Saving Seafood

Murkowski Introduces Updated Legislation to Require Labeling of GE Salmon

March 3, 2016 — The following was released by the Office of Senator Lisa Murkowski:

Today U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) continued her fight against “Frankenfish” by introducing legislation to mandate labeling of genetically engineered (GE) salmon. The Genetically Engineered Salmon Labeling Act, co-sponsored by Senators Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), changes the acceptable market name for any salmon that is genetically engineered to include the words “genetically engineered” or “GE.” The bill also requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to ensure a third-party scientific review of the FDA’s environmental assessment of AquaAdvantage salmon, focusing in particular on the effects that GE salmon could have upon wild stocks and ecosystems. Congressman Don Young (R-AK) introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.

“We have had success in in the fight against Frankenfish, but I won’t let up until it is mandatory to make clear to consumers whether they are purchasing Frankenfish or the wild, healthy, sustainably-caught, delicious real thing,” said Murkowski. “I still adamantly oppose the FDA’s approval of GE salmon, for the health of both consumers and fisheries. But at least with this legislation, Alaskans and consumers across the rest of the country won’t be deceived and will be aware of what it is they are seeing on store shelves.”

Background:

  • November 2015: In response to the FDA’s decision to approve GE salmon for human consumption, Murkowski announced that she would block the confirmation of Dr. Robert Califf to be FDA Commissioner until her concerns regarding labeling guidelines for GE salmon had been resolved.
  • December 2015: Murkowski successfully inserted a provision in the omnibus bill that blocks the FDA from introducing GE salmon into the market until it publishes labeling guidelines so consumers are aware of what is contained in the product they are purchasing.
  • January 2016: Murkowski officially placed a hold on Dr. Califf’s confirmation after he advanced out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
  • January 2016: In direct response to Senator Murkowski’s efforts, the FDA announced an import ban on GE salmon until labeling guidelines had been published.
  • February 2016: The FDA provided Senator Murkowski with technical drafting assistance on legislative language that would effectively mandate labeling of GE salmon, and in response Senator Murkowski lifted her hold on Dr. Califf’s nomination.

View the release online

Auto-aquaculture? Conference in Woods Hole explores possible uses for robots and automation to reduce costs

January 12, 2016 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Yogesh Girdhar wowed the room with a video of what looked like a small shoebox awkwardly paddling underwater.

What Girdhar, a post-doctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, called a “curious robot” had none of the cachet of the sleek autonomously operated torpedoes, high-tech miniaturized laboratories, or parasite-zapping lasers that had already been displayed at a conference held Monday at the institution’s Quissett Campus to explore the role of robots and automation in aquaculture.

But his clumsy looking creation filled a need in the minds of many at the conference. As it paddled along, its software played the favorite childhood learning game — one of these things is not like the others — picking out a small coral head sticking up from the sand and zeroing in on it. The program, Girdhar said, would help a free-swimming vehicle, patrolling inside a fish cage far out to sea, recognize and investigate anomalies such as dead fish, a hole in the net, even evidence of disease. It could then notify its owners that something was wrong, prompting additional investigation.

It’s the kind of innovation conference organizers hope will make offshore aquaculture more cost effective.

“Open-ocean aquaculture is a high-cost way of producing fish that hasn’t really taken hold yet,” said Hauke Kite-Powell, a WHOI researcher in marine policy. “The challenge is to make it cost-competitive with near-shore aquaculture.”

With the world population projected to climb from 7 billion in 2011 to 9 billion by 2040, the demand for food, especially protein, will also soar. A diminishing water supply, droughts and less arable land are squeezing agriculture and land-based meat production.

Unfortunately, the one resource people once believed was limitless, wild fish, has proven to be all too finite. Mismanagement, overfishing, climate change and other factors have depleted fish stocks worldwide.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Times

Iran seeks revival of caviar industry in post-sanctions era

November 13, 2015 — GOLDASHT, Iran (AP) ” On the shores of the Caspian Sea, an ambitious project is underway to produce a pricey delicacy that could boost Iran’s economy as sanctions ease: caviar.

Iran, once the world’s biggest exporter of the luxury food, sold over 40 tons of sturgeon eggs in 2000. Exports plunged to just 1 ton last year due to dwindling fish stocks and economic sanctions imposed by world powers in response to Iran’s nuclear program.

After Tehran struck a landmark deal this summer to curb its nuclear ambitions in exchange for lifting sanctions ” including those on caviar ” some in Iran are now counting on a revival in exports of the exclusive eggs.

“We hope that as a result of the Iranian government’s interaction with the world, the path will be opened for us to export our products abroad and bring in foreign currency earnings. It does not make a difference where we export to, the United States or Europe,” said Ishaq Islami, manager of the private Ghareh Boron Caviar Fish Farm in the coastal village of Goldasht.

The farm and two nearby facilities are breeding half a million sturgeon fingerlings a year, filling its pools with water pumped in from the Caspian Sea.

Islami began the $100 million project in 2005 but it takes at least 12 years for sturgeon to mature and produce caviar. About 110,000 are beluga species that produce prized silver-gray eggs, the world’s most expensive caviar.

