Saving Seafood

Little Relief in the Deep for Heat-Stressed Corals

January 8, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

A team of NOAA scientists recently examined more than a thousand hot water events on coral reefs across the Pacific Ocean. Combining on-site monitoring with satellite records, they found that corals in deeper waters are just as exposed to marine heatwaves as those in shallower waters. They published these findings in Nature Scientific Reports.

This is bad news for coral reefs. These unique ecosystems have already experienced the devastating effects of three global coral bleaching events from hotter-than-normal water. Climate models project that temperatures will continue to rise.

“Scientists primarily use satellite-derived sea surface temperatures to understand heat stress and predict coral bleaching,” said Dr. Scott Heron, an associate professor at James Cook University and partner of NOAA. “It’s immediately available, it’s convenient and it has global coverage. However, because the measurement is only at the very surface of the ocean, there is some uncertainty about how well it reflects what is actually happening on deeper reefs.” In fact, the data might be underestimating the stress caused by these higher temperatures.

Read the full release here

NOAA Researchers Study How Fish Use Artificial Reefs

January 8, 2020 — Shipwrecks and rocky reefs off the coast of North Carolina are home to many commercially and recreationally important fish species. Scientists with NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science are researching how and when fish use these artificial and natural reefs. In the fall of 2019, aboard the NOAA ship Nancy Foster, the researchers used advanced technology to study how these reefs function as habitat.

The team used two kinds of sonar to survey the bottom and look for fish. The Foster’s multibeam echosounder registered the depth and physical properties of the reefs. Her splitbeam echosounder provided imaging that helps identify the size of fish and the location of the fish relative to the reefs.

Sonar gave the team the big picture, and NOAA divers also collected thousands of photos along the reefs. Using photogrammetry software, the team is stitching the photos together into three-dimensional models, which will provide detailed pictures of the reef structures and the plants and animals living on them.

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

New Year Brings New Protections For West Coast Seafloor Habitat

January 2, 2020 — Along with the new year, the West Coast is getting new protections for corals and sponges that live on the seafloor.

Regulations starting Jan. 1 restrict bottom trawl fishing on about 90% of the seafloor off Oregon, Washington and California.

Bottom trawlers drag weighted nets along the seafloor to catch dozens of groundfish species, including lingcod, Dover and petrale sole and all kinds of rockfish. In the process, they can damage corals and sponges that live on the ground.

Ashley Blaco-Draeger with the environmental group Oceana said corals and sponges don’t recover easily from the damage because they grow very slowly.

“They only grow about a millimeter a year,” she said. “So once these structures are destroyed it can take hundreds or thousands of years for them to recover — if ever.”

Read the full story at OPB

Resilient New England Coral Is Teaching Us about the Future of Reefs

December 16, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Dave Veilleux and Sean Grace lean over trays lined with thumb-sized coral colonies, varying in color from white to brown to a mix of white and brown. An instrument called a fluorometer beeps, and they move on to measure photosynthesis in the next colony. In the background, you can hear the constant flow of seawater from Long Island Sound, and the whir of the carbon dioxide system hard at work.

Grace chairs the Biology Department at Southern Connecticut State University, and Veilleux runs the shellfish hatchery at NOAA Fisheries’ Milford Laboratory. The two have known each other for 15 years, since Veilleux was Grace’s first graduate student. They’ve teamed up again to study the effects of ocean acidification on New England’s only hard coral species, the appropriately named Astrangia poculata, or northern star coral.

Northern star coral is considered a model for investigating coral response to environmental change. Researchers want to pinpoint what makes this hardy coral uniquely able to thrive in harsh conditions. This may provide ideas on how to help boost the resilience of more delicate tropical coral species. The Milford Lab has two state-of-the-art ocean acidification experimental systems built for carbon dioxide exposure studies, making it an ideal setting for this research.

Read the full release here

A ‘Strange’ New England Coral May Hold Secrets To Combating Climate Change

December 13, 2019 — When we think about animals that inhabit the cold New England ocean, sharks, seals, or lobsters may spring to mind. But there’s another critter lurking in the deep off our coast, and it’s one that may hold valuable secrets that could help its tropical cousins.

And you may not have even known that it’s actually an animal: coral.

“The coral that exists in Connecticut is called Astrangia poculata,” said Sean Grace, a biologist at Southern Connecticut State University. Grace said the name Astrangia captures the surprise scientists felt when they observed this coral centuries ago.

“You can imagine back then, they pulled it up and looked at it and went, ‘Well, that’s a strange thing to see off the coast of New Jersey, the mid-Atlantic,’” Grace said.

Today this species of Astrangia, also known as the “northern star coral,” is dispersed widely. From southern New England, it goes down the Eastern Seaboard into the Gulf of Mexico.

Corals are invertebrates. They’re not plants. They’re definitely not rocks. Instead, corals are related to jellyfish and anemones.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Some of Earth’s oldest creatures thrive in the dark off coasts of Carolinas, Virginia

December 9, 2019 — Some of the oldest living things on the planet are centuries-old corals growing in perpetual darkness along Mid Atlantic states like Virginia and the Carolinas, according to NOAA’s Office of Exploration and Research.

