No profits found in this tangled catch

SEEING RED: Galilee fisherman Ben Piquette displays a handful of the invasive, red weed. In the background is crewman Peter D' Ambra. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN LEE
SEEING RED: Galilee fisherman Ben Piquette displays a handful of the invasive, red weed. In the background is crewman Peter D' Ambra. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN LEE

Local fishermen this year have had a tough time with a species of red seaweed, an algae, that looks like matted hair. The algae began to bloom and spread in May.
Nets would get fouled – often beyond recognition – and the fishermen would spend hours cleaning them, only to have their nets get “weeded up” on the very next tide. And to add insult to injury, when the weed was thickest, covering acres of the seabed, the nets would often be empty of fish.
“Sure, every spring and summer we see our share of seaweed,” said Narragansett’s Galilee village fisherman Aaron Gewirtz, owner and operator of the gillnetter Nancy Beth. “We’re used to that. But this season, we all knew something very different was going on.”
The culprit, according to Carol Thornber, University of Rhode Island associate professor of biological sciences and a leading expert on seaweeds and coastal ecology, was Heterosiphonia japonica.
“It’s an invasive species that is native to the western Pacific, around Japan,” Thornber said.
Rhode Island was the first place in the western Atlantic for this species to be seen, according to Thornber, being first observed in 2007 off Fort Wetherill in Jamestown.
Heterosiphonia has now spread from Rhode Island down into Connecticut and Long Island and north through Massachusetts and into Maine.
“It’s explosive,” Thornber said. “It grows and spreads very quickly. Both Massachusetts and eastern Long Island Sound have had big problems with it.”
Thornber has been studying Heterosiphonia and other invasive species to try and better understand their relationship to local marine ecology.
“We really don’t know what it will do,” she said, “what long-term impacts it will have. Many invasive species show a pattern – they invade, they explode, then they settle down and become part of the community. With Heterosiphonia, we don’t yet know.”
Scientists speculate that Heterosiphonia came into Rhode Island waters from Europe. Heterosiphonia invaded Europe in the 1980s from Japan. From Europe it arrived, the thinking goes, by hitching a ride either on a ship’s hull or in a ship’s ballast tank. When the ship came into Narragansett Bay the red algae disembarked, and attached to rock in Jamestown. “We didn’t take notice until 2009 when Hurricane Bill put a lot of this new seaweed up on the beach,” Thornber said. “This was when Heterosiphonia was first positively identified and when we started to pay attention.”
Massachusetts was hit particularly hard in 2012, said Christine Ramsay, a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University Marine Science Center. Ramsey has worked with Heterosiphonia in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
“[Massachusetts] towns spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get the seaweed off their beaches,” he said.
After analyzing the different kinds of seaweed that were coming ashore north and south of Boston, Ramsay found that Heterosiphonia represented up to 65 percent of the total seaweed volume.
Rhode Island beaches, so far, have been spared the full-force invasion of Heterosiphonia that Massachusetts has seen.
“We did not see a crazy amount of seaweed on our beaches,” confirmed John Faltus, R.I. Department of Environmental Management deputy chief of parks and recreation.
For reasons that are still unclear, the huge amount of red weed in Rhode Island waters has stayed, for the most part, off the beach, out in deeper water, with fishermen seeing the largest densities between depths of 40-120 feet.
The weed has affected all types of state-water fishermen, from lobstermen to draggermen to gillnetters, and pot fishermen to the charter-boat industry. Vessels with federal permits are able to fish outside the 3-mile state line and get clear of it by getting into even deeper water, where algae has a harder time growing because of reduced sunlight.
Gewirtz targets skate, monkfish, bluefish and fluke. Like other state-water fishermen, Gewirtz relies heavily on the spring and summer for a large percentage of his yearly income. He sets nets, called gillnets, across the bottom, mostly around Block Island. The net is shaped like a tennis net, a half-mile long and 12-feet high.
“Block Island was the epicenter for this red weed,” he said. “It was everywhere. Normally, a net would take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to haul. This year we had nets that took us five-and-a-half hours. The whole thing would be plugged with weed, end-to-end. Not a fish in it.” And when fishermen lose time trying to clean nets, they lose money.
The seaweed would clog nets, lines and lobster gear. Fishermen would try to move around and find clear areas. They tried to judge where the weed would be based on the moon phase and the wind and swell direction – based on the theory that the weed was worse when, as Gewirtz said, “the tide was running on the moon.”
Some fishermen tried to modify their nets, make them weedless. Joel Hovanesian put rollers on the bottom of his net, hoping the rollers would roll over the weed beds. “It didn’t work,” he said. “The net fouled up just the same.”
Galilee fisherman Greg Duckworth said that the workload this year versus past years, “you can’t even calculate it – 30 times more. Who knows? And we hardly made a dollar. But I’m an optimist – each day we’d go out and hope it’d be better. Now with the fall weather, it has gotten better. The weed has settled down.”
All the fishermen who struggled with the weed this year are worried about next spring. Worried that the blooms they saw this year are going to be the new normal.
“Can’t predict it,” said Thornber of what the fishermen can expect. “Don’t know if this year was a bad year for us or next year will be worse.”
Gewirtz says if the same thing happens next year, it’ll be bad news for the local fishing industry.
“We want to know why this happened,” said Gewirtz. “And if it happens again we want some help – not a handout – but some help from the state, some research money. Because if next season is the same as this one, then guys will start to go out of business.”
DEM Marine Fisheries Biologist Jason McNamee says the state is aware of the problem, though not necessarily what can be done about it.
“A number of fishermen told us about it. … Next spring, if fishermen see another big bloom, then we need to start collecting information about this red weed. We have to start there before we can do anything.”

No posts to display