Saving Seafood

Nautilus Finally Moves toward Endangered Species Protection

September 1, 2016 — The world’s most mathematically perfect marine species moved a little bit closer to protection last week when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agreed to consider listing the chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilius) under the Endangered Species Act.

The move comes after several years of hard work on the part of conservationists and federal agencies to understand the massive scope of the nautilus trade and how it impacts wild populations. According to that research, nearly 1.7 million of these mollusk shells—the natural embodiment of the Fibonacci spiral—have been imported into the U.S. alone over the past 16 years, where they’re sold for anywhere between $15 and $200. The trade in nautilus shells is so bad that it has all-but depleted many populations of these ancient animals.

Further imports as well as interstate trade would become illegal if the species does gain Endangered Species Act protection.

Read the full story at Scientific American

NOAA awards $5.4 million in grants for endangered, threatened species recovery

August 22, 2016 — NOAA has awarded $5.4 million in grants to states and tribes in all coastal regions to help in the recovery of endangered and threatened marine species. The agency also opened a call for 2017 proposals under the Species Recovery Grants Program, authorized under Section 6 of the Endangered Species Act.

This year’s awards include $3.9 million for 17 new grants to 12 states and one federally recognized tribe. The remaining funds will support seven continuing state projects and one continuing tribal project. Visit our website for highlights of this year’s new state and tribal projects.

The funding supports management, research, and outreach efforts designed to bring vulnerable species to a point where Endangered Species Act protections are no longer necessary.

Read the full release at NOAA.gov

Endangered Right Whale Season Winds Down in Cape Cod Bay

May 10, 2016 — PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — The 2016 North Atlantic right whale season is winding down and researchers from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown are reporting a large turnout in the area.

The center conducts multiple aerial surveys each week from December through May to provide data to local, state and federal managers of the critically endangered species which population is estimated to be around 500.

More than 25 percent of the species estimate population visited Cape Cod Bay this season, including six mothers and their newborn calves.

“It’s once again an indication that Cape Cod Bay is central to the future of the species,” said Charles “Stormy” Mayo with the Center for Coastal Studies.

The whales come to the bay during this time as there is an abundance of food.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

In Mexico, Fish Poachers Push Endangered Porpoises to Brink

March 1, 2016 — In 2013, Song Shen Zhen, a 75-year-old resident of Calexico, California, was attempting to re-enter the United States from Mexico when border patrol noticed a strange lump beneath the floor mats of his Dodge Attitude. The plastic bags beneath the mats contained not cocaine, but another valuable product: 27 swim bladders from the totoaba, a critically endangered fish whose air bladders, a Chinese delicacy with alleged medicinal value, fetch up to $20,000 apiece. Agents tracked Zhen to his house, where they discovered a makeshift factory containing another 214 bladders. Altogether, Zhen’s contraband was worth an estimated $3.6 million.

The robust black market is grim news for totoaba — but it’s an even greater catastrophe for vaquita, a diminutive porpoise that dwells solely in the northernmost reaches of the Gulf of California, the narrow body of water that extends between the Baja Peninsula and mainland Mexico. Since 1997, around 80 percent of the world’s vaquitas have perished as bycatch, many in gill nets operated by illegal totoaba fishermen.

Today, fewer than 100 vaquitas remain, earning it the dubious title of world’s most endangered marine mammal. Scientists fear the porpoise could vanish by 2018. “The possible extinction of the vaquita is the most important issue facing the marine mammal community right now,” says Barbara Taylor, a conservation biologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

The vaquita — “little cow” in Spanish — is a creature of superlatives. Not only is it the most imperiled cetacean, it is also the smallest, at less than five feet long from snout to tail, and the most geographically restricted: Its entire range could fit four times within Los Angeles’ city limits. Prominent black patches ring its eyes and trace its lips, giving Phocoena sinus a charming, panda-like appearance. The porpoise, which typically travels in pairs or small groups and communicates using rapid clicks, is famously cryptic; conservationists recently went two years without documenting a single sighting. Some Mexican fishermen insist the vaquita is already extinct, photographic evidence notwithstanding.

Read the full story at Yale Environment 360

Warmer waters could change Cape Cod fisheries

February 15, 2016 — Hot water is fine for fish chowder and lobster bisque, but not so much for many fish in the sea.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has unveiled a study of 82 species of fish, mollusks and crustaceans, ranking each on how they might fare under a regime of warming waters in the Northeast.

The authors, and there are quite a few, selected important commercial species, various forage fish of little economic import such as sand lances that are ecological heavyweights, and endangered species.

The amount of available data varies widely species by species, but the authors made their best assessments based on the estimated vulnerability of each animal to shifting climate. They weighed environmental factors that would be altered by climate change (water and air temperature, salinity, acidity, precipitation, the variance of those factors, sea level and ocean currents) vs. the species’ resilience (prey and habitat specificity, sensitivity to temperature, acidity, stock size, population growth rate, spawning cycle and mobility).

