May 9, 2016 — The Dock-U-Mentaries Film Series continues on Friday, May 20th at 7:00 PM with Fishing for Knowledge: Cooperative Research for Sustainable Fisheries in New England. Dock-u-entaries is a co-production of New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, and the Working Waterfront Festival. Films about the working waterfront are screened on the third Friday of each month beginning at 7:00 PM in the theater of the Corson Maritime Learning Center, located at 33 William Street in downtown New Bedford. All programs are open to the public and presented free of charge.
No fish left? Let’s build an app for that
May 6, 2016 — Behold a few of the marvelous things the internet has done for us: filed our taxes, found us dates, recommended that we watch the film Repo Man. Is there anything the internet can’t do? No, there’s not, and for proof I offer the fact that I am sitting in a room, watching people try to use the internet to save fish. Fish are in serious trouble, thanks to both overfishing and climate change. Could the tech world, with its legendary affinity for sushi, come to the rescue?
The U.S. State Department thinks so, and has a few ideas about how best to go about keeping the world’s remaining supply of fish alive and reproducing. For the last three years, it’s held a weekend-long coding competition (aka “hackathon”) as a way of getting those ideas implemented. It’s called the Fishackathon.
In cities around the world, coders work around the clock for a weekend to come up with software (and sometimes hardware) to tackle the problem of overfishing. At the end of it, a panel of judges in each city picks a winning team, and then the State Department unveils the winner of all winners on June 8 (World Oceans Day). That victorious team gets a $10,000 prize and a chance to develop their project with a U.S. government contractor.
Helping Fishermen Catch What They Want, and Nothing Else
May 3, 2016 — Heather Goldstone, of NPR affiliates WGBH and WCAI, discusses bycatch reduction in fisheries on a recent episode of “Living Lab.” Her guests were veteran gear designer Ron Smolowitz of the Coonamessett Farm Foundation, who has worked with the southern New England scallop industry; Steve Eayrs, a research scientist at Gulf of Maine Research Institute, who has worked with groundfishermen in Maine; and Tim Werner, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium, who put acoustic pingers on gill nets to warn away dolphins. An excerpt from the segment is reproduced below:
It’s the holy grail of commercial fishing: catch just the right amount of just the right size of just the right species, without damage to the physical environment. It’s a tall order, and few fisheries are there yet.
Leaving aside the issue of straight up over-fishing, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that, each year, fishermen around the world accidentally catch more than seven million tons of marine life – everything from whales and turtles, to sea cucumbers – that they weren’t even after. Such by-catch, as it’s known, is essentially collateral damage.
And fishing has other environmental impacts. In some parts of the ocean, the scars left by trawls dragged across the sea floor can be seen for years.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Over the past decade or so, a lot of effort has gone into designing fishing gear and related equipment that allows fishermen to catch more of what they do want, and less of what they don’t, while also minimizing damage to the environment. For example:
- Veteran gear designer Ron Smolowitz and the Coonamessett Farm Foundation have worked with the southern New England scallop industry over the past several years to develop a trawl that excludes loggerhead sea turtles. It turns out, it’s also better at capturing scallops, with the end result that scallopers can use smaller areas and less fuel – 75% less – to make their catch.
Research supports blaming warmer waters for lobster decline
May 2, 2016 — HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut researchers found no pesticides in lobsters collected in Long Island Sound in late 2014, a new study has found, boosting evidence that warming water temperatures are the main culprit in a huge crustacean decline that has decimated the local lobster industry.
The findings raise questions about restrictions Connecticut passed in 2013, amid concern over declining lobster stocks, limiting coastal use of pesticides that can control mosquito populations that transmit diseases, including the West Nile and Zika viruses.
Lobstermen supported the restrictions, believing pesticides contributed to lobster die-offs. Some municipal and environmental officials were opposed, saying the rules would restrict the use of effective mosquito-controlling pesticides that can protect public health and there was no proven connection between pesticides and lobster die-offs.
The renewed debate about pesticides and lobsters comes as concern grows about the Zika virus spreading to the U.S. from Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus is mainly spread through mosquito bites and causes mild illness or no symptoms in most people. But it can cause microcephaly, a severe birth defect in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald
Fisheries scientists to address flaws in past forage fish research
WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – May 2, 2016 – Dr. Ray Hilborn, a marine biologist and fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, has launched a new initiative aimed at addressing key issues surrounding forage fish science and the impacts of forage fishing on predator species. Dr. Hilborn’s Forage Fish Project is one of several scientific efforts occurring in the next few months to expand the existing body of scientific research on forage fish.
