Conservation & Environment

Criticized for underpublicizing a request for developers to build windmills over more than 2,000 nautical square miles — including parts of the Georges Bank fishing grounds — the federal government has extended the public comment period for the controversial project.

The 30-day extension for public comments on the wind development project off the southern New England coast now expires March 30, according to the Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

The locale for the wind energy grid, selected in consultation with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the limited initial notice for the hearings brought complaints from the fishing industry, Congress and the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick.

The complaints noted the overlap of windmill plots on the fish-rich Georges Bank, the Northwest Atlantic's most fertile harvesting water.

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A bill recently introduced in the California Legislature would ban the sale and possession of shark fins, including the serving of shark’s fin soup. Down the rickety alleyways and produce-laden byways of San Francisco’s Chinatown, some see the proposed law as a cultural assault — a sort of Chinese Exclusion Act in a bowl.

Similar to a measure passed in Hawaii, the bill seeks to curtail shark finning, a brutal, bloody practice of the global trade in which the fins are typically hacked off a live shark, leaving it to die slowly as it sinks to the bottom of the sea.

The bill is attracting a motley group of supporters, including the state’s sport and commercial fishermen’s associations, aquariums, chefs, scientists and numerous environmental groups.

But in a city where food and the environment are perhaps equal obsessions, the politics of soup has also highlighted a generational divide between eco-conscious children and their tradition-bound elders.

Read the complete story from The New York Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twenty years after the No-Name storm closed a Plymouth marsh used by fishermen since the 17th century, a group of volunteers has succeeded in reopening an inlet to the sea to keep the marsh alive. The victory came after a hard battle — not against the elements but against regulators who wanted to let nature take its course.

The course that nature was taking since storms closed the Ellisville Marsh was turning a once-vibrant ecosystem into a mud flat, according to members of the volunteer group Friends of Ellisville Marsh. And environmental regulators in the state’s Coastal Zone Management office thought that was all right, they say.

The Friends spent three years and raised $85,000 to reopen the marsh’s historic channel to the sea, allowing water to flow into and out of the marsh with the tides. With the permits finally in hand, dredging was completed recently. As seawater surged in, dead marsh grass floated out, water scoured the marsh bottom, and gulls gathered to see if fish might be on the menu again.

Draining the marsh at low tide is essential to allow the primary vegetation — a marsh grass called spartina alterniflora — to survive, said Friends president Eric Cody. Without regular tidal alternations, the marsh grass was “drowning,’’ with fatal consequences for the whole ecosystem, he said.

But three-quarters of the money raised by the Friends was spent not on the physical work of dredging the marsh’s inlet channel but on fulfilling the requirements of the state’s permitting process.

“All we wanted to do was to protect fisheries and wildlife, and it’s mind-boggling what they made us go through,’’ Cody said.

Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

whitehouse1aOn February 14, the Obama Administration released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request, which includes a total of $1 billion for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) – higher than the President’s FY11 budget request and only slightly less than the FY10 enacted NMFS budget. The President's budget actually proposes increases in funding for key programs areas that support the implementation of annual catch limits (ACLs) aimed at ending overfishing.

Proposed increases to the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) would also support expanded efforts to improve the precision, timeliness and geographical resolution of recreational fisheries data. Other key fisheries programs that support data collection and fishery monitoring would receive slight increases or maintain level funding under the President’s budget.

The Administration’s proposed $15 million increase for Expanding Annual Stock Assessments (EASA) and $3 million increase under Fisheries Statistics for recreational fisheries monitoring (MRIP) reflect the Administration’s ongoing commitment to expand data collection and other activities that support the implementation of ACLs.

Read the complete story from The Marine Fish Conservation Network.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SANTA ROSA, Calif. – March 1, 2011 – California officials say the state could see a return to a full-length coastal salmon fishing season this year with biologists forecasting a tripling of the fish's ocean population.

Department of Fish and Game spokesman Harry Morse says the agency is projecting 729,000 salmon from the Sacramento River fall run in 2011, up from a 2010 projection of 245,000 fish.

The department announced the preliminary figure Tuesday at a meeting in Santa Rosa.

Read the complete story by The AP at The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

EDF has totally hijacked our fisheries management process as described on their own webiste – they were "instrumental in crafting and passing the reauthorization of Magnuson". So, all of these inflexible and arbitrary timeframes that we are faced with were put into place not by sound science, but by an environmental corporation for their own purposes.

