Voice your support for common sense solutions like having federal observers on all trips by these industrial vessels, requiring them to provide their entire catch to these observers for inspection instead of dumping huge amounts of it unseen, and enacting an overall limit on the amount of river herring they can catch and kill each year. Our fishery managers need to hear from you!
Our local meeting is:
Tuesday, March 27, 7-9 p.m., Plymouth, MA
Radisson Hotel Plymouth Harbor, 180 Water St.
Read more at http://www.herringalliance.org/blog/180-speak-out-to-help-protect-river-herring
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
River Herring and other fish getting 'nuked'
On March 8th JRWA filed a legal challenge against Entergy's operations at Pilgrim Nuclear Plant. One of the significant issues at hand is the number of fish that get sucked into the plant's cooling system. Those of us who follow the annual Jones River herring run are well aware of how imperiled river herring are in the Jones and beyond. River herring are the third most impinged (sucked into the grates) species at Pilgrim. In fact, based on Pilgrim's monitoring data, river herring have been impinged at Pilgrim every year from 1980 to 2010. The total number of river herring impinged in this time period was estimated at 92,001 (68,489 alewife + 23,512 blueback herring). Peak impingement years included:
- 1995 when alewife alone was the greatest single species impinged at the plant and total river herring impinged was 41,128 individuals (39,884 alewife + 1,244 blueback herring)
- 2010 when alewives were the second most impinged species (after Atlantic silversides) at an extrapolated total of 12,680 fish plus an additional 271 blueback herring. This is more than three times greater than the total number of fish estimated for the entire 2010 Jones River river herring population.
You can read more about the legal filing, including testimony from JRWA's Exectutive Director and Ecology Program Director, by clicking here: Cape Cod Bay Watch
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Herring and the Herring Alliance need our help.
Greg Wells of the Herring Alliance was kind enough to come down to our annual meeting and give a great talk about the history, status, and future of river herring. Those of you who attended know how urgent the need is to protect these fish. You also saw the massive task that the Herring Alliance has in front of it in order to affect positive change. This is the big scale stuff that our small organization can't handle on it's own. So we rely on them to do the heavy lifting and they rely on us to back them up. Greg sent us an email today asking for some of that back up. I can't improve much on his wording so I'll just let his note speak for itself. You should feel free to contact them or us if you want more information or just to talk it over. We will be following up as an organization, but support from individuals is also key.
Hi Pine and Alex,
Thought I’d send you an quick update on our herring efforts and let you know about the open comment period and hearings scheduled on Amendment 5 to the Atlantic Herring FMP. Comments on the proposed management options are being accepting now through April 9, and seven public hearings are coming up, including one near you on March 27th. Final decisions on management measures – including protections for river herring – will be made in June.
Leading up to these final decisions, there are a number of ways JRWA and your members can help ensure adequate protections for river herring are voted through and ultimately approved for implementation (hearing attendance/testimony, sign-on letter, op-eds in local papers, encouraging elected officials to weigh in on the process, etc.). I’ll keep you posted as these opportunities come up. In the meantime, please help us spread the word about the upcoming hearings (link below). It would be really great to have you or others in your community at a hearing to let Council members know that groups like yours are putting in a lot of time and effort to restore river herring runs, that we need them to support these efforts by establishing protections for these fish in federal waters. I can provide you some talking points, and if you or anyone is interested I’d be happy to meet up before the main event.
Thanks,
Greg
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