Conservation & Environment

October 1, 2013 — When the big Alaska processors decided not to renew their Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification last year it sent shock waves through the industry. Confident in its own sustainability efforts, Alaska adopted Responsible Fishery Management (RFM) guidelines for its third-party certification.

What wasn’t expected was how the decision would displease Walmart. The retail giant said in June that it might stop shopping there. Its internal regulations on sustainable seafood sourcing dictated it could not buy from fisheries without MSC certification or equivalent standards established in fishery improvement projects (FIP’s) working toward MSC certification.

And though other seafood retailers have bought from FIPs for some time, none are so big as the Bentonville, Ark., chain, which set a 2006 goal of purchasing 100 percent of its seafood from MSC-certified fisheries.

That decision didn’t sit well with the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI). Alaska fisheries are not only recognized as a model for sustainability, ASMI says, its fisheries have no plans of deviating from the demanding and proven program: RFM was now, and would remain, its third-party certification scheme.

That scenario proved problematic for Walmart. According to Senior Manager of Sustainability Communications Christopher Schrader, Walmart was unfamiliar with the RFM standards, and without knowing that policy’s particulars, the retailer couldn’t be certain Alaska salmon still met its sustainability criteria. Schrader insists the company is not in this quandary by choice.

“We’re not taking a position around Alaska fisheries,” Schrader says. “The question has become, how do we collectively ensure that the seafood we’re sourcing today is sustainable and available for generations to come? To answer that, we have to have a clearer understanding.”

ASMI Executive Director Mike Cerne understands that. But what bothers him is Walmart’s presumption that switching to a new certification source makes Alaska salmon a dubious commodity. Why, he asks, would Walmart potentially shift its purchases away from proven providers to fisheries only now working toward MSC standards?

“We feel it’s very important that they recognize how sustainable Alaska’s fisheries are already,” says Cerne, who, while being interviewed, was preparing to meet with Walmart executives.

Cerne believes Alaska’s longstanding reputation for sustainable fisheries should exempt its industry from third-party certification entirely, but he also understands Walmart’s predicament.

Read the full story at Seafood Business Magazine 

 

October 9, 2013 — Ocean acidification, the lesser-known twin of climate change, threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom.

Imagine every person on Earth tossing a hunk of CO2 as heavy as a bowling ball into the sea. That’s what we do to the oceans every day.

Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, belches carbon dioxide into the air. But a quarter of that CO2 then gets absorbed by the seas — eight pounds per person per day, about 20 trillion pounds a year.

Scientists once considered that entirely good news, since it removed CO2 from the sky. Some even proposed piping more emissions to the sea.

But all that CO2 is changing the chemistry of the ocean faster than at any time in human history. Now the phenomenon known as ocean acidification — the lesser-known twin of climate change — is helping push the seas toward a great unraveling that threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom, and far faster than first expected.

Here’s why: When CO2 mixes with water it takes on a corrosive power that erodes some animals’ shells or skeletons. It lowers the pH, making oceans more acidic and sour, and robs the water of ingredients animals use to grow shells in the first place.

Acidification wasn’t supposed to start doing its damage until much later this century.

Watch the video and and read the full story at the Seattle Times

October 7, 2013 — State Water Quality officer Bert Simons estimated that fish in the Neuse River have been dying for two and a half weeks now, while Coastal Carolina River Watch’s Rick Dove says he’s been fielding calls since at least Oct. 2, when they started washing up at Carolina Pines.

As of Sunday, thousands of dead menhaden were washing up along New Bern’s shores while the strong odor of their rotting carcasses could be smelled downtown. The same thing is happening along the Pamlico River, Simons said, and it’s a kill that residents can expect to see continue for at least another two weeks.

“The fish kill is just going on day after day,” Dove said. As to the size of the kill, he said, “Nobody’s out there doing a count that I know of,” but based on his experience, Dove is willing to guess that “we’re in the millions at this point. Quite possibly the tens of millions.”

Fish that are still alive “are in their death spirals,” Dove said. “You can see them everywhere.”

It is the third fish kill in four months, following on the heels of kills first reported on July 10 and Aug. 11. Dove described these kills as “moderate” in size.

The last major fish kill, in which about 200 million fish were killed, began just over a year ago on Oct. 2, 2012. That kill, Dove pointed out, took 30 days, and he expects the current one to follow a similar pattern.

Neuse Riverkeeper Lauren Wargo agreed.

“Dead fish will only float for about 48 hours, so what you see out there have just died,” she said. Wargo also described schools of fish swimming with open sores and added that the bottom of the river is littered with dead fish that have sunk.

Read the full story from the Sun Journal

October 7, 2013 — More dead fish are turning up in the east. The latest spot is along the Washington waterfront.

We captured video Monday just outside the estuarium along Stewart Parkway of hundreds of dead fish.

We've also had reports of dead fish in other parts of the Pamlico River. It's believed this is part of the millions of fish killed in the Tar, Pamlico, and Neuse Rivers last week.

Read the full story and watch the video from WITN

CHATHAM, Mass. — October 7, 2013 — The first offshore wind farm in U.S. history may soon have company: If a proposed 30-acre mussel farm is permitted this fall, in Nantucket Sound adjacent to the Cape Wind lease area on Horseshoe Shoal, it will become the first offshore aquaculture project in federal waters.

Proponents say it is an idea whose time is long overdue, because the U.S. imports more than 90 percent of the mussels Americans consume and the country's own wild mussel supply suffers large fluctuations because of predation, weather and unfavorable spawning conditions.

