Conservation & Environment

September 27, 2013– A report released yesterday by a panel of scientists, conservation organizations and government agencies have positively linked a mass stranding of whales to sonar used by Exxon/Mobile during an offshore survey. In this case, the whales fled the area prior to the seismic phase of the survey, which shows that even this type of sonar (also used by military and research vessels) is devastating to whale and dolphins.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare reports:

An independent scientific review panel has concluded that the mass stranding of approximately 100 melon-headed whales in the Loza Lagoon system in northwest Madagascar in 2008 was primarily triggered by acoustic stimuli, more specifically, a multi-beam echosounder system operated by a survey vessel contracted by ExxonMobil Exploration and Production (Northern Madagascar) Limited.  

WCS and IFAW support these conclusions that add to a mounting body of evidence of the potential impacts of anthropogenic noise on marine mammals," said Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, Director of the Ocean Giants Program for WCS. "Implications go well beyond the hydrocarbon industry, as these sonar systems are widely used aboard military and research vessels for generating more precise bathymetry (underwater mapping). We now hope that these results will be used by industry, regulatory authorities, and others to minimize risks and to better protect marine life, especially marine mammal species that are particularly sensitive to increasing ocean noise from human activities.  

Read the full story at The Huffington Post   

 

PORTLAND, Maine– September 27, 2013 — Fish commonly found in warm ocean waters to the south have become more common in New England as ocean temperatures rise.

Over the past two years, fishermen in southern New England have seen an increase in croaker, cobia and spot, species more commonly found in waters off the mid-Atlantic. Certain types of skates and blue crabs are also becoming more numerous, fishermen say.

In the colder Gulf of Maine waters north of Cape Cod, black sea bass have become more prevalent the past two summers. Longfin squid, which are found primarily south of Cape Cod, were present in Maine waters during the 2012 summer, resulting in new fisheries and markets being developed for the season.

Before last year, lobster fisherman David Cousens of South Thomaston, Maine, had seen only one ocean sunfish in nearly 40 years of pulling traps. This summer he's seen a bunch of them, sometimes days in a row.

Cousens even found some sea horses in his traps last summer. Scientists say there have also been reports of triggerfish and filefish — colorful species that look more suited to an aquarium — and juvenile snowy grouper, which is normally found in the Caribbean or off the southern U.S.

Read the full story by the Associated Press at The Washington Post

September 27, 2013 — The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) issued a five-page statement today, lashing out at its critics, including the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) and some of the seafood industry media, for what it called “negative and inaccurate statements.”

The MSC has been at odds with ASMI for years, but the statement comes on the heels of a 24 September hearing by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard that examined the need for third-party certification programs like the MSC’s.

In the statement, described as an “open letter and fact sheet,” Kerry Coughlin, regional director for the Americas for the MSC, described the hearing as a “particularly egregious example of biased and inaccurate discussion,” and blasted the committee’s chair, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, for keeping the MSC out of the hearing.

“With due respect to Chairman Begich, exclusion from the hearing of the MSC, the world’s leading seafood sustainability certification program and a main subject of the hearing, suggests the purpose of the hearing was not to gather informative testimony on the subject but to posit a particular position based on misinformation,” Coughlin wrote.

Coughlin also challenged Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who also made headlines this week in her criticism of the involvement of third-party certification programs in government activities. On 24 September, Murkowski praised a decision by the U.S. General Services Administration to confirm it will not let third-party groups such as NGOs influence its definition of sustainable seafood. The senator has also proposed legislation that would further prohibit federal agencies from using third-party certification programs.

Read the full story from Seafood Source 

Read MSC's open letter addressing recent criticism

Read MSC's 'fact sheet' 

 

September 27, 2013 — An online video campaign designed to build consumer confidence in sustainable seafood has sparked outrage in the B.C. and Alaska fishing industry.

While a song titled Happy Go Lucky Me plays, the animated video features a tractor pulling an enormous net that captures farm animals, uproots trees and causes widespread destruction on the property. The marketing spot carries the tag line: “We don’t farm like this. Why do we fish like this?”

World Wildlife Fund Canada agreed to remove the 75-second video from its website and YouTube last week at the request of the Marine Stewardship Council, a London-based group that certifies wild-caught sustainable seafood.

The group’s blue MSC eco-labels are placed on retail products, after they pass scientific standards and meet guidelines for best practices for catching seafood.

Representatives of the B.C. and Alaska fishing sector are still seething, saying the video appeared for one week on WWF Canada’s website and YouTube, and also the Facebook page of the Loblaws grocery chain. The video had been intended to generate buzz on social media in a joint campaign by WWF Canada and Loblaws.

Read the full story from The Globe and Mail

Read more of Saving Seafood's coverage of this video

 

PORTLAND, Maine — September 26, 2013 — Atlantic cod and many other commercially valuable fish in New England have been shifting northeast from their historical distribution centers in recent years because of warming waters. Warm water was blamed for lobsters shedding their shells far earlier than usual last year, leading to a glut that created havoc within the industry.

At the same time, species that normally live in warmer waters are showing up with greater frequency off New England, scientists say, largely because of rising ocean temperatures. Other factors, such as fishing pressure and environmental changes including increased acidification and lower salinity levels, are believed to be at play.

Third-generation fisherman Rodman Sykes, who fishes out of Point Judith, R.I., said he’s been catching more barndoor and clear-nose skates and torpedo rays. And dockside workers have reported seeing mahi mahi swim by.

The fish aren’t abundant enough yet to make money from. But in time, he said, fishermen in southern New England could benefit financially from the newcomers.

‘‘But I'm more fearful for the guys down south who might be losing some of their opportunities,’’ Sykes said. ‘‘Maybe something will replace them, or they'll become more spread out. Or maybe they'll come up here and go back down there for the winter.’’

Many of the warmer-water species that are now becoming more common have been coming to New England for years but in smaller numbers, said Mike Fogarty, chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass.

Those that made it to New England would typically die in years past when the waters got cold in the winter, he said, but more of them are now surviving because of the temperatures.

A study written by Fogarty and other researchers that appeared in the journal Science this month concludes that climate change has resulted in shifts in where and at what depths many marine species are found throughout U.S. and Canadian waters. The shifts have not been uniform and are most likely caused by local climate conditions.

Read the full story by Clarke Canfield of the Associated Press in The Boston Globe 

 

September 25, 2013 — Sea-level rise is a slow-moving threat that presents a tremendous risk to some of America’s most populous cities. The Center for American Progress visited Norfolk, Virginia, a city on the front lines of the fight against rising seas, to talk to residents and community leaders about their efforts to save the city and learn to live with the water. One thing is clear: Doing nothing is not an option.

Watch the video at the Center for American Progress

 

September 23, 2013 — A one-acre oyster reef has been created in the river just off the shore of Soundview Park in the South Bronx — one of the largest oyster restoration projects in the city. On Saturday, students from the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School relocated about 100,000 farm-raised baby oysters, known as spat-on-shell, to the reef, which was made this summer by piling 100 tons of empty shells on the river’s muddy bottom.

Not much lived in the Bronx River in the 1970s, when it was tainted with toxic chemicals and human waste and choked by abandoned cars dumped into its waters.

The oyster did.

Oysters clung tenaciously to tires here and there, a tiny remnant of the vast oyster reefs that once thrived in New York City’s waterways and nourished natives and settlers alike. Now after decades of cleanup efforts in the river, the oyster has emerged as a tangible measure of how much more needs to be done to return the river closer to its natural state.

These Bronx oysters are not destined for the dinner plate or coveted as a source of pearls, but instead are prized for their ability to filter pollutants and anchor a marine ecosystem with their craggy reefs.

“They’re ecological engineers,” said Dennis Suszkowski, science director of the Hudson River Foundation in Lower Manhattan, which is overseeing the oyster reef in the Bronx River. “Oysters will grow on top of one another and create a three-dimensional habitat with all sorts of nook and crannies for fish to feed and use as shelter. It’s the kind of habitat that was once here that is no longer here.”

Read the full story at The New York Times 

 

 

 

HYANNIS, Mass. — September 23, 2013 — A large leatherback sea turtle was freed from an entanglement of rope Monday in Nantucket Sound, one of 18 freed so far this season.

The turtle was held fast in fishing gear off Hyannis and was found by commercial fishermen, according to Cathrine Macort of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. The fishermen reported the entanglement to the U.S. Coast Guard station in Chatham, which responded with the center's disentanglement expert, who is part of the Massachusetts Sea Turtle Disentanglement Network. On site, the rescuers found a 500-pound animal with its right front flipper wrapped in buoy line.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

September 19, 2013 —  Thanks to ongoing research in the Monterey Bay and in offshore waters, new sections of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary's (MBNMS) underwater terrain have been identified by Oceana, an international ocean conservation and advocacy organization, and other research groups as significantly less vulnerable to trawlers' dragnets than other, more complex areas. As a result, Oceana is proposing reopening sections to trawling in coming years on the condition that new closures be made in federal water fisheries outside of the bay, where highly vulnerable ecosystems have been discovered.

“We're essentially looking at these areas as bargaining chips,” says Geoff Shester, the California program director for Oceana.

The areas that could be reopened in the MBNMS are primarily soft substrate, mostly void of coral shelf and major bio-diversity, but still productive fishing grounds for trawlers, he says.

“The idea is to trade areas that appear to be muddy and flat in exchange for these rich, complex, coral-covered canyon walls that are just epic habitats,” Shester says.

Shester says these soft-sediment flat areas being considered for reopening are still vulnerable to trawling, but not as severely as the coral reef zones.

“There's relatively less impact,” he says. “It's really a lesser evil. There's less of a long-term impact in some places than in others.”

Trawling, a system fishermen have utilized in the Monterey Bay for the past 100 years, became heavily regulated in federal waters in 2006 by the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) and was outlawed in coastal California waters by the state legislature in 2005, though there are minor exceptions in Southern California.

Read the full story at Good Times Weekly

 

September 13, 2013 — Joshua Reichert, executive vice president of The Pew Charitable Trusts, praised the release of new sustainable consumption guidelines for government and public sector employees in Hong Kong to not serve shark fin and bluefin tuna at official functions.

“We congratulate the Hong Kong government for taking leadership to protect shark and bluefin tuna populations that are globally at risk. This announcement is particularly significant as Hong Kong is the world’s largest shark fin market, representing approximately 50 percent of the global trade. In addition, a recent stock assessment of Pacific bluefin indicated that the population has declined by about 96 percent.”

Global shark populations are declining at an unprecedented rate. Approximately 100 million sharks are killed every year in commercial fisheries, driven largely for the demand for shark fin. Because sharks mature late in life, have long reproductive cycles, and produce few young, they are extremely vulnerable to overfishing.

The momentum to protect sharks has clearly been growing. Since 2009, nine countries and territories have established shark sanctuaries, closing their waters to commercial shark fishing and banned the sale, trade and possession of shark fins and products. In 2012, the Chinese government announced it would establish regulations banning consumption of shark fin at official banquets by 2015. Last March, protections were extended to five species of sharks and manta rays under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

In contrast, bluefin tuna protections are entirely inadequate to reverse the decline of these severely depleted species. There is no limit on total catch, and greater than 90 percent of Northern Pacific bluefin catch is comprised of small juveniles. Like its North Pacific cousins, the southern bluefin tuna is at approximately 5 percent of its unfished level, and western Atlantic bluefin have been overfished for decades. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, Atlantic bluefin are endangered and southern bluefin are critically endangered.

Effective implementation and enforcement of these new regulations in Hong Kong will be key in order to protect sharks and bluefin tuna for future generations.

Read the release from the Pew Charitable Trusts