Chesapeake watermen fear blue crab not coming back

[Brooklynbomber]

You fuckers are so busy arguing about "righty" versus "lefty" you cant' see the forest through the tress

Shit is Dissapearing......salmon off the West coast now this.............we'll all be eating farm raised sea-food soon with 70% less nutrientsucking:


By KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press Writer Wed Jul 16, 1:40 PM ET

<!-- end storyhdr --> RIDGE, Md. - Chesapeake Bay crabber Paul Kellam has advice for the teenage boys who help tend his traps every summer: You better have a backup plan.
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It's an anxious summer for watermen harvesting the Chesapeake's best-loved seafood, the blue crab. The way some see it, the crabbing business here isn't just dying. It's already dead.
Crabs have thrived in the bottom muck of the Chesapeake and its tributaries even as centuries of overfishing harmed oysters, fish and other species in the nation's largest estuary. Now blue crabs are in trouble, too, and when they go, a way of life is sure to go with them.

"There was a time when crabbers were only out here from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Now, it's about all we have left," says Kellam, 53, steering his 30-year-old rig "Christy" out of the Potomac River and onto the bay for a day of crabbing. The contradictory decor in the cabin sums up the outlook of today's waterman: a red wooden good-luck horseshoe dangles over a mud-splattered copy of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook."

The bay's blue crab stock is down about 65 percent since 1990 due to overfishing and water pollution, according to Virginia and Maryland fisheries managers. The states have imposed steep cuts on this year's female crab harvest, aiming to reduce the number of crabs taken by more than a third.

For Kellam and his neighbors in southern Maryland, where the working rigs and crab picking houses that sustained these communities for generations have been replaced by yachts and vacation homes, hopes are dim that the blue crabs will ever come back.

"It's looking worse every year," says Bob McKay, who at 74 is the oldest working waterman in St. Mary's County. He still sells crabs out of a shed in his yard but doubts the industry will live much longer than he does. "I don't know what the solution could be."

Watermen have turned to real estate and automobile repair. They've opened seafood restaurants and bakeries.
The best way to make money on the Chesapeake these days is taking businessmen from Washington and Philadelphia on charter fishing trips. Those who still rely on crabbing are further hurt by a double punch of higher fuel costs and an economic downturn that's meant fewer consumers dropping up to $200 on a bushel of crabs.

"People don't have the disposable income. They're just not buying," says Kellam, who spends up to $150 a day on diesel, which costs about $5 a gallon at a nearby marina.

There was a time when Chesapeake watermen made their living off the winter oyster harvest, using hand tongs and later power dredges to supply most of the world's oysters. But disease and over-harvesting nearly wiped out Chesapeake oysters in the 1980s, and despite millions invested in restoration, they've never recovered. Scientists estimate the Chesapeake now contains about 1 percent of the oysters it once did.

After the oyster industry collapsed, watermen looked to hardy blue crabs to make up the slack. But the next generation may not have another option.

"I want to make a living on the water," says Randy Plummer, a chain-smoking 19-year-old who works on Kellam's crab rig. "But there ain't no future in it. Everybody knows that."
Plummer has wanted to crab since he was a boy, but is instead headed to community college this fall, at the urging of Kellam and his parents.

Even scientists who called for the harvest reductions say overfishing isn't entirely to blame.
The main culprit is water pollution and soil runoff from development throughout a watershed that is home to 10 million people. Excess nutrients wash into the Chesapeake, causing algae blooms and choking the native plant life that crabs rely on for food and habitat. In the summer, large swaths of the Chesapeake contain so little oxygen that scientists call them "dead zones," because few critters can live there.

Watermen call it "bad water," and they track it all summer, following crabs as they skitter to shallower water that contains more oxygen. Even when watermen luck out and pull up a pot full of crabs, long-timers say the crabs are nothing like they used to be.

"Sometimes in the summer, you pull the pots up, they've got algae and mud all over them. The bad water comes in and coats everything and the crabs can't stand it," Kellam explains.

He now spends hours hauling up the same number of crabs he could catch in a few pots a decade ago. And what he catches isn't as healthy-looking as the crabs he caught as a boy. Wholesalers are buying them anyway.

"They're buying a lot of stuff that 10 years ago they would've turned away," Kellam says.