Comprised of 14 renowned fisheries scientists from around the globe, the Forage Fish Project held its inaugural conference last month in Hobart, Australia, where it identified shortcomings in the existing forage fish research. Specifically, it found several issues with work produced by the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, whose April 2012 report, “Little Fish, Big Impact,” concluded forage fish are vulnerable to overfishing, among other findings.
The Forage Fish Project, which includes two members of the Lenfest Task Force, began work to address these flaws, with the goal of producing an accompanying study later this year.
In Hobart, Project members found that most of the models used in previous forage fish studies, like the Lenfest Task Force report, left out factors such as the natural variability of forage fish stocks, and the extent of size overlap between fisheries and predators. The group also found multiple indications that the Lenfest study greatly overstated the negative impact of forage fishing on predator species.
“Most [food web] models were not built with the explicit intention of evaluating forage fish fisheries, so unsurprisingly many models did not include features of forage fish population biology or food web structure that are relevant for evaluating all fishery impacts,” according to minutes from the Hobart meeting.
Two upcoming fishery management workshops will also evaluate forage species on the East and West Coasts of the U.S., the first organized by the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the Pacific Fishery Management Council. The workshop, which will be held in La Jolla, Calif., from May 2-5, will focus on how to improve stock assessment methods for northern anchovy and other coastal pelagic species. Attendees will evaluate model-based assessment approaches based on routinely assessed pelagic species from around the world, consider non-assessment approaches to estimate fish stocks, and develop recommendations for how the SWFSC should evaluate coastal pelagic fish stocks in the future.
A similar forage fish workshop will be held May 16-17 in Portland, Maine. This workshop will focus on Atlantic herring, with the goal of establishing a rule to specify its acceptable biological catch (ABC), the recommended catch level for any given fish species. An effective ABC rule will consider the role of Atlantic herring in the ecosystem, stabilize the fishery at a level that will achieve optimum yield, and address localized depletion in inshore waters.
Ultimately, these various forage fish workshops and projects are striving to use the best available science to update previous research and determine sound management practices for forage species.
Read the full minutes from the Forage Fish Project conference in Hobart, Australia
Learn more about the upcoming coastal pelagic species workshop in La Jolla, Calif.
Learn more about the upcoming Atlantic herring workshop in Portland, Maine
Odor plays a role in whether mussels stay or go
April 29, 2016 — For people looking to settle down, a location’s odor can be a factor in whether they stay or go.
Turns out the same is true for mussel larvae.
Mussel larvae swim toward odors from adult mussels, and swim away from odors from predators, including green crabs and dog whelks, says Scott Morello, a visiting researcher at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine.
Morello found mussel larvae can recognize and respond to a broad range of odor cues when deciding whether to settle in wild beds or on aquaculture lines.
And, says Morello, the predator odors he used are from species that do not directly feed on mussel larvae, or even on newly settled mussels. The odors were from predators that feed on older mussels, which indicates larvae assess future risk on some level when they make settlement decisions.
How will Fish in the Northeast Respond to Climate Change?
April 27, 2016 — A new study, published by the journal PLOS ONE found 82 species of marine fish and invertebrates in the northwest Atlantic (or the northeast US) to be vulnerable to climate change (A write up of the study by the New York Times can be found here). These 82 species encompass every commercially managed fishery in the region as well as a few popular recreational species and endangered species.
Not all species were predicted to experience negative effects from climate change – only about half were likely to be negatively affected. 20 percent will be positively affected by climate change and the rest will be neutral, said Jon Hare, NOAA oceanographer and lead author of the paper. However a majority of the species studied did show a high potential for a change in habitat distribution, which could create significant management challenges
“Peter Baker, director of Northeast U.S. oceans for the Pew Charitable Trusts, said the report should be a motivator for fishing managers to protect more ocean habitat and preserve marine species.”
