Saving Seafood

NOAA publishes global list of fisheries and their risks to marine mammals

April 3, 2018 — The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published the first list of foreign fisheries, detailing the risks that commercial fishing around the world pose to marine mammals.

“The [List of Foreign Fisheries] is an important milestone because it provides the global community a view into the marine mammal bycatch levels of commercially relevant fisheries,” according to a statement published on the NOAA Fisheries website.

“In addition, it offers us a better understanding of the impacts of marine mammal bycatch, an improvement of tools and scientific approaches to mitigating those impacts, and establishes a new level of international cooperation in achieving these objectives,” the statement says.

The register is a step toward meeting specific requirements in the Marine Mammal Protection Act on the sources of fish imported into the U.S. It includes nearly 4,000 fisheries across some 135 countries. These fisheries have until 2022 to demonstrate that the methods they use to catch fish, as well as other marine animals such as coral, crabs, lobsters and shellfish, either aren’t much of a danger to marine mammals, or they employ comparable methods and mitigation measures to similar operations in the United States.

Fishing nets can exact a high toll on animals that fishers don’t intend to catch. Nets themselves can trap dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea lions as bycatch. In Mexico, a fishery targeting the totoaba for its swim bladders that fetch high prices in Asian markets has decimated the tiny porpoise known as the vaquita (Phocoena sinus). Perhaps as few as 12 remain in the wild.

The lines from traps, pots and nets can also ensnare even the largest animals in the ocean. Recent research has shown that almost every one of the estimated remaining 451 North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) either is toting errant fishing equipment around or it bears the scars of entanglements with gear. These ropes can cause injuries to right whales and other animals that can lead to infection or death. And towing pieces of gear that can be longer than the whale’s body causes what scientists call “parasitic” drag that can interfere with the ability to find food.

Read the full story at Mongabay

 

John Bullard: Lobster industry must lead on right whales

April 2, 2018 — A number of events over the past two weeks have probably gotten the full attention of the US lobster industry and increased pressure for it to take the lead in fighting the potential extinction of the North Atlantic right whale.

In response to the deaths of the endangered whale, including 12 in Canada last year, Canada has imposed new restrictions on ship speeds and snow crab fishing, as well as earmarked $1 million more annually to help free marine mammals from fishing gear.

In addition, survey teams on Saturday ended their aerial search for right whale calves off the southeastern US coast. For the first time since the spotters began their survey, in 1989, they recorded zero births this calving season. Last year only five births were recorded, well below what used to be the average of 15 per year. Last year there were 17 confirmed right whale deaths. Already this year, a 10-year-old female, who was just entering her breeding years, died after becoming entangled in fishing gear. She was discovered off Virginia.

There are only about 450 North Atlantic right whales, including about 100 breeding females. Females used to give birth every three to four years. Now they give birth only every eight years, if at all. Photographic evidence suggests that about 85 percent of right whales show signs of entanglement in fishing gear, which affects the whale’s fitness and is likely one of the reasons for the longer breeding cycle.

The $669 million lobster industry must assume a leadership role in solving a problem that it bears significant responsibility for creating. Entanglements occur in other fixed-gear fisheries, but the number of lobster trawls in the ocean swamps the other fisheries.

Read the full opinion piece at the Boston Globe

 

Canada issues safeguards to protect right whales

March 29, 2018 — OTTOWA, Canada — New restrictions on snow crab fishing, along with new restrictions on ship speeds and $1 million more each year to free marine mammals from fishing gear, have been put in place this year to protect North Atlantic right whales, Canadian government officials announced Wednesday.

“We’re confident that these measures will have a very significant impact in protecting right whales,” Fisheries and Oceans Canada Minister Dominic LeBlanc said.

But, LeBlanc said, he and Transport Minister Marc Garneau are prepared to modify the new restrictions or add more as the weeks and months unfold.

Canada was under pressure to act after the deaths of 12 right whales last summer in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from June to September, most either hit by ships or from gear entanglement.

“Our resolve is to avoid the kind of situation we had last year,” LeBlanc said.

That resolve in Canada is encouraging, said attorney Jane Davenport with the Defenders of Wildlife, a U.S.-based environmental group that with two other groups have sued the National Marine Fisheries Service and two other agencies for failing to protect right whales from lobster gear entanglements.

With the 12 dead in Canada last year and at least four identified dead off Cape Cod and the Islands, and with only five births, the North Atlantic right whale population is expected to dip below 451 from 2016.

“The government of Canada may be late to the table, not realizing the risk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but at least they’ve gotten off the stick and they’re moving forward,” said Davenport, who said she worries about what she says is a slower, less-well-funded pace in the U.S. “We need a moonshot, that kind of government investment,” she said.

Biologist Mark Baumgartner, head of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, said he was encouraged by the proposed measures in Canada, which also include more airplane and boat surveys of right whales. That amount of surveillance means that any entangled or killed whales will have a good chance of being detected, Baumgartner said.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Fishermen suit against Atlantic marine monument moves ahead

March 27, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Organizations suing to eliminate the first national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean have gotten the OK to proceed with a suit designed to reopen the area to commercial fishing, which environmentalists fear could jeopardize preservation efforts.

The fishing groups sued to challenge the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument created by President Barack Obama in 2016. It’s a 5,000-square-mile area off of New England that contains fragile deep sea corals and vulnerable species of marine life such as right whales.

The fishermen’s lawsuit had been put on hold by a review of national monuments ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration in April 2017. Court filings at U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia say the stay was lifted in mid-March and the litigation can proceed.

Marine national monuments are underwater areas designed to protect unique or vulnerable ecosystems. There are four of them in the Pacific. The Northeast monument, the only one off the East Coast, is also an area where fishermen harvest valuable species such as lobsters and crabs.

“To lose a big area that we have historically fished has quite an impact on quite a lot of people here,” said Jon Williams, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, crabber and a member of plaintiff group Offshore Lobstermen’s Association. “It’ll raise attention to it a little bit, which it needs.”

The court ordered the federal government, which is the defendant in the case, to respond by April 16. A spokeswoman from the federal Department of Commerce declined to comment.

The lawsuit’s ability to move forward will hopefully prod the federal government to make a decision about the future of the monument, which is unpopular with commercial harvesters, Williams said. But a coalition of environmental groups is also intervening in the case in an attempt to keep the monument area preserved.

Read the full story at the AP News

 

‘Truly alarming’: No babies for endangered right whales

March 27, 2018 — SAVANNAH, Ga. — The winter calving season for critically endangered right whales has nearly ended with zero newborns spotted in the past four months — a reproductive drought that scientists who study the fragile species haven’t seen in three decades.

Survey flights to look for mother-and-calf pairs off the Atlantic coasts of Georgia and Florida are scheduled to wrap up when the month ends Saturday. Right whales typically give birth off the southeastern U.S. seacoast between December and late March. Researchers have recorded between one and 39 births each year since the flights began in 1989.

Now experts are looking at the possibility of a calving season without any confirmed births.

“It’s a pivotal moment for right whales,” said Barb Zoodsma, who oversees the right whale recovery program in the U.S. Southeast for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “If we don’t get serious and figure this out, it very well could be the beginning of the end.”

Zoodsma said she doesn’t expect any last-minute calf sightings this week.

The timing could hardly be worse. Scientists estimate only about 450 North Atlantic right whales remain, and the species suffered terribly in 2017. A total of 17 right whales washed up dead in the U.S. and Canada last year, far outpacing five births.

With no rebound in births this past winter, the overall population could shrink further in 2018. One right whale was found dead off the coast of Virginia in January.

“It is truly alarming,” said Philip Hamilton, a scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston who has studied right whales for three decades. “Following a year of such high mortality, it’s clear the population can’t sustain that trajectory.”

Right whales have averaged about 17 births per year during the past three decades. Since 2012, all but two seasons have yielded below-average calf counts.

Scientists will be looking for newborn stragglers as the whales return to their feeding grounds off the northeastern U.S. this spring. That happened last year, when two previously unseen babies were spotted in Cape Cod Bay.

Right whale researcher Charles “Stormy” Mayo of the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts, said he was hopeful some calves were born this season off the Carolinas or Virginia, where scientists weren’t really looking.

It’s also possible right whales could rally with a baby boom next year. Females typically take three years or longer between pregnancies, so births can fluctuate from year to year. The previous rock-bottom year for births — just one calf spotted in 2000 — was followed by 31 newborns in 2001, the second-best calving season on record.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe

 

Path to extinction for North Atlantic right whales

March 26, 2018, PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — Inside the cabin of the research vessel Shearwater, Charles “Stormy” Mayo, senior scientist and director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies, pulled up on his computer an image of the family tree of North Atlantic right whale #1140.

