Saving Seafood

Congress cracks down on seafood fraud

October 28, 2015 — Local watermen of the Chesapeake Bay have come under attack from knowingly imported and mislabeled foreign seafood. Consumers are also at risk because safety standards for seafood in other countries of origin differ from those in the United States. “Consumers should protect themselves with knowledge about these issues and get to know local seafood companies they can trust,” said Paula Jasinski, executive director of Chesapeake Environmental Communications.

Crabbers from Virginia’s Blue Crab Industry Panel highlighted this significant problem for their industry several years ago.

Read the full story at Northern Neck News

 

NEW YORK: Woman Among the Baymen

October 23, 2015 — “Clam Power” read the T-shirt on the sturdy woman carrying gear from her pickup to her no-frills work boat tied to a ramshackle dock in Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island.

The woman, Flo Sharkey, 72, works full time on the bay, and on Wednesday morning, she and her son, Paul Sharkey, 36, a bayman himself, loaded rakes, hip waders and bushel baskets into the boat and headed out through Swan Creek into the open bay.

People who make their living on these waters are known as baymen, and it’s a dwindling profession. A woman doing it for a living is nearly unheard-of.

Ms. Sharkey said she knew of no other baywomen. Her sister and mother could hold their own on the water but elected not to make it their life’s work.

Ms. Sharkey has often kept side jobs — these days, she moonlights as a school custodian — but clamming has been her mainstay on the Great South Bay, just off Fire Island.

“Years ago, this was the most productive bay in the country, except for the Chesapeake, for crabs, clams and fish,” Ms. Sharkey said as the boat bounded across the shimmering flat water toward a shallow spot. “But then came the brown tide, the road runoff and fertilizer off people’s lawns.”

With those factors affecting the abundance and health of the clams, much of the bay is now off limits for shellfishing. Weaker market prices and the ever-rising cost of living are other reasons that there were a mere two other clam boats off in the distance, compared with the hundreds that would have been seen years back.

Read the full story at The New York Times

MARYLAND: Down year seen for oysters

October 8, 2015 — Watermen dredging the muddy bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries for oysters may not haul in the bounty that some recent years have produced, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources cautions as a new season gets underway.

“We’ve had good harvests the last couple years,” said Chris Judy, the department’s shellfish division director. But “we will no longer enjoy the spotlight on our oysters because other oysters are going to enter the market in a stronger way this year.”

The season kicked off Oct. 1, as it always does, but largely in name only. The same nor’easter that chewed at Delmarva’s beaches and rained out a weekend of activities at the beginning of the month kept most watermen off the water. But they were out in force after the skies cleared.

“It looks like we got the whole state of Maryland working on one bar off Tangier Island,” said Greg Price, a waterman based out of Chance in Somerset County. “I counted 55 boats this morning.”

Those freshly caught oysters are already finding their way into refrigerator cases.

“At first it was a little dreary because of the storm, but we’re booming now,” said Miranda Taylor, manager of Ocean Highway Seafood and Produce in Pocomoke City.

Read the full story at Delmarva Now

 

Chesapeake waters are warming, study finds, posing challenges to healing bay

October 14, 2015 — The Chesapeake Bay’s waters are warming, in some places more rapidly than the region’s air temperatures, researchers from the University of Maryland say. If unchecked, scientists say, the trend could complicate costly, long-running efforts to restore the ailing estuary, worsen fish-suffocating dead zones and alter the food web on which the bay’s fish and crabs depend.

Drawing on remote sensing by satellites, researchers at Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science found that water temperatures have risen since the 1980s across more than 92 percent of the Chesapeake and its river tributaries. The study appeared in the October issue of the journal Remote Sensing of Environment.

The increase averaged nearly 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, according to Andrew J. Elmore, co-author of the study and a geologist at the center’s Appalachian laboratory in Frostburg.

Baltimore and other parts of the bay showed up as “hot spots,” with warmer water than surrounding areas. Elmore and his co-author, Haiyong Ding, a visiting scholar from China, say the heat anomalies appear to be linked to spreading urbanization and to warm-water discharges from power plants.

“In the case of power generation, we’re deliberately increasing the temperature of water,” Elmore said. “With urbanization, it’s not intentional, but it’s an effect.”

Read the full story at the Baltimore Sun

 

Virginia, Maryland legislators fighting fake Chesapeake Bay blue crab meat

September 16, 2015 — A group of federal legislators from Virginia and Maryland urged the White House this week to do more to curb the mislabeling of Chesapeake Bay blue crab.

In a letter Monday, U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Rep. Rob Wittman from Virginia and Sen. Barbara Mikulski from Maryland applauded President Barack Obama for launching the Presidential Task Force to Combat Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud earlier this year.

But, they said, its draft recommendations don’t go far enough to protect area watermen from dishonest people willing to import foreign crabmeat and repackage it as Atlantic or Chesapeake Bay blue crab.