Comment by Doug S. Butterworth, Marine Resource Assessment and Management Group, University of Cape Town
In this paper, Hare et al. report the results of the application of Vulnerability Assessment methodology to assess the extent to which abundance or productivity of species on the Northeast US Continental Shelf may alter in response to climate change. More particularly, they consider, inter alia, directional effects (whether negative, neutral or positive) and potential for changes in distribution. The determinations are based on expert opinions which lead the authors to draw firm conclusions, e.g. that climate change is expected to negatively affect about half the species they consider.
The environmental conditions associated with the habitat preferences of different species may be determined from empirical studies for which considerable data are available. Hence there is a clear basis in data and analyses to formulate the opinions that have been consolidated in this report.
What is much less clear, however, is what bases could defensibly have been used by experts to comment on directional effects for abundance and particularly productivity under projected changes in environmental variables under climate change. The productivity, and consequently to a large extent, the abundance, of a population of a fish or invertebrate species is driven by the (typically) annual recruitments to that population. The inferences drawn by these experts must consequently have been based on knowledge of how environmental variables affect such recruitment.
Yet the difficulties of reliably establishing such relationships are well known in fisheries assessment science. The classic article on this topic by Ram Myers (When do environment-recruitment correlations work?) pointed to the failure of almost all such relationships that had been proposed when tested with new data.
This then begs the questions of what bases the experts contributing inferences concerning directional effects to the Hare et al. study used for their determinations and how reliable those inferences might be. If they are reliable, why are they generally not being used in the fisheries assessments from which advice on catch limits is formulated?
I agree with Hare et al. when they argue that the expert opinions they collated “can guide future monitoring, research, and monitoring studies.” However, they go further to state that their results can be used by managers to “guide management actions” (they provide examples of species for which they suggest decreasing fishing mortality). Should they not first meet the burden of justifying the bases on which the experts who contributed to their study drew their inferences about directional effects, and also explain the associated implications for the reliability of knowledge about fishery recruitment-environmental variable relationships?
Scientists say more cod might survive fishing than thought
April 22, 2016 — BIDDEFORD, Maine — A group of scientists say more Atlantic cod might survive being thrown back in the water by fishermen than previously thought.
Scientists from several organizations, including the New England Aquarium in Boston and University of New England in Biddeford, conducted a study. It’s published in the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea’s Journal of Marine Science.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Washington Times
Lobster veterinarian says gentler treatment of catch translates to bigger paycheck
April 19, 2016 — Jean Lavallée said he once watched a Canadian lobsterman overstuff a crate with lobsters, put the wooden lid on top and then smash it down with his foot.
The resulting crunch of limbs and shells “sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies,” he told a group of Maine lobstermen in Bath on Monday. Not only did the carelessness cause needless death and injury, Lavallée said, it also undoubtedly cost the lobsterman some money.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
Lavallée, a veterinarian from Prince Edward Island who has specialized in lobsters for more than 20 years, is traveling along the Maine coast this week to lead a series of workshops on proper care and handling of the lucrative crustaceans. The workshops are sponsored by the Maine Lobstermen’s Association and the Maine Lobstermen’s Community Alliance with funding from the Island Institute.
Lavallée said as many as 10 percent of the lobsters harvested in the U.S. die on their way to market. Given Maine’s $616.5 million harvest in 2015, that’s up to $61.7 million in lost revenue for the state’s top fishery.
“We kill more lobsters (prematurely) than most other countries are fishing for their entire year,” he said of the U.S. lobster industry. “That’s a lot of lobsters.”
Lavallée argues that more careful handling of lobsters, based on a better understanding of their anatomy and biology, will reduce losses and save the industry millions of dollars.
RAY HILBORN: Sardine stories
April 14, 2016 — At the end of February, Dr. Geoff Shester, California campaign director for the nonprofit advocacy group Oceana, criticized the Pacific Fishery Management Council for the persistence of low numbers of California sardines. The lack of a population recovery may cause the commercial moratorium to last until 2017.
The author explained this sardine population decline as being 93 percent less than it was in 2007. Shester does not believe this is because of environmental causes like climate change, El Niño or natural fluctuations in forage fish species, however. Instead he blames the management body.
“They warned of a population collapse, and the fishery management body basically turned a blind eye and continued moving forward with business as usual.”
Shester also cited recent sea lion deaths, specifically 3,000 that washed ashore in California in 2015.
See the full story at the National Fisherman. Reproduced with permission.
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