Saving Seafood

Study: Ropes that break more easily could save some whales

December 15, 2015 — BOSTON (AP) — A study published in a scientific journal says life-threatening whale entanglements could be reduced by using ropes that break more easily under the force of the enormous animals.

Whales become entangled in commercial fishing gear almost every week along the East Coast of the United States and Canada. A coastal study in conservation biology examined ropes retrieved from live and dead whales entangled in fishing gear from 1994 to 2010.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Gloucester Daily Times 

NEW JERSEY: Black sea bass: We’ll make more

December 8, 2015 — New Jersey is very interested in a new federal grant program designed to create more black sea bass habitat and also to answer scientific questions about what this particular fish needs to thrive in mid-Atlantic waters.

Black sea bass are both a popular fish for anglers in New Jersey and an important catch for commercial fishermen. For a type of fish that relies on underwater structure, which ran range from a shipwreck to a natural rocky outcrop, a key question is whether building artificial reefs creates new black sea bass or simply concentrates ones already in the ocean.

“That would be a great question to ask. We’d absolutely be interested in that,” said Lisa Havel, a coordinator for the Atlantic Coastal Fish Habitat Partnership or ACFHP.

The partnership, through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, is offering grants of up to $225,000 for projects that restore black sea bass habitat or qualify as research projects to learn more about the habitat needs of a fairly strange fish species, known for, among other things, the ability to change sexes (hermaphrodite transition) as needed.

The restoration or research proposals are for a region that runs from Long Island Sound to Cape Hatteras. While black sea bass range from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, there is a distinct population in the Mid-Atlantic region the study wants to address.

Read the full story at Press of Atlantic City

 

Closing In on Where Eels Go to Connect

December 7, 2015 — Eels hold tight to their biological secrets, so much so that Aristotle mused that they must be sexless creatures spontaneously emerging from the “earth’s guts.” Now, at least one eel enigma is finally a step closer to being solved.

For the first time, scientists have tracked American eels migrating to their legendary spawning grounds in the Atlantic Ocean.

“For a very long time, circumstantial evidence has pointed to the Sargasso Sea as the breeding grounds of eels, but like crime novel detectives, scientists have wanted conclusive proof,” said David Cairns, a research scientist at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who was not involved in the work.

The search for that proof, he added, “has preoccupied eel scientists for more than a century.”

American eels spend their adult lives, which range from three to 20 years, in rivers and estuaries from Greenland to Venezuela, but those far-flung populations share a single reproductive site in the Sargasso Sea. Their migration to the sea is perhaps one of the most impressive animal journeys in the world, but no one has ever caught an adult in the open ocean — much less observed them reproducing.

Read the full story at the New York Times

GMO fish and the strangeness of American salmon

December 2, 2015 — Sometime in the next few years, an entirely new fish will appear on American plates. After several decades of biotech research and a final upstream push past the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month, the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, a genetically engineered species of fish, will go into commercial production. While modified plants like corn and soy abound in the American diet, this will mark the first time in history that an engineered animal has been approved for human consumption. The new fish’s genetic code is comprised of components from three fish: base DNA from an Atlantic salmon; a growth gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon; and a promoter, a kind of “on” switch for genes, from a knobby-headed eel-shaped creature called an ocean pout.

The salmon’s pathway to the market will involve a similarly complex formulation. The first phase of AquAdvantage production will take place in Canada, on Prince Edward Island. There, the all-female eggs will be rendered sterile through a pressure treatment. They will then be flown to Panama, where they’ll be hatched, raised to harvestable size, slaughtered, and imported into the U.S. as the familiar orange-hued fillets that Americans have come to prefer above all other types of fish. Though AquaBounty hopes that the costs of this circuitous route to market could be offset by the savings incurred from the fish’s rapid growth (the company claims that AquAdvantage reaches maturity in about half the time as unmodified fish), the company is hoping to eventually gain permission to farm the fish here at home. “In the longer run,” AquaBounty’s co-founder, Elliot Entis, wrote me in an e-mail, “the real payoff will be when inland recirculating facilities are built in the U.S.”

Read the full story at The New Yorker

Nova Scotia approves oil exploration lease next to Georges Bank, entrance to Gulf of Maine

December 1, 2015 — Norwegian energy giant Statoil has received approval to explore for oil in an area next to the Georges Bank and the entrance to the Gulf of Maine, raising environmental concerns on both sides of the border.

In a move opposed by fishermen, Canadian authorities have granted the company an exploratory lease for the area 225 miles southeast of Bar Harbor and bordering on the eastern flank of Georges Bank. Environmentalists fear drilling could leave the ecologically sensitive Gulf of Maine susceptible to a catastrophic oil spill.

It would be the closest that exploratory drilling has come to Maine since the early 1980s. Five wells were drilled on the U.S. side of Georges Bank in 1981 and 1982, before U.S. and Canadian moratoriums were put in place to protect the fishing grounds.

Final approval was granted Monday afternoon as a deadline passed for federal and provincial authorities to veto a Nov. 12 recommendation by the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board, an intergovernmental entity responsible for regulating petroleum activities near the province.

“We’re aware of concerns that exist, particularly from fisheries, about the effects of oil and gas activity,” said Kathleen Funke, the board’s spokeswoman. “Bidding on a license is a first step but doesn’t guarantee any work will take place in this underexplored area.”

Statoil has pledged to spend at least $82 million exploring the parcels under its six-year exclusive lease. The relatively small financial commitment suggests the company has no immediate plans to begin drilling, which is a much more expensive process that requires further approval. The company did not respond to interview requests.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Georges Bank drilling moratorium extended by Nova Scotia government

November 26, 2015 — The Nova Scotia government is extending the Georges Bank moratorium on oil and gas exploration and drilling.

The fishing bank has been off limits since 1988. This extends the protection until at least 2022. Ottawa passed a similar protection bill last June. Such exploration comes under the joint jurisdiction of the provinces and federal government.

BP and Chevron have drilling and exploration rights in the region, but will remain unable to use those leases.

Two parcels just outside the exclusion boundary and buffer zone have recently been granted to Statoil Canada Ltd., a Norwegian-based oil and gas company. It has promised to spend $82 million exploring the two properties.

Read the full story at CBC News

NEFMC: Response to Study on Rising Water Temps in the Gulf of Maine

October 29, 2015  — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The Gulf of Maine, located off northern New England and Canada, has hosted important commercial and recreational marine fisheries for centuries. In addition to existing threats from land-based pollution, marine discharges, energy development, and disturbances to habitat, a more recent problem, temperature rise, has emerged. The just-published paper in Science —Slow Adaptation in the Face of Rapid Warming Leads to the Collapse of Atlantic Cod in the Gulf of Maine — adds to the increasing body of work on this topic.

As an organization responsible for the management of fisheries in federal waters that encompass the Gulf of Maine, the New England Fishery Management Council (Council), along with partners, NOAA Fisheries and the New England states, offers comments on this paper.

  • Most importantly, climate change is a very real issue that affects fisheries in ways we are just beginning to understand and is one the Council and others must confront.
  • This particular paper presents interesting research, but as is generally the case, it is rare that any one scientific study provides “The Answer.” This one will almost certainly generate more discussion and further consideration of how fisheries management bodies might respond.
  • NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center is actively investigating climate change that could help develop possible responses. The Science paper will likely become part of the larger discussion on how to adapt and respond to climate change. During that process, it will be the subject of careful review, including testing of its assumptions and conclusions. Should they stand up to this scrutiny, the work may influence future quota-setting
  • Work is underway by the Council to look more broadly at fisheries through ecosystem-based fisheries management; those efforts may illuminate the way in which we consider this pressing threat to the productivity of fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere.
  • More critically, the Science paper appears to presume that the Council should have anticipated the unusual temperature rise in 2012, without any explanation of how that could have been done. The current quota for Gulf of Maine cod is the lowest on record, and will almost certainly remain so in the foreseeable future. The goal at this time is to allow sustainable levels of fishing on healthy stocks, such as haddock, redfish, and pollock to continue, while creating the opportunity for cod to recover.

