Muhyiddin Yassin vows to export Malaysian seafood to the European Union
International Trade and Industry Minister Muhyiddin Yassin of Malaysia said today that the government is taking immediate measures to avoid an European Union (EU) ban on Malaysian seafood exports. Six out of nine tests failed were failed by the seafood exporter.

Illegal Lobster Trap
Norway’s lobster population has been in serious decline for years and the trapping ban was imposed to try to revive it. Crab trapping is still allowed but regulations only allow traps at a depth of more than 25 meters. All traps are to be clearly marked with their owner’s name and address, and they must be recorded with the state fishing register. When lobster trapping is allowed after October 1, only those larger than 24 centimeters can be taken. Police have suspected illegal trapping, and thus mounted a secret wave of patrols along the coast. In less than a week, they confiscated over 100 illegal traps and other equipment. They’ve taken those lying at depths that are too shallow and many that weren’t registered. Some have likely been placed by holidaying Norwegians unaware of the ban. Others may have been placed intentionally. Around 50 percent of the traps checked along the Aust-Agder coast were unmarked, 30 percent before the traditional summer holiday season got underway.

These do not belong in the road
Officer Seth Appelbaum was on patrol in his cruiser Thursday morning when he came upon a dozen or more jumbo lobsters crawling across Nimble Hill Road and a tractor trailer driver picking some of them up, say police. According to Sgt. Timothy Stuart, on July 24 at about 10 a.m., Appelbaum stopped when he saw the colony of “big huge lobsters,” weighing about 7 to 10 pounds each, all crawling “in the middle of the road.” “The claws on these are so big, you need a hammer to get them open,” said Stuart. “These are big sea lobsters, not the kind you get in the harbor.” The truck driver told the officer he stopped his rig to move the lobsters to the side of the road as a precaution. The trucker also reported that the driver of a pickup truck had just left the scene after grabbing another dozen or more of the big crustaceans and hauling them off to points unknown. No license plate information was provided for that suspect pickup, said Stuart, adding that a charge of theft of lost property could have been be levied. Following an investigation, police concluded that a local business made a pick-up of lobsters at Little Bay Lobster Company, didn’t close the rear gate of a delivery truck properly and while making a turn onto Nimble Hill Road dumped the load of lobsters. Appelbaum collected the lobsters left at the scene and brought them back to Little Bay Lobster, said Stuart. “We had no place to put them here,” he said from police headquarters.

Spiny Lobster
A Ridgley man who started sending friends Tasmanian seafood as gifts, before cashing in on his catch, has been fined almost $60,000 for selling abalone and rock lobster without a commercial license. Andrew Ian Crawn was sentenced in the Devonport Magistrates Court yesterday after pleading guilty to five counts of unlawfully selling fish and one count of having more than 20 abalone in his possession. Between 2003 and 2005, Crawn sent 57kg of abalone meat and 43kg of rock lobster by air freight from Launceston Airport to friends in Victoria. Magistrate Melanie Bartlett said Crawn, 47, had initially sent the seafood as gifts. “It then progressed into a business venture, where money changed hands,” Mrs Bartlett said. “It was not an enterprise or a scheme as such. It started as a legal undertaking.” The court heard Crawn had pocketed $8000 from the deals. His crimes were detected when two parcels containing 182 frozen greenlip abalone and five frozen rock lobster destined for Victoria were intercepted by Launceston Airport staff in July, 2005. Crawn, who has fished all his life and is also involved in a North-West bus business, was licensed to take scalefish for commercial purposes but could only take abalone and rock lobster recreationally. Mrs Bartlett said courts had to hand down mandatory penalties in such cases. She said Crawn had no prior fisheries matters and had already suffered financially because of his criminal conviction. Crawn is unable to use his $30,000 boat in a commercial capacity and has on-sold his abalone quota at a discounted rate. Mrs Bartlett said Crawn was not depleting a natural resource. “But these are serious matters and you were aware of the regulatory framework. You also received a modest financial gain,” she said. “This kind of crime is difficult and expensive to detect.”

Dead Salmon
Over 40,000 baby salmon were released prematurely last week after McGuffie Creek filled with sediment from a construction site. Volunteers with the Powell River Salmon Society and CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) Local 798 had been imprinting the fish in a pen placed in the creek. Paul Nassichuk, City of Powell River parks foreman and one of the driving forces behind enhancing salmon in the Willingdon Beach area, noticed the water in the creek had turned a milky gray on Monday, April 21. He traced the sediment-filled water to the old Safeway store on Joyce Avenue, where workers have been renovating the building for a new Quality Foods outlet. Workers for a contractor, BA Blacktop Ltd., were pumping water from an area where they were digging directly into a catch basin, Nassichuk said. “I attended the site and explained to the contractor what was happening on the first day,” he said. “He did instruct his guy to shut the pump down.” Salmon society representatives checked the oxygen levels in the pen and determined that most of the fish would probably survive. Chum can handle a slighter lesser water quality, Nassichuk pointed out. “Had they been coho, we would have had 40,000 dead coho.” Over the following days, however, the contractor continued to pump into the catch basin, Nassichuk said. On Thursday, when it happened for the third time, Shane Dobler, salmon society manager, made the call “that we couldn’t torture these fish any longer and that their survival rate was plummeting,” Nassichuk said. The dissolved oxygen had dropped in the tank, Dobler said. “Once the fish become stressed, they use more oxygen,” he said. “The minimum percentage of dissolved oxygen you want to see is 60 per cent and generally it’s higher than that. But it was down to 20 per cent saturation.” The fish were choking on the silt and trying to expel it through their gills, Nassichuk said. “We had to let them go on an extreme low tide,” he said. “They basically had to run a gauntlet in their stressed condition from the creek through hungry seagull flocks to the ocean. Once they were there, who’s to say what kind of survival rate we will really have?” The organizations want to ensure a similar incident never happens again. “In this day and age, it shouldn’t,” said Nassichuk. “In other communities, it doesn’t. And if it does, the fine can be up to $1 million a day.” Under sections 35 and 36 of the Fisheries Act, Dobler said, it is unlawful to knowingly discharge a deleterious substance into a fish-bearing waterway. Nassichuk has been involved with the stream for over 10 years, rehabilitating it and raising awareness and educating the public about the need to protect the waterways. “We do all, in fact, live in a watershed,” he said. “There is a need to establish Millennium Park, to protect headwaters of this creek system and to protect these fish that we have such an invested interest in, not only as members of the salmon society, but members of this community.” In the future the group would like to bring coho in, but before they do, they have to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The incident is under investigation by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the ministry of environment and Environment Canada.