Federal agents are investigating allegations that Casey’s Seafood Inc. in Newport News did just that. No charges have been filed in connection with the case, but DNA tests on several of Casey’s Seafood products contained mixtures of Atlantic blue crab and cheaper alternatives native to foreign waters. All of the products were labeled “Product of the USA.”

“This deceptive labeling misleads consumers and threatens the livelihood of the watermen in our states,” reads the letter, which indicates Virginia’s blue crab fishery generates nearly $30 million in total fishing revenue for watermen each year. Maryland’s blue crabs generate over $58 million annually.

Read the full story at The Virginian-Pilot

 

Maryland DNR Creates New Position to Give Seafood Industry More Input

July 29, 2015 — EASTON MD — Former Queen Anne’s County commissioner and waterman George O’Donnell has been brought onto the Department of Natural Resources’ payroll as a seafood industry and fisheries stakeholders liaison, of sorts.

O’Donnell has been in the position since July 8, and according to Maryland Watermen’s Association President Robert T. Brown, he’s already been working with the commercial industry to find solutions to their issues.

“We’ve finally got a friend up there,” Brown said.

O’Donnell’s official title at DNR is the fisheries customer relations manager.

It’s an outreach position to ensure that fisheries stakeholders’ views are communicated to state departments and policymakers for consideration.

“The administration believes that through outreach a better understanding can be reached to benefit the user groups as well as our marine resources,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell said that Gov. Larry Hogan, in his quest for the state government to provide better “customer service” to the people of Maryland, wants to make sure that any industry area of the state that feels underserved has a voice in Annapolis.

Read the full story at The Star Democrat

The Chesapeake Bay Is Turning Into Plastic Soup

July 22, 2015 — They’re in the oceans, in the Great Lakes, and now it turns out they’re fouling the Chesapeake Bay—microplastics, the remnants of unrecycled products that are damning the world’s water to seemingly eternal pollution.

The presence of microplastics—from broken-up containers to ingredients in bathroom products—has been established in four Bay tributaries by researchers at the University of Maryland, NOAA, and elsewhere. “Microplastics were found in all but one of 60 samples, with concentrations ranging over 3 orders of magnitude (<1.0 to >560 g/km2),” they write in Environmental Science and Technology. “Concentrations demonstrated statistically significant positive correlations with population density and proportion of urban/suburban development within watersheds.”

One can deduce that with more growth around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., we can expect to see yet more microplastics. See, and maybe eat, too, as scientists recently discovered the stuff’s being consumed by plankton and passed up the food chain. That’s bad news for marine animals, which can starve on the nutrientless substances or die of stomach obstructions, and possibly for humans, as plastics leach chemicals into fish with unknown impacts on our health. (They might also affect that treasured Chesapeake delicacy, blue crabs, as crabs both eat and breathe in microplastics.)

Read the full story at CityLab

 

115-year-old oyster fishing skipjack finally getting new life

July 3, 2015 — MARYLAND — Faded, dusty boat paraphernalia littered a warehouse on the Eastern Shore as a small group of people worked Thursday to lift the anchor on an old fishing vessel and send it home.

For a decade, the skipjack George W. Collier lay at the end of a long road in Cape Charles, literally and figuratively.

The 72-foot-long boat was built in Maryland in 1900 and was once used as an oyster fishing vessel, able to easily navigate shallow waters. But when engine-powered boats replaced skipjacks, the George W. Collier was left on a mud bank. Fewer than 30 of the traditional boats remain today.

The Allegheny Beverage Corp. found and restored the vessel in the ’60s and in 1978 donated it to the city of Norfolk, where it was renamed after the city and used in boat parades and to train teens. It even made a journey to New York City for the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty.

But the Norfolk City Council left the boat, in disrepair, to a nonprofit in Cape Charles 10 years ago, when even a $110,000 donation was not enough to repair it.

Thus, the George W. Collier found its way to the back of a Wako Chemicals building in Cape Charles, where it sat on a bed of grass, slowly decaying while the nonprofit lacked the resources to restore it. Its sister, the E.C. Collier, lives at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

On Thursday, the skipjack was finally sent to a shipyard, on its way to being restored in its birthplace on Deal Island in Maryland.

Read the full story at the The Virginian Pilot

 

Maryland launches campaign against illegal crab fishing

July 1, 2015 — Maryland on Tuesday launched a campaign to police recreational and commercial crab fishing as the state grapples with a low population of crabs that can be caught in the Chesapeake Bay, authorities said.

The enforcement campaign takes aim at poachers who defy regulations on minimum sizes, harvest limits and hours, as well as crab pot registrations, threatening the sustainability of Maryland’s blue crab population, officials said.

“Our officers will be on the water, on the docks, at wholesalers and at roadside stands to ensure that everyone plays by the rules,” Colonel George Johnson, superintendent of the Maryland Natural Resources Police, told a news conference in Annapolis.

Officers also will be on the lookout for recreational crabbers who keep female crabs, which is illegal in Maryland.  Officers plan to use patrols, undercover operations, night-vision equipment, cameras and radar, Johnson said.

Read the full story at Reuters