Conservation & Environment

CANADA — August 16, 2012 — Northern cod appear to be in better shape than any time since Ottawa imposed a moratorium on the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery two decades ago, a leading fisheries scientist says.

But George Rose, a former federal fisheries scientist who has studied cod stocks for decades, says the improvement is not nearly strong enough or well documented to warrant an increase in cod quotas.

"I haven't seen that amount of fish or the size of the fish that we encountered this spring in, well, it's over 20 years," said Rose, director of the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystem Research at Memorial University.

"We really are at a new beginning, particularly with regards to caplin and the cod, which seem to be on the increase — at least in some areas," he told CBC News.

Rose said researchers, though, will not have hard numbers on cod stocks until next spring.

Without enough data, he warns against increasing quotas for a commercial cod fishery.

There are limited fisheries for cod around Newfoundland and Labrador, although it represents a tiny fraction of the overall seafood industry.

 

Read the full story at the CBC.

 

 

August 16, 2012 — Anyone who lives near a busy highway can sympathize with the North Atlantic right whale: Research released Wednesday shows the leviathans off New England’s coast are subject to such a constant undersea din it is difficult for them to hear each other most of the time.

It is a hazard that could be hindering the critically endangered species’ ability to navigate, avoid predators, and care for calves.

Global trade and the cruise industry have brought more, larger, and noisier ships to the region, resulting in the whales losing about two-thirds of their ability to communicate with each other compared with about 50 years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-led paper found. The estimated 450 right whales left in the world are believed to use their ethereal moans, whoops, and whistles to find food and mates, and to avoid peril in the sea.

“There is this overall hum they have to deal with, and it’s increased over time,’’ said Leila Hatch, NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary marine ecologist and lead author of the paper that appears in the journal Conservation Biology.

While authors of the study said they can’t tease out how much the noise is affecting whales compared to myriad other problems facing the animals, they said it is probably significant. They estimated background noise levels have risen about 10 decibels off Boston over the last half-century. Such an increase, scientists say, represents a dramatic change.

These “whales rely on their ability to hear far more than their ability to see,’’ Hatch said. “Chronic noise is likely reducing the opportunities to gather and share vital information.”

The study may prove useful as the International Maritime Organization works on guidelines to reduce noise from ships’ engines and propellers and other machinery, so that less noise is transferred to the water and whales.

The researchers spent three years using submerged acoustic recorders in and around Stellwagen Bank to measure real-time locations, levels, and types of sound from ships, whales, and the ocean overall. In April 2008 alone — the peak of right whale feeding season off Massachusetts — scientists documented more than 22,000 right whale calls.

The group, including researchers from Cornell University, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and Marine Acoustics Inc., an environmental consulting group in Arlington, Va., also estimated how underwater sound had changed over time by comparing a patchwork of available historical data from similar water bodies and linking it back to Boston.

While Jacques Cousteau dubbed the submerged depths “The Silent World,” the oceans in their natural state are, in fact, filled with squeaking dolphins, grunting fish, and even an undersea roar from occasional storm winds. But ships, sonar, oil exploration, and other water traffic are also drowning out conversations among marine mammals that rely on their super-sensitive hearing to navigate and communicate.

Sound, especially the kind of low frequencies large whales use, travels five times faster under water than on land and can be carried across vast ocean channels. Whale pods often communicate across hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.

Just as a construction blast bothers nearby humans, shorts bursts of sound perturb marine animals, according to a growing body of evidence compiled by scientists. For example, dolphins have refused to perform tasks if noise is too loud, and noise has been suggested as the cause of a handful of beached whale cases.

 

Read the full story in the Boston Globe

 

 

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — August 15, 2012 — Warming water temperatures may be causing an increase in the number of striped bass that have lesions from a viral or bacterial infection, the state Division of Marine Fisheries said.

While the number of infected fish is estimated at less than 5 percent of those landed along the entire Massachusetts coastline, the infection rate is higher in fish caught in the Cape Cod Canal and Buzzards Bay, according to a state advisory issued last month.

So far, there is no evidence of the bacterial disease mycobacteriosis that has become prolific among striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay, according to the fisheries division, but the agency urged caution in handling fish because the disease can be transferred to humans through contact.

Those reporting issues in Massachusetts have described small red spots on the white underbelly of fish. Any fish with large open lesions or darkened patches of meat should be discarded.

Visual tests have not discovered any mycobacteriosis in striped bass landed in Massachusetts yet but samples are getting more intensive tests at the University of Connecticut, Paul Diodati, director of the Division of Marine Fisheries said Tuesday.

Lou MacKeil, vice-president of environmental affairs for the Cape Cod Salties Sportfishing Club, who fishes every day for bass, said at least one fellow fisherman caught bass with spots, took photos and submitted them to the state. But MacKeil said he has no personal experience with the bacteria.

 

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times.

 

 

SANTA CRUZ — August 12, 2012 — Northern California environmentalists are teaming up to ask the state and federal government to step up protections for great white sharks, seeking to have them declared an endangered species deserving of the highest level of regulatory safeguards.

The request was filed Friday with the federal National Marine Fisheries Service by Monterey-based Oceana and the San Francisco-based Center for Biological Diversity. If the federal agency decides to take up the petition, a decision would take more than a year.

"Our end goal is both the federal and state government listing the U.S. West Coast population of great white sharks as endangered," said Ashley Blacow, a spokeswoman for Oceana, saying the groups are seeking added conservation measures, particularly when it comes to drift net and gill net fisheries.

Miyoko Sakashita, the Center for Biological Diversity's oceans director, said the science around white sharks is only now emerging, including how distinct the West Coast population is and their relatively low numbers.

If approved, the designation could lead to greater habitat protections, stronger limits on bycatch and increased funding for studies.

"We do a lot of Endangered Species Act requests and it does tend to increase the science around a species," Sakashita said.

The commercial and recreational fishing of white sharks is illegal in California, and the practice of shark-finning is banned along western U.S.

But a handful of juvenile sharks are mistakenly caught in nets, an average of about 10 a year, Blacow said. Oceana suspects more incidental catches go unreported.

An evolutionary castaway, white sharks are the only remaining survivors of the genus Carcharodon. They are ferocious hunters and an apex predator in the ocean, congregating near Año Nuevo, the Farralon Islands and Guadalupe Island in Mexico.

Numbers are difficult to determine, but recent studies concluded there are about 220 adults and near-adults near the Central Coast region, and fewer than 400 statewide. The International Union for Conservation of Nature regards them as a vulnerable species, one step above endangered.

 

Read the full story here

 

 

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — August 11, 2012 — The man who invented the wire lobster trap believes he can help rebuild cod stocks in New England by persuading fishermen to stop dragging nets and switch to cod pots, similar to those used for lobster fishing.

It took 20 years for Jim Knott's wire pots, which debuted in 1957, to be accepted by fishermen as replacements for the heavy wooden traps then in common use. Now he is encountering a similar reluctance to embrace this innovative fishing gear, he said.

"Cod pots are the standard in Alaska and Newfoundland," said Knott, founder and current president of Riverdale Mills in Northbridge. His company manufactures the wire mesh used for many of the lobster traps used in New England.

Knott, 83, has an economics degree from Harvard and said he believes that cod pots create less environmental damage than trawl gear and can save fishermen thousands of dollars in fuel costs.

"The wonderful thing about pots is that everything comes up alive," he said, allowing undersized or unwanted fish to be thrown back.

Knott first saw cod pots at a fish expo he attended in St. John's, Newfoundland and brought the idea back to New England. The Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries became interested and conducted a yearlong study in the waters off Chatham. The project began in November 2008, using pots made by Knott's company from the Newfoundland design, in addition to a smaller version manufactured in Norway.

"Mike Pol told me they worked but I'm still waiting for them to be approved," Knott told the Standard-Times.

Michael Pol, a marine biologist with DMF and a key figure in the state-run study, was on vacation and unavailable for comment. The report on the study concluded that pots "are now demonstrated to be effective at catching Atlantic cod in the region," but it also noted that "commercial practicality still appears elusive."

 

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times.

 

 

August 10, 2012 — Arctic sea ice coverage has been declining for decades, and 2011 set a record for the lowest amount of coverage ever recorded—a record we’re currently threatening to break. Less ice and more open water means the region will soon be available for additional human activity.

Shipping companies and cruise lines are already utilizing new routes, taking advantage of the long-sought northwest passage from Europe and North America to Asia. And as soon as next week, Shell Oil could receive the green light to begin drilling up to five new exploratory oil-and-gas wells off the north slope of Alaska. As Big Oil prepares to exploit the emerging resources and access, the fishing industry has chosen to take a very different approach—one the oil companies should heed.

In August 2009 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration formally approved a proposal by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to ban all fishing activity in the U.S. Arctic except subsistence fishing by Alaska Natives. Members of the council—the majority of which is comprised of fishing industry representatives—voted unanimously to recommend the prohibition. In a remarkably forward-looking move, the body also opted to close the nearly 150,000-square-mile Arctic Management Area (see Figure 1) until adequate scientific fish stock assessments and other data could be collected that would ensure this virgin resource could be managed sustainably.

This move gained the support of environmental organizations such as Oceana, The Ocean Conservancy, and the Pew Environment Group, as well as Alaska’s biggest coalition of fishing industry interests—the Marine Conservation Alliance, which represents more than two-thirds of the state’s groundfishermen and crabbers.