Note the phrase "the LAW now requires…"

"Shaping the most sweeping fishery legislation in a decade. Our oceans team was instrumental in crafting and passing the 2006 Magnuson-Stevens Act, which introduced a market approach to protecting our oceans. The law now requires that catch limits or caps be set for all fisheries and also encourages the use of tradable "catch shares," which give fishermen a financial stake in preserving fish populations and help sustain fishing communities. With EDF’s help, fishermen and fishing communities on the Gulf of Mexico and the West Coast set up programs that are revitalizing the red snapper and Pacific groundfish fisheries."

EDF NEEDS TO GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR FISHERIES MANAGEMENT.

Read this blog at Florida Sportsman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second-largest utility in Massachusetts has agreed to buy electricity from three wind power companies to help it meet renewable power mandates, but it won't be buying from a high-profile wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod.

On Friday, NStar filed contracts with the Department of Public Utilities to buy power from Hoosac Wind in Massachusetts, Groton Wind in New Hampshire and Blue Sky East in Maine.

Cape Wind, the nation's first offshore wind farm, is still trying to find a buyer for half its power. It agreed last year to a 15-year deal to sell the first half to National Grid starting at 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour, and increasing 3.5 percent annually.

If Cape Wind doesn't sell the rest of its power within the next several months, it may be forced to move ahead with a project smaller than the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt wind farm planned in Nantucket Sound.

Read the complete story by the AP at ABC News.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Congress reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 2007, they gave federal fisheries regulators a deadline: establish catch limits and end overfishing by 2011. As the fateful year dawned a couple of months ago, recently retired NOAA Fisheries Chief Scientist Steve Murawski made an historic announcement: mission accomplished. Headlines trumpeted the end of overfishing in the United States.

And yet, the most recent status reports from NOAA’s Office of Sustainable Fisheries still list 40 stocks – including 10 in New England, alone – as being actively subject to overfishing. Why?

Emily Menashes, Acting Director for the Office of Sustainable Fisheries, says it’s the “difference between implementing measures and having positive verification of [their] success.” Or, put another way, the difference between belief and knowledge. The strict catch limits put into place for the 2010 fishing season are based on scientists’ interpretation of available information about how many fish there are and also a complex suite of what are known as life history traits, such as life span and reproductive success. Regulators believe that the current limits are set at a point that will end overfishing. But they won’t know that for sure for some time.

Read the complete story from WGBH.

 

 

 

 

 

A 21-year Florida ban on harvesting Goliath grouper will last at least a few more years.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation spent hours considering the topic of Goliath grouper — formerly known as jewfish — during its meeting this week in Apalachicola, but declined to take any action that would change the harvest ban in place since 1990.

Commissioners said anglers ask them almost every day when they will be able to harvest a Goliath grouper," said agency spokesman Lee Schlesinger.

"But there are real issues with the species stock assessment," Schlesinger said. "There's a lot of uncertainty, and this is a fish population that you have to treat with a lot of caution."

A recent assessment report on Goliath grouper populations was rejected as inadequate by a science committee of the federal Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council.

The state Fish and Wildlife Research Institute has launched several studies that seek to better understand the Goliath grouper life cycle, and ascertain when the population has increased to the point where harvest can resume.

Read the complete story from Keys Net.

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, the majestic striped bass. It’s been called the “perfect fish” by enthusiastic anglers, and represents one of the greatest successes of fisheries management in North America. It fights like a demon when hooked and is delicious when baked. Anglers are so enthusiastic about them that they will turn on commercial fishermen at the slightest evidence that a handful of stripers are getting caught in their gear, and this fish has considerable political clout thanks to the massive amounts of money brought in by the recreational fishing industry.  Other popular sportfish like bluefish and false albacore are mere peons compared to them.  In North Carolina, only red drum are mentioned with the same reverence and sought with the same obsession.  All hail Morone saxatilis, the mighty striped bass!

It’s not that I don’t like striped bass.  Stripers are a fun fish to catch and taste great, and are one of the better excuses to call out sick and get on the water.  I just get tired of hearing about them on a near-constant basis.  North Carolina is a state with many interesting and worthwhile fish to catch, but sometimes it seems like the entire state’s recreational fishing culture lives and dies solely on these black and white brutes, and this is reflected in the amount of research and management effort that goes into them.

So I’m here to tell you that striped bass are not all that.  In fact, they eat way too much.

Spiny dogfish, blamed for single-handedly keeping every valuable fish stock in the Atlantic down, are density-dependent feeders, which means that their diet typically reflects whatever is abundant in the local environment.  As foraging strategies go, this could be considered one of the more “responsible”, as it prevents dogfish from over-consuming any one species and also allows them to switch prey when necessary.

Read the complete blog from The Southern Fried Science Network.