Conservation & Environment

April 10, 2014 — Do you know if the fish on your plate is legal? A new study estimates that 20 to 32 percent of wild-caught seafood imported into the U.S. comes from illegal or "pirate" fishing. That's a problem, scientists say, because it erodes the ability of governments to limit overfishing and the ability of consumers to know where their food comes from.

The estimated illegal catch is valued at $1.3 billion to $2.1 billion annually and represents between 15 and 26 percent of the total value of wild-caught seafood imported into the U.S., report scientists in a new study in the journal Marine Policy.

Study co-author Tony Pitcher says those results surprised his team. "We didn't think it would be as big as that. To think that one in three fish you eat in the U.S. could be illegal, that's a bit scary," says Pitcher, who is a professor at the fisheries center of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Read the full story at National Geographric 

 

April 10, 2014 — The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a legal petition asking the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to prohibit fishing for Pacific bluefin tuna.

Pacific bluefin has suffered a 96 percent decline since large-scale fishing began, triggering a requirement for the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) to recommend new regulations for managing the fishery by 8 April. According to the center, PFMC decline to take any action.

Read the full story from SeafoodSource

AUGUSTA, Maine — April 8, 2014 — The Legislature on Tuesday overturned a veto by Gov. Paul LePage of a bill that aims to protect delicate fish spawning habitats from motorized mining operations.

After a unanimous vote in the Senate on Tuesday morning, the House voted 119-23 Tuesday evening to override the veto.

The bill, LD 1671, prohibits motorized recreational gold prospecting in certain Maine waterways that contain brook trout and Atlantic salmon spawning habitats. It calls for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and the Department of Marine Resources to conduct a study before Dec. 1, 2015, aimed at determining to what degree the waterways in question are still critical spawning habitats.

In his veto letter, LePage said the Legislature shouldn’t have the authority to order work for the executive branch.

“When the Legislature gives detailed instructions to executive departments on what work they should do, how and when, it is an overreach of their authority and a clear violation of the separation of powers,” wrote LePage.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

April 8, 2014 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Galveston District, is scheduled to complete construction of the $1.3 million Half Moon Reef project April 11 to restore 12 acres of sub-tidal reef and habitat located within the northernmost extent of the Half Moon Reef in Matagorda Bay, Texas – one of the largest restoration projects around the country.

The project is the second segment of a larger 60-acre reef restoration project led by The Nature Conservancy to restore one of the largest oyster reefs in the Gulf of Mexico. The project funds will continue to be used to monitor and survey the reef’s progression.

“This is the first estuary habitat restoration project of this kind in the Galveston District,” said Byron Williams, a project manager with the USACE Galveston District. “We used more than 3,900 cubic yards of recycled concrete consisting of various sizes of boulders and placed them in a specific pattern to encourage the reef to grow vertically and to try to replicate a real reef.”

Read the full story from Dredging Today

April 7, 2014 — A study to be published in Marine Policy estimates that between 20 percent and 32 percent of wild seafood imported into the U.S. comes from illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. Valued at USD 1 billion (EUR 728 million) to USD 2 billion (EUR 1.5 million) annually, this represents between 15 to 26 percent of the total value of U.S. wild seafood imports.

The new study finds that the amount of IUU seafood entering the U.S. market is in line with global estimates of pirate fishing, assessed at 13 to 31 percent of global catch and valued at between USD 10 billion (EUR 7.3 billion) and USD 23.5 billion (EUR 17 billion) annually.

“This study unfortunately confirms what we have long suspected — that seafood from pirate fishing is getting into our markets. Illegal fishing undercuts honest fishermen and seafood businesses that play by the rules, and the U.S. should not be incentivizing pirate fishers by creating a legal market for their products,” said Beckie Zisser, Oceana ocean advocate.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

 

WASHINGTON — April 3, 2014 — The United States Senate on April 3 took a strong stand in the global fight against illegal fishing by ratifying a treaty that will prevent illegally caught fish from entering the market through ports around the world.

The treaty, called the Port State Measures Agreement, or PSMA, also would empower port officials to prohibit foreign vessels that are suspected of illegal activity from receiving port services and access. By cutting off market access for illegally caught fish, the treaty will erode the profit incentive that drives the activity.

The treaty, which the United Nations adopted in 2009, applies to foreign-flagged vessels calling on ports in any country that is a party to the agreement. Under its provisions, port officials who conclude that a vessel has a known or suspected record of illegal fishing would turn away the vessel or subject it to immediate inspection. If there is evidence of illegal catch, port officials would prohibit the landing of the catch. They also would alert other ports to the situation and could deny the vessel permission to refuel or receive repairs.

Read the full story from iStockAnalyst

April 4, 2014 — Sometimes the smallest critters can cause the biggest problems. For example, the rusty crayfish, which measures only five inches fully extended, is a major headache once it invades a fishery because the crustacean feeds on fish eggs and vegetation. The loss of vegetation reduces habitat for native crayfish and aquatic animals.

