Saving Seafood

Massachusetts: 4 Local Communities Receive State Habitat Improvement Grants

January 4, 2018 — BOSTON — Four local communities have been awarded funding from the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife’s Habitat Management Grant program to protect natural resources.

Barnstable, Mashpee, Nantucket and Yarmouth will receive a total of almost $78,000 towards habitat improvement projects.

Barnstable ($10,000), Mashpee ($24,000) and Yarmouth ($25,000) were awarded funding for prescribed burns to improve pitch pine and oak woodland habitats. Nantucket will use the $18,997 in funds to manage heathlands on the Head of the Plains properties.

Read the full story at CapeCod

 

Diners Still Have a Crustacean Crush as Lobster Prices Jump

December 21st,2016  — Compared with most lunch sandwiches, the lobster rolls Alex Robinson sells from the side of his blue Happy Lobster Truck in downtown Chicago were already pricey. So, he was worried customers would go elsewhere after he started charging $17 instead of $15 to cover higher costs.

Turns out, Americans still have a crush on the crustaceans, and many are more than willing to pay up. Even after the price increase this year, Robinson says he hasn’t lost any business. The 4 ounces (113.4 grams) of wild-caught Maine lobster that he drizzles with butter and a touch of mayonnaise on a bread roll remain his best-selling item.

“We haven’t had anyone who said it wasn’t worth it,” said Robinson, who owns the truck. “Prices are going up, and it’s still staying popular.”

Four years after a glut led to the cheapest lobsters since the 1980s, prices on average are up 37 percent this year and the highest on record going back decades. While U.S. and Canadian fisherman have caught more than ever in recent years, output hasn’t kept pace with demand. Exports to China surged, and American restaurants that got used to low-cost seafood have added lobster to spice up everything from soups and salads to macaroni and cheese.

“The market now is outstripping the supply,” said Bernie Berry, president of the Yarmouth, Nova Scotia-based Cold Water Lobster Association, which represents fisherman in Canada. “I don’t think we can catch enough lobsters.”

Canadian claw and knuckle meat — a common variety used in lobster rolls –averaged $28.31 per pound (454-gram) this month, up 7 percent from a year earlier and well above the 10-year December average of $17.85, according to Urner Barry, a Toms River, New Jersey-based researcher that has been tracking food prices since 1858. In July, the average reached $29.44, the most ever.

Read the full story at Bloomberg News 

MAINE: Big changes are occurring in one of the fastest-warming spots on Earth

October 25, 2015 — Sandwiched on a narrow sandbar between Yarmouth’s harbor and the open Gulf of Maine, the fishermen of Yarmouth Bar have long struggled to keep the sea at bay.

Nineteenth-century storms threatened to sweep the whole place away, leaving Yarmouth proper’s harbor more open to the elements, prompting the province to build a granite cribwork across the quarter-mile bar, behind which the hamlet’s fishing fleet docks. Global warming has brought rising seas, a two-story-high rock wall to fight them and the hamlet’s designation as one of the communities in the province most threatened by climate change.

Now, snaking around the snout of Nova Scotia and into the Gulf of Maine is a new, unseen threat to Yarmouth Bar and hundreds of coastal communities in Maine, eastern New England and the Maritimes: currents fueling the rapid warming of the sea.

The Gulf of Maine – which extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and includes the Bay of Fundy, the offshore fishing banks, and the entire coast of Maine – has been warming rapidly as the deep-water currents that feed it have shifted. Since 2004 the gulf has warmed faster than anyplace else on the planet, except for an area northeast of Japan, and during the “Northwest Atlantic Ocean heat wave” of 2012 average water temperatures hit the highest level in the 150 years that humans have been recording them.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald