Conservation & Environment

NEW ORLEANS – September 13, 2010 – Marsh grasses matted by oil are still a common sight on the gulf coast here, but so are green shoots springing up beneath them.

In nearby bird colonies, carcasses are still being discovered, but they number in the thousands, not the tens of thousands that have died in other oil spills.

And at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the zone of severely oxygen-depleted water that forms every summer has reappeared, but its size does not seem to have been affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Read the complete story from The New York Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The controversial Pew critique of the Marine Stewardship Council from  the Journal Nature:

A growing number of consumers want to eat seafood without feeling guilty. Enter the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which purports to certify sustainable fisheries and provides a label for sustainable products to “promote the best environmental choice in seafood”. The MSC is growing rapidly; the organization is also rapidly failing on its promise.

The MSC has become the world's most established fisheries certifier: 94 fisheries are currently MSC-certified, accounting for about 7% of global catch, and about 118 more are under assessment. MSC-certified seafood products, identified with a blue check-mark label, pack the shelves of stores such as Wal-Mart, Whole Foods Market and Waitrose. Although other certification schemes exist, such as Friend of the Sea based in Milan, Italy, the MSC is taken most seriously by scientists. The MSC is praised in Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), and is featured as a solution to declining fish stocks in the 2009 film The End of the Line.

However, objections to MSC certifications are growing. Scores of scientists (including ourselves) and many conservation groups, including Greenpeace, the Pew Environment Group and some national branches of the WWF, have protested over various MSC procedures or certifications. We believe that, as the MSC increasingly risks its credibility, the planet risks losing more wild fish and healthy marine ecosystems.

This can be turned around only if the MSC creates more stringent standards, cracks down on arguably loose interpretation of its rules, and alters its process to avoid a potential financial incentive to certify large fisheries.

Read the complete story from PEW.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recent Fisheries Roundtable discussion at the Portsmouth Public Library highlighted the need to protect cod and winter flounder populations that spawn in the Gulf of Maine.

The New England Fishery Management Council is currently developing Framework 45, part of the multispecies fishery management plan that deals with spawning cod populations.

Speakers weighed in on the results from collaborative research on cod and winter flounder at the Aug. 26 event. The Fisheries Roundtable series is sponsored by N.H. Sea Grant and The Northeast Consortium.

Annie Hawkins, groundfish analyst for the New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC), gave a brief overview of some of the management items proposed for Framework 45. Fisheries managers are working to refine the areas where cod spawning occurs and include those areas in seasonal closures that will protect groups of spawning fish, or ‘aggregations,’ in the Gulf of Maine. 

Read the complete story from Sea Grant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Crockett, director of federal fisheries policy, and Holly Binns, manager of the Campaign to End Overfishing in the Southeast, for the Pew Charitable Trusts spoke about ending overfishing and rebuilding depleted fishing stocks Aug. 19 in Tallahassee at the Florida Outdoor Writers Association conference.

Why does Pew care about ocean conservation? We like to fish!, they said.

Ending overfishing is a hallmark of our work in federal waters, Crockett said. Taking fish out of the water faster than they can replenish themselves is overfishing. There were no time limits in the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act. In 2006, that was changed with the recognition of the need to put an annual catch limit in place based on science and have them in place by 2010.

Some feel that 10 years as a target timeline to rebuild depleted populations is not biologically possible; we think the timelines are accurately reflected, Crockett said. “We’re seeing stocks recovering, such as sea scallops in New England. Red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico also is doing better.”

Read the complete story from The Examiner.

Read about the Florida Outdoor Writers Association conference.

 

 

 

 

 

In the early 19th century, freshwater eels — the only fish in the world that spends its adult life in freshwater and spawns in the middle of an ocean — were so abundant in New England’s rivers that residents described “slicks” of young, migrating eels moving up tidal creeks in spring, so thick they formed mats on top of the water. A century ago, America’s eels traveled up the Mississippi and its tributaries as far as Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois, in numbers large enough to support commercial fisheries. Eels once made up 50 percent of the inshore fish biomass of Lake Ontario at the head of the St. Lawrence River.

In England’s Thames River, a little more than a century ago, runs of young eels, each about two inches in length, formed a densely-packed column five inches wide that ran uninterrupted for miles. Indeed, the word for a young freshwater eel, elver, is thought to have come from a phenomenon in mid-May on the Thames that eel fishermen used to term the “eel fair.”

