State and Local

February 20, 2014 — The United Fishermen of Alaska are trying to revive the legislative discussion in Juneau about the vessel-based scallop limited entry program as managers and participants prepare for the new open access state-waters fishery that will open July 1.

In a Feb. 16 email, UFA Executive Director Julianne Curry wrote to members of the legislature that extending the limited entry program for scallops was a priority for UFA.

Curry cited economic concerns for the fleet, and sustainability issues in the fisheries, as reasons for continuing the program in her emails to the Legislature and to UFA board members.

Scallops are fished with dredges in Alaskan waters and many of the scallop beds cross the three-mile line that divides state and federal waters.

Previously, the fishery was managed jointly by state and federal entities.

This summer, the state-waters scallop fishery is slated to become open-access for the first time in just more than a decade after the previous vessel-based limited entry program was not renewed by the Legislature during the 2013 session due to concerns over consolidation.

The scallop fishery was the only vessel-based limited entry program in the state until the program expired Dec. 31, 2013.

Curry wrote in an email to the Journal that if the Legislature allowed one limited entry program to expire, it could set a precedent that would concern permit holders in other fisheries.

Last year, UFA passed a resolution supporting the program’s extension.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

February 19, 2014 — Commercial fishermen tell WITN that they're concerned a historic fishery could be coming to an end.

There's a proposed ban over the fishing of river herring, because the fish stock is depleted.

Wednesday night at the Crystal Coast Convention Center in Morehead City, some fishermen were fishing for an explanation on the proposed ban.

Kathy Rawls with the Division of Marine Fisheries said, "When we adopted our fishery management plan in 2007, the stock assessment that went along with that plan, had a stock assessment of possibly 24 years for this stock."

Rawls said the river herring stock is still in a depleted state.

In 2007, a moritorium that banned anyone from fishing went into effect. Although, a four-day discretionary harvest season once a year, held over Easter weekend, was still allowed.

Watch the video and read the full story at WITN

February 19, 2014 — This past Friday, the fishing community including local NOAA officials, academics, members of the RI Department of Environmental Management as well as commercial and recreational fishermen provided Rhode Island's congressional delegation with input on the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act Reauthorization. The act, which is commonly called the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), will come before congress for renewal this year.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act is the primary law governing marine fisheries management in the United States. It was originally enacted as the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 and amended many times. The two recent amendments were the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 and then the MSA of 2006.

Senator Shelton Whitehouse, D-RI, organized the input session for the congressional delegation and fishermen at the Coastal Institute on the URI Bay Campus. Senator Whitehouse said, "We are in the process of considering the Act and want your input. As you know this is not the only opportunity for input, many of you have and will continue to connect with us about fisheries issues and the MSA but his is a good start."

Congressmen James Langevin, D-RI, in opening comments spoke about a draft MSA bill being circulated by Representative Doc Hastings, R-Wash, "The draft bill proposed by Representative Hastings would strip away a lot of the gains of the Magnuson-Stevens Act." Director Janet Coit of the Department of Environmental Management said that the Hastings bill would weaken Annual Catch Limits (ACL), which have served us well to rebuild fish stocks in RI and the nation.

A common theme related by fishermen and fish managers at the meeting was fishermen participation in data collection and research. Ted Platz, commercial fishermen and an active member of the fishing community and monk fishery said, "We need fishermen to play an active role in fishery research." The collaboration between researchers and fishermen is key, the days of relying on just government sponsored research are gone. It has proven not to be effective.

As a member of NOAA's Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee's Recreational Working Group and an active member of the Rhode Island recreational fishing community, I testified at the hearing.

Highlights of my testimony are noted below.

Read the full story from the Warwick Beacon

BATON ROUGE, La. — February 20, 2014 — A new gelatin-like bait using shrimp waste could improve the way blue crabs are caught along the coast of Louisiana and add value to the state’s shrimp processing industry, an LSU researcher says.

Julie Anderson, a crustacean specialist with the LSU AgCenter, is working on a crab bait that could replace Atlantic menhaden, the current bait used.

The menhaden, also known as pogy, is shipped from the East Coast, Anderson said, but stocks are declining. The Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission put a limit on how much menhaden can be caught. Anderson said this is driving up the price of Atlantic menhaden.

Menhaden also is caught in the Gulf of Mexico, but it is rarely used for bait.

“Gulf-caught menhaden is valuable as its own separate fishery,” she said. “There are some fishermen that used to sell it as bait, but it is more valuable to use as Omega-3 oils – fish oils – that it is just not worthwhile to sell as bait."

Read the full story from the Daily Comet

AUGUSTA, Maine — February 19, 2014 — Changes that a legislative panel made Wednesday to a tentative agreement state fisheries officials had made with the Passamaquoddy Tribe over elver fishing mean that the agreement is “pretty much gone,” according to a tribal official.

Newell Lewey, a Passamaquoddy tribal councilor at Pleasant Point, said Wednesday evening that the decision by the Legislature’s marine resources committee to require the tribe to impose individual quotas on its licensed elver fishermen made tribal officials “quite upset.”

In trying to negotiate an agreement with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the Passamaquoddy Tribe had indicated it did not want to limit the number of elver licenses it can issue to its members or to set individual limits on how much each fisherman could catch. The tribe had agreed that it would limit its overall catch quota to 1,650 pounds, which is the same amount it caught in 2013.

What Wednesday’s move by the marine resources committee might mean for the upcoming elver season, which is scheduled to start on March 22, remains to be seen, Lewey said.

The committee made the change to proposed legislation that would set management measures for the 2014 elver season in response to concerns raised by the state attorney general’s office. State attorneys had told legislators that provisions that were included in a tentative agreement between DMR and the tribe might not be considered legal under the equal protection clause of the state constitution.

The proposals that concerned state attorneys would have barred Passamaquoddys from using large, funnel-shaped fyke nets — a ban that tribal officials said they would not object to — and would have allowed the tribe to avoid individual catch quotas for its members. The committee voted Wednesday to allow the Passamaquoddy Tribe to issue up to six fyke net licenses for the upcoming elver season.

Read the full story from The Bangor Daily News

February 20, 2014 — Researchers who conducted tests have known for at least eight years that lobsters at the mouth of the Penobscot River contained “hazardous” levels of mercury, but consumers were not told until the state announced it this week.

The long-term study that led the Department of Marine Resources to declare Tuesday that it will close down lobster and crab harvesting in a 7-square-mile area shows that lobsters in the area have had mercury levels, year-to-year since 2006, that are higher than the state deems safe to consume.

The banks downriver from the former HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. plant in Orrington still contain mercury, decades after the company stopped dumping chemicals into the waterway leading to the bay, according to the study.

The study, first ordered by a federal judge in 2003 and completed by a team of three scientists in 2013, says that mercury contamination in the sediment and wetlands has been declining slowly since HoltraChem began discharging mercury waste directly into the river in 1967, but is “still high enough to be hazardous” to plants and animals and the people who eat them.

The revelation about contaminated lobsters is a black eye to the state’s most valuable fishery, which has endured low prices in recent years. But the closure of the area where the river empties into Penobscot Bay applies to only a small fraction of the more than 14,000 square miles in the Gulf of Maine where lobsters are harvested.

State Toxicologist Andrew Smith, who was called in to analyze the study’s findings after they were first shared with the Department of Marine Resources in November, said lobsters from that small area had high mercury levels, but most lobsters caught along Maine’s coast have less than half the amount of mercury contained in canned chunk light tuna, and less than one-sixth the mercury of canned white tuna.

“Really, people should have no worries about eating lobster,” Smith said. “They should be looking at it as a seafood (with mercury levels) well below what they typically consume.”

