fishing

U.S. commercial fishing profits and jobs were down in 2015, due mostly to environmental issues, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in its Fisheries Economics of the United States report. Earnings for 2016 have not yet been released.

Only 9 percent of Marine Protected Areas have enough staff and only 35 percent receive adequate funding, says a report published in the journal Nature. MPAs, which include marine reserves, no-take zones, sanctuaries, and parks, are an increasingly popular way to conserve marine species by restricting fishing and energy extraction.

President Trump’s budget slashes all funding to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program, but environmental activists and bipartisan supporters of the program say they are prepared for a sustained fight with the President, says The Washington Post.

After decades of gaming and monopolizing the system governing commercial fishing rights in New England, a crime lord known as The Codfather has been kicked from his throne in New Bedford, Massachusetts, writes Ben Goldfarb in FERN’s latest story, co-produced with Mother Jones. Rafael will plead guilty for fraud before a federal judge in Boston on Thursday, facing 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, expects to publish a draft environmental impact statement this spring on offshore aquaculture in the Pacific Islands Region, which included Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Marianas, says Civil Eats.

As two-thirds of marine species off the Northeast coast adjust their range due to rising ocean temperatures, fishermen are frustrated by outdated catch regulations, says The New York Times. “Lobster, once a staple in southern New England, have decamped to Maine. Black sea bass, scup, yellowtail flounder, mackerel, herring and monkfish, to name just a few species, have all moved to accommodate changing temperatures,” says the Times.

Fishermen in Maine are experimenting with a new kind of trawl net that catches ample flatfish like flounder and sole, but leaves the plummeting cod population alone, says NPR. New Englanders once claimed they could walk across the water on the backs of cod, because they were so plentiful. But the fish is now struggling after decades of overfishing and rising water temperatures. Fishermen who catch them accidentally as bycatch are dinged by a quota manager.

California’s coastal ecosystem is in the midst of a massive “disruption” because of climate change, says the San Francisco Chronicle. For example, warmer waters have stalled the growth of kelp forests, causing sea urchins, which depend on kelp as their main food source, to mature abnormally. Their spiky shells are nearly hollow, and North Coast divers have brought in only one-tenth of their normally lucrative catch.

In Gazi Bay, Kenya, a carbon-credit program is saving mangrove forests by encouraging fishermen to cash in instead of cutting down trees. As part of the Mikoko Pamoja (Mangroves Together) program, “[l]ocal people who are protecting and replanting mangroves are now selling 3,000 tonnes of carbon credits a year to international buyers, for about $5-$6 a tonne," says Reuters.

Federal investigators say they haven’t found much evidence to back up claims of labor abuse on Hawaiian fishing boats, reports Civil Beat. The officials started interviewing foreign workers after an Associated Press investigation revealed human trafficking, egregious pay and abusive working conditions for the Southeast Asian men who make up the majority of Hawaii’s fishing fleet crews.

A new program called the Global Fishing Watch lets anyone track the world's 35,000 largest fishing vessels using a free online map, says Vox. The program, which relies on Google software, was created by Oceana and the nonprofit SkyTruth in the hopes of curbing overfishing and illegal harvests.

Many fishermen rely on an inefficient paper-based systems to record their catches, meaning the data are often inaccurate or purposefully corrupted, said a panel on seafood traceability at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Food Institute in Monterey, Calif.

Global fisheries could see $10 billion losses in annual revenue if climate change goes unchecked, says a University of British Columbia study published in Scientific Reports. That is a 35 percent greater drop than current projections for catches by the 2050s under high CO2-emmissions scenarios, say the authors.

The effects of ocean warming are already being felt on crop yields and fishing stocks, according to the most comprehensive report yet on the topic, released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.

Thirty Hawaiian lawmakers wrote President Obama urging him not to expand the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument by 8 percent, as conservationists have proposed, says Civil Beat.

Chemicals in hydraulic fracking are capable of disrupting the endocrine systems of fish and potentially humans, says a new study that tested water around a fracking wastewater disposal site in Fayetteville, West Virginia.

A new study by researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the University of Washington demonstrates that adopting “rights-based fishery management” (RBFM) would not only help fish populations recover, but would mean more money for fishermen, reports The Christian Science Monitor.