Maryland and Virginia officials have responded to the watermen's plight by asking the federal government for a disaster declaration that would free up about $20 million to subsidize crabbers and seafood processors until blue crabs rebound.
Maryland is also working on sweeping revisions to state planning laws with an eye toward protecting its 3,000 or so miles of shoreline. Already this year, the state toughened zoning laws dealing with development closest to the water, a law that aims to reduce sediment and pollution running into the Chesapeake and its tributaries.

"It's certainly getting more difficult to make a living on the water," conceded Lynn Fegley, a biologist in charge of crabs for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. But Fegley says the cynicism along the Chesapeake is unfounded. There will always be Chesapeake blue crabs, she says — as long as watermen lay off them when the stock dips.
"As the watershed gets more crowded, the face of the fishery may change. But people are always going to want seafood, right? It's healthy and it's delicious. What we have to do is find a way to harvest seafood that's sustainable for the future," Fegley says.

But Thomas Courtney, who sells Kellam the alewife fish he uses for bait, laughs when asked whether state efforts to revive blue crabs will bring them back.

"It ain't what we're pulling out of the water. It's what we're putting in the water," says Courtney, 62. "You've got a cornfield, 20 acres, you put 80 or 90 houses on it, hook 'em up to sewer pipes, put roads and ditches down. That's what's destroyed the bay. It ain't us. They let development take over and then, that's it, we're done."


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[Brooklynbomber]

shit wrong forum, and the cut-and-paste is fucked up too. mods move this to the poli-forum where it can get some eyeballs, if you can reduce it down too so it doesn't take up a page and a half would be good......don't drink and post boys and girls:grandmais

 

[ScottL]

"shit wrong forum, and the cut-and-paste is fucked up too."

Yeah looks like this thread is swimming with the fishes

 

[tiznow]

bullish for HQS jdog ope:

 

[tiznow]

in other food supply related issues.... top soil depletion becoming an issue

-------------------------

Soil under strain: A thinning layer of life evokes concern
By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent
Published: July 16 2008 19:32 Last updated: July 16 2008 19:32


Civilisation sprang from dirt. The thin layer of topsoil, formed on parts of the earth's surface over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, enabled crops to be cultivated and gave early farmers a reliable food source. On average, that layer is only three feet deep.

But now that dirt is in danger. “The world's cropland is losing topsoil through erosion faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land's inherent productivity,” warns Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, in his book Plan B. “Where losses are heavy, productive land turns into wasteland.”

Farmland across the world is affected, stretching from the wheat-covered prairies of the US to chemically contaminated tracts of eastern Europe and China. But the problem is most acute in Africa, where farmers tilling some of the world's oldest soils are among the least able to take action to protect their most important resource.

These problems are not new. Some archaeologists assert that civilisations such as the Mayans, the Easter Islanders and the Norse settlers of Greenland collapsed because of the depletion of their soils, caused by over-use, deforestation or climate change. More recently, the “dust bowl” of 1930s America provided a stark warning of the dangers.

What has changed is population pressure: there are now more than 6.5bn people on the planet, a figure that is forecast to rise to 9bn by mid-century. Though scientists estimate that there is enough suitable uncultivated land to meet increased demand until at least 2020, feeding the world demands that existing fields remain productive.

The soil degradation problem has been worsening for decades but it has taken the food price rises of the past two years to spur policymakers to take the issue seriously. A report from the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology, which found that the rate of yield increases was faltering, concluded that a large part of the reason was the declining quality of soils.

“Land degradation is certainly linked to the food crisis,” says Parviz Koohafkan, director of the land and water division at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. “It is not such a direct and immediate threat [as changing supply and demand pressures] but we will have more and more of a problem, as soils in many places are becoming less and less resilient.”

The reasons for soil degradation are as varied as the soils themselves. In the US, soils have been protected since the 1930s, when the federal government was forced to take action on conservation. Nevertheless, North American farmers are still losing topsoil at 1 per cent a year, according to David Montgomery, a geologist and author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations. The losses often occur through erosion by water, as downpours or even irrigation wash topsoil into rivers and dams. A study published in Science in the 1990s found that soil erosion cost the US economy about $44bn (€28bn, £22bn) a year.