The fish farm aims to export 30 tons of salt-cured caviar and 2,000 tons of sturgeon meat in three years. Islami expects to earn $90 million a year based on an average price of $3,000 a kilogram (about $1,360 a pound) for caviar. The United States, Europe and Japan have traditionally been Iran’s biggest export markets.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Report: Gloucester, Mass. landings down, but worth more

November 2, 2015 — The volume and value of U.S. seafood landings remained flat in 2014, while the declines locally in volume and value have leveled off from the ear-popping decline experienced the previous year, according to NOAA’s Fisheries of the U.S. report.

According to the annual report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Gloucester held serve at No. 22 among U.S. ports in volume of landings, but declined to 26th (from 25th last year) in the value of its landings.

New Bedford, riding the lucrative success of its scallop fishery, was ranked as the nation’s top revenue-producing port for the 15th consecutive year. It generated $329 million from the 140 million pounds of fish landed in 2014, but that was down 13.2 percent from the $379 million in value from 2013.

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, reported a catch of 762 million pounds, and came in second for value, at $191 million.

Nationally, U.S. ports landed 9.5 billion pounds of fish in 2013 worth $5.4 billion. That represents a 4 percent decline in landings and less than 1 percent decline in value.

“The overall trends from landings and value for U.S. wild-caught fish is positive even though landings and value are down slightly from last year,” said NOAA Chief Scientist Richard Merrick, who said the declines all fall within the range of statistical error.

Local data

For Gloucester, the report’s data produced a mixed bag, with a slight decrease in landings offset by a slightly higher value from those landings that NOAA primarily attributed to a strong pricing year for lobsters.

A year after losing about 25 percent of both the volume and the value of its landed catch, Gloucester in 2014 landed 61 million pounds of fish, down slightly from the 62 million pounds landed in 2013 and drastically below the 83 million pounds landed here in 2012, before the current slide commenced.

Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times

 

Lingering drought heightens worries of extinction for salmon

October 28, 2015 — SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Another deadly summer of drought has heightened fears of extinction in the wild for an iconic California salmon, federal officials said Wednesday.

Officials with the National Marine Fisheries Service said preliminary counts indicate that hot, shallow waters caused by the drought killed most of this year’s juvenile winter-run Chinook before they made it out to the Pacific Ocean.

It “doesn’t look very good,” said Garwin Yip, a federal fisheries spokesman.

If a final count this winter confirms the bad news, it would mean a second straight summer in which 5 percent or less of the young fish survived California’s drought.

Since the fish spawn on a three-year cycle, the die-off would make management of next year’s water critical for the salmon’s survival in the wild.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at New Jersey Herald

 

The next food revolution: fish farming?

October 25, 2015 — Sanggou Bay looks like a place where the pointillism movement has been unleashed on an ocean canvas. All across the harbor on China’s northeastern coast, thousands of tiny buoys – appearing as black dots – stretch across the briny landscape in unending rows and swirling patterns. They are broken only by small boats hauling an armada of rafts through the murky waters.

For centuries, Chinese fishermen have harvested this section of the Yellow Sea for its flounder, herring, and other species. Today the area is again producing a seafood bounty, though not from the end of a fisherman’s rod or the bottom of a trawler’s net. Instead, the maze of buoys marks thousands of underwater pens or polyurethane ropes that hold oysters, scallops, abalone, Japanese flounder, mussels, sea cucumbers, kelp, and garish orange sea squirts. They are all part of one of the world’s biggest and most productive aquaculture fields. Sanggou Bay is a seafood buffet on a colossal scale.

The buoys here extend for miles out to the horizon, offering, on an aluminum-gray day, the only clue to where the ocean stops and the sky begins. Hundreds of migrant workers – many from as far away as Myanmar (Burma) – pilot the fishing boats zigzagging around the floats, shuttling fish to shore, checking the lines for mussels and oysters, and voyaging farther out to sea to harvest seaweed.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor

 

 

Maine Is Literally Dropping Fish Out of Low-Flying Airplanes, and It’s Mesmerizing

October 21, 2015 — Video of a man “aerial dropping” live fish into a pond from a low-flying plane has become a minor sensation after the footage was uploaded to the Facebook page of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The video has so far gotten more than 25,000 views.

“The department annually stocks over 1 million fish throughout the state, utilizing a variety of methods that include flying fish by airplane into remote ponds,” the department wrote in the video description. “The fish are loaded into tanks that are attached to the pontoons on the aircraft, stocking locations are verified and then the planes take off. The tanks are then emptied when flying over the water. The department generally stocks over 180 waters each year by airplane.”

Read the full story at News.Mic 

Economic pressures on fishing

September 9, 2015 — Stocks of wild fish cannot be protected from overfishing in the long term by the expansion of aquaculture alone. Economic driving forces such as increasing global demand for fish or improved fishing methods will lead in future to increased fishery pressure on the most popular types of edible fish. Ocean researchers from Kiel and Finland come to this conclusion in a current study, which will be published online yesterday (September 8th) in the journal “Global Change Biology”.

Economists, fisheries and evolutionary biologists from Kiel University, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, and the Finnish University of Helsinki working together in an interdisciplinary project have calculated how fishery and aquaculture will develop in the coming decades in regard to popular types of edible fish such as sea bass, salmon, cod and tuna. These four are among the most important fish species on the North American and European markets. Salmon and sea bass come mostly from fish farming, while cod and tuna stem from wild-capture fisheries.

Read the full story here