Saving Seafood

Right whale protections could force change for lobster industry

October 3, 2018 — In the second week of October, the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team will meet in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. to discuss what efforts are necessary to stop the deaths of right whales, one of the most endangered species on the planet.

Those efforts will likely include some restrictions on various North Atlantic fisheries that use roped gear, such as the New England lobster fishery. A string of recent whale deaths has been linked to entanglement in fishing gear, such as one whale found floating near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on 27 August.

Those entanglement deaths have already pushed regulators towards requiring any roped lobster gear to be removed from areas that right whales are known to be present, with month-long fishery bans proposed for certain areas. The threat has also led to some companies trying to innovate ropeless lobster gear in order to keep the lobster fishery working while roped gear is banned.

The need for action is dire, according to a recent report by NOAA. While the right whale had been in recovery, the series of recent deaths has put that recovery in question.

“At the current rate of decline, all recovery achieved in the population over the past three decades will be lost by 2029,” the NOAA report said.

In Maine, the lobster industry was recently awarded a grant to gather data on the affect of lobster gear on right whales. Finding out what impact Maine’s lobster industry has would be of vital importance to the states economy. In 2017, the state took in USD 434 million (EUR 376 million) in 2017, and generated another USD 1 billion (EUR 867 million) in post-dock revenue.

The lobster industry in Maine has been confident that the entanglements haven’t been caused by their gear. None of the whale deaths in 2017 could be directly attributed to lobster gear.

According to the Portland Press Herald, the state has proposed putting a mark unique to Maine on all gear used by lobstermen from the state so that regulators can rule out Maine fishermen from entanglements.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

‘The Wave Of The Future Is Breaking, Right Here In Maine’ – Aquaculture And Maine Entrepreneurs

October 2, 2018 — Maine’s 21st century saltwater farmers are using new techniques and technology to produce scallops, oysters, salmon and eels — to name just a few. All this week Maine Public Radio is profiling innovators who want to take Maine’s aquaculture industry to the next level.

Maine Public reporter Fred Bever has spent some time with these entrepreneurs, reporting for our series, “Aquaculture’s Next Wave.” He joined Nora Flaherty on Maine Things Considered to discuss the project.

Flaherty: Fred, you’ve been doing a lot of reporting on this. What’s the bottom line?

Bever: The bottom line is that Maine fishermen are increasingly turning to farming fish and shellfish as a hedge against uncertainty about the wild fisheries.

Now, is that because the Gulf of Maine is warming so fast? Is it overfishing?

It’s both, and there are other factors, but the Gulf is warming faster than most saltwater bodies on the planet, which is disrupting ecosystems and wild-caught harvests. The herring fishery is recently in trouble — we’ve seen a lot about that in the news lately — but cod, urchin, Maine shrimp, they’re all restricted now or completely off-limits.

But the warmer waters have been good for lobster populations here and for the lobster industry, right?

Incredibly good, we’ve seen record hauls this decade. But an appreciable number of lobstermen are not taking that for granted. Lobster populations are slowly moving north and east, herring for bait are an issue now, and the plight of the North Atlantic right whale threatens to force expensive, and maybe prohibitive, gear changes by fishermen.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Conflicting proposals will greet regulators looking at right whale protections

October 2, 2018 — To save the endangered right whale, advocates are proposing major changes that would upend the New England lobster fishery.

Proposals to close the fishery in the western Gulf of Maine south of Cape Elizabeth during April, cut the number of seabed-to-surface lines that can entangle whales, and become a ropeless fishery by 2020 are among the ideas that will be discussed next week in Providence, Rhode Island, by the team of scientists, fishing groups and animal rights activists tasked with saving the right whale from extinction.

The Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team will spend the week reviewing seven whale protection proposals and a dire new technical report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that outlines the grim recovery challenges facing the right whale, whose population has been in decline for eight years. A new population estimate is due out later this year, but scientists believe that fewer than 450 right whales remain.

The report underscores the threat to a species that has been on the brink of extinction before, like when whalers hunted them down to double digits a century ago.

“At the current rate of decline, all recovery achieved in the population over the past three decades will be lost by 2029,” the NOAA report said.

