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1/14/12

After waiting weeks for the season to begin, commercial crab fishermen were allowed to drop their traps into the water Friday at noon.

Dozens of boats loaded with crab pots headed out to sea on Friday morning, and crab is expected to show up on docks on Sunday.

Eureka crab fisherman Scott Creps said fishermen will be waiting on the water at midnight Sunday to pull up their catch.

”It's been a month and a half -- everybody's really anxious to get going,” he said “We've got a good price to get started with.”

DFG senior marine biologist Pete Kalvass said crab samples tested last weekend finally showed crabs from all ports on the North Coast -- including Eureka and Trinidad -- meeting the minimum standards for the season. Although the season normally starts Dec. 1, early results showed that the crabs weren't meaty enough, delaying the season. Crabs must be 25 percent meat to reach the threshold.

Creps said fishermen have been offered $3 a pound, a substantial increase from last year's price of $1.75 a pound.

The delayed market may have played a role in the price.

The season has already opened in the San Francisco Bay Area, where parties agreed to a price of $2.25 a pound in late November after a two-week bargaining delay.

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12/11/11

Roger Payne first came to prominence more than 40 years ago, when he and a colleague made the discovery that whales sing eerily beautiful songs as a way of communicating. Their 1970 recording of whale sounds, Songs of the Humpback Whale, helped to galvanize the global anti-whaling movement, which led most countries to scrap their whaling fleets.

Payne, the founder of the conservation group, Ocean Alliance, has continued his groundbreaking work on whales, including recent landmark studies showing how whales worldwide have high levels of pollutants — including DDT — in their bodies. He also is continuing a 40-year study of more than 2,000 right whales in Argentina, identifying individual whales by the markings on their heads.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Christina Russo, Payne talked about current threats to the world’s whale populations, including the ongoing killing of whales by Japan and other nations — a practice he describes as inhumane. Payne also discussed the mystery of the songs sung by whales, whose haunting strains have the power, he says, to move people to tears.

Yale Environment 360: You’ve been studying whales for nearly half a century?

Roger Payne: Yes. I’ve been studying whales about 45 years.

e360: Do you ever come across educated, aware people who don’t realize that whaling is still taking place?

Payne: I would say most of them don’t realize it. And if they do realize that whaling is taking place, they are very pleased that there is a moratorium and that whaling is under control. And of course the truth of the matter is that whaling is completely under the control of the whalers — not the rest of the world. The rest of the world gets no chance to vote on it, even discuss it, set up any quotas or anything else. The whalers have won absolutely everything.

e360: When you first started studying whales in the 1960s, the chief threat to them was commercial whaling. About 33,000 great whales at that time were killed annually. The 1986 moratorium made a huge impact. But Norway, Iceland and Japan — among others — still whale. How many whales are killed now annually?

Payne: The numbers have been climbing steadily since the moratorium went into effect. At that time the total number killed was 185 whales. Two years ago it was 1,004.

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12/21/11

Aan angler who has fished North Coast salmon streams for many years, I’m pleased that we are having relatively strong salmon returns this year. If nature cooperates with normal rainfall and good ocean conditions, and if we continue to invest in habi­tat restoration, we should see a meaningful improvement to our beleaguered salmon populations in the next few years. For the North Coast, that means more than just good news for the environ­ment; it means jobs.

But just as we see some hope for the commercial and recreational fishing industries that depend on wild Califor­nia salmon, a new threat is looming — not from dams, or sedimentation, or loss of habitat, but from a CanadianCorporation called AquaBounty which has invented a genetically engi­neered (“GE”) fish that crosses growth-hormone genes from an ocean pout with a Chinook salmon to dramatically increase the speed and size of the salmon’s growth.

For the past decade, AquaBounty has been trying to secure approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration to market and sell its proprietary GE fish as “salmon” in supermar­kets and restaurants through­out the United States. If approved, it would be the first GE animal permitted for sale for human consump­tion.

Not surprisingly, this has sparked controversy and strong concerns from the sci­entific, environmental and consumer rights communi­ties. One concern is that if the GE salmon escaped its pens, it could have devastat­ing effects on wild salmon stocks. Another is that selling the GE fish as “salmon” would confuse consumers and undermine prices for the commercial salmon fishing industry.

Despite the controversy, the FDA and the U.S. Depart­ment of Agriculture are working overtime to help AquaBounty. The USDA recently granted $500,000 to AquaBounty to do further research to perfect the engi­neered fish. This is on top of previous federal grants, now totaling nearly $3 million, to support the research and development of AquaBoun-t­y’s GE salmon.

The latest grant comes despite the introduction of an amendment by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to the 2012 Agriculture Appropria­tions bill that would prohibit the FDA from using its fund­ing to approve the applica­tion for GE salmon, and a similar amendment by Rep.

Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, and Rep. Don Young, R-Alas­ka (supported by Rep. Mike Thompson) that passed the House of Representatives earlier this year. Until this legislation gets approved by the full House and Senate and signed by the president, federal agencies can continue to dole out public money to AquaBounty, so that is what they have decided to do.