This image has nothing to do with the story, but I couldn’t resist!
Two lobster men from Nova Scotia’s Shelburne County have been fined for catching illegal lobsters. Douglas Wickens, 51, of Shag harbor was ordered to pay $3,500 for possessing five undersized lobsters. The offense took place Mar. 27 at Bear Point wharf. Joseph Nickerson, 40, got a lesser fine of $3,000 for having 11 undersized lobsters.

Mussel Farm
Members of the Nelson fishing industry are taking legal action over what they say is a lack of consultation in the approval of up to 1000 of mussel farms in Golden and Tasman bays. Challenger Finfisheries Management Company chief executive Carol Scott said the action was being taken on behalf of the Challenger fisheries management companies, which were upset the Tasman District Council allowed two mussel companies to change their operation from six-monthly seasonal spat catching to year-round mussel farming. This week they would be lodging judicial review proceedings in the High Court against the council decision to approve 100, with consent to increase to 500ha, of mussel farms over fishing grounds in the two bays, and against the Ministry of Fisheries over its decision to approve a further 480ha in Tasman Bay. She said they were concerned about the effects of year-round mussel farming on fishing or fisheries resources, and the fact they were unable to talk to the council about the issue. “What the TDC did was that they decided they didn’t need to notify anybody, not just us but the rest of the community, and that’s the part that got us,” Ms Scott said. “If they had gone through a fair process and they had considered effects on other users then we would be able to have our case, comment on the proposal and we’d be able to see how they assess the effects.” She said the decision of the council to change the consents would set a dangerous precedent that would allow all aquaculture in the bays to change the activity at a site without consideration of the effects on fishing activity or stocks. The fishing industry believed everyone should have had the opportunity to comment on the council decisions concerning the change of use from the activity of spat catching to mussel farming. Port Nelson Fishermen’s Association vice-president Darren Guard said the decisions would hurt not only commercial fisheries, but recreational and customary users of the bays. “(We want) consultation - be told about these things before they arrive, and if people are thinking about a change of use from spat catching to permanent structures . . . that they talk to affected users - that’s recreational, commercial and customary. “Our concerns are twofold. It’s spatial - the more room they take up there is less area to fish, obviously, and our concerns are that they just failed to address the effect on fisheries resources, like how do we know these things are not polluting the areas and damaging fish stocks.” Ministry of Fisheries aquaculture manager Dan Lees said he was unaware of the pending legal action and therefore could not comment. Council environment and planning manager Dennis Bush- King also would not comment.

African Spiny Lobster
Former Hout Bay Fishing Industries company owner Arnold Bengis, his son David, and US business partner Jeffrey Noll are described in current US Appeal Court papers as “key players in a sprawling, trans-Atlantic criminal scheme to illegally harvest massive quantities of South African rock lobster and Patagonian toothfish - marketed in the US as Chilean sea bass - and then to sell that illegally harvested fish in the US for a significant profit”. Fishermen working for, or paid off by, Bengis, caught huge quantities of both West Coast and South Coast rock lobsters in South African waters, way in excess of local legal quotas. To escape detection, the three men and their co-conspirators offloaded poached lobsters at night, under-reported to fisheries authorities, and bribed South African fisheries inspectors. Once the lobsters were ready for export to the US, false documents were submitted to the South African authorities. In the US, they kept two sets of books: one for legal amounts of rock lobster, within South Africa’s quota, and the other - “Sheet B” - for the poached animals. Between 1999 and 2001, 93 percent of all the lobsters processed at Bengis’s Hout Bay factory were poached, according to one of the co-conspirators who turned state witness against him. Between the 1987/8 and 2000/1 seasons, the amount of only South Coast rock lobster - the smaller of the two lobster resources poached was estimated at about 776 550kg. After the initial container was seized by the authorities, the men and their co-conspirators “engaged in a series of elaborate deceptions designed to avoid detection and perpetuate the scheme”, including removing wage documents from the Hout Bay premises and shredding financial documents in the US. When US authorities - including the FBI - were investigating their activities they moved rock lobster from a storage warehouse to other premises, and diverted an illegal shipment of Patagonian toothfish from New York to Hong Kong. Bengis even hired a private eye to follow the federal agents, to locate a container of illegally poached seafood that the US authorities had seized.

Kung Fu Crab

Maryland Blue Crab
Maryland’s icon, the blue crab, has been fading away in Chesapeake Bay. Last year Maryland saw the lowest harvest (22 million pounds) since 1945. Just four decades ago the bay produced 96 million pounds.The population is down 70% since 1990, when they first did a formal count. There are only about 120 million crabs in the bay and they think they need 200 million for a sustainable population. Overfishing, pollution, invasive species and global warming get the blame.