The fishing industry’s approach to management stands in direct contrast to that taken by the oil-and-gas industry and its federal regulators. Shell has led Big Oil’s charge into the Arctic Ocean and is on the cusp of receiving final permits that could allow them to begin drilling operations there as soon as next week. Logic would dictate this means we know more about the science of oil in the Arctic than we do about the science of fish. Not so.

The same lack of knowledge about baseline environmental conditions in the region that has caused fishermen and their regulators to hit the pause button have not slowed the oil industry. While Shell and other oil companies have committed resources to research projects such as the Chukchi Sea Environmental Studies Program, they are not waiting to see data from these efforts before plowing forward with drilling operations.

Where the fishing industry has taken a reasoned, methodical approach, oil and gas and their regulators are operating full speed ahead, though Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has insisted that Shell’s permits would be issued “under the most watched program in the history of the United States.”

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard has ramped up its Arctic effort, driven primarily by the need to babysit Shell’s drilling operations. To do this it will have to reallocate ships, helicopters, and personnel that would otherwise be dedicated to its traditional missions including migrant and drug interdiction, search and rescue, and fisheries enforcement. And it’s already desperately lacking in Arctic-capable resources, with just one seaworthy icebreaking vessel currently afloat (our two others are in drydock awaiting funding for lengthy and expensive repairs). “The Coast Guard has zero capability in the Arctic,” admitted the service’s commandant, Adm. Robert Papp, last month.

 

Read the full story on the Center for American Progress

 

CHATHAM, Mass. — August 10, 2012 — In 19 years of lobstering, Ben Bergquist has seen plenty of whales but never one entangled in fishing gear. That doesn't mean he hasn't experienced the effect of those tragedies at sea.

He spent $20,000 a few years ago to comply with regulations meant to reduce the chances a loop of rope would get caught in a whale's mouth, front flippers or tail.

But he knows that isn't enough.

On Thursday night, Bergquist joined 50 other fishermen at the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association in becoming certified in the first of five levels of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's whale disentanglement program. Each level comes with an increased level of responsibility, training and skill.

While there was little hands-on training and a lot of information on how the program works, Bergquist and others felt it was important to show they are willing to help protect the region's whale populations, many of which are either threatened or potentially facing extinction.

"I think it's become kind of a necessity to take a proactive approach," Bergquist said. "We don't want to entangle whales. We're just guys with families trying to make a living."

NOAA looks to certify professional mariners like fishermen, marine patrol officers, naturalists and others with boating experience at that first level to put more people on the water who know what to do and what not to do.

At the top level are people such as Scott Landry, director of the whale rescue program at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, who cuts the lines and frees snarled whales.

What not to do, Landry told fishermen at Thursday's session, is to attempt to free the whale, even if they have the best of intentions.

In a whale rescue earlier this year off Province-

town, someone attempted to free a small whale by cutting through the line off its tail that anchored it to the bottom by a series of lobster pots. If the person had been successful, a whale encased in line from nose to tail would have been freed, and difficult to find.

At the entry level, fishermen would be expected to report a whale in trouble and stand by the animal until certified rescuers arrive and assess the type of gear and the extent of entanglement.

Their expertise in knowing what kind of a whale had become ensnared in could actually prove more important than freeing it, Jamison Smith, NOAA's large whale disentanglement coordinator for the Northeast, told the group because it could show the effectiveness of gear changes or lead to other whale-saving innovations.

Chatham lobsterman Will Martin said he thought the session was informative. He'd never seen the graphic images of what happens to whales that are cut and weighted down by lines and gear.

"We've been doing this already. It just makes it official," said Jim Nash, a Chatham gillnet fisherman who helped put the training session together.

Nash sits on a NOAA whale advisory committee that helps come up with solutions to the problem. He said fishermen are working to help fix the problem of whales becoming caught in their gear.

 

Read the full story in the Cape Cod Times

 

 

PORTLAND, Maine — August 8, 2012 — The state is committed to a plan that would allow alewives to return to the St. Croix River above a dam that blocks their passage, but only in a gradual manner and not in an unrestricted fashion that environmental groups and Maine Indian tribes are calling for, Maine's attorney general said Wednesday in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA last month sent a letter to Attorney General William Schneider saying a Maine law that bars alewives, or river herring, upriver of the Grand Falls dam violates the federal Clean Water Act, and that Maine should take action to allow alewives upriver of the dam. Advocates of restoring alewives to the river's full watershed had hoped the EPA's letter would force the state to open the dam's fish passages and allow the fish upriver.

But in his response, Schneider wrote that the law, known as the alewife law, is valid, and that the state never intended to apply it for purposes of the Clean Water Act. That stance is opposed by the Conservation Law Foundation, which has sued the EPA in hopes of giving alewives full river access.