Wild Pacific salmon are a critical natural, cultural and economic resource for Cali­fornia and other Northwest states. Yet many salmon runs in California and the Pacific Northwest have gone extinct, and many more are at risk of extinction. And just last month, a lethal and conta­gious salmon infection origi­nating from farmed salmon was found in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest, stirring concern that neighboring salmon populations, includ­ing here in California, could be vulnerable to infection.

There is a dire need for research to protect our wild salmon populations, and $3 million could certainly help.

Unfortunately, the FDA seems bent on not only sub­sidizing but approving AquaBounty’s GE salmon application. That approval will affect Californians’ con­sumer confidence and their pocketbooks, and it could devastate our commercial salmon fishing industry.

Consumers would have no way to tell whether the “salmon” they purchase is genetically engineered. That’s because the federal govern­ment is not requiring AquaBounty to label its product.

This is why I wrote Assem­bly Bill 88, which requires a label on all GE salmon sold in California — just as Alas­ka law currently requires — so that consumers can make informed choices. Frankly, if California was not federally pre-empted from doing so, I would introduce legislation, similar to the Murkowski/Woolsey/Young amendments, to ban GE salmon. Short of that, we should at least make sure GE salmon is properly labeled so that consumers know what they are getting.

Our government should not be underwriting the busi­ness activities of private cor­porations like AquaBounty, especially in light of the pending application for FDA approval and the controversy and environmental risk posed by GE salmon. Here in Cali­fornia, requiring proper labeling of this dubious prod­uct is the best we can do.

AB 88 will be heard in Jan­uary when the Assembly reconvenes for session. Please write to members of the Assembly Appropriations Committee and urge them to approve AB 88, or contact my office at 415-479-4920 for information on how you can help ensure passage of this important legislation. 

Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, chairs the Assembly Water, Parks & Wildlife Commit­tee and is a candidate for the newly created 2nd Congression­al District along the North Coast. 

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A journey along Humboldt Bay to see where the ocean might come in

1/5/12 [excerpts]

In May 2011, Aldaron Laird set out to explore the entire 105-mile perimeter of Humboldt Bay and its three major sloughs. Keeping the tides’ peculiar hours, he launched his little white kayak from dozens of locations, sometimes negotiating slippery slopes and thick brambles. He walked tirelessly, squishing through mud and teetering along rock-tumbled barriers. Frequently he paused, put down his pack, and pulled out digitized maps to ink in adjustments. He shot thousands of photos.

His mission: Record the current conditions of the bay shoreline and sloughs and determine where it is vulnerable to inundation, either from erosion combined with super high “king” tides or from sea level rise driven by long-term climate change. He had been awarded a $33,000 grant from the California Coastal Conservancy for what he had hoped would be mostly a tranquil wander by kayak. That’s not quite how it turned out.

“So far, an awful lot of the entire shoreline is really low,” Laird says. “Particularly the railroad beds and a lot of the dikes. And some bridges. The state is saying to prepare for four-and-a-half feet — 55 inches — of sea-level rise by 2100. Very little around Humboldt Bay can withstand that. If we don’t put the planning effort in now, we’re going to have trouble by 2050.”

Laird hopes that when people see his data, and his and Powell’s final map, they’ll be inspired to do much more. And quickly. During a king high tide Laird has seen the rookery and the Tuluwat village site on Indian Island floating on open water, with all of the surrounding salt marshes submerged. He’s seen the bay flood right up to the top of the railroad tracks near Arcata and to the lip of a dike on Gannon Slough. “Just a little bit more and it will spill over and into the fields and highway,” he said.

“I think [the idea] is so big, people just don’t want to deal with it,” Laird said, sitting in his Arcata office one day in early December. One of the pelican skeletons he’d found lay thinly on a bookshelf. “Look at Caltrans — they’re spending millions to rebuild the 101 corridor, and yet they’re not putting it on a causeway. Maybe they should be. When I’m out there walking around those places, or kayaking, I try to imagine the scale of the impact. And I think, who’s going to hold the ocean back?”

This new project had desk work, too. But Laird imagined that he’d spend much of his time in the field skimming along happily in his little white Dagger kayak. Besides the serious work at hand — the mapping — he was charmed by the notion he might be the first person to consciously cover every inch of bay and slough shoreline, shooting evocative photographs and scouting out potential new kayak launch sites while he was at it.

Instead his journey, now nearly completed, turned out to be a bit more of a slog — on foot, through mud, weeds and occasional filth. Mostly he had to go out at low tide, because he needed to see the shoreline exposed to be able to tell its nature and condition. He ended up hiking two-thirds of the 105 miles. The rest he mostly kayaked, although he sometimes took the Humboldt Baykeeper boat to inventory the industrial shoreline around Eureka. Occasionally, he had to be innovative. When he needed to get to a far southern portion of bay shoreline, up against a steep bluff encased by private property, he ventured out at low tide in a deep channel cutting through South Bay’s mudflats — it was there he saw that colony of seals — then, as the tide began to rise, bringing with it the shrieking, feeding shorebirds, he paddled toward the bluff and back along the shoreline.