Saving Seafood

Japanese seafood industry confronting limits of wild-catch fisheries

April 14, 2021 — The nonprofit financial think tank Planet Tracker has released a study asserting that Japanese companies highly exposed to seafood are beginning to suffer constraints from the country’s overfished resources and that their valuations over the last decade have declined as a result.

Titled “Against the Tide – The Japanese Seafood Industry Confronts Nature’s Limits,” the report is mainly aimed at institutional investors, with the hope that they will recognize that businesses built on a declining resource will eventually face difficulties and that they will use their influence as shareholders to push the companies toward better environmental practices.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

How Did the Pandemic Affect Ocean Conservation?

April 13, 2021 — As we enter what’s hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done different to avoid those problems in the future, and what’s next.

That might mean confronting some of our earlier conclusions. For example, at the start of the pandemic we were bombarded with often false stories about suddenly quiet cities and waterways experiencing animals reclaiming what was once their habitat. “Nature is healing” stories like this seem to have created an overly rosy picture of the pandemic’s impact on the natural world.

The reality is much more complicated, and I’m not just talking about things like the well-publicized millions of inappropriately discarded plastic bags and protective masks ending up in the ocean. Many other changes to the world’s waters, including some potentially harmful ones, are taking place beneath the surface.

“Protected and conserved areas and the people who depend on them are facing mounting challenges due to the pandemic,” says Rachel Golden Kroner, an environmental governance fellow at Conservation International. Indeed, for the past two decades a sizable chunk of global biodiversity conservation has been funded by ecotourism, a funding source that dries up when international travel slows down, as it did this past year.

Read the full story at EcoWatch

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘We’re helping make a difference’: New Bedford waterfront center administers 1,100 vaccines

April 13, 2021 — The new vaccination center on New Bedford’s waterfront vaccinated 1,100 people on Saturday, many of whom work in the fishing industry, according to Greater New Bedford Community Health Center leadership.

Noelle Kohles, chief nursing and clinical operations officer at the health center, said there were about 1,200 appointments on Saturday and that most belonged to workers from the fishing industry.

Cheryl Bartlett, CEO of the health center, said all the fish house businesses encouraged their workforce to sign up or signed them up directly through the health center.

The city’s stated focus for the new center is workers in the fishing industry, of which there are about 6,200, according to a 2019 report from the New Bedford Port Authority.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation cancels this spring’s Symphony of Seafood events

April 12, 2021 — The Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation (AFDF) is cancelling the rescheduled Symphony of Seafood events planned for this spring due to “ongoing health and safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization said in a press release.

Preparation efforts for the next installment of the event are planned to resume later this year, with the call for product to be released in August 2021.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MAINE: Mitchell Center hosts talk about alternative seafood networks and fishing community resilience April 19

April 9, 2021 — The Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine will host a talk about how alternative seafood networks can support resilient fishing communities from 3–4 p.m. on Monday, April 19.

Global seafood trade is at an all-time high, with an estimated 36 percent of seafood worldwide traded across international borders at a value of $148 billion. In the U.S., 71 percent of the seafood consumed is imported. The benefits of this trade, however, are not evenly distributed and often disadvantage rural communities, small- and mid-sized harvesters and low-income nations.

In this talk, “A Fishy Tail About Our Food System,” Joshua Stoll will describe the recent emergence of alternative seafood networks in North America and their role in supporting resilient fishing communities, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. He will also discuss ongoing work to better integrate seafood into local food systems.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Alaska Symphony of Seafood – 2020/2021 Events Cancelled

April 9, 2021 — The following was released by the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation:

The Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation (AFDF), organizer of the Alaska Symphony of Seafood (Symphony), announces the cancellation of the rescheduled Symphony events planned for Spring 2021 due to ongoing health and safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The annual Symphony event is planned to resume with the Call for Product to be released in August 2021.

The Symphony is an exciting platform that encourages companies to invest in product development, helps promote those new products and competitively positions Alaska Seafood in national and global markets. Product development is critically important to the Alaska Seafood industry. Innovative new products enable the industry to remain competitive and relevant to consumers.

Before making the decision to cancel the Symphony events, AFDF polled industry partners and participants, and the results were clear that COVID-19 has hindered the industry’s ability to produce new value-added products or participate in large events. Without healthy participation by industry, the benefits of an in-person or virtual event are limited. Additionally, Diversified Communications recently announced the cancellation of the 2021 Seafood Expo North America (SENA), originally rescheduled for July 11-13 in Boston. SENA is the central event at which AFDF promotes the winning products of the Symphony each year. AFDF will continue to feature Symphony winners at SENA, including entrance in the Seafood Excellence Awards, when the in-person SENA resumes in March 2022.