The ocean has been heating up, if not steadily.

“It depends on what period you’re looking over,” reflected lead author John Hare, director of NOAA’s Narragansett Laboratory. “I tend to look over a long period, since the 1880s, it’s up about two degrees Fahrenheit. We took all the information we know now and try to look forward to 2050.”

Read the full story at The Cape Codder

 

Feds protecting South Carolina waters for endangered whales

January 26, 2016 — A stretch of the southern Atlantic coast needed by endangered right whales to survive will receive more federal oversight under a decision that’s expected to put greater government scrutiny on efforts to locate and drill for oil and gas off the South Carolina seashore.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday declared the entire South Carolina and Georgia coasts as “critical habitat’’ for North Atlantic right whales, rare sea mammals that migrate from New England to southern waters. Parts of north Florida, New England and southern North Carolina also fall under the designation for the first time.

Tuesday’s decision doesn’t necessarily preclude oil and gas drilling in South Carolina or other states and it won’t add new regulations that would impede shipping or commercial fishing, federal officials said.

But it “would definitely make it harder’’ for oil and gas exploration to occur, said David Gouveia, a marine mammal coordinator for NOAA’s fisheries division. The critical habitat designation allows the government to more carefully review the proposals to search or drill for fossil fuels that might be buried in the sea floor, federal officials said. If concerns arise, the government could recommend changes.

Not only will the agency look at the direct impact of oil and gas development on right whales, but it also would examine how that could affect habitat important to the species’ survival, Gouveia said during a conference call with reporters. The government unveiled the proposal about a year ago and finalized the rule Tuesday.

The Amazing Survival of a Diabolical Fish

January 26, 2016—The critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish of Death Valley have long been considered the struggling survivors of the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago – trapped in a dwindling watering hole in the midst of the most hellish desert on Earth.

But a new genetic analysis confirms that the fish known to science as Cyprinodon diabolis has managed the diabolically impossible: it seems to have arrived at Devil’s Hole more recently and somehow mixed with other pupfish species of other desert springs within the last few centuries.

This apparently miraculous feat, while being very mysterious in itself, could actually demystify another inexplicable fact about the Devil’s Hole minions that has long bedeviled scientists: how such a small population of fish living in a body of water the length and width of a couple of school buses could have survived for thousands of years without succumbing to inbreeding or the occasional mega drought.

“It’s one of the most ridiculous fish habitats in the world,” said Christopher Martin of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the lead author of the new study which appears online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Indeed, at 10 feet wide and 70 feet long (3.5 by 22 meters) the steep-sided Devil’s Hole is the smallest range of any vertebrate in the world.

Read the full story at Discovery News

California temporarily curbing water to spare vanishing fish

January 15, 2016 — SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Saying current water conditions pose particular peril for the state’s tiny, disappearing Delta smelt, federal officials moved Thursday to temporarily reduce water deliveries for farmers and millions of other Californians.

Especially muddy water from winter storms is among the factors that risk sweeping some of the world’s few remaining Delta smelt off course and into giant water pumps that draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin river deltas, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials said.

The pumps are part of federal and state water projects that provide water for up to 25 million Californians. Wildlife experts believe the pumps are one of the main threats to native fish, including the once-plentiful Delta smelt, now nearly extinct, and endangered runs of native salmon.

The federal wildlife service’s determination on Thursday means federal authorities will reduce water flows temporarily starting Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Real-time fishery management significantly reduces bycatch

January 12, 2016 — DURHAM, N.C. – Using real-time management policies to regulate fisheries can reduce the accidental bycatch of juvenile fish and endangered species with substantially less economic impact on fishermen, a new Duke University-led study finds.

The study compared results from six different types of fishery closures commonly used to reduce bycatch.

It found that “dynamic closures” — which typically involve setting smaller portions of the ocean off-limits for shorter periods, based on fine-scale, real-time assessments of changing conditions — are up to three times more efficient at reducing bycatch with lower costs to fishermen than static measures that close large areas and remain in force longer.

“The ecological patterns that create bycatch don’t occur on monthly or 100-square-kilometer-size scales or larger. They occur at much smaller time-space scales,” said Daniel C. Dunn, lead author of the study and a research scientist in the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “Our study provides empirical evidence that if we’re not managing the ocean at these smaller scales there is an inherent inefficiency in the system that costs both fishermen and species alike.”

The study appeared the week of January 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The success of dynamic fisheries management hinges on recent advances “that extend the real-time technology at our fingertips and take it into the ocean,” said Sara M. Maxwell, assistant professor of biological sciences at Old Dominion University, who co-authored the study.

Read the full story at EurekAlert

 

More stranded turtles wash up on Cape

January 6, 2016 — More sea turtles stunned by the weather have washed ashore on Cape Cod this week, following a cold spell that came with several inches of snow in the area.

About 57 turtles — both loggerheads and Kemp’s ridleys — have been found since the start of the year, said Bob Prescott, director of Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Approximately 25 of those animals were alive and sent to the