"The state has always regarded the alewife law as a fisheries management measure with meaning and effect only in that context; it has never considered the statute to be a CWA water quality standard," Schneider wrote.

Schneider's letter is the latest step in an ongoing dispute about whether alewives should be allowed full access to the St. Croix River, which serves as a boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.

The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation filed a lawsuit against the EPA in May to require the agency to force Maine to allow the fish to return to their natural habitat above the Grand Falls dam. The CLF claimed that not doing so violates the Clean Water Act.

The Passamaquoddy Tribe and other groups have also pushed to have the river opened to alewives.

 

Read the full story from the AP at the Boston Globe.

 

 

July 25, 2012 — The following is an excerpt from a Greenpeace petition on Atlantic menhadem.

The most important fish in the sea need your help. Last November, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) responded to scientific evidence of a severe decline in menhaden—and more than 90,000 comments from people like you—and took a historic first step to help the recovery of Atlantic menhaden. The commission initiated a plan to significantly increase the number of menhaden left in the ocean, a move that would benefit and protect sport fish, seabirds, whales, and thousands of fishing-related businesses and bird and whale watching operations that depend on these fish.

There is still no limit on how many menhaden are taken from the Atlantic Ocean. Every year, hundreds of millions of these fish are hauled in and ground up, reduced to fish meal and oil for use as dietary supplements, fertilizer, and feed for farm animals, pets, and aquaculture.

Don’t let the menhaden industry derail the plan to restore this critically important fish. The ASMFC needs to hear from you! Urge the commission to make good on its commitment to restore the menhaden population.

View the petition here.

Analysis: On July 25, Greenpeace published a petition, “Keep Menhaden Recovery On Track,” advocating for officials at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) to implement new regulations on Atlantic menhaden. The text is virtually identical to a menhaden petition published on July 23 by Peter Baker, Director of the Northeast Fisheries Program for the Pew Environment Group, and both petitions contain the same misleading arguments about the menhaden fishery. The result is an exaggerated view of the Atlantic menhaden population that is more dire than the reality, and one that minimizes the many aspects of the menhaden science and management process that are currently in dispute.

The petitions contain several inaccuracies and selective quoting of facts. For example, they state, “overfishing has occurred in 32 of the last 54 years,” but fails to mention that in the last 15 years, overfishing of menhaden has only occurred twice, most recently in 2008 by only .04%. Similarly, they neglect to mention that the menhaden stock is at its target abundance (the number of eggs being produced by the population), which is almost twice the level it would need to be in order for the stock to be considered overfished.

In the petitions, the organizations also ask the public to demand that menhaden management be based on the 2012 menhaden update stock assessment. Not mentioned is that because of issues such as a pattern of contradictory historical population estimates, and incorrect assumptions about the age distribution of fish caught by the fishery, the members of the ASMFC Menhaden Technical Committee have deemed that assessment to be severely flawed and not reliable for management purposes. They also neglect to include the results of a recent aerial survey of the northern range of the menhaden population in the North Atlantic, which indicates that the coast-wide menhaden stock may be twice as large as the ASMFC is currently estimating.

 

 

SUNDERLAND, Mass. — August 5, 2012 — The dream seemed tantalizingly within reach: restoring majestic Atlantic salmon to the Connecticut River, where dams had blocked the waterway so completely the overfished population became extinct.

Now, almost 50 years and more than $25 million later, the federal government is giving up on restocking the river.

The coveted sport fish follow an intricate, circuitous life journey along the 407-mile long Connecticut. Born in tributaries, they swim to the ocean off Greenland before returning to that same tributary to spawn the next generation. Many of their most daunting foes — dams — are now equipped with fish ladders and lifts, allowing the easiest passage in centuries for the salmon.

But the fish confront a new nemesis: the changing ocean. So few Connecticut salmon today are surviving their arduous sea journey — a tenfold decline since the early 1990s — federal officials say they can no longer justify spending money to save them. This year, only 54 fish ­returned to the Connecticut River.

No one knows exactly why, although theories abound, including the consequences of climate change.

“We really thought this was going to work . . . but the quality of the ocean is changing,’’ Mickey Novak, longtime hatchery manager at the Richard Cronin National Salmon Station in Sunderland, said as he stood in a concrete holding pool with one of the silver fish writhing in his hands.

A decision has not been made about whether the station will remain open.

The Connecticut’s story is a painful lesson about the challenge of repairing nature — and an ominous indicator for Atlantic salmon in more northern locales. Maine salmon populations are nowhere near levels that would allow them to be self-sustaining without stocking despite decades of effort, and scientists worry that the fish — or the funding — may disappear before they figure out how to save them.

 

Read the full story at the Boston Globe.