AFDF will continue to monitor the COVID-19 health crisis and will provide updates to industry and partners on the 2021-2022 competition and events. Additionally, AFDF will explore exciting new opportunities throughout the year to promote past Symphony winners, as a part of the effort to expand the reach and positive impact of the annual competition.

Thank You to Sponsors
AFDF would like to recognize and thank our sponsors from last year. Major sponsors include Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, Lineage Logistics, Trident Seafoods, Marine Stewardship Council, Northwest Fisheries Association, Alaska Air Cargo, At-Sea Processors Association and the United Fishermen of Alaska. See here for a complete list of sponsors.

About the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation
Founded in 1978, AFDF is dedicated to identifying common opportunities in the Alaska seafood industry and developing efficient, sustainable outcomes that provide benefits to the economy, environment and communities. For more information, visit www.afdf.org.

Oregon pink shrimp season opens amidst pandemic uncertainty

April 8, 2021 — Oregon’s pink shrimp fishery is opening with an inventory surplus and extreme market uncertainty resulting from pandemic-related restaurant closures.

Oregon is home to the world’s largest pink shrimp fishery, with a 30-year average annual harvest of around 30 million pounds. The small shrimp – also known as cocktail shrimp or salad shrimp – have traditionally been sold to the foodservice market.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

“Year of the quiet ocean”: Emerging ocean listening network will study seas uniquely quieted by COVID-19

April 8, 2021 — The following was released by the International Science Council:

Travel and economic slowdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic combined to put the brakes on shipping, seafloor exploration, and many other human activities in the ocean, creating a unique moment to begin a time-series study of the impacts of sound on marine life.

A community of scientists has identified more than 200 non-military ocean hydrophones worldwide and hopes to make the most of the unprecedented opportunity to pool their recorded data into the 2020 quiet ocean assessment and to help monitor the ocean soundscape long into the future. They aim for a total of 500 hydrophones capturing the signals of whales and other marine life while assessing the racket levels of human activity.

Combined with other sea life monitoring tools and methods such as animal tagging, the work will help reveal the extent to which noise in “the Anthropocene seas” impacts ocean species.

Sound travels far in the ocean, and a hydrophone can pick up low-frequency signals from hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away. The highest concentrations of non-military hydrophones are along the North American coasts — Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic — Hawaii, Europe, and Antarctica, with some scattered through the Asia-Pacific region.

For over a century, navies have used sound to reveal submarines and underwater mines and for other national security purposes. Marine animals likewise use sound and natural sonar to navigate and communicate across the ocean.

But the effects of human-generated ocean sounds on marine life remain poorly understood.

“Measuring variability and change in ambient, or background, ocean sound over time forms the basis for characterizing marine ‘soundscapes,'” says collaborator Peter L. Tyack, Professor of Marine Mammal Biology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

“Assessing the risks of underwater sound for marine life requires understanding what sound levels cause harmful effects and where in the ocean vulnerable animals may be exposed to sound exceeding these levels. Sparse, sporadic deployment of hydrophones and obstacles to integrating the measurements that are made have narrowly limited what we confidently know.”

In 2011, concerned experts began developing the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE), launched in 2015 with the International Quiet Ocean Experiment Science Plan. Among their goals: create a time series of measurements of ambient sound in many ocean locations to reveal variability and changes in intensity and other properties of sound at a range of frequencies.

The plan also included designating 2022 “the Year of the Quiet Ocean.”

Due to COVID-19, however, “the oceans are unlikely to be as quiet as during April 2020 for many decades to come,” says project originator Jesse Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

“The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unanticipated event that reduced sound levels more than we dreamed possible based on voluntary sound reductions. IQOE will consider 2020 the Year of the Quiet Ocean and is focusing project resources to encourage study of changes in sound levels and effects on organisms that occurred in 2020, based on observations from hundreds of hydrophones deployed by the worldwide ocean acoustics community in 2019-2021.”

With IQOE encouragement, the number of civilian hydrophones operating in North America, Europe, and elsewhere for research and operational purposes has increased dramatically. With these, IQOE and the ocean sound research community can shed needed light on humans’ influences on marine life and ecosystems.

The existing hydrophone network covers shallow coastal and shelf areas most influenced by local changes in human activity. It also includes deep stations that can measure the effects of low-frequency sound sources over large open ocean areas.

