November 9, 2012 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is finding fish are ready for a close-up shot with its video data-gathering project.
Dr. Nate Bacheler, research fisheries biologist and coordinator of the Southeast Fishery-Independent Survey (SEFIS) at the NOAA lab on Pivers Island in Beaufort, gave a presentation Monday at a Science Café held at McCurdy’s Restaurant & Deck. His presentation, “Lights! Camera, Fish?: Using Video to Improve Reef Fish Management,” informed about 25-30 people who attended on the success so far of the administration’s project to improve data-gathering on reef fish species.
“There’s a large number of these reef fish species from Florida to Cape Hatteras,” Dr. Bacheler said. “They’re mostly associated with hard bottom habitat.”
Areas of hard bottom habitat, such as reefs, aren’t found on the Atlantic coast in a single mass, but in patches. The exact location of all these patches isn’t known, so finding the areas hard-bottom fish species congregate is a challenge for fishery managers.
Most of the data gathered for fishery managers, like the South Atlantic Fishery Management Commission, which manages fisheries in federal waters from Florida to this state’s border with Virginia, comes from commercial fishermen. Information from other sources is known as independent data, and comes from sources like the SEFIS program.
SEFIS was created in 2010 when the red snapper commercial fishery was closed due to traditional data-gathering methods showing the snapper was overfished or undergoing overfishing outside of North Carolina. Dr. Bacheler said the problem with the closure is that without an active commercial fishery, the fishery managers were left without their primary source of data, so they wouldn’t know when the fishery could be reopened.
“So SEFIS was developed,” he said. “Our first goal was to expand the sampling.”
Before SEFIS, most of the independent data for the South Atlantic area came from the Marine Resources Monitoring, Assessment and Prediction program, a NOAA program based in South Carolina. However, this program used traditional data gathering methods; it put out chevron-shaped fish traps to gather data at patches of hard bottom habitat to gauge things like the fish species in the area, their average numbers, sizes, age ranges and reproduction rates.
Dr. Bacheler said the problem with traditional data-gathering methods is many species in an area aren’t easily trapped. Also, there’s too little data being gathered for the size of the areas to which the data is being applied.
“We wanted to address the gear problem, as well,” Dr. Bacheler said. “So we attached cameras to the traps. The cameras are a way to get at the fish that go past the trap or don’t fit in the trap.”
Dr. Bacheler and his associates attach three video cameras to each trap that they use. The traps are put out for 90-minute soak periods, then retrieved. The cameras record for the entire soak period.
Read the full story at the Carteret County News-Times