Photos of the most bizarre of the corals were shared this week on Facebook, revealing them to be bony looking, brightly colored and filled with legions of cowering shrimp.

“Some individual corals live for several hundred years and reefs can be several thousands of years old,” NOAA officials wrote.

A video shows the coral’s growth is dense enough in some spots to form “a wall of coral” that fish can’t penetrate.

“Look at the size of that. I am in awe now,” one NOAA researcher says in the video. “These organisms have been growing down here in the deep sea for longer than our country probably has been a country… It is astounding.”

Read the full story at The State

New regulations to expand protections for seafloor habitats, reopen fishing grounds off US West Coast

December 5, 2019 — New regulations for essential fish habitat off the West Coast of the United States that go into effect in 2020 will extend protections for deep-sea habitats and corals while reopening fishing grounds where fish populations have rebounded.

The new rules were finalized by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (known as NOAA Fisheries) last month, and will go into effect on January 1, 2020. The updated regulations were recommended to NOAA by the Pacific Fishery Management Council and enjoy broad support from the fishing industry and environmentalists alike. The changes will be implemented via an amendment to the Fishery Management Plan for groundfish off the US West Coast.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council is responsible for minimizing impacts of human activities on essential fish habitat (EFH), which are habitats deemed vital to maintaining sustainable fisheries. In 2005, the Council established area closures in groundfish habitat that limited the use of bottom trawling and other types of fishing gear that come into contact with the ocean floor.

According to NOAA Fisheries, groundfish fisheries contribute $569 million to household incomes in West Coast communities, from the state of Washington down to Southern California. About 3,000 square miles that had been closed to bottom trawling for groundfish will be reopened when the changes take effect, including 2,000 square miles of a Rockfish Conservation Area off the coasts of California and Oregon that have been off-limits to bottom trawling since 2002.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Plan would protect 21 coral hot spots in Gulf of Mexico

November 15, 2019 — A plan to protect corals in the Gulf of Mexico is close to becoming a law, drawing cheers from environmental groups who believe leaving the corals alone would help vulnerable ocean ecosystems to grow.

The plan would create 21 protected areas off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. Thirteen of the areas would carry new commercial fishing restrictions, and that has attracted the attention of fishing groups, who want the government to take a cautious approach.

Pew Charitable Trusts has characterized the plan as a way to protect nearly 500 square miles of slow-growing coral “hot spots,” and is championing the protection plan as a way to spare vulnerable corals from fishing gear. The proposal would prohibit gear such as bottom trawls and dredges that can disrupt the corals.

Sandra Brooke, an oceanographer and coral ecology expert at Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory, said it’s important to spare the corals because of their importance to the marine environment and because they can have value for the development of new medicines.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WRAL

Half the World’s Coral Reefs Already Have Been Killed by Climate Change

October 11, 2019 — The oceans have long been the biggest buffer for humankind’s dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions. Around a quarter of all the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the 1980s—from driving cars, running factories and churning out electricity with fossil fuels—has ended up sunk into the waters. As the planet has warmed from mounting emissions, the oceans warmed first and fastest, absorbing 90% of that excess heat. A report released last month by the UN-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the foremost scientific authority on the subject, warned that damage to the oceans is accelerating and may be at the point of irreversibility.

That makes delicate coral reefs around the world something of a leading indicator for the collapse of the ocean ecosystem. Half of all reef systems have already been destroyed, putting a quarter of marine life at risk. Even if global warming is limited to the 1.5 degree Celsius target outlined in the 2016 Paris Agreement—a longshot goal, at the current rate of emissions—the IPCC now concludes that “almost all warm-water coral reefs are projected to suffer significant losses of area and local extinctions.”

In a perverse consequence, lost reefs will leave nearby coastlines even more vulnerable to erosion and storms, as well as from accelerating sea-level rise, which could go up by as much as two feet this century as a result of glacier melt.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Trump Sued For Failing To Protect Hawaii’s Cauliflower Coral

October 11, 2019 — The Center for Biological Diversity said Thursday that it is suing the Trump administration for failing to protect cauliflower coral around the Hawaiian Islands.

“The bushy, shallow-water coral species has been devastated by ocean warming triggered by human-caused climate change,” according to a press release.

The warming is due to a “marine heat wave … now hitting Hawaii’s coral reefs hard, and researchers predict massive coral bleaching and death.”

The coral species is estimated to have declined by 36% from 1999 to 2012, and conditions are expected to worsen.

“Cauliflower coral is like the canary in the coal mine of our warming oceans. Marine life around Hawaii will suffer without bold actions to protect coral reefs,” said Maxx Phillips, the center’s Hawaii director. “Hawaii’s coral reefs are dying and they need our help. Letting colorful corals bleach white and die indicates an ocean becoming less bountiful and biodiverse.”

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat