November 16, 2020 — The federal government’s plan to phase out open-net salmon farms on the B.C. coast could result in different rules for different areas of the province.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans says it is exploring the use of an “area-based management approach” to aquaculture that would take into account the cumulative impact of groups of fish farms in a certain area.
October 5, 2020 — More than 300 Dungeness crab traps and four vessels were seized last month by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), who said they were illegally placed in American waters, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Canada’s Dungeness crab season begins at the end of July and the American season begins in December. Toward the end of the Canadian season, fishermen sometimes illegally place traps south of the border, risking fines or forfeiting their catch, to access the American crab stock which hasn’t been depleted over the course of a season.
March 19, 2020 — Canada’s decision to close the border to some foreign visitors threatens to upend the Atlantic lobster and snow crab processing industry.
The processing plants rely on thousands of mostly Mexican temporary foreign workers who are no longer allowed into the country. The restriction applies to travellers who are not Canadian citizens, permanent residents or Americans.
January 16, 2020 — The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in Canada is instituting new requirements for the country’s lobster and crab fisheries, partially intended to help coordinate protection of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
The new measure involves specially marked gear rope that will be required for roughly 14 fisheries, with all lobster and crab traps in Eastern Canada coming under the new rule, according to the CBC. According to a notice from the DFO, the requirements are part of the country’s effort to address ghost gear and to measure threats to marine mammals, particularly right whales, in the region.
June 26, 2019 — In the parking lot of an Irving gas station in Aulac, N.B., not far from the Nova Scotia border, Curtis Kiley popped the trunk of a Toyota Corolla.
Inside was a white bucket containing what looked like a giant hairball, the type that might be pulled from a bathtub drain.
Except it was alive — a wriggling, slithering mess.
This was just an initial sample Kiley had brought to show a prospective black-market buyer, a woman he knew only through text message as “Danielle.”
He was ultimately hoping to unload up to 300 kilograms of the tiny creatures, a huge haul worth $1.3 million on the open market, but one he was offering at a steep discount.
Moments later, Kiley’s world turned from dollar signs to handcuffs. He’d been nabbed in a federal fisheries sting, one targeting poaching in a little-known but enormously lucrative industry that plays out each spring in Nova Scotia’s rivers and brooks.
At the centre of the undercover operation by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in May 2018 was the most unlikely of creatures — baby eels.
May 28, 2019 — Seven North Atlantic right whale calves have been spotted off the coast of the United States so far in 2019 – a positive development for the critically endangered species, according to a recent report from CBC News.
Last year, no new North Atlantic right whale calves were born, and the overall population for the species was estimated to be just 411 individuals. The increased presence of calves this year is encouraging for research scientists like Garry Stenson, who heads the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) marine mammal division in Canada.
“It’s really nice to start seeing that we’re getting more calves,” Stenson told CBC News. “It’s gonna take a lot more before we’re gonna be feeling at all comfortable, but it does help to have some. It’s a much better view than what we had last year.”
Plane surveillance carried out this month revealed that North Atlantic right whales have returned to Canadian waters earlier than usual this year, arriving in late May instead of the typical June, the DFO said.
One of the world’s three right whale populations, North Atlantic right whales usually spend their winters in warmer waters nearby Florida and Georgia before migrating to New England and the Canadian Maritimes for the summer. In years past during this migration, entanglements in fishing lines deployed by lobster and crab fishing operations and ship strikes have resulted in several whale deaths. In 2017, 17 right whales died from ship strikes or entanglements in fishing gear, and in 2018, an additional three right whales died from similar causes.
July 20, 2017 — U.S. officials are lifting a ban on some whale disentanglement efforts after briefly banning the practice that last week led to the death of a Canadian fisherman.
But the ban will stay in effect for right whales, “whose unpredictable behavior is particularly challenging during rescue attempts,” Chris Oliver, Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries, said Tuesday.
In response to the death of Joe Howlett, who died after freeing a right whale from fishing gear, the fisheries division of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration on July 11 barred anyone from approaching an entangled whale in U.S. waters.
On Tuesday, it announced that rescue efforts could resume, but that it would only allow right whale disentanglement efforts “on a case-by-case basis,” depending on circumstances and availability of trained people. The suspension of right whale rescues likely will remain in effect as long as Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans investigates Howlett’s death, NOAA has said.
Federal law bars anyone from closely approaching whales, except for those specifically trained and authorized to do so for research or conservation purposes.
Howlett, 59, died July 10 while freeing a whale from fishing gear in the Gulf of St. Lawrence near Shippagan, on the northeast coast of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Howlett, who helped found the Campobello Whale Rescue Team, was part of a group of trained responders who had just freed the whale when it struck and killed him.