Saving Seafood

‘They’re stuck’: Cape Cod seeing more whale, turtle and dolphin strandings

December 30, 2024 — While Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is known as a popular vacation destination in the north-east US, it has built a reputation for an entirely different reason this year: animal strandings.

Dolphins, whales, sea lions and turtles are turning up in large numbers on the beaches of the famous peninsula in a phenomenon that has experts scrambling to execute more rescue operations than ever before. The cause? Changing tides.

A sea animal is considered “beached” or stranded when it is found alive but injured or stuck on the shore. Without expert assistance, many animals are unable to get back into the water and could die.

Brian Sharp, a senior biologist at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, one of the largest animal conservation organizations in the world, said that the best way humans can understand what it is like for an animal to be stranded “is probably similar to the stress and shock we experience in a car accident”.

Read the full article at The Guardian

$2M Grant to Fishermen’s Alliance Means More Boats Gathering Ocean Data

December 5, 2024 — Strange things have been happening in recent years in the Gulf of Maine, the 36,000 square miles of relatively enclosed ocean stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia. Low-oxygen zones have become annual occurrences, a large brown algae bloom in summer 2023 grew from Maine to northern Massachusetts, and looming over it all is the accelerating warming of surface waters. The Gulf of Maine is warming three times faster than the global average, according to the Maine Climate Council, which is faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans.

Understanding these phenomena and their effects on fisheries is difficult, said Owen Nichols, Director of Marine Fisheries Research at the Center for Coastal Studies, because of the lack of data available on the ocean water below the surface — at the depths where most fish live.

There is one group of people, however, who regularly put equipment deep in the ocean: fishermen. And many of them are already working with scientists to gather data on the water.

But on Oct. 31, Gov. Healey’s administration announced a nearly $2 million grant to the Chatham-based Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance that will significantly expand fishing vessel-based measurements. The grant is from the quasi-public Mass. Technology Collaborative.

Since 2001, a Northeast Fisheries Science Center project has partnered with local fishermen to try to fix the lack of data about the depths. The project, called eMOLT (Environmental Monitoring on Lobster Traps and Large Trawlers), has so far installed sensors on about 100 fishermen’s gear to gather data on stratification of water temperature, dissolved oxygen levels, and other parameters.

Read the full story at The Provincetown Independent

‘Completely uncharted territory’: Cape Cod’s dolphin stranding season breaks records

September 20, 2024 — The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has been rescuing stranded dolphins for 26 years, but this has been the busiest year by far.

In the last two weeks alone, IFAW’s Yarmouth-based marine mammal rescue team has responded to 26 stranded dolphins, including 14 stranded bottlenose dolphins in Brewster on Monday. That event marked the largest recorded mass stranding of bottlenose dolphins in the U.S. Northeast.

IFAW’s director of Marine Mammal Rescue, Brian Sharp, said three of the bottlenose dolphins died, but his team managed to re-float and save 11 others. A satellite tag attached to one has since shown that the pod has stuck around Cape Cod Bay.

“I don’t think I’ll take a sigh of relief until they get out and around Provincetown and out into out into the ocean and out of the bay,” Sharp said.  “We’re hoping that they will be able to figure it out.“

Read the full article at CAI

Fishermen stage floating protest at Vineyard Wind site

August 27, 2024 — As concerns mount over the July collapse of one Vineyard Wind turbine blade, a “flotilla” of about two dozen commercial and recreational fishing vessels steamed to the wind farm on Sunday to protest offshore wind development and its impact on the marine ecosystem.

The vessels, hoisting anti-offshore wind flags and blasting air horns, departed early Sunday morning from ports in New Bedford, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Rhode Island and along the Cape, converging at about noon on the site of the crippled Vineyard Wind turbine.

“The blade collapse was an eye-opener to a lot of people who before didn’t know that offshore wind is a disaster for the ocean,” said Shawn Machie, 54, who is captain of the New Bedford scalloper F/V Capt. John.

On July 13, one of the three blades on turbine AW38 sustained damage while undergoing testing. Five days later, a 300-foot section of the blade collapsed into the water leaving fiberglass debris floating in fishing grounds and scattered across beaches, mostly on Nantucket. It marked an inflection point as the first industrial energy incident in this era of offshore wind development in waters off the Northeast coast.

Read the full story at The New Bedford Light

Cape Cod regional leaders ask feds for more direct role in plans for offshore wind

August 26, 2024 — Barnstable County officials are calling on the federal government to involve the community more directly in offshore wind plans for the Outer Cape.

The Assembly of Delegates voted Wednesday to send a letter to the Biden administration making that request.

In an interview before the vote, Assembly Speaker Pat Princi of Barnstable said Cape Codders need to be heard.

“There’s just a lot that really hasn’t been talked about that is of major concern to residents who live here, work here, who support their families here,” he said.

Before the meeting, Wellfleet Delegate Lilli-Ann Green drafted a letter to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland asking to turn back the clock five years on Outer Cape offshore wind.

Read the full article at CAI

Cape Cod scientists delay controversial climate change project after feds raise concern

August 19, 2024 — Cape Cod scientists are delaying a geoengineering project that looks to dump more than 60,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the ocean and has caught federal concerns around potential impacts on the ecosystem.

Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth have pushed back the project from mid-September to next summer because they say a fully-equipped research vessel is no longer available.

Woods Hole’s decision to delay became public two days after the National Marine Fisheries published a warning last Monday that the project could “adversely affect federally-managed species and other NOAA trust resources.”

The experiment, consisting of two phases, would dump sodium hydroxide and freshwater into the Atlantic, temporarily changing the water’s chemistry – increasing carbon dioxide levels that the ocean absorbs.

Scientists say it’s an effort that could be a way to slow climate change in the long run.

The first phase of the so-called LOC-NESS project, short for “Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope,” would release 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide solution roughly 10 miles south of Normans Land, an island off of Martha’s Vineyard.

The release of the solution would occur over two to three hours to “create a patch of alkalinity on the ocean surface and then monitored for up to 5 days by an on-site scientific research team,” according to project documents.

In the second phase, pushed back to 2026, scientists would dump up to 66,000 gallons into the Wilkinson Basin, nearly 40 miles northeast of Provincetown.

Read the full article at the Boston Herald

How abundant shellfish help create healthy waters

August 16, 2024 — As a fisheries and aquaculture specialist at the Barnstable County Cooperative Extension, Abigail Archer spends a lot of time trying to help the public connect the dots between shellfish, nitrogen, and healthy estuaries. This relationship starts when nitrogen travels through freshwater streams and runoff into our marine environment.

“Oysters are kind of like sheep grazing out in a field. And so, you know, the sheep are not standing in a field absorbing the nutrients from the grass. They’re actually munching on the grass and then eating that and then getting the nutrients in the grass,” she explained.

Read the full article at CAI

MASSACHUSETTS: Cape Codders protest offshore wind plans as Gov. Healey visits Barnstable ice cream shop

August 16, 2024 — Opponents of landing more offshore wind cables in Barnstable got a chance to confront Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday when she visited Cape Cod.

Members of the community groups Barnstable Speaks and Save Dowses Beach protested across the street from Four Seas ice cream in Centerville, where Healey stopped to promote the new Massachusetts Ice Cream Trail.

About 25 protesters held signs and chanted, “Protect our beaches. Say no to Avangrid.” They waited outside as the governor went in, greeted the staff, and tried the mint chip ice cream.

Read the full article at CAI

Using Environmental DNA to Understand Biodiversity in a Marine National Monument

August 16, 2024 — When I tell my friends that I’m going to collect environmental DNA samples in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, their first question is always: Where is that?

Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National is a highly protected area located about 130 miles east-southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It is similar in size to Connecticut. President Obama designated this area as the first marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean in 2016.

NOAA shares management responsibilities with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for activities and species within the monument. It is a relatively undisturbed environment, which could be called a true ocean wilderness. The chief scientist of this research expedition, Peter Auster, is a research professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and a senior research scientist at Mystic Aquarium. When Peter asked me if I’d be interested in sailing together to collect environmental DNA samples from the monument, I answered with an enthusiastic yes.

An interdisciplinary research group mustered aboard R/V Connecticut. Peter Auster and others scuba dove to deploy baited remote underwater video cameras to study apex predators. Meta Miner and Mael Glon from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted seabird surveys. Mary Beth Decker of Yale University used a specialized net to collect and identify gelatinous animals.

And of course, I collected seawater samples for eDNA metabarcoding analysis to study biodiversity in the monument, including fish and marine mammals.

Besides the fascinating habitat we studied, this expedition offered unique research opportunities for me.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

MASSACHUSETTS: Can crawler robots, fiberoptic sensors prevent the next break?

August 13, 2024 — A month after a football field-sized blade on Vineyard Wind turbine AW-38 folded over and began breaking apart into the ocean, the company and blade manufacturer GE Vernova are continuing work to remove its remnants and to respond to floating and washed-up debris around the region — including the Islands and Cape Cod.

Over the weekend, an outline of the blade incident report and action plan was also released.

The latest detachment of blade portions still hanging from the turbine occurred on Sunday morning, and Nantucket officials issued an advisory Sunday night about the potential for more debris coming ashore there, depending on wind direction.

Sunday’s “controlled detachment” followed a series of adjustments to the blade’s position completed at the end of last week, which, in combination with winds from the remnants of Hurricane Debby, “led to the safe separation of the sections below the root of the blade,” according to Nantucket officials.

Read the full article at The Herald News