"When I look at the market and the possibilities of farming, I'm thinking in the tens to hundreds of million pounds," said Bill Silkes, the president of American Mussel Harvesters of Quonset, R.I., with more than 25 years in the mussel business. He employs more than 40 people harvesting, processing and shipping mussels, oysters and clams.

Aquaculture farms off Canada's Prince Edward Island alone export 35 million pounds of blue mussels to the U.S. annually, worth about $20 million.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

October 3, 2013 — State officials believe extreme natural changes are to blame for millions of dead fish in two major river systems here in Eastern Carolina.

The dead Menhaden are turning up in both the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico river basins.

Read the full story from WITN

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — October 1, 2013 — An estimated 10,000 walrus unable to find sea ice over shallow Arctic Ocean water have come ashore on Alaska’s northwest coast.

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday photographed walrus packed onto a beach on a barrier island near Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage.

The walrus have been coming to shore since mid-September. The large herd was spotted during NOAA’s annual arctic marine mammal aerial survey, an effort conducted with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that conducts offshore lease sales.

An estimated 2,000 to 4,000 walrus were photographed at the site Sept. 12. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that manages walrus, immediately took steps to prevent a stampede among the animals packed shoulder to shoulder on the rocky coastline. The agency works with villages to keep people and airplanes a safe distance from herds.

Young animals are especially vulnerable to stampedes triggered by a polar bear, a human hunter or a low-flying airplane. The carcasses of more than 130 mostly young walruses were counted after a stampede in September 2009 at Alaska’s Icy Cape.

Read the full story by the Associated Press at The Boston Globe 

 

September 26, 2013 — The Texas-based company presented its innovations in water conservation at the Virginia Industrial and Environmental Conference this month. With Chesapeake Bay operations based out of Reedville, Va., Omega’s crews harvest menhaden to produce fish oil and fishmeal products.

Bill Purcell, the company’s environmental manager, explained how the plant has reconfigured its process to reuse both seawater and the water that comes from the processed fish to propel fish from the fishing vessels or to wash down the plant floor.

Instead of using ground water (which could soon require a permit in Virginia), crews pump filtered seawater into the fishing vessels, which helps keep the fish cold and can be used to convey them into the plant for processing.

The plant also reuses the water that is squeezed off the fish when they are turned into oil and fishmeal products. The Reedville plant uses a waste heat evaporator — the same kind that’s used to make orange juice concentrate — to extract about 300,000 gallons of water per day.

That water can be reused to wash down the plant floor, bail fish from the boats and operate several large machines. The measures save the company from using more than 18 million gallons of water per year that would have otherwise come from the ground.

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Journal 

September 29, 2013 — It sounds too good to be true: There are so many fish that Seattle-based boats haul in more than a million metric tons of them every year without depleting the population. "It still boggles my mind how much is a million tons of fish," says David Fluharty, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. "To actually catch that much protein . . ."

The fish is the unfortunately-named walleye pollock. One probably won't see walleye pollock, caught in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska by vessels dragging midwater trawls, on a bed of ice beside the ahi and Copper River king in a fish store display case. But one may well have eaten it in the form of fish sticks or pre-breaded fillets or, perhaps, McDonald's fish sandwiches.

By volume, Alaskan pollock support the world's largest food fishery. All by itself, the Alaska fishery represents about 1 out of every 100 pounds of fish from the entire world's oceans.

In terms of seafood export value Alaskan pollock shipped through Puget Sound probably trail only Alaskan salmon, says Andy Wink of the Juneau-based McDowell Group. Overall, the pollock fishery  "likely creates the largest impact on Seattle of any Alaska species," Wink says. He explains, "Alaska pollock generates the largest amount of wholesale value of any Alaska species and all the boats that fish for pollock homeport in Seattle. Likewise, the crews on pollock ships are often made up of Washington residents or they at least get on the boat in Seattle." 

Although pollock fetch little more per pound than the humble anchovy, the annual catch is worth more than that of any other U.S. fishery except salmon, lobster, shrimp or crab. In 2011, pollock were worth $374 million, compared to $618 million for salmon and $650 million for crab.

Read the full story at Crosscut

 

September 28, 2013 — The ideas, he says, had been germinating for a while — big-picture ruminations on alternative and sustainable energy sources, with the future of the oceans and their fisheries serving as a backdrop to the more tightly focused attention on Gloucester and its harborfront and fishing issues.

But it wasn’t until this summer, when Camron Adibi took part in a research trip by the Gloucester-based Ocean Alliance to the Gulf of Mexico to study the toxicity of sperm whales after the BP Oil disaster, that it finally crystalized in his mind.

“The thing that nobody wanted to talk about were the dispersants that were used to clean up the oil spill,” Adibi said. “Those were possibly more toxic than the oil itself.

“I got to see it. I got to see the ocean pollution that no one seems to want to talk about, how it’s affecting our groundfish.”

Upon returning to Gloucester, Adibi, an enviromental engineer with particular interest in developing sustainable communities, started raising the issue with friends and colleagues.

“Why isn’t this being talked about more?” Adibi said, citing examples such as the March 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan and the proliferation of other ocean-going pollutants, such as the gigantic floating dumps of discarded plastics now seen in the waters off Asia.

The product of those discussions is Sea Commons, a newly formed Gloucester-based citizen-action group that hopes to raise the level of debate not only on ocean pollution, but the ways that discussion dovetails with many of the waterfront and fishing issues currently being debated in Gloucester.

Included in that, he said, is the growing debate on the concept of ocean management, particularly on the escalating influence and benefits being reaped by corporate interests while the interests of the fishing community generally are ignored.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times