After reviewing the paper, Council Executive Director Tom Nies summarized his reaction to the challenges raised in the Science paper. “Fishery managers will need to adapt to the host of significant changes caused by the rapid rise in water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine; specifically, the New England Council will continue its close partnership with the scientific community in order to mount an effective response to this circumstance.”

View a PDF of the release here

Scientists: Warming Ocean Factor in Collapse of Cod Fishery

October 29, 2015 — PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The rapid warming of waters off New England is a key factor in the collapse of the region’s cod fishery, and changes to the species’ management are needed to save one of America’s oldest industries, according to a report published Thursday in Science magazine.

Fishery managers say cod spawning in the Gulf of Maine — a key fishing area between Cape Cod and Canada that touches Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire — is only about 3 percent of sustainable levels, and participants in the fishery that dates to the Colonial era face dramatic quota cuts as a result.

The scientists behind the Science report say the warming of the Gulf of Maine, which accelerated from 2004 to 2013, reduced cod’s capacity to rebound from fishing pressure. The report gives credence to the idea — supported by advocacy groups, fishing managers and even some fishermen — that climate change has played a role in cod’s collapse.

The lead author of the study, Andrew Pershing of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, said the gulf is warming at a rate 99 percent faster than anywhere else in the world, and as a result, too many of the fish aren’t living past age 4 or 5. Cod can live to be older than 20.

“Every animal has a temperature range that they prefer. The Gulf of Maine, for cod, is really at the warm end of that,” Pershing said. “If you warm it, you push it somewhere that’s really uncomfortable.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Cod Could Recover in Warming Waters

October 28, 2015 — The first clue came in 2008, recalled George Rose, a marine biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, when he saw the cod aggregating in large numbers offshore during the spawning season. It was a sight he had sorely missed in 15 years. In the early 1990s, cod fisheries suffered such a dramatic collapse that they emerged as an aquatic poster child for fisheries mismanagement, according to Rose.

In a paper published yesterday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Rose and his colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, document the comeback of the Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade. The fact that they have shown that the cod stock there is on the way to recovery is good news, Rose said, as “it shows that it is not all gloom and doom.”

Their study attributed the recovery to improved environmental conditions, better fish management and the availability of an important food source, capelin, whose populations also fell drastically in the early 1990s and have recently bounced back, too. The rebound of Atlantic cod in this region contrasts with their rapidly declining populations off the northeastern coast of the United States, where until last year the stocks remained significantly below sustainable levels. Previous research has associated this persistent population slump with the pressures of overfishing and also warming waters. The warming temperatures, however, seem to be favoring a cod fishery revival in Newfoundland and Labrador, or at least not hampering its recovery.

Read the full story at Scientific American 

 

Fish Success Story: Cod Makes a Comeback

October 27, 2015 — The cod is coming back.

The species that was for centuries a mainstay of the American and Canadian economies had virtually vanished off the Northeastern North American coast by the 1990s owing to overfishing. That led regulators in 1992 to impose a moratorium on cod fishing.

It appears to have worked.

New research shows that cod biomass has increased from the tens of tons to more than 200,000 tons within the last decade. This spring, scientists documented large increases in cod abundance and size for the first time since the moratorium in the more northerly spawning groups, according to a study published Monday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

“Cod was historically one of the most important fish stocks in the world,” said George Rose, director of the Center for Fisheries Ecosystems Research at the University of Newfoundland in Canada and author of the new report on the cod’s recovery. “When the stocks collapsed in the 1990s, it became the icon of all the bad things we are doing to the ocean, and in many ways, it changed how we deal with our oceans worldwide.”

Read the full story at TakePart