Saving Seafood

Bahamian spiny lobster fishery embarks on sustainability assessment

January 12, 2017 — The following was released by the Marine Stewardship Council:

The Bahamian spiny lobster fishery has stepped forward for assessment to the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) global standard for sustainable fishing. Working with scientists, the fishing industry and conservation groups, MSC has developed the world’s most credible and recognized standard for environmentally sustainable wild-caught seafood.

Since 2009, the World Wildlife Fund, together with Bahamas Marine Exporters Association, The Bahamas Department of Marine Resources and The Nature Conservancy, have been driving improvements to the fishery. Through a Fishery Improvement Project addressing governance, fishing practices, and environmental impacts, their efforts have been aimed at helping the fishery meet the MSC standard.

Spiny lobster is an important commercial species in The Bahamas. The $90 million Bahamian lobster industry employs about 9,000 fishers who cover a massive 45,000 square miles of ocean. More than 4 million pounds of spiny lobster tails are exported each year, primarily to the United States and Europe. Chances are high that the lobster tail you pick up at your local grocery store is Bahamian.

If certified, these lobster tails will be eligible to carry the internationally recognized blue MSC ecolabel, which provides consumers an easy way to choose seafood that can be traced back to a certified sustainable source.

Mia Isaacs, president of Bahamas Marine Exporters Association (BMEA) which is supporting this assessment said:”In The Bahamas, a growing share of the seafood sector recognizes the economic benefits of MSC certification. Keeping stocks healthy can open new markets, satisfy eco-minded consumers, and ensure that there will be lobsters to catch in the future.

Wendy Goyert, World Wildlife Fund senior program officer said: “The Fishery Improvement Project has made a myriad of accomplishments – adoption of a harvest control rule, lobster trap fishery bycatch studies, a stock assessment, and the establishment of a data collection and management system – all of which put Bahamian spiny lobster in good position for MSC assessment.”

Brian Perkins, MSC regional director – Americas, said: “We welcome the Bahamian spiny lobster fishery’s decision to enter MSC assessment and the hard work that’s been done through their fishery improvement project. This is an important milestone for the MSC and for fishing in The Bahamas.”

The independent assessment will be conducted by ME Certification Ltd., an accredited third-party conformity assessment body. ME Certification Ltd. will assemble a team of fishery science and policy experts to evaluate the fishery according to the three principles of the MSC Fisheries Standard: the health of the stock of spiny lobster; the impact of fishing on the marine environment; and the management of the fishery. The process takes around 18 months and is open to stakeholders. All results are peer reviewed and no decision is made about a fishery’s sustainability until after the assessment is complete.

The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence

November 21, 2016 — Facial recognition software is most commonly known as a tool to help police identify a suspected criminal by using machine learning algorithms to analyze his or her face against a database of thousands or millions of other faces. The larger the database, with a greater variety of facial features, the smarter and more successful the software becomes – effectively learning from its mistakes to improve its accuracy.

Now, this type of artificial intelligence is starting to be used in fighting a specific but pervasive type of crime – illegal fishing. Rather than picking out faces, the software tracks the movement of fishing boats to root out illegal behavior. And soon, using a twist on facial recognition, it may be able to recognize when a boat’s haul includes endangered and protected fish.

The latest effort to use artificial intelligence to fight illegal fishing is coming from Virginia-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which launched a contest on Kaggle – a crowdsourcing site based in San Francisco that uses competitions to advance data science –earlier this week. TNC hopes the winning team will write software to identify specific species of fish. The program will run on cameras, called electronic monitors, which are installed on fishing boats and used for documenting the catch. The software will put a marker at each point in the video when a protected fish is hauled in. Inspectors, who currently spend up to six hours manually reviewing a single 10-hour fishing day, will then be able to go directly to those moments and check a fishing crew’s subsequent actions to determine whether they handled the bycatch legally – by making best efforts to return it to the sea unharmed.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Maine fishermen testing a ‘game-changer’ for protected cod

July 25, 2016 — GEORGETOWN, Maine — Like many Maine fishermen, Bryan Kelley faces a dilemma as he looks to diversify beyond the lobster that account for the bulk of his catch.

To target pollock, which are relatively common in the Gulf of Maine, he has to fish in the same areas frequented by cod, a type of groundfish protected through strict federal catch limits.

“We literally have to stay away from the codfish,” Kelley said while standing on his 40-foot boat moored in the Five Islands harbor of Georgetown. “I could fill this with codfish if I wanted to, but that wouldn’t help anybody in this sector and that is not why we are out here.”

To help him catch the groundfish he wants and avoid the species he doesn’t, Kelley has begun experimenting with a contraption akin to a conventional fishing reel on steroids and with an electronic brain. The “automatic jigging machines” loaned to Kelley and a handful of other fishermen by The Nature Conservancy allow them to more accurately target the water column where pollock hang out and stay off the bottom where cod lurk. The machines’ simple hooks and lures also ostensibly reduce inadvertent “by-catch” of cod while avoiding other downsides of trawlnets and gill nets more commonly used by fishermen.

“That’s part of the draw of it: It’s the quickest and easiest I have ever rigged anything up in my life,” Kelley said.

Geoff Smith, marine program director at the Maine chapter of the The Nature Conservancy, said preliminary reviews of the machines have been largely positive.

“This project is really about helping fishermen target those healthy stocks (of fish) while avoiding the codfish to allow them to rebuild,” said Smith, whose organization owns several groundfish permits in the Gulf of Maine. “We really feel that these jigging machines, if fished properly, can be selective and have minimal impact on the seafloor. … And if they work for fishermen, we think they could be a real game-changer.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald