollution model, Maryland achieved 100 percent of its sediment reduction goal. Additionally, the model said the state completed its phosphorus reduction goal and 99 percent of the nitrogen reduction goal from 2009 to 2025. Moore said the model was updated this year based on data from 2025.

Read the full article at CoastTV

NYS teachers take on microplastics with snail-inspired robot

August 11, 2026 — On a rainy morning in late July, Professor Sunny Jung asked a group of New York state schoolteachers to consider the biology of the aquatic snail.

With only one foot, the snail can move and feed, and they do it with an efficient undulating motion that can draw in particles from a distance 10 times greater than their body length.

“They are very efficient at pulling in water from the surface without sucking in the bulk fluid,” said Jung, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, at a workshop for New York state teachers offered by a team of researchers and staff at Cornell, New York Sea Grant (NYSG), Princeton University and the University of Michigan. Now in its second year, the program gives teachers the tools to apply Cornell research in their classrooms, with lesson plans and hands-on materials they can share with their learners.

The workshop’s lessons center on the application of Jung’s research to a problem of increasing concern: the proliferation of microplastics in waterways. Inspired by the undulating movement of the snail, Jung designed a simple robotic system that can pull surface water in and filter microplastics out. With a team of collaborators, the group put the mechanism on a robot they named Mollusca and created both lab-scale prototypes and a build-your-own version for schools.

As Jung presented the research, the wires, circuit boards, motors and many 3D-printed components of the Mollusca robots lay in disassembled piles on a back table. Before day’s end, the teachers would build the robots, test them in a kiddie pool filled with small pieces of plastic called nurdles, and troubleshoot just like students, just like researchers, turning the conference room in Upson Hall into a makeshift robotics lab.

“The Sea Grant trainings are the best I’ve ever done,” said Emily Colletta, head of the gifted and talented program at North Tonawanda Intermediate School in North Tonawanda, New York, who was attending the workshop for the second time. “They’re super interactive, and it’s always local, which makes it easier to integrate and for the kids to benefit. And they always provide us with hands-on materials we can take back to our classrooms. It’s pretty special.”

Read the full article at the Cornell Chronicle

Deep Diving and Innovation to Restore the Gulf’s Mesophotic Corals

July 23, 2026 — Deep in the Gulf of America lies a vital but little-known habitat. In the “mesophotic” (middle light) zone are coral ecosystems that are essential to the Gulf’s food web. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill injured extensive areas of this delicate environment. Today, scientists across federal agencies and partner organizations are working together to restore these foundational habitats.

In the spring of 2026, a mission on board NOAA Ship Nancy Foster set out to achieve ambitious restoration goals. The team focused on planting propagated corals of species Swiftia exserta, Muricea pendula, and Thesea nivea, and collecting samples to better understand the seafloor and local water quality. Some of the corals were planted on new dome-shaped concrete structures. They were specially designed by Marine Applied Research and Exploration to support coral growth and provide habitat for other small marine animals.

New Innovations to Streamline Outplanting

Getting the corals safely down to the bottom is a challenge. In the past, scientists used “coral elevators.” These large, weighted platforms can be lowered from the ship to the seafloor where a remotely operated vehicle can then move the corals into place. However, these were cumbersome to maneuver, and met significant resistance as they moved through the water. Plus, it’s hard for an ROV, or remotely operated vehicle, to precisely place individual coral fragments on the new dome structures. This challenge called for a new way to transport the corals from the surface down to the bottom, and required the use of human divers to plant them precisely in their intended place.

This mission saw the debut of the “coral torpedo,” an invention by Chris Gardner, fisheries biologist with NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center. Designed with a streamlined shape, it travels quickly through the water column. It acts much like the pneumatic tubes at a drive-through bank teller window to deliver precious coral cargo to the seafloor efficiently and safely.

“We were looking for a way to rapidly get corals to the bottom without a lot of water mixing,” explains Gardner. “The key is to land them in a very precise location. The corals coming from the lab have little bases on them, so we can just pop them in the tube, then at depth the divers have it set up like a little coral buffet that they can pull from and place on the seafloor. This was definitely a prototype, and I have to say it worked even better than expected.”

The new equipment worked flawlessly—safely delivering the delicate specimens down to the divers below. There, the divers made quick work of placing these corals at the designated restoration site.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

MASSCHUSETTS: Massachusetts shellfish harvesters to get financial relief fund after Haverhill sewage overflow

July 13, 2026 — Massachusetts shellfish harvesters who were not able to work for nearly two weeks because of a sewage overflow that impacted the Merrimack River and parts of the North Shore will be eligible for some state financial support.

The ruptured pipe in Haverhill was discovered during the night of June 26 following a storm, with a second break found about 100 yards farther along the pipe the next day. Before the overflow stopped, officials estimated that up to 10 million gallons of wastewater were entering the Merrimack River each day.

State officials closed the fisheries across several communities on June 29 and began testing water quality in the region. After seeing water quality improvements, samples of shellfish meats were tested for safety, and those came back negative on July 9.

Read the full article at WCVB

NORTH CAROLINA: Rains keeping shellfishing waters closed

November 9, 2015 — SOUTHEASTERN N.C. — For 61 years parishioners of Dixon Chapel United Methodist Church in Varnamtown have gathered for an oyster roast on the first Saturday in November. But the 62nd roast won’t happen until after the holidays, thanks to heavy rains that have closed local waters to shellfish harvest.

For much of the last month, nearby Lockwoods Folly Inlet has been closed indefinitely — a post on the church’s Facebook page tells members that the roast might be rescheduled around the end of oyster season early next year. Even before the season opened Oct. 15, the threat of pollution from heavy rains has kept shellfish harvesters waiting throughout Southeastern North Carolina.

As soaking rains wash stormwater runoff into the Cape Fear River and Intracoastal Waterway, the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries issues the closures as a precautionary measure. An oyster filters about 50 gallons of water per day, and if that water is contaminated with fecal matter or pollutants from roadways, it’s likely to end up in the shellfish.

Closures are still in effect for some waters from the state line to Wrightsville Beach, and Patti Fowler, chief of the division’s Shellfish Sanitation and Water Quality section, said more rain in the forecast means its unclear how soon fishermen can get back to the oyster beds.

Read the full story at StarNews