In Australia, one of the world's most important wheat producers, increased salinity is a serious problem, as farmers pump more water from underground aquifers and as years of heavy fertiliser and pesticide use take their toll.

The European Union is consulting on a Soil Directive to address the issue. According to a “soil atlas” published in 2005 by the EU's Joint Research Centre, in southern Europe nearly 75 per cent of soil had an organic matter content – a measure of fertility – low enough to be a cause for concern. “Soil is a non-renewable resource and we need to take action to protect it,” says Arwyn Jones, a research scientist at the centre one of the authors of the atlas.

In Spain and Italy, in particular, the erosion of soil by water and wind is a serious problem. An increasing tendency for farmland to fall out of cultivation exacerbates the problem: when the crops are taken away, the bare soil is vulnerable until wild vegetation re-establishes itself.

In the EU's new member states to the east, more than one-third of land is affected by soil degradation, according to the soil atlas. In China, meanwhile, industrial pollution is one of the main culprits. Rivers running black with industrial effluent do not tend to bode well for farmland, while increasing demand for water is also taking its toll, allowing desert to swallow the drier areas of what was once fertile land.

It is Africa that is suffering the most. “Africa's soils are among the poorest in the world, and poor soils produce poor crops,” said Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the UN, at the launch last year of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), of which he is chairman. Cereal yields in sub-Saharan Africa are barely 1 tonne per hectare, compared with yields in Asia of well over 3 tonnes. While cereal yields in other developing regions rose by between 1.2 and 2.3 per cent a year from 1980 to 2000, those in Africa increased by just 0.7 per cent a year, according to the World Bank.

Africa's soils suffer from several disadvantages. First, the continent is geologically old and has been home to people for a long time. Ancient soils are thin and often lack the structure necessary to hold water and nutrients. The deep red colour characteristic of the continent's soils betrays another difficulty: such earth is heavily laden with iron, which “binds” phosphorus, rendering it unavailable to plants. African soil also often lacks the key nutrients of nitrogen and potassium, as well as less important substances such as zinc, says Otto Spaargaren, head of the World Data Centre for Soils at the International Soil Reference and Information Centre.

These problems are compounded by poor agricultural practices. Mr Koohafkan explains: “Farmers are driven by their immediate needs to provide food and income.” As a result, “they are ‘mining' their own resources”, he says. “They are using up their capital and they can't re*invest in those resources.”

Traditional farming practices that might have preserved the soils have fallen away under the pressure of feeding so many more mouths. “No longer can traditional systems answer the demand of [an] increasing population,” says Mr Koohafkan.

“The [practice of leaving ground] fallow has disappeared. The size of the plots is smaller, so they don't provide a sufficient income for people to both feed themselves and invest in the future.” A lack of security of tenure in some areas exacerbates the problem, as people are unwilling to invest in the future of land they do not own or that they could be thrown off, he adds. “[Soil degradation] is a structural problem, not a temporary problem,” he concludes.

As a result, according to the International Centre for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development, Africa loses about 8m tonnes of soil nutrients a year, while more than 95m hectares of land have been degraded to the point where productivity is greatly reduced.



As Agra notes, “such severe soil depletion results in a vicious cycle of declining yields, deepening poverty, and increased degradation of the natural resource base that farmers depend upon ... As soils decline and farm yields drop, impoverished farmers move on to clear forests and savannah, where the cycle begins again.”

African farmers are among the lowest users of artificial fertilisers in the world. Could shipping in millions of tonnes of the chemicals used to enhance soil in the US, Europe and Asia be the answer? It is not so simple, warns Mr Spaargaren.

“The soils themselves can't hold much fertiliser, because their nutrient retention is so poor,” he says. “You can pour fertiliser on to land like that but most of it will be washed away.” Even if large quantities of fertiliser are applied to degraded soils, it would still take centuries to recover their health, he says. Overuse of fertiliser can also generate problems such as the acidification of the soil that has occurred in places such as Europe and Australia.

Yet the overuse of fertilisers is a problem that most African farmers can only dream of having. Many lack the income to buy even small amounts, and the infrastructure that developed-world farmers take for granted – banks that will give credit and wait until the crops are sold to be repaid, together with reliable networks of agricultural suppliers – is seldom in place.

What about natural fertilisers? Again, soils that are too poor to hold artificial nutrients cannot hold on to natural ones either and some of it is washed into water courses. Using animal manure also requires sufficient land to graze animals, which is not always possible – and some experts suggest that over-grazing on unsuitable lands is exacerbating soil erosion and desertification.

If soil degradation is to be halted, experts agree, the answer will be some combination of fertiliser use and improvements in farming methods. “We need a 21st-century green revolution designed for the special and diverse needs of Africa,” said Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, when announcing an initiative this year in which Agra was granted $164.5m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and $15m from the Rockefeller Foundation to establish a soil health programme for the continent. “It must be driven by greater investments in technological research and dissemination, sustainable land management, agricultural supply chains, irrigation, rural microcredit and policies that strengthen market opportunities while assisting with rural vulnerabilities and insecurities.”

The lessons are not unique to Africa, moreover. Improved farming methods are required around the world to ensure that erosion is minimised and the nutrient content is maintained. “Farmers can be taught better practices,” says Steve McGrath, a scientist at the Rothamsted Institute, a centre for agricultural research. One example is no-till farming, says Julian Little, chairman of the ABC. This requires a mixture of carefully managed crop rotation, the introduction of secondary “undercrops” to prevent the growth of weeds, as well as “the judicious use of herbicide”.

The US Soil Conservation Service, set up after the devastation of the dust bowl, has been teaching similar techniques for years, along with manuring and the use of artificial fertiliser. Other techniques are simple, such as ploughing along the contour of fields so that water does not run off and take topsoil with it, and maintaining hedgerows or ditches as field boundaries.

About three feet of topsoil represents the foundation of human civilisation. The pressure of feeding a population of 9bn people is likely to stretch that resource to the limit.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

 

[nhoj]

Would you come back if you thought Obamma might be President?

 

[RobFunk]

we'll all be eating farm raised sea-food soon with 70% less nutrients

Farm Raised is so disgusting.

When I saw a bunch of sardines swimming around a plastic barrel at a factory on some news clip.

I just thought, some sea food is being raised in a damn barrel. They get nothing but fish food and bump into the plastic or each other. As they swim tightly in circles. YUM.

 

[tiznow]

HQS a stock i own

a few companies looking to the future and doing so with health and environment on their minds

-----------------------------

WHAT DO WE FEED OUR TILAPIA?
What do farmed fish eat?
Farmed fish eat palliated feeds that contain all of the essential and micro-nutrients that the fish need to grow.They may also consume natural feeds as well, although as they get bigger in size, typically the fish gain most of their nutrition from feeds that are added to the ponds.The composition of the fish pellets varies depending on the species and its nutritional requirements.
What do we feed our fish at HQSM?
Unlike many other farmed Tilapia species, our animals are fed a diet that is largely plant protein.This plant protein is free of the contaminants that are commonly found in fish meals. Tilapia are not carnivorous and do very well on plant derived proteins.

