The American Lobster Management Board, made up of representatives from each of the Eastern Seaboard states with lobster fisheries, last week shelved a proposal for a five-year ban on lobstering south of Cape Cod. Scientists recently reported to the board that the lobster population from Cape Cod to North Carolina has declined tremendously over the past several years. It recommended a five-year ban to allow lobsters to rebound.  The Board rejected the ban proposal and established a committee to evaluate three alternative options: reduce the region’s annual lobster catch by 75 percent, by 50 percent, or maintain the status quo. Again, short-term economics triumph over conservation. More here

TAGS: New England lobster fishery, ban canned, conservation scuttled, American Lobster Management Board, sustainable, fisheries

Commentary re: New forms of marine life found off east coast
This auspicious event in the world of fishery science cannot go unnoticed even at a time of unparalleled, massive slashes in the Federal Fisheries Science budget without some commentary from the thousands of seasonally employed fishermen in N&L and its 80,000 displaced fishery participants now employed in Alberta, BC or Ontario.These men and women would never deny the need for more knowledge on
sponges and corals especially when male and female scientists from three Canadian Universities, from DFO's diminishing science personnel and of course the scientists from that bastion of fishery non-conservation and world champion of overfishing, Spain. However, they do question the science priorities of DFO when the bureaucrats chose to allocate major funding to take the Bedford Institute's "Hudson", fill it with fishery scientists from universities when they can't afford to assess the state of the all important cod, turbot, flounder species, redfish, capelin, crab, shrimp and other species that are the life-blood of thousands of displaced fishery participants in N&L. Of course that kind of decision-making is not unexpected. In the not-too-distant-past when DFO canceled the Northern Cod Experimental project we discovered the "Hudson" under Bedford Institute direction was studying Pacific Sea Lions off Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. Another earth-shaking event in DFO fisheries management!              

A team of Canadian and Spanish scientists have discovered new forms of marine life previously unknown to science, some of which are more than 1,000 years old and hold the secrets to ancient underwater ecosystems. DFO and scientists from three Canadian universities and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography made this discovery on a 20-day expedition, using a robot to take pictures and to grab samples of coral and sponges located up to three kilometres deep in the waters off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador — that's twice as deep as BP's crippled Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. More here See an array of photos of new species at National Geographic here

TAGS: new marine species, DFO, Spain, corals and sponges

Congressmen Barney Frank and John Tierney have called for Dr Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to step down. "Dr Lubchenco's stance towards the fisherman....seems to approach hostility," said Frank. The Congressmen accused Lubchenco of failing to address specific allegations of mistreatment of local fishermen and the negative economic impact of the new proposed catch-share limits. More here

TAGS: NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, Congressmen, call for resignation