Saving Seafood

NOAA site aims to help fishing communities bounce back

November 24, 2017 — NOAA Fisheries has introduced a new website designed to help fishing communities be more resilient in the face of climate change, fluctuating fish stocks and even declines in waterfront infrastructure and economy.

The new website endeavor, introduced this week after almost three years of planning, is called Community Resilience in the Greater Atlantic Region.

“It really came out of the strategic plan we developed here in the regional office, which was the first one anywhere,” said Peter Burns of NOAA Fisheries in Gloucester. “One of the goals of that plan centered on building community resilience to help strengthen fishing communities.”

Working with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, the community resilience working group — which included NOAA staffers from the West Coast, as well — began exploring ways to assist fishing communities in coping with regulatory, environmental and economic changes that challenge the very sustainability of fishing communities.

According to NOAA Fisheries’ own description of the endeavor, the resiliency strategy would provide information on “solutions to improve groundfish business practices and economic vitality,” as well as incorporating climate change, ocean acidification and ecosystem analysis into NOAA Fisheries’ activities.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Maine’s shrimp fishery unlikely to open in 2018

November 22, 2017 — The Maine shrimp fishery appears headed toward another closed season in 2018 based on bleak stock assessments made earlier this year, according to federal officials.

If a panel meeting next Wednesday in Portland agrees with the recommendations released this week, 2018 would be the fourth year the small but much-loved winter fishery is closed.

“It was not a good result for shrimp this year,” said Max Appelman, who coordinates the fishery for the federal regulatory body, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, that oversees the fishery.

Abundance of the species was at a 34-year low in 2017, according to the commission. During the annual summer scientific survey, data showed that survival of the shrimp that spawned in 2016 was the second lowest observed in the history of the survey, which began in the mid-1980s.

Climate change is the likeliest cause for the crash in the fishery; Northern shrimp, or pandalus borealis, require cold winter water to spawn. Waters in the Gulf of Maine, the southern most waters the shrimp can survive in, are warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, according to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

The environment for shrimp is increasingly “inhospitable,” according to the report.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

Climate change, sparse policies endanger right whale population

November 8, 2017 — North Atlantic right whales – a highly endangered species making modest population gains in the past decade – may be imperiled by warming waters and insufficient international protection, according to a new Cornell University analysis published in Global Change Biology.

North Atlantic right whales’ preferred cuisine is copepods that thrive in cool waters, such as the Gulf of Maine, said author Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, who conducted the work as a doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Charles Greene, professor of oceanography and co-author on the paper.

Scientists once relied on continuous plankton sampling to track the copepods, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations’ National Marine Fisheries Service discontinued the program, preventing researchers from observing ecosystem changes as they occur.

Read the full story at Science Codex

 

Climate change preview? Pacific Ocean ‘blob’ appears to take toll on Alaska cod

November 4, 2017 — Gulf of Alaska cod populations appear to have nose-dived, a collapse fishery scientists believe is linked to warm water temperatures known as “the blob” that peaked in 2015.

The decline is expected to substantially reduce the Gulf cod harvests that in recent years have been worth — before processing — more than $50 million to Northwest and Alaska fishermen who catch them with nets, pot traps and baited hooks set along the sea bottom.

The blob also could foreshadow the effects of climate change on the marine ecosystem off Alaska’s coast, where chilly waters rich with food sustain North America’s richest fisheries.

Federal fisheries biologist Steve Barbeaux says that the warm water, which has spread to depths of more than 1,000 feet, hit the cod like a kind of double-whammy. Higher temperatures sped up the rate at which young cod burned calories while reducing the food available for the cod to consume.

“They get weak and die or get eaten by something else,” said Barbeaux, who in October presented preliminary survey findings to scientists and industry officials at an Anchorage meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. The 2017 trawl net survey found the lowest numbers of cod on record, more than 70 percent lower than the survey found two years earlier.

Barbeaux said the cod decline likely resulted from the blob, a huge influx of warm Pacific Ocean water that stretched — during its 2015 peak — from the Gulf of Alaska to California’s offshore waters.

Biologists tracked increases in bird die-offs, whale strandings and other events such as toxic algae blooms. Even today, its effects appear to linger, such as in the dismal survey results for salmon this past summer off Oregon and Washington.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

Whale research to highlight changes in gulf

November 2, 2017 — BAR HARBOR, Maine — Upcoming new research into the feeding habits of baleen whales in the Gulf of Maine – one of the fastest-warming bodies of water on the planet – could shed light on impacts of climate change on oceans worldwide.

The study of whale foraging ecology will be undertaken by members of College of the Atlantic’s Allied Whale marine mammal research program, in partnership with Cetos Research Organization, during a five-year project beginning in spring 2018.

Paired with data from a similar Allied Whale study done before temperatures began rising so dramatically in the gulf in 2004, this new research will give scientists their first broad picture of how the ocean’s top predators are adapting to a rapidly changing environment.

“The warming gulf has the potential to radically affect prey structure, and we have the control data from before the warming started to go by,” said Allied Whale Director Sean Todd, the Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Science at COA and a principal investigator on the project.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

 

WHOI Led Research Team to Develop System to Predict Changes in Ocean Temps

October 30, 2017 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — A research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has received a federal grant to develop a system to predict changes in ocean temperature.

The system will estimate seasonal and year-to-year temperature changes in the Northeast U.S. Shelf, which is seeing some of the highest ocean warming rates in the world and is home to a highly productive and commercially important marine ecosystem.

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole and Stony Brook University are also part of the research team.

“Changes in ocean temperature hugely impacts the living organisms in coastal waters,” said Young-Oh Kwon, an associate scientist in WHOI’s Physical Oceanography Department and lead investigator of the new project.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Fish shrinking as ocean temperatures rise

October 4, 2017 — One of the most economically important fish is shrinking in body weight, length and overall physical size as ocean temperatures rise, according to new research by LSU Boyd Professor R. Eugene Turner published today. The average body size of Menhaden—a small, silver fish—caught off the coasts from Maine to Texas—has shrunk by about 15 percent over the past 65 years.

Menhaden make up about one-half of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico fish harvest and had a dockside value of about $129 million in 2013. They are coastal species that spawn offshore and move to estuaries where juveniles grow to one- and two-year old fish. The air and off the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico has steadily increased, especially in estuaries, where heat exchange occurs efficiently between air and sea. Adult menhaden return offshore where they are harvested with purse seine nets.

Read the full story at Phys.org

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘A new era’: UMass Dartmouth SMAST building to open

September 29, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — UMass Dartmouth’s new marine science building is finished, its laboratories gleaming with the promise of new research.

The $55 million School for Marine Science and Technology building, dubbed SMAST East, officially opens today in the South End of New Bedford. At 64,000 square feet, it nearly triples the physical size of SMAST, a graduate school and research center focusing on fisheries, coastal preservation, ocean modeling, and climate change.

The new building reunites the school’s programs in a campus-like setting. For several years, some have been housed in the AT&T building in Fairhaven for lack of space.

“Just to be back together was great,” said Steve Cadrin, a professor and chairman of the Department of Fisheries Oceanography. But more importantly, it’s a world-class facility, he said.

The building also helps cement the school’s relationship with the state Division of Marine Fisheries. The agency leased the third floor for its New Bedford office, and it will have a first-floor office for permitting.

The Division of Marine Fisheries works hand-in-hand with SMAST on research and sometimes hires its Ph.D. graduates. Recent hires have represented the agency on New England Fisheries Management Council committees, helped the state understand fish surveys, and studied algae blooms.

The agency’s director, David Pierce, is an adjunct professor.

“We are now in a far better position to collaborate,” he said.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

In the Pacific – oceans and climate change have compromised livelihoods

September 20, 2017 — The Chiefs of Falealupo village, on the island of Savaii noticed a disturbing trend in the last ten years in their lagoon. The presence of crown of thorns have increased in alarming numbers. “It is impossible to fish here now. They have ruined the coral and now what was previously a productive reef, has been rendered useless by them,” Chief Aeau Mareko Lamositele.

According to them, their families used to be able to rely on fish from the lagoon in front of their village. “Now we have to venture further out, we have to fish for longer to get anything back,” Aeau said.

The people of Falealupo are dependent on the ocean for their daily sustanence and for their livelihoods. Through susbsistence fishing activities they are able to feed their families and sell any surplus for other family needs.

“It’s actually quite new, we haven’t ever experienced this, even into adulthood we were always able to fish here without any problems, and always return with plenty for the family,” Aeau said.

Crown of Thorns

The decline in fisheries and habitat health on the reefs of Falealupo have been attributed to a variety of factors, with one of them being an influx in the number of crown of thorns.

The crown of thorns has been a growing problem in Samoa. Scientists have found that rising sea temperatures increase the survival rate of the coral-eating crown-of-thorn starfish. Reports from the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that a 2-degree increase in temperature improved their likely survival rate by 240 per cent, or more than tripling it.

Read the full story at HuffPost

Climate change challenges the survival of fish across the world

September 18, 2017 — Climate change will force many amphibians, mammals and birds to move to cooler areas outside their normal ranges, provided they can find space and a clear trajectory among our urban developments and growing cities.

But what are the chances for fish to survive as climate change continues to warm waters around the world?

University of Washington researchers are tackling this question in the first analysis of how vulnerable the world’s freshwater and marine fishes are to climate change. Their paper, appearing online Sept. 11 in Nature Climate Change, used physiological data to predict how nearly 3,000 fish species living in oceans and rivers will respond to warming water temperatures in different regions.

“Climate change is happening. We need tools to try to identify areas that are going to be the most at risk and try to develop plans to conserve these areas,” said lead author Lise Comte, a postdoctoral researcher in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “It’s important to look at the organisms themselves as we cannot just assume they will all be equally sensitive to these changes.”

The researchers compiled data from lab experiments involving nearly 500 fish species, conducted over the past 80 years by researchers around the world. These standardized experiments measure the highest temperatures fish are able to tolerate before they die. This analysis is the first time these disparate data from lab experiments have been combined and translated to predict how fish will respond in the wild.

Read the full story at Science Daily