This week on Talking Fish, NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer brings incredible live footage of New England’s ocean floor to your computer; in Fish Talk in the News, lobster shell disease and southern species move north in response to warmer waters.

This week on Talking Fish, CLF’s Sean Mahoney and the State of Maine celebrate the return of alewives to the St. Croix River; Gloucester Daily Times reporter Richard Gaines has died; 20 years after New England’s cod stocks collapsed, the sense of deja vu is unshakeable; in Fish Talk in the News, the first great white of the season is spotted off Cape Cod and Connecticut scales back its salmon restocking efforts.

It’s not often you get the chance to celebrate such a clear victory for the environment as the return of the alewife to the St. Croix River watershed.  As discussed in prior posts, a Maine law prohibiting alewives from accessing this fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam was repealed this past May and for the first time in two decades, alewives are able to return to their spawning grounds upriver.  The victory was celebrated not only with partners like Chief Clayton Cleaves of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and the Downeast Salmon Federation but also with former adversaries, like the US EPA who we sued in order to break the logjam with the federal agencies and establish that the Maine law violated the Clean Water Act. For more background on the read more…

There has never been a better time to care about the ocean than now. The ocean provides us with so many things – half of the air we breathe, an amazing variety of things to eat, a place of beauty and refuge and sometimes fury. This year the New England coast line was pummeled by tropical storms and Northeasters, reminding us yet again that our glorious ocean is powerful, relentless and unforgiving. Despite our ingenuity and technical know-how, we live in a natural and changing environment and need to better plan and protect our ocean ourselves going forward. We used to think that the ocean was so big, and life in it so abundant, that nothing we did could harm it or exhaust its resources. But now, because of us, read more…

This week on Talking Fish, Tom Toles responds to a new study on fisheries and climate change with a clever cartoon; in Fish Talk in the News, a top official is leaving NOAA, alewife counts are way up, and a parasite may be hurting yellowtail flounder populations.

After 18 years, Maine alewives can finally swim freely into their ancestral habitat. In an event that went largely unnoticed, on Monday, April 22nd, Governor LePage decided not to veto L.D. 72, legislation requires Maine to ensure that the fish ladders on the Woodland Dam and the Grand Falls Dam be reconfigured or operated in such a way that “allows the unconstrained passage of river herring.” The deadline for this action is May 1st.

Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) applauded today’s vote by the Maine state legislature to pass L.D. 72, which will open the fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam an allow alewives, a key forage fish, to reach 98% of their natural habitat in the St. Croix River. The vote caps a two year effort by CLF advocates to restore a fishery that numbered close to 3 million until a state law closed the fish ladder and the number of alewives dwindled to less than 10,000. Last year CLF successfully filed suit against the EPA to enforce the Clean Water Act’s provision related to the state law and then filed suit against the State to invalidate that law.

After a full day of vigorous testimony (including supportive testimony from CLF) on March 25, Maine’s Marine Resources Committee today unanimously voted that LD 72, a bill that will reopen the St. Croix River to alewives, ought to pass. This is an excellent outcome. With that strong recommendation, the bill will soon go to the full Legislature for a vote. If passed, LD 72 will reverse the law on the books since 1995 that has closed the fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam  to alewives, preventing them from reaching their spawning grounds. Originally justified by a mistaken belief that alewives competed with smallmouth bass and caused a decline in their population, numerous scientific studies since then debunked that myth. But in the intervening years, the alewife population has shrunken to the read more…

This week on Talking Fish, NOAA’s action to open groundfish closed areas is deeply inconsistent with its own climate adaptation strategy; in Fish Talk in the News, NOAA releases proposed catch limits for the 2013 fishing year and fishermen and scientists discuss Cape Cod’s gray seal problem.