Other News

April 16, 2015 — This is the astonishing moment a college crew team came under terrifying attack from leaping fish.

Freshmen from Washington University in St. Louis were training at Creve Couer Lake in Missouri on Friday when the giant Asian Carp struck, the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Students were left stunned as the creatures started to aggressively ripple in the water around their boats.

But then all hell suddenly broke loose – as hundreds of fish began jumping out of the water, many of them hurled themselves at the rowers’ vessels.

Asian Carp can jump up to 10 feet in the air, and are known for getting spooked by boats, according to the Post-Dispatch.

Read the full story and watch the video from the Daily News

April 15, 2015 — “Unfortunately about 80%-plus of our fish is imported, and the laws in many of those countries are more lax than ours,” Heffernan told Speakeasy. “Yet only 2% of seafood is actually inspected. So what you think might be grouper or snapper or whatever is likely not.”

Everything from Austrian cuisine to sustainable fish was on the menu at the seventh annual New York Culinary Experience, a cooking camp held at the International Culinary Center in SoHo this past weekend.

The event exposed some 150 students to a mix of both well-established chefs like David Bouley and Andre Soltner, as well as rising stars like Emma Bengtsson, who was propelled to fame last year when she became the first female chef in New York to earn two Michelin stars for Aquavit.

It was the first time teaching a cooking class for Bengtsson, who showed students how to make a Scandinavian bouillabaisse, which involved cleaning mussels, searing seafood and making a parsley aioli.

The chef’s methodical approach helped students of all cooking abilities create the dish. Comments like “It’s very doable” could be overheard in various parts of the kitchen.

Read the full story from The Wall Street Journal

 

March 16, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

A recently published journal article co-authored by NOAA Fisheries scientists Phil Clapham and Yulia  Ivashchenko is providing new insights into the extent of industrial whaling.  Clapham and Ivashchenko worked with Robert Rocha, director of science programs, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, to produce the first global estimate of the number of whales killed by industrial hunts in the 20th century – an astounding 3 million whales. Click here to read more about NOAA Fisheries Scientists work and the published paper.

 

March 6, 2015 — An Alaskan author has published a new book about the adventurous life — and sometimes tragedy — of commercial fishing.

Dead Reckoning is Dave Atcheson’s third non-fiction book. In it the author, now based in Sterling, Alaska, revisits his early arrival in the state and his introduction to commercial fishing — and the harrowing near-disaster that changed the lives of everyone on his crew.

Dave Atcheson will read from “Dead Reckoning” at 6:30 PM on Monday, March 9, at Old Harbor Books in Sitka.

Dave Atcheson’s story is near-universal for people who come to Alaska, propelled either by romance or economics, to try their hands at commercial fishing.

This is every new crewman’s waking nightmare.

“One of the deckhands on the Lancer, when I first got here, was wanted for questioning in a murder. And I buddied-up with him because I was so terrified of the old skipper who was a screamer — a notorious screamer.”

Read the full story and listen to the audio from KCAW

March 3, 2015 — Did you ever wonder what became of those towns after the tobacco industry collapsed?

Well, local artist Tony Alderman is wondering the same thing about our fishing communities.

Tony is spending a lot of his time on the coast when he is not here with his wife and adult son. He is finding that a lot of the young people are moving away, finding the back-breaking work of their prents and grandparents a dead-end field they want no part of. Recently, while talking to him at Respite, a popular tea shop near Brightleaf, he told me the average age in the town he is looking at is 50.

It wasn’t long ago that folks were thinking the same about Durham, that it was a dying town, before it went through the renovations that are bringing more people downtown every day. A rebirth that is seeing new restaurants, entrepreneurial businesses and residents moving in.

One can only hope that Varnamtown, N.C., the community that Tony is documenting, can find some similar way to reinvent itself. And not just become another Norman Rockwell-type painting people look at it to remember the way things were.

Read the full story at the Durham News

Read more about the project here

 

February 17, 2015 — Red Robin is trying to bait the pope — yes, that pope — with an offbeat promotion.

The casual dining chain has invited Pope Francis to eat at Red Robin during Lent. Should His Holiness accept the invite and visit any Red Robin in the U.S. during the Lenten season (Feb. 18 through April 2), the 500-store chain will offer all guests free Wild Pacific Crab Cake Burgers on Friday's during Lent

That would cost a pretty penny. Red Robin's crab cake burgers start at $14.29.

There's a social media twist, too. Red Robin is nudging customers to tweet the pope @Pontifex and use the hashtag #RopeInThePope.

"We're hoping that our invitation catches the pope's attention," said Denny Marie Post, Red Robin's senior vice president and chief marketing officer. She says an invitation was delivered to the Vatican on Friday, followed by a tweet Tuesday.

Read the full story at USA Today

February 10, 2015 — The shrimp-streaming service Shrimp Cloud has almost tripled its $100 Kickstarter goal with the promise of delivering the world a terabyte of shrimp content on a public Google Drive.

A bizarre database of over 2 million images of shrimp is therapeutic, according to the project's founder Eric Dennis.

Read the full story and watch the video at Eater

 

February 10, 2015 — According to a new study conducted by York University and Queen’s College in New York City, the introduction and expanded use of pottery in the Americas was largely due to social factors. It had been previously thought that pottery developed as an adaptive response for the containment of foodstuffs. While hunter-gatherers of the northeastern American Continent utilized a large variety of wild animal and plant foodstuffs, it seems that pottery developed specifically as a method of handling fish and fish oil.

Reliance on a common living area allowed for an abundance of aquatic resources and pottery was thus used in group gatherings along river banks. While she was a research fellow at York University, Dr. Karine Taché (now of Queen’s College, in New York City) undertook the analysis of nearly 3,000 year-old potteries, taken from 33 different sites around the northeastern United States and Canada. Specifically, she was looking for residues on the pots that would indicate their prior purpose and the specific items they used to hold. By testing for bulk carbon, nitrogen isotopes and compound specific isotopes, as well as identifying lipids on the containers, Taché was able to ascertain that a great number of the pots once held fish and other aquatic species. It is also believed that the pots were used to store fish oil and other nutritious supplements. Taché explained the importance of her findings beyond the mere fact that the pots once held marine animals and the products made from them.

Read the full story at New Historian

January 30, 2015 — Two coasts. Two teams. Two major seafood cities.

This year’s Super Bowl may be a matchup between Tom Brady and Russell Wilson, but for proud Seattle or Boston folks this could also be a battle for seafood city supremacy. Both cities have some clammy claims to fame like Boston’s chowder or the world-famous Pike Place Market in Seattle, so let’s talk about 5 of the best seafood joints in each city and then you can decide who should win the Super Bowl of Seafood.

Read the full story from NewsNet5

 

January 13, 2015 — The copper rockfish lost an eye years ago when cataracts didn't heal, and other fish kept stealing his food. Officials at the aquarium decided it was time to stop turning a blind eye to the problem.

Here’s one way to scale back on school bullying.

In a first-of-its-kind operation at the Vancouver Aquarium, surgeons gave a copper rockfish a prosthetic eye to stop other fish from harassing him in the tank for his disability.

The fish had one of its eyes removed years ago when cataracts didn’t heal, Global News reports.

Read the full story and watch the video from the New York Daily News