Mercury is toxic to humans and, in high doses, can attack organs and neurological systems such as the brain, peripheral nerves, the pancreas, the immune system and kidneys. Unborn children are especially sensitive to mercury’s toxic effects, and excessive exposure can lead to mental disabilities, cerebral palsy and nervous system damage.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

February 18, 2014 — Local charter fishermen are criticizing proposed federal regulations that they fear could curtail their efforts to land cod in the Stellwagen Bank area of Massachusetts Bay, officials said.

Stellwagen Bank Charter Boat Association President Charlie Wade said the regulations could completely close a 73-square-mile area of the ocean to the hook-and-line groundfishing that “defines this area.”

Closing the area is one possible option being considered by the New England Fisheries Management Council, a spokeswoman said.

“What people don’t seem to understand is that we are in a very, very preliminary stage,” spokeswoman Patricia Fiorelli said in a telephone interview today. “These are only some of many options.”

The regulation is one part of a broader package of fishing regulations that the council is slated to vote on at a meeting next Tuesday and Wednesday in Danvers before taking the regulations on a tour of New England ports, seeking public input.

Wade said charter fishermen make money by taking customers out into the bay on their 25- to 30-foot boats, where the anglers can try to catch groundfish like cod and haddock.

Currently, cod fishing is banned in the 73-square-mile zone for 5 1/2 months a year, from Nov. 1 to mid-April. When the spring cod season kicks off, fishermen rush to fish there, said Wade.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

February 18, 2014 — The Maine Department of Marine Resources said Tuesday it will close a seven-square-mile area at the mouth of the Penobscot River to the harvesting of lobsters and crabs because “mercury contamination” has been found in lobsters there.

The closure will last a minimum of two years, according to a news release issued by Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher.

Keliher said the closure will take effect Saturday and will extend from Wilson Point, just north of Castine Village, across to Fort Point in Stockton Springs and north into the Penobscot River.

“This closure is being taken as a precautionary measure in response to information the Department of Marine Resources recently received about mercury contamination in muscle tissue from lobsters found in this area,” Keliher said in a statement.

The Department of Marine Resources said it became aware of the mercury levels in lobsters in November after it examined findings from a federal court-ordered study. State Toxicologist Andrew Smith was asked to do the analysis.

The Department of Marine Resources said it historically has relied on data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Coastal Condition Assessment, which did its last study of Maine lobsters in 2010. That study did not detect mercury levels that exceeded safe consumption standards.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — February 14, 2014 — More than a ton of illegal shark fins were seized from a vendor in San Francisco, state wildlife officials said Friday.

Michael Kwong, 42, of Kwong Yip Inc. was cited for having 2,138 pounds of the fins, which violates California's ban that went into effect last July, said Lt. Patrick Foy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Possessing shark fins, selling or trading them is a misdemeanor under California's law, so Foy said it will be up to a judge to determine any penalty.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at USA Today

February 15, 2014 — Minority Leader Bruce Tarr has helped shepherd a budget amendment through the state Senate that, if passed by the House, would continue funding for an endangered survey program that utilizes ventless lobster traps to help develop more accurate stock assessments for lobsters.

The amendment would create a $500,000 reserve fund, of which at least $150,000 would go to the state Division of Marine Fisheries for the ventless trap survey that Tarr said is essential for helping to manage the lobster fishery, negotiating reasonable catch allocations and setting rebuilding and sustainability strategies for the fishery.

“The importance of continuing to collect this data makes a compelling case for the state funding,” Tarr said Friday. “This will help us avoid having a gap in the data. Other states are continuing to collect this data, which could leave us at a disadvantage when it comes time to negotiate each state’s catch limits for lobsters.”

Tarr said he envisions the state funding to be a stop-gap source of financing for the survey program, established in 2003 and previously financed by federal funds through NOAA grants and mitigation funds from marine construction projects. Those funds dried up in this year’s federal budget, necessitating an increased state funding role.

“But this isn’t intended to be a perpetual source of funding,” Tarr said. “Going forward, we hope that revenues from fishing permits and licenses, as well as reinstated federal funds, will become the sources for funding this program.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times