Of the 231 non-military hydrophones identified to February 2021, several have agreed to their geographic coordinates and other metadata being shown on the IQOE website (https://www.iqoe.org/systems), with organizers hoping to attract many more contributors.

Of the hydrophones identified, most are in US and Canadian waters, with increasing numbers elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Meanwhile, more acoustic instrumentation and measurements are clearly needed across the Southern Hemisphere.

The researchers are working to create a global data repository with contributors using standardized methods, tools and depths to measure and document ocean soundscapes and effects on the distribution and behavior of vocalizing animals.

As part of the effort to create a global time-series, new software under development by a team of researchers across the country and led by the University of New Hampshire (MANTA) will soon help standardize ocean sound recording data from collaborators, facilitating its comparability, pooling and visualization (From April 8, the new MANTA software will be available at https://bit.ly/3cVNUox)

As well, an Open Portal to Underwater Sound (OPUS) is being tested at Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, to promote the use of acoustic data collected worldwide, providing easy access to MANTA-processed data.

Meanwhile, scientists over the past decade have developed powerful methods to estimate the distribution and abundance of vocalizing animals using passive acoustic monitoring.

“Integrating data on animal behavior on soundscapes can reveal long-term effects of changes in ocean sound,” says Jennifer Miksis-Olds, Director of the Center for Acoustics Research and Education, University of New Hampshire.

The fledgling hydrophone network will continue contributing to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a worldwide collaboration of observing assets monitoring currents, temperature, sea level, chemical pollution, litter, and other concerns.

“To observe a return to normal conditions as the pandemic subsides, the intensive acoustic monitoring by many existing hydrophones must continue at least through 2021,” says Edward R. Urban Jr, IQOE Project Manager, of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research.

Comparable unintended opportunities for maritime study are rare and important in modern history. They include the start (1945) and stop (1980) of above-ground nuclear testing, creating traces of carbon and tritium the movements and decay of which have provided major insights into ocean physics, chemistry, and biology.

As well, the terrorist attacks in New York City and Arlington, Va., on 11 September 2001, caused the cancellation of hundreds of civilian airline flights allowing scientists to study the effects of jet contrails (or their absence) on weather patterns.

Those attacks also led to a shipping slowdown and ocean noise reduction, prompting biologists to study stress hormone levels in endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy. With their 2001 data, research revealed higher September stress hormone levels over the next four years as the whales prepared to migrate to warmer southern waters where they calve, suggesting that the industrialized ocean causes chronic stress of animals.

Precious chance

Seldom has there been such a chance to collect quiet ocean data in the Anthropocene Seas. COVID-19 drastically decreased shipping, tourism and recreation, fishing and aquaculture, energy exploration and extraction, naval and coast guard exercises, offshore construction, and port and channel dredging.

Data graphed by JP Morgan reveals the impact of COVID in several categories of commercial activity. If true also of maritime activity as suspected, it suggests a relatively short-lived quiet ocean due to COVID — late March to mid-May, 2020.

Says Jesse Ausubel: “Let’s learn from the COVID pause to help achieve safer operations for shipping industries, offshore energy operators, navies, and other users of the ocean.”

“We are on the way to timely, reliable, easily understood maps of ocean soundscapes, including the exceptional period of April 2020 when the COVID virus gave marine animals a brief break from human clatter.”

The end of that break is clear from recent news, he notes, pointing to this from California in mid-March, for example: Port of Long Beach Sets 110-Year Record in February.

Concludes Mr. Ausubel: “We invite parties in a position to help to join this global effort on the variability and trends of ocean sound and the effects of sound on marine life. The shocking global effect of COVID-19 on human additions of noise to the oceans can spur maturation of regular monitoring of the soundscape of our seas.”

Additional information:

Eos: Measuring Ambient Ocean Sound During the COVID-19 Pandemic

MANTA: https://bitbucket.org/CLO-BRP/manta-wiki/wiki/Home

JOMOPANS: https://northsearegion.eu/jomopans/news/soundscape-maps-of-north-sea

OPUS: “An Open Portal to Underwater Soundscapes to explore and study sound in the global ocean” https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/53610
and https://opus.aq (TBC)

IQOE publications, including newsletters, available at Products | International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE)(https://bit.ly/3sDTkd9)

TEDxExeter: Changing the soundtrack of the ocean, Steve Simpson, 2019: https://youtu.be/Z8XxAfGBcOo