Daily Archives: December 12, 2023
Shrimpers struggling as season draws to an end
“When the season is good, we bring in around 20 to 30 [thousand] pounds a week,” said Victor Le, a deckhand on the Captain Can. “We have to sell all of it to get a little profit margin, but not as much as it used to be.”Le has worked in the Gulf for seven years. But it does not take a seasoned veteran to see a startling trend. “Everybody is struggling right now because of the price. The price is so down, the import is affecting us mainly. Undercuts our prices and everybody loses when comparing to import prices,” he said. more, video, <<click to read<< 11:35
California’s Central Valley Chinook Are Getting Lost on Their Way Home
Picture yourself: a chinook salmon in the prime of your life. You dart through the water off California’s central coast, winding through kelp and dodging hungry sea lions. Long, sleek and silver, dappled with dark spots. Eyes wide and vigilant. More than 20 kilograms of pure muscle. You’ve been out at sea for several years now, first voyaging north along the Oregon coastline, then westward into deeper water. As winter approaches and the days grow shorter, you’ve found your way back to California. You’ve felt the seasons turn before, but this year, it means something special. Your kind, the Central Valley chinook—what fishers call the king salmon—are not born at sea. For thousands of years, your ancestors began their lives in the heart of California, where tributaries and streams flow together to form the mighty Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. photos, >>click to read<< 08:31
Jack Merrill, poet, painter… and lobsterman
If one were to attend a recent Mount Desert Island school sporting event, then attend an art exhibit reception at the Northeast Harbor Library and buy some lobster for dinner right off the fisherman’s boat, they might be convinced that the coach at that game, the painter and the lobsterman were all a part of a set of triplets. And when an identical guy showed up at a poetry read to recite his own works, you might up the ante and think you’d had a close encounter with a rare brace of quadruplets. But no, Jack Merrill, lobsterman, coach, artist and poet is just one man; albeit a man with a multitude of talents and interests that, at age 70-something, still keep him busy on a daily basis. Perhaps there is something about watching a lavender-rose sunrise and a blazing gold and scarlet sunset spread over a mackerel sky and a wine dark sea almost every workday that inspires some of our local fisherman to paint and poeticize, because, as Merrill rightly insists, he is not unique. He points out that several Cranberry Isles fishermen are also accomplished artists, including Rick and Corey Alley and Dan Fernald and, of course, island author and fisherman Trevor Corson, who included Merrill in his book, “The Secret Life of Lobsters.” more, >>click to read<< 07:08
Fisheries in Focus: How the mystery of the great eastern Bering Sea snow crab die-off was solved
A 2018 National Marine Fisheries Service survey estimated the eastern Bering Sea snow crabs population at 11 billion crabs, the highest amount ever recorded. Three years later, the population crashed by more than 90 percent, closing the fishery for the first time in its history (it remains closed). Where did all the snow crab go? What caused their disappearance? Did they move elsewhere? Did they die? Alaska fishery management is regarded as the best in the world – was this management error? Two years ago, we published an interview with Cody Szuwalski, a researcher at NOAA and lead investigator on the snow crab collapse, speculating on what happened. Now, we have answers: A team of scientists seemed to have solved the mystery this fall with a paper published in Science, Szuwalski et al. 2023. They concluded that the crabs died from a warm water anomaly that sped up their metabolisms. In short, there wasn’t enough food to go around – they starved. more, >>click to read<< 06:05