This whale — dubbed “Wart” by researchers — has a file of photographs, identifying marks, and a life history, as does nearly every one of the remaining 451 right whales on earth.

“Her productivity has been extraordinary,” Mayo said. But Wart hasn’t been seen since 2014, and some worry her fabled life may have come to an end.

Last summer was particularly tragic with 16, possibly 17, right whales — 4 percent of the remaining population — killed after being hit by ships, entangled in fishing gear, and other unknown causes.

Extinction, experts say, is suddenly a reality.

“It was one of the big stories of the day, that right whales were coming back,” Mayo said. “But up to 2010, you had this appallingly slow climb, then decline. Now we have a species that is clearly headed for extinction.”

Wart, first seen in 1981, at the dawn of right whale research, has been subsequently spotted and identified 66 times from the Bay of Fundy to Florida. Believed to be in her 50s now, she is one of the more successful breeders — mother to seven calves, grandmother to 13 and great-grandmother to six.

But that productivity may not be enough in the face of a host of environmental issues related to an increasingly urbanized ocean — vessel noise, pollution and oil and gas exploration — and the unknown complications from a rapidly warming sea that could affect, for example, the seasonal timing of critical right whale food.

Then, there is the intractable problem of human induced mortality and serious injury.

Sixteen deaths last summer caused many to hit the panic button. Researcher Brian Sharp called it shocking.

“It begs the need for fishery managers, the industry and scientists to push harder to find solutions,” said Sharp, manager of Marine Mammal Rescue and Research at the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth.

Twelve of last year’s deaths occurred in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where right whales had been seen sporadically over the last four decades, fewer than a dozen a year, and not well-documented. Five live entanglements also were documented in that area last year. Unlike the U.S., Canada has had no ship or fishing restrictions in place as the numbers of whales documented in the Gulf, possibly following prey driven north by climate change, has grown.

But four deaths also happened in the U.S. last year, despite decades of research and planning on how to create whale-safe fishing gear, massive fishing closures and rerouted and slowed ships to avoid fatal interactions with whales. The U.S. deaths alone were four times the number scientists set as the maximum allowed per year if the species is going to recover.

“There’s a huge misconception that the industry is not sensitive to this matter or not aware of it. We certainly are, and it concerns the industry a lot,” said Grant Moore, of Westport, a longtime offshore lobsterman and president of the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association.

The exact number of North Atlantic right whales that existed prior to human killing is unknown, but the population was likely reduced to fewer than 100 by the time the international 1935 ban on whaling was enacted.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

NOAA Announces Right Whale Speed Restriction Zone Off Nantucket

March 23, 2018 — NANTUCKET, Mass. — In an effort to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, NOAA Fisheries has implemented a voluntary vessel speed restriction zone off Nantucket.

The Dynamic Management Area 11 miles southwest of the island was established after six whales were spotted in the area on Tuesday.

Mariners are asked to avoid the area or travel at speeds of 10 knots or less through April 4.

At least 18 of the whales died over the last year and the population is estimated to be around 430.

Read the full story at Cape Cod

 

Right whale survival may be dependent on snow crab fishery’s flexibility

March 22, 2018 — The future of the North Atlantic right whale is looking more and more bleak, and with their fate inextricably tied to the lobster and crab fishing grounds off the coast of Northern New England and Eastern Canada, pressure is mounting on the fisheries and their regulators to take more drastic action.

No right whale calves have been spotted so far this year – the latest in a string of bad news for the species, which lost 17 members in 2017. That total represented about four percent of its remaining population, and was around six times the normal mortality of the whales.  An eighteenth dead whale was found entangled in fishing gear off the coast of Virginia in January. Gear entanglement, followed by blunt force trauma caused by collisions with ships, have been identified as the main causes of these deaths.

Philip Hamilton, a research scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium, who studies the mammals, said there’s slim hope remaining that researchers have missed spotting any new calves.

“The calving season isn’t considered completely over – the folks who are doing the surveys on the calving grounds off of Florida and Georgia will be going for another month, but we’ve never gone this long and not found a calf,” Hamilton said. “And there are only a few whales that have not been seen, so we’re not particularly optimistic that a calf will be seen down there.”

With only an estimated 100 breeding females left in the entire North Atlantic right whale population, scientists are closely monitoring the changing reproductive cycle of the whales.

“We have had drops in reproduction in the past. We had a dip in the early 1990s and then a pretty dramatic downturn in the late 1990s that culminated with just a single right whale calf born in 2000. So we have seen this before, but we’ve never seen it in conjunction with such extremely high mortality,” Hamilton said.

In addition to the premature deaths and low birth rate, the right whale species faces the new and additional challenge of a lengthier gestation period. According to Hamilton,  their inter-birth interval has been increasing over the last five or six years, going from the standard of three to four years to 6.6 years in 2016, and jumping to an average of 10.2 years in 2017.

“There is a lot going on for them. We do know that females will forego reproduction if they aren’t in adequate body condition, meaning they have to have substantial fat reserves to support a calf. They end up losing up to a third of their body weight nursing a calf, so they have be able to handle that,” Hamilton said. “And there are a couple of factors which may be impacting female body condition. One would be food availability.”

The whales have been shifting where they feed in recent years and largely not going to some of their standard, historically productive feeding grounds like the Bay of Fundy and Roseway Basin and Great South channel east of Cape Cod. Instead, last year many ended up in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they are in much greater danger of entanglement with fishing gear, Hamilton said.

 

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Whale deaths result in Canada’s snow crab fishery losing MSC certification

March 21, 2018 — Canada’s East Coast snow crab fishery has had its sustainable catch certification suspended by the Marine Stewardship Council, the organization announced on 20 March. Until another audit occurs in October 2018, some Maritime snow crab will not be able to display the MSC label.

The certification suspension is the result of incidents involving the deaths of 13 North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2017. Necropsies showed that three of the whales died as the result of entanglement with crab gear. The audit also found that of a further five live entanglements, four were with crab gear.

The certification suspension is the result of incidents involving the deaths of 13 North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2017. Necropsies showed that three of the whales died as the result of entanglement with crab gear. The audit also found that of a further five live entanglements, four were with crab gear.

Philip Hamilton, a research scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium, described last summer as the perfect storm when it came to right whale mortality. The whales appeared in waters where they have never been before and during a fishing season when there were more crab pots and rope in the water.

Peter Norsworthy, executive director of the Affiliation of Seafood Producers Association of Nova Scotia (ASPANS), said 2017 was an extraordinary year.

“It was a longer fishery last year because the quota was higher than it had ever been. So it took a lot longer to execute the fishery than it normally would. Normally, 75 percent of the catch is landed within the first three weeks. This year, the quota is going to be down to normal levels, about 25,000 tonnes vs last year’s 43,000 tonnes. So we fully expect it will be caught in a normal time period and finish by the end of May,” Norsworthy said. “Hopefully, with an earlier start we’ll get most of the fishing completed before the whales show up, if they show up again.”

Norsworthy said fishermen were unsure what the certification suspension will mean to individual fishermen in terms of catch prices. He said they will wait to see “how the market responds.”

“I think most buyers realize 2017 was an unusual circumstance and are fairly well-informed about what activities are being undertaken [to protect the whales],” he said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

NOAA closes areas to protect whales

March 20, 2018 — As NOAA Fisheries continues to address the rising peril to whales in coastal waters stretching from New England to Florida, it is reminding local fishermen of current or impending gear closures off Massachusetts.

The closures, primarily around Cape Cod and in Cape Cod Bay, are part of NOAA Fisheries’ Atlantic large whale take reduction plan developed to provide increased protection to several species of whales — particularly the endangered North Atlantic right whales whose population continues to plummet.

Some of the gear closures impact trap and pot fishermen, while other impact gillnetters.

The closures have been greatly enlarged as part of a 2015 amendment to the large whale take reduction plan, according to Mike Asaro, the Gloucester-based marine mammal and sea turtle branch chief for NOAA Fisheries.

“The Cape Cod Bay closure has been greatly expanded northward and out beyond the outer Cape toward Nantucket,” Asaro said.

The closest closure to Cape Ann is the Massachusetts Restricted Area that encircles Cape Cod, with its northwest corner approaching the southern end of Cape Ann. The area is closed to all trap and pot fishing until April 30.

The Great South Channel restricted area, which sits to the east and southeast of Cape Cod, will be closed to all trap and pot fishing from April 30 until June 30. The Great South Channel also will be closed to all gillnetting during the same time.

Gillnetters also will be prohibited from fishing in the Cape Cod Bay restricted area until May 15.

Asaro said the closures are just one element in NOAA Fisheries’ strategy for mitigating dangers to the whales from gear and other man-made obstacles in the ocean’s waters.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times