Read the full story at the Sun Journal

Humpback whale sightings around Hawaii declining

October 1, 2018 — Whale researchers are spotting a trend in the Hawaiian Islands — a decline in humpback whale sightings.

Not only are there fewer sightings, fewer male Hawaiian humpback whales have been recorded singing, and the number of mother-calf pairs has been diminishing for the past three seasons, according to the researchers. While the trend has been consistent over the past three years, the scientists refrained from sounding an alarm about the whales disappearing as a new season is around the corner.

“They’re not all gone,” said Ed Lyman, who is with the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. “We are seeing indications of fewer whales near the islands where our effort is … There are still plenty of whales out there.”

The peak of the season is usually between January and March, when thousands of humpback whales migrate from Alaska to Hawaii to mate, calve and nurse their young, although they can be spotted in November or earlier, and stay as late as May.

Lyman, a researcher and the sanctuary’s whale entanglement response coordinator, said for him, the first signs of the decline were in late December 2015.

That’s when he got calls from whale-watching tour operators on Hawaii island, inquiring about their late arrival. Lyman reached out to tour operators on other islands, as well, and found them saying the same thing — the whales were late, and there were fewer sightings. He got the same reports from contacts in Mexico.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser

 

NOAA Memorandum on Whales Lays Basis for Much Stricter Regulation of Trap Fisheries

September 28, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A recent technical memorandum from NOAA on right whale recovery in 2018 could push the agency to require new limits on trap fishing technology.

In short, the memorandum says that the measures adopted to reduce the number of rope lines in the water have backfired.

Although the number of lines to individual buoys have been reduced, the remaining trawl strings have more traps and stronger rope.

The result is that whales are suffering more for entanglements than they were before the new rules were introduced.

The memorandum says that “stronger rope contributed to an increase in the severity of entanglements.”

“Knowlton et al.(2012) showed that nearly 85% of right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once, 59% at least twice, and 26% of the regularly seen animals are entangled annually. These findings represent a continued increase in the percentage of whales encountering and entangling in gear, which grew from to 61.5% in 1995 (Hamilton et al. 1998), to 75.6% in 2002.”

“Rough estimates are that approximately 622,000 vertical lines are deployed from fishing gear in U.S. waters from Georgia to the Gulf of Maine. Notably until spring of 2018, very few protections for right whales were in place in Canadian waters. In comparison to recent decades, more right whales now spend significantly more time in more northern waters and swim through extensive pot fishery zones around Nova Scotia and into the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence (Daoust et al. 2018).

Taken together, these fisheries exceed an estimated 1 million vertical lines (100,000 km) deployed throughout right whale migratory routes, calving, and foraging areas.”

“Each vertical line out there has some potential to cause an entanglement. With a 26% annual entanglement rate in a population of just over 400 animals, this translates to about 100 entanglements per year.”

The problem is that sub-lethal entanglements can impact the reproductive success of the population.

“While serious injuries represent 1.2% of all entanglements, there are often sublethal costs to less severe entanglements. Should an entanglement occur but the female somehow disentangles and recovers, it still has the potential to reset the clock for this “capital” breeder. She now has to spend several years acquiring sufficient resources to get pregnant and carry a calf to term, the probability of a subsequent entanglement is fairly high, and this will create a negative feedback loop over time, where the interval between calving becomes longer. This is certainly a contributing factor in the longer calving interval for females, which has now grown from 4 to 10 years.

The implication of this technical report is that substantial reductions in entanglements will be necessary if the long term decline in the population is to be reversed, and under the endangered species act, NOAA will be required to evaluate any actions that increase harm or fail to mitigate harm to the right whale population.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.

 

California bans giant ocean fishing nets blamed for killing sea turtles, whales

September 28, 2018 — Ending years of controversy and debate, Gov. Jerry Brown late Thursday signed a new law phasing out the use of giant ocean fishing nets used to catch swordfish, but blamed for accidentally killing sea turtles, dolphins and other sea creatures.

The bill, SB 1017 by state Sen. Ben Allen, D-Redondo Beach, requires the state to set up a program to buy back nets and fishing permits from commercial fishermen who work in the state’s drift gill net fishery.