These days, however, an eel caught in the St. Lawrence, the Thames, or the rivers of America’s Upper Midwest is an aberration. The range of American and European eels is shrinking dramatically and their total populations have fallen sharply. Populations of freshwater eels the world over — from South Africa, to Indonesia, to Australia — are in decline as the mysterious creatures have fallen victim to hydropower dams that macerate them on their downstream migrations, to coastal and river development that destroys or degrades their habitat, and to fisheries working to satisfy a robust demand for eels in Asia, especially in Japan.

Read the complete story from Yale Environment 360.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BUCKSPORT — The Gulf of Maine has a golden opportunity for extensive revitalization coming as Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins  return to Washington. About $990 million will be available to resurrect our legendary coastal fisheries and environmental richness.

But they must champion these proposed new funds in different bills written in response to two great disasters in our sister Gulf, as the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has arrived, and BP's criminal negligence has been capped off (maybe).

I remember watching a band of New Orleans musicians sway solemnly by vast acres of stacked caskets filled with their forebears' remains. I wondered how all this beauty had evolved. I remember thinking that of course the levees would protect them – they were built by the Army Corps of Engineers, after all.

Read the complete story from the Portland Press Herald.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BARNEGAT LIGHT – August 30, 2010 – The tales fishermen tell on the dock aren't always about the big one that got away. Some are about the many old nets, crab traps and ropes they haul in with the day's catch.

On Monday, this port — home to 300 fishermen — became a participant in Fishing for Energy, a program that allows commercial fishermen to recycle gear that otherwise would be hauled to a landfill or dumped back into the ocean.

Fisherman Brett Clark of Tabernacle was among the first to toss a used fishing net into the special bin Monday morning, signaling the beginning of a green partnership between the community and Covanta Energy-from-Waste facilities in New Jersey and Schnitzer Steel industries Inc. in New England.

"In the old days, fishermen would just kick the old nets they got out of the water back into the water," Clark said. "Now, everyone is going green and we (fishermen) are no different. Let's start turning these old nets into energy."

Read the complete story from the Asbury Park Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you know, Oceana is in the midst of an eight-week expedition in the Gulf of Mexico. They wanted to tell you about our ship, the Oceana Latitude. The Latitude is an impressive vessel that has been used by its owner for fishing on the high seas. It is a nice cruise boat that we have turned into a research vessel to support our scientific expedition to find out more about the effects of the oil spill.  We thank the owner greatly, who has given us the boat at cost to make our work possible in the Gulf. It made the Latitude the cheapest boat available for our two-month expedition.

Here are some other facts about our boat:

-It was originally designed as an offshore rig supply vessel. We retrofitted the boat back into a campaign boat, taking advantage of this design, which was very useful for our purposes.

– This has also led to some interesting adaptations of the boat; for example, we have turned the pool into a storage area and the sauna has been converted into a locker for the diving equipment. (And with the temperatures  on deck, the crew didn’t need a sauna, trust us.)

-The salon of the boat has been converted into a working office with eight computers, a printer, phones and screens that display the images from the ROV and the navigational data. It doubles also as our dining room.

Read all about the Latitude from Oceana.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scientists are squabbling with the government about what happened to the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP well before the well was capped.

The dispute started a couple of weeks ago, when the federal government released a report that left the impression that most of the oil was no longer a problem. In releasing what it called its oil budget, the government said the vast majority of oil had evaporated or been captured, vacuumed up, burned or dispersed. And much of what was left in the Gulf was degrading quickly.

Some scientists couldn't believe what they were reading.

"We saw some press reports that 75 percent of the oil was gone, and we were alarmed at hearing that number," says Chuck Hopkinson, a marine science professor at the University of Georgia and director of the Georgia Sea Grant. Hopkinson says he believes those reports gave the public an "absolutely incorrect" impression, which the government failed to contradict. He gathered a group of scientists who came up with an assessment that 70 percent to 79 percent of the oil remains in the Gulf.

Listen to the story from NPR.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On August 4, Carol Browner, special adviser to the president for energy and climate change, appeared on NBC’s Today Show and CBS’s The Early Show to announce that 75 percent of the oil in the Gulf from the BP spill was gone.

“The vast majority of the oil has been contained, it’s been burned, it’s been cleaned and that’s good news for the people of the Gulf,” she said on CBS.

Browner was backed up by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, whose office issued a five-page report which said that only 52.7 million gallons out of the approximately 172 million gallons that spewed into the water from the broken BP well remained.

Read the complete story from The IND.