Daily Archives: February 24, 2018
Our Drowning Coast: Left to Louisiana’s tides, Jean Lafitte fights for time
Out toward the horizon, a fishing village appears on a fingerling of land, tenuously gripping the banks of a bending bayou. Just two miles north is the jagged tip of a fortresslike levee, a primary line of defense for New Orleans, whose skyline looms in the distance. Everything south of that 14-foot wall of demarcation, including the gritty little town of Jean Lafitte, has effectively been left to the tides. Jean Lafitte may be just a pinprick on the map, but it is also a harbinger of an uncertain future. As climate change contributes to rising sea levels, threatening to submerge land from Miami to Bangladesh, the question for Lafitte, as for many coastal areas across the globe, is less whether it will succumb than when — and to what degree scarce public resources should be invested in artificially extending its life. Video, images>click to read<21:20
SURETTE: Open-pen fish farming a mess: How the world is passing us by
There’s big stuff happening in the dirty world of open-pen salmon farming. World production of farmed salmon is declining and prices are rising accordingly. The main culprit is sea lice grown immune to the chemicals used to wash them off, helped by algae blooms, fish disease, pollution, damaged wild stocks, and finally political disgust with the whole mess in the more enlightened jurisdictions. The move now, worldwide, is to either haul production to dry land or otherwise insulate the at-sea operations from the surrounding environment,,, >click to read< 18:28
Fish and Wildlife Service official reportedly violated conflict of interest rules
Richard Ruggiero, chief of the Division of International Conservation at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, may have violated federal ethics rules by his involvement in agency grants that provided monetary benefit to a family member, according to a Feb. 20, 2018, Department of Interior Inspector General report. “We found that Ruggiero violated federal laws and regulations by participating in an FWS cooperative agreement that financially benefited his family member, and neither Ruggiero nor his family member disclosed their relationship in writing to the FWS,” the report said. >click to read< 17:22
Anacortes delegation travels to Unalaska
Visitors from Anacortes, Wash., traveled to the Aleutian Islands last week to urge the Unalaska City Council to stop asking the U.S. Congress to restrict a stranded factory trawler from buying cod at sea. Earlier, Unalaska Mayor Frank Kelty sent the state’s congressional delegation a letter urging “sideboard” restrictions on any Jones Act waiver granted to the new factory trawler America’s Finest. The vessel ran afoul of federal domestic content law when it was discovered it had excess foreign steel in its hull. Now, the state-of-the-art $74 million flatfish factory trawler can’t fish in the U.S., unless Congress grants a waiver. >click to read< 12:531
Fisherman’s case yields complicated evidence trail
The federal trial of Thomas Kokell features a trail of evidence including hand-scrawled freight tickets and fishing-trip reports. Stacks of paper slips have cluttered a U.S. courtroom in Central Islip over the past two weeks, a multicolored trail of evidence in the first major criminal trial of a Long Island fisherman charged in a probe of alleged illegal fishing.,,, The charges stem from a five-year federal probe of an auction program that let fishermen harvest beyond their quotas. The investigation has netted seven guilty pleas and prison or home-detention sentences for five other people. One of the men who pleaded guilty is Mark Parente, a fish dealer from New Jersey,,, >click to read<11:16
Cape Cod environmentalists plan to wreck their lobster Industry to save the whales
Scientists trying to convince New England lobstermen to invest in “ropeless fishing” to cut the risk current fishing methods pose to northern right whales, The Boston Globe reported. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution say ropeless fishing will allow lobstermen to continue in their livelihood, but without long ropes running from buoys on the ocean’s surface to lobster traps on the ocean floor.,,, Scientists warn if this technology is not pursued, the only other option to save the whales is government regulation of fishing seasons and areas, which would devastate the industry much more than ropeless fishing. >click to read< 09:07
Our fishing heritage has been gutted
“A nation that forgets its past has no future.”— Sir Winston Churchill. The Plains Indians of the American west, the bands of First Nations peoples in North America, were attacked by white settlers and the U.S. cavalry who eventually killed the buffalo herds, the one resource which was essential to the tribes’ existence and their culture.,,, When Canada took control of our fishery, its dominant activity was to produce wealth, power and position centrally as they sold, bartered and traded the resource, its licences, quotas and its processing jobs to foreign countries and elite industry players. >click to read< 08:00
Coast Guard issues violations for illegal fishing near Cape Romain
A Coast Guard boarding team issued fishing and safety violations Thursday to a vessel 19 miles east of Cape Romain, South Carolina. The 44-foot fishing vessel The Long Line was found actively laying and retrieving fishing pots in a prohibited area. The Coast Guard Cutter Cormorant noticed The Long Line crew setting their pods Wednesday night and later retrieving the pods Thursday morning. A Cormorant boarding team conducted a living marine resources boarding and cited the crew for failing to comply with area restrictions. >click to read<23:50