The rusty crayfish is native to the Ohio River, but N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission biologists discovered the rusty crayfish in 2007 making itself at home in the North Fork Catawba River, upstream of Lake James. The invader has expanded its presence 10 miles upstream in the North Fork Catawba, according to TR Russ, an aquatic wildlife diversity biologist with the NCWRC.

Any fisherman who finds a rusty crayfish should kill it immediately, note its location, freeze it, and contact Russ at thomas.russ@ncwildlife.org. The rusty crayfish can be identified from other crayfish by a rust-colored spot on its sides, just in front of its tail. The rusty crayfish also has black bands on the tips of its claws.

Read the full story at The Dispatch 

 

April 2, 2014 — For lovers of fatty tuna belly, canned albacore and swordfish kebabs, here's a question: Would you be willing to give them up for several years so that you could eat them perhaps for the rest of your life?

If a new proposal to ban fishing on the open ocean were to fly, that's essentially what we might be faced with. It's an idea that might help restore the populations of several rapidly disappearing fish – like tuna, swordfish and marlin — that we, and future generations, might like to continue to have as a food source.

The novel conservation plan, introduced recently in a in the journal PLoS Biology, would close international waters – where there's currently pretty much a fishing free-for-all — to all fishing and restrict commercial fishermen to coastal areas managed by individual nations. The authors, and , suggest turning the open ocean into a worldwide reserve for the migratory species that travel huge distances.

That reserve would give these fish populations to chance to rebound. And the fish that strayed into coastal national waters, where fishing would remain legal, could meanwhile be caught by fishermen. Overall, under such a plan, fish populations would grow healthier, fishing would become a more lucrative business and we would have more fish to eat, the researchers argue.

But let's face it: Closing off most of the ocean to fishing boats would be a pretty drastic move.

But as White, a marine biologist at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, notes, the policies we currently have in place to regulate fisheries — catch quotas, seasonal closures and minimum size limits — aren't working.

Read the full story at NPR 

 

 

April 2, 2014 — Historians say the Chesapeake Bay has changed since Capt. John Smith first landed at Jamestown four centuries ago. And scientists say it will change again by the end of this one as a rising, warming ocean with more acidic waters carves out a different estuary and disrupts the huge diversity of marine life that depends on it.

"It will be quite a bit different," said Robert Latour, fisheries scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point. "I imagine the coastline will be a little bit different — some projections put the Florida Keys underwater in 100 years, and we're pretty low-lying. In the fish populations, there will be winners and losers."

The bay is a vital space for numerous spawning species, a nursery for others and an important migratory route for countless more. Latour suspects native oysters, already decimated by overfishing and disease, could be hard-hit. And iconic blue crabs, once plentiful, could become scarce.

"We're starting to see blue crabs moving north in areas that we hadn't historically associated with them," Latour said. "So there's been a general shift in fishes, too."

But the bay is just one example, scientists say, of how a warming Earth will have real impacts at the local level. And it illustrates the message behind a new report issued this week by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report builds on earlier ones with more sophisticated and comprehensive science, and identifies the populations and places at risk: everyone, everywhere.

"The report concludes that people, societies and ecosystems are vulnerable around the world," Chris Field, co-chairman of the working group behind the study, said in a statement. "But with different vulnerability in different places."

Read the full story from the Daily Press

April 1, 2014 — To anyone on land, climate change can seem subtle. The sea, however, is changing alarmingly. The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the second of three reports on the impacts of global warming—offers the scary forecast that the hotter the planet, the higher the risk of  ”abrupt and irreversible changes” (pdf, p.13) to ecosystems.

We’ve already tipped past some of those ”tipping points” in the oceans, though. By the middle of the century, global warming will have thoroughly reshuffled marine ecosystems (pdf, p.16). That will leave some areas with more sea life to catch, but will thin out the marine populations in more temperate climes. The complex interplay of these and other factors will invite the invasion of a few marine species, driving others to new, less hospitable habitats—and even extinction.

Fish don’t like it hot

Since fish are lousy at adapting to hotter water, they simply move to where it’s cooler. This, says the IPCC report, will hurt commercial fishing in a big way. As fishing populations in the equatorial areas disappear, more fish and marine invertebrates will be pushed toward the poles. That means fishing fleets will have to travel farther, driving up costs. And some species won’t survive these strange new habitats.

The red and yellow areas in the map below show where fish catches will decrease the most. Many of these are close to shore, where commercially valuable species tend to congregate because food is more plentiful. There are lots of blue areas where fish populations are predicted to increase, but they’re smaller to begin with. The IPCC is vague on whether this will reduce the total global fish supply, but catching those fish will certainly be harder.

Read the full story at Quartz