July 8, 2021 — A new app through The Skipper Science Partnership will allow fisherman to contribute info directly to a database, aiding in the monitoring of changing ocean conditions throughout Alaska. Heather Bauscher, Lauren Divine, and Lindsey Bloom join host, Brooke Schafer to discuss the program and how fisherman can get involved.
This robot fish makes seafood more sustainable
July 7, 2021 — Liane Thompson and her husband and business partner, Simeon Pieterkosky, were well ahead of the blue economy curve when they founded Aquaai in 2014. Simeon’s work was in robotics and climate change, but his daughter had the vision for their company’s priority.
“I met Simeon while I was working as a journalist in the Middle East, and he had made a promise to his child to save the seas,” Thompson explainsed. “After his daughter learned of the ocean crisis at school, she came home and said, ‘Dad, enough with the land-based robots. Can you please make a robot to save the seas and help the planet?’”
Thompson, CEO at Aquaai, believes that turning their attention to the oceans and a commitment to sustainability and affordability has shaped what they do.
“Our long-term vision is to help keep humanity alive through sustainable and environmentally friendly practices by combining risk management with biomimicry,” she said.
Aquaai makes biomimetic robotic fish, autonomous underwater vehicles that are selective laser sintering (SLS) 3-D printed and can be deployed by a single person to monitor aquaculture fisheries and other underwater industries. The device’s small size and the way it “swims” allows it to get close to the sources it is monitoring to gather data, images and footage. These are then delivered to a web dashboard for clients.
Is offshore wind for the birds?
July 7, 2021 — The northbound spring migration of shorebirds through the New Jersey coast raises an obvious question: What happens if there are 850-foot-tall wind turbines spinning in their flyway between South America and Canada?
The prospect of dozens, perhaps hundreds of wind turbines on the East Coast outer continental shelf raises questions of how those structures may affect the red knot, considered a threatened species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Developers Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind LLC engaged one of the world’s top experts to find out.
“The birds jump off from Cape Cod, Brigantine, Stone Harbor,” said Larry Niles, ticking off coastal Massachusetts and New Jersey feeding grounds for the red knots. “We know the birds are going through the wind (power) areas.”
I met Niles years ago when he was chief of New Jersey’s Endangered and Non-Game Species Program and started the Delaware Bay Shorebird Project, now in its 25th year of monitoring the migration. Today he has a consulting firm, Wildlife Restoration Partners, with years of experience assessing the health of red knots with other shorebirds and working on wind power studies.
New Study: Precautionary Catch Limits on Forage Fish Unlikely to Benefit Predators
July 6, 2021 — The following was released by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries:
A newly released study finds that, for many predator species, extra-precautionary management of forage fish is unlikely to bring additional benefits. How to manage forage fish sustainably, both by themselves and for the rest of the ecosystem, has become a much-discussed topic in fisheries management, with regulators of several forage fisheries beginning to adopt precautionary strategies on the premise that they will better provide for the needs of predator species including seabirds, marine mammals, and fish.
The study, from Drs. Chris Free of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Olaf Jensen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, examines decades of historical abundance data of both forage species and their predators, and uses mathematical models to determine to what extent predator populations benefited from increasing abundance of their forage fish prey. Of the 45 predator populations examined, only 6, or 13 percent, were positively influenced by extra forage.
“Our work suggests that the sustainable limits that we already employ are sufficient for maintaining forage fish abundance above the thresholds that are necessary for their predators,” said Dr. Free. “Predators are highly mobile, they have high diet flexibility, and they can go and look for forage fish in places where they’re doing well, switch species for species that are doing well, and have often evolved to breed in places where there’s high and stable forage fish abundance.”
The results have important implications for how strictly to manage forage fisheries. The study finds that, at least in forage fisheries that are already being well managed and are closely monitored, adopting additional precautionary measures will “rarely” provide any additional benefits to predator population growth. However, fishery managers who deal with less well-monitored fisheries may consider more precautionary strategies.
“In places of the world where we already have really strong, very effective fisheries management, additional limitations on forage fish catch are not likely to benefit their predators,” said Dr. Free.
“Management of forage fish populations should be based on data that are specific to that forage fish, and to their predators,” said Dr. Jensen. “When there aren’t sufficient data to conduct a population-specific analysis, it’s reasonable to manage forage fish populations for maximum sustainable yield, as we would other fish populations under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”
According to the models used in the study, other environmental factors, such as water temperature, are more likely to influence predator populations. These results are consistent with previous efforts to examine the relationship between predator and prey populations.
“What we’ve done here that’s different from previous analyses is try to control for some of the other factors that influence predator population dynamics,” said Dr. Jensen. “In this case, we included in the models a covariate representing ocean temperature.”
SCEMFIS produced a video of the authors and independent experts discussing the results of the paper. Watch it here.
National Academies studying wind turbine impact on vessel radar
July 2, 2021 — A new committee associated with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is taking on a study of how planned wind turbines off the U.S. East Coast may affect vessel radars.
Knowing how mariners will see turbine towers on radar – and see each other’s vessels moving past them – will help the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in planning for those projects.
With BOEM aiming to have environmental reviews for 16 of those projects by 2025, the agency is looking to expand understanding of how marine radars can be affected, said Arianna Baker, a BOEM program analyst, during an introductory online meeting June 29 with committee members. The National Academies committee mission is “to assess impacts of offshore wind turbine generators on marine vessel radar and identify techniques that can be used to mitigate those impacts,” according to an announcement of the meeting.
Previous studies the agency is looking at include one by the British Wind Energy Association that examined the Kentish Flats project near approaches to the Port of London during 2006, a time of smaller, less powerful turbines and earlier generations of marine radar. A 2007 report from that study described radar reflections, mirror images and other phenomena seen by operators.
Now BOEM is reviewing plans by developers to erect 12- to 14-megawatt turbines, and how that could affect the radar images mariners use in navigation.
Offshore wind developers fund shorebird study
June 30, 2021 — Red knot shorebirds make epic annual migrations, some logging up to 18,000 miles from the southern tip of South America to Canada and back, dropping down onto Delaware Bay beaches in May to gorge on horseshoe crab eggs.
That ancient pattern was disrupted by overharvesting of horseshoe crabs for commercial fishing bait in the 1990s. Biologists say neither the crab nor red knot populations have fully recovered yet.
Now, the prospect of dozens, perhaps hundreds of wind turbines spinning over waters on the East Coast outer continental shelf raises questions of how those structures may affect the red knot, considered a threatened species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Developers Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind LLC engaged one of the world’s top experts to find out.
“The birds jump off from Cape Cod, Brigantine, Stone Harbor,” said Larry Niles, ticking off coastal Massachusetts and New Jersey feeding grounds for the red knots. “We know the birds are going through the wind (power) areas.”
As the former chief of New Jersey’s Endangered and Non-Game Species Program, Niles started the Delaware Bay Shorebird Project, now in its 25th year of monitoring the migration. He’s now principal of Wildlife Restoration Partners, with years of experience assessing the health of red knots with other shorebirds and working on wind power studies.
NOAA sets sail to study endangered smalltooth sawfish
June 28, 2021 — Federal researchers are back in the waters near Southwest Florida to tag and study endangered smalltooth sawfish.
Scientist Andrea Kroetz, with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, and Research Biologist John Carlson, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, returned to the Everglades and 10,000 Islands area to monitor the population and habitat use of juvenile smalltooth sawfish.
Carlson said the research is two-fold. Since sawfish are listed under the Endangered Species act, the team has been monitoring the population since 2008 to get an idea if the species is recovering.
“The other aspect is habitat use,” Carlson said. “We’re trying to gather more information to better define what features sawfish use when they’re juveniles.”
Smalltooth sawfish can grow up to 17 feet long and were historically common off Florida’s coastline, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s website says. Populations declined, however, because of overfishing.
Seafood industry pilot study reinforces importance of standards to traceable, responsible supply chains
June 24, 2021 — A recent seafood industry traceability pilot study conducted by GS1 US supports the value of universal standards to help seafood companies efficiently and effectively exchange supply chain data and improve end-to-end visibility.
The study was conducted in collaboration with the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST), the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), Beaver Street Fisheries, Bumble Bee Seafoods, Chicken of the Sea, FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, Insite Solutions/Norpac, ripe.io, SAP, Walmart, and Wholechain. It follows a similar 2020 prototype that confirmed traceability solutions from FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP can operate, transmit, and exchange product data throughout a supply chain when GS1 Standards are applied.
2021 Northeast Spring Ecosystem Monitoring Cruise Completed
June 24, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
During May, researchers returned to sea for the ecosystem monitoring cruise. This was the first ecosystem monitoring cruise since operations were stopped in 2020 to reduce risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This one-year hiatus is the longest gap in sampling in the nearly 45-year record of oceanographic observations made on this recurring cruise.
Scientists and crew aboard the NOAA Ship Gordon Gunter sampled at 106 stations. They achieved near-complete coverage of the survey area from Delaware through Southern New England.
Fewer days were available for the cruise than originally planned, so the scientific crew dropped all stations south of Delaware Bay to accommodate the time available. Coverage was also reduced on the Scotian Shelf, in the northern Gulf of Maine, and on Georges Bank, when a fast-moving storm front passed through, making sampling impossible. Instead, the team moved into the western Gulf of Maine to keep working, and collected more mackerel eggs and larvae.
Samples of zooplankton—tiny animals and very young stages of some larger ones—provide information about the food chain supporting fisheries and marine mammals. Scientists use larval fish and egg samples to learn more about fish stock spawning and help estimate stock abundance. Measurements of physical and chemical conditions like temperature and salinity help us describe ecosystem productivity, spawning, larval recruitment, fish condition, and species distributions.
Together, the core measurements conducted by our ecosystem monitoring (EcoMon) cruises help researchers understand and predict changes in the Northeast shelf ecosystem and its fisheries. Researchers are scheduled to sail on the next EcoMon survey in August aboard NOAA Ship Pisces.
As Marine Fish Shift With Climate Change, Scientists Work Across Borders to Ensure Sustainability
June 23, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
The cold waters of the eastern Bering Sea support some of the world’s largest and best-managed commercial fisheries. Sustainable management of these fisheries is founded on scientific information provided by Alaska Fisheries Science Center groundfish surveys. New collaborative research is providing information to ensure accurate local estimates of fish abundance in a changing Bering Sea.
Recent rapid, large-scale movements of fish driven by unprecedented warming in the Bering Sea have created a challenge for survey scientists. As fish populations track their preferred conditions, they are shifting northward and westward, likely beyond historical survey boundaries.
“To maintain sustainable fisheries, managers need to understand how climate is influencing how many fish there are and where they are. As fish populations shift in response to changing ocean conditions, we need to adapt and expand our surveys to provide accurate information that represents the entire population,” said Cecilia O’Leary, NOAA Fisheries biologist, Alaska Fisheries Science Center.
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