July 24 – Local Summer Fisheries – Lobster – In this latest edition of Local Summer Fisheries, read about the biology, management, and regulation of the American lobster in New England, learn about the current lobster price plummet in Maine, and find the simplest, most delicious lobster salad recipe around.

July 25 - Summer and Fall Seafood Festivals – Interested in eating local seafood and learning more about the fishermen who bring it to us?  Check out one of the many summer and fall seafood festivals taking place in New England. These festivals highlight all kinds of regional seafood

July 27 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, July 27 – This week’s round-up of fish news includes a lot about lobsters, Hannaford’s Supermarket’s new comprehensive sustainable seafood policy, an update on the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Out of the Blue program, efforts to rebuild Boston Harbor’s clam population, and opportunities to learn to fish in New Hampshire.

July 17 – Local Summer Fisheries – Summer Flounder - Summer flounder, also known as fluke, can be found in New England’s shallow coastal waters in the summer months, when they migrate inshore from their deeper, offshore winter habitats. They have historically composed one of the most popular and important commercial and recreational fisheries on the east coast.

July 18 – A Tale of Two Cod - The almighty cod – the most legendary fish in our New England waters. Atlantic cod is greyish-green, and a renowned dweller of the Gulf of Maine. It is a staple of our traditional cuisine and a historic driver of our economy. You’ve seen an Atlantic cod, right? But have you ever seen a red Atlantic cod?

July 20 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, July 20 – This week’s fish news includes: More news about the Maine lobster surplus; congressional delegates from New England states urge the House Committee on Natural Resources to use caution in determining 2013 groundfish quotas; innovative technology decreases environmental impact of sea scallop surveys; underutilized species may be key to sustainable seafood; Stellwagen Bank celebrates its 20th anniversary as a national marine sanctuary, New England Ocean Odyssey posts about red cod; marine mammal protection may play a role in perpetually low groundfish populations; controversy over the latest Georges Bank yellowtail flounder stock assessment; and a showing of the documentary Ocean Frontiers in Nahant, MA.

July 10 – Local Summer Fisheries – Bluefish- The third post in the Local Summer Fisheries series is on bluefish, a species known for their chaotic feeding frenzies and putting up a good fight on the end of a fishing rod.

July 10 – What Single-Celled Diatoms Know That We Can’t Seem To Take Seriously – A recent study from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences reveals that increased precipitation, likely due to climate change, is correlated with a drastic reduction in primary productivity levels in the Gulf of Maine. Phytoplankton, the organisms responsible for fixing carbon from the atmosphere and the oceans, are at the very base of the marine food web.

July 13 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, July 13 – On July 9^th, in a major victory for alewives, the EPA directed Maine’s Attorney General to take action to allow alewives and other small fish species to access habitat above the Grand Falls Dam in the St. Croix River.  A story from this weekend’s Portland Press Herald covers the history of the 17 year effort to open the St. Croix to these important forage fish, which are at the base of many commercially and ecologically important marine food chains.

July 3 – Local Summer Fisheries – Dogfish – This second installment in the Local Summer Fisheries series is about Dogfish, a small and relatively underutilized shark species that migrates up the New England coast each summer.

July 6 - Fish Talk in the News – Friday, July 6 – This week in Fish Talk in the News: early shedding leads to historically low lobster prices; a great video about mercury in the environment and in seafood; the World Wildlife Fund releases their plan to create a Financial Institution for the Recovery of Marine Ecosystems; author and historian H. Bruce Franklin of Rutgers University discusses the importance of menhaden in an interview about his book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea; UMass Dartmouth receives a grant to fund groundfish stock assessment research; and scientists are mapping the ocean floor 15 miles off the Maine coast.

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  TalkingFish.org interviewed Mike Palmer, Northeast Fisheries Science Center fisheries biologist, about stock assessments.

  June 12 – Taking Stock of New England Fish: Part 4 – TalkingFish.org interviews Mike Palmer, Research Fisheries Biologist in the Population Dynamics Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. In this post, Mike Palmer answers our questions about best available science and the challenges of conducting fish stock assessments.

• June 15 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 15 – Stories of interest this week: Discussion of a new marketing campaign for Maine lobster; NEFMC looking for a new executive director; GMRI raises awareness of underutilized local species; work begins to remove the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Maine; record numbers of river herring and shad are returning to spawn in the Connecticut River; and a new study shows the Gulf of Maine’s productivity is decreasing due to climate change.

The St. Croix River (Photo credit: NOAA Photo Library)

•  Tuesday, June 5 – “Taking Stock of New England Fish: Part 3” – TalkingFish.org interviews Mike Palmer, Research Fisheries Biologist in the Population Dynamics Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. In this post, Mike Palmer explains how uncertainty comes into play in stock assessments and how it is accounted for.

• Thursday, June 7 – “CLF Lawsuit to Protect Alewives in Maine” – Last week, CLF filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in an effort to overturn a Maine law that has prevented the alewife, a key forage fish, from accessing its native habitat in the St. Croix River in Maine.

• Friday, June 8 – “Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 7” – Interesting stories this week: bad grades for ocean policy, mermaids, yeast research, and environmental and health risks of imported shrimp.

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  This week, Peter Shelley writes about the importance of federal funding for fisheries science. Here, cooperative research in action: A Massachusetts industry-based cod survey (photo credit: MA Division of Marine Fisheries).

  Tuesday, May 29 – “Taking Stock of New England Fish – Part 2” – TalkingFish.org interviews Mike Palmer, Research Fisheries Biologist in the Population Dynamics Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. In this post, Mike Palmer explains the basic steps to conduct a stock assessment and the role of models in stock assessments.

• Wednesday, May 30 – “Investing in fisheries science for management success” -  A TalkingFish.org exclusive opinion piece from CLF’s Peter Shelley about the need to adequately fund fisheries science in order to get the fishery management results we want.

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  Soon, Boston residents will be able to buy day-boat-caught fish at farmers markets like this one. Read about this and other interesting fish-related news on TalkingFish.org. (Photo credit: Commonwealth of Massachusetts)

  Monday, May 21 – “Congress, Catch Shares, and the Councils” – An opinion piece by Nick Battista of the Island Institute and Ben Martens of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association on the effort by some members of Congress to prohibit NOAA, NMFS and the councils from developing new catch shares management plans on the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico.

• Tuesday, May 22 – “Taking Stock of New England Fish: Part 1” – TalkingFish.org interviews Mike Palmer, Research Fisheries Biologist in the Population Dynamics Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. In this post, the first in the series, Mike Palmer talks about his background and interest in fisheries science and the types of data used in stock assessments.
• Thursday, May 24 – “A Small ‘Catch’ in Recent Fisheries Coverage” – Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group writes to “make an important distinction between catch limits and catch shares, a difference that has been inadequately explained by NOAA and has resulted in some understandable confusion.”
• Friday, May 25 – “Fish Talk in the News – Friday, May 25” – Interesting stories this week: Boston brings local and fresh fish to its farmers markets; disconcerting news about Thailand’s seafood export industry; and recipes for healthy fish stocks.

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  Photo credit: Sean Cosgrove

  May 17 – “Slinging Mud” – The mud in Casco Bay, Maine, is changing. According to an article last fall in the Bangor Daily News, areas that used to contain vast quantities of economically valuable clams are now “dead mud.” Local clammers are finding that sites of former abundance are now completely devoid of shellfish. Even efforts to seed the formerly thriving areas with shellfish larvae are not yielding results. Some scientists think that the increasing acidity of the mud, due partly to the increased carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere, is making conditions unsuitable for shellfish larvae to form, well, shells. We may not yet be able to quantify the damage ocean acidification will cause in New England waters – although researchers are trying. But we don’t want to sit on our hands and wait to see how bad it will get.

• May 18 – “Fish Talk in the News – Friday, May 18” – This week’s interesting fishing and seafood-related stories: the ethics of seafood; NOAA’s annual status of the stocks report; making sure funding for ocean programs stays in the federal budget; CLF’s Peter Shelley talking about seafood on WGBH; and what local seafood to keep and eye out for at the market this summer.