The nets — giant nylon curtains that can stretch one mile long and extend 100 feet underwater — are used mostly by fishermen between San Diego and Big Sur. Although they are intended to catch swordfish, thresher shark and opah, studies have shown that they entangle dozens of other marine species, including whales, dolphins, sea lions and sea turtles, fish and sharks. Those animals, known as bycatch, are often thrown back overboard, injured or dead.

“There is no longer room in our oceans for any fishery that throws away more than it keeps,” said Susan Murray, deputy vice president for Oceana, an environmental group with offices in Monterey that pushed for the new law.

Read the full story at Mercury News

 

Unprecedented experiment with Canadian military provides new insights on right whales

September 27, 2018 — North Atlantic right whales began making headlines the summer of 2017 when a record number of the whales died after getting tangled in fishing gear or hit by ships.

Before the die-off and since, Dalhousie researchers have collaborated with a number of partners in Canada and the United States to gain as much insight as possible on the endangered species. After a significant number of the whales began deserting other habitats off the coast of Nova Scotia in favour of a location in the southern region of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, experts recognized the lack of scientific evidence required to best inform marine management measures in this newly identified habitat.

That’s why members of the Whale Habitat and Listening Experiment (WHaLE) team in Dalhousie’s Department of Oceanography have been working tirelessly to fill the knowledge gap. In one experiment this past summer, they helped bring together a number of federal agencies in an effort to collect the most multi-faceted dataset on the North Atlantic right whales yet.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Washington Governor’s task force releases draft plan to save local orcas

September 26, 2018 — A state organization dedicated to protecting the area’s endangered orcas is one step closer to fulfilling its mission.

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee’s Southern Resident Killer Whale Task Force released a draft plan on Sept. 24. The public can comment on the report until midnight, Oct. 7 at governor.wa.gov/orcareport. Members will review comments at their Oct. 17-18 meetings and their final plan is due by Nov. 16.

The draft plan states that the organization’s “goal is to ensure the ecosystem is healthy and resilient enough to support a thriving Southern resident orca population.” Members are coordinating with an orca recovery plan created by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2008, which strives to create an average population growth rate of 2.3 percent per year for 28 years.

Read the full story at The San Juan Journal

 

Fishing regulators approve measures to conserve Atlantic herring

September 26, 2018 — New England fishing regulators on Tuesday approved two measures aimed at conserving the dwindling Atlantic herring stock.

The New England Fishery Management Council approved a rule that “establishes a long-term policy that will guide the council in setting catch limits into the future” at a meeting in Plymouth.

Such an option will result in more herring being left in the water “to serve as forage and be part of the overall ecosystem,” according to the council. Under that proposal, catch limits can be adjusted based on new information.

Additionally, the council approved a measure aimed at preventing midwater trawlers from fishing too close to shore for herring. The boats are banned from fishing within 12 miles of shore, an area stretching from the Canadian border through Rhode Island, that includes areas east and southeast of Cape Cod, according to the council.

Recent surveys have found that the Atlantic herring population in the Gulf of Maine is at risk of collapse. The fish provide a crucial source of food to species that include cod, striped bass, and humpback whales.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

Right Whale Rules May Have Worsened Fishing Gear Entanglements

September 26, 2018 — A report by federal scientists says it’s time for a new look at regulations that aim to protect the endangered North American right whale — because they aren’t working and may have made things worse.

Over the last decade, regulators required lobstermen to change their gear and reduce the overall number of traplines in U.S. waters. But the new 30-page National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration technical memo finds that a 2015 rule requiring fewer trap lines in the water — with more traps per line in some areas — meant lobstermen had to use stronger lines to accommodate the increased loads. The tougher rope may have unintentionally contributed to an increase in the severity of potentially deadly entanglements with right whales.

They also find that as lobster seek cooler waters farther offshore, lobstermen are following them, right into likely whale travel lanes. Meanwhile, right whales are changing their patterns, too, swimming longer distances to forage for increasingly unpredictable prey species.

Read the full story at Maine Public