Why is this good for the consumer?
Many fish contain contaminants that enter their environment through feed and water.
Carnivorous fish typically contain higher levels of these contaminants.Our Tilapia are free of these influences.The feed contains no fish meal
Use of fertilizers??
The use of manure as a fertilizer in fish ponds is a common practice.We do not use any manure based fertilizers in the rearing of our fish.
Why is this important?
Animal manures, while rich in nutrients, can contain a variety of adulterants including antibiotic residues, heavy metals, pesticides, pathogenic bacteria and viruses.HQSM does not use any animal manures in the production of its Tilapia.
Why does this make our fish better?
Produced in waters free of contaminants and using production methods that do not result in the addition of contaminants during the rearing process guarantees you that the Tilapia we produce are free of the substances that rearing the fish in other environments might result in.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
Where do we produce our fish?
All of our fish are produced on the Chinese Island of Hainan.This is a tropical island located off the Southern tip of China in the South China Sea.Its latitude is less than 20 N making it at the same latitude as the Hawaiian Islands.This is a favorable climate for producing Tilapia.
Where does the water come from that we use to produce our fish?
The water that we use is rain water.It is collected in reservoirs for the specific purpose of producing Tilapia.The water is not used for anything else before we use it.This water is clean and completely free of any agricultural influences.
What is so special about the environment where we rear our fish?
Most farms produce Tilapia in ponds using water from rivers, estuaries and other surface waters.Tilapia are also grown in lakes.Our water is pure rain water that is collected in reservoirs and pumped into our ponds.Hainan Island has no industrial base and the water is clean and not polluted by any local influences.
What so special about the water quality?
Our tilapia is approved to be sold as Izumi-dai, sushi grade Tilapia.The standards for this are exacting and the filets have to be of the highest quality, produced in pristine waters free of any all potential contaminants.This is a prerequisite for obtaining permission to label our Tilapia filets as Izumi-dai.
ZERO HORMONE USE
Why are Male Tilapia reared preferentially?
Male tilapia grow faster and larger than female fish do.Reproducing females can damage pond bottoms by digging nests.Tilapia are typically farmed cyclically.They are stocked, reared to a marketable weight and harvested in a time cycle that varies only with the weather.Large numbers of females producing fry can make this a more complicated strategy.For these reasons most farms that produce tilapia preferentially produce male fish.
How are male tilapia produced?
All-male tilapia are produced by three primary methods.One is by using a cross between two different species.Many, if most most, other farms use a hormone, methyl-testosterone that is applied to fish in the hatchery, when they are very small.This hormone changes the fish so that they are almost all males.Other methods include manipulation of the sex by genetic selection, producing YY chromosome males that produce only male (XY) offspring.
How does HQSM produce our male tilapia?
The method takes advantage of the fact that most of the offspring of a cross between two different species will be male.HQSM uses Oreochromus niloticus crossed with O. aureus.This is an all natural method for producing a high male population.The animals are never exposed to methyl-testosterone or any other chemical to produce all males.Our process yields more than 90% males.This all natural process does result in some females and we accept the minor disadvantages of having some females in our ponds.
Why does our method give you a better product?
We never use hormones at any stage of the life process.Nothing is given to our fish to promote reproduction or to alter normal genetic patterns.We rely on the fact that crossing two different species of Tilapia gives us a largely male population.You are thus assured a product that is completely free of added hormones.
OFF-FLAVOR
What is off-flavor?
The term off-flavor refers to a characteristic taste found in the flesh of fish that have been reared in ponds.It is often described as a musty or muddy taste, although not always.It can range from subtle to making the fish inedible.Not all people find low levels unpleasant though quality fish products are free of off-flavor.
What causes off-flavor?
Most off-flavor is caused by specific species of algae and bacteria.Some cases have been linked to other sources such as diesel and for some types of off-flavor there are no identifiable causes.At this time, two algal and bacterial metabolic products have been identified as being the cause of the majority of off-flavor.These are geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol (MIB).
Where does off-flavor come from?
MIB and geosmin are produced by many species of actinomycte bacteria and blue-green algae species.Blue-green algae that cause most off-flavor include species of Anabaena and Oscillatoria as well as other species.
What conditions favor the production of blue-green algae that cause off-flavor?
Blue-green algae are normal inhabitants of most aquatic environments.In ecologically balanced systems they are present as components of the overall mixture and are not dominant.In systems in which nutrients have altered the ecology, blue-green bacterial species may dominate.The conditions that typically cause this are known as eutrophication.This is a form of environmental disruption that favors the growth of blue-green algae that may produce off-flavors.
Why is this not a problem in Tilapia produced by HQSM?
HQSM Tilapia are produced in ponds using rain water collected for the purpose of rearing the fish.Water quality is kept at a high level to avoid the accumulation of excessive nutrients that characterize eutrophic waters.The use of polyculture is one important tool to accomplish this.Three species of fish are being reared in the ponds at the same time, feeding on different types of food in the ponds.These factors ensure that the water quality remains in balance not allowing the algae or bacteria that produce off-flavors to proliferate.

 

[RobFunk]

TIZ, you might be making money off it. But don't tell me you don't perfer fresh ocean caught.

 

[punter]

Free range fish.

 

[tiznow]

oh i do rob....just saying aquaculture in a renewal way such as HQS using organic products, no manure for fertilizers, rain water for their ponds etc.....just a necessity in the world to come

especially with the overpopulation problems that are building each and every day

 

[Darwinian]

sad, nothing like blue claw crabs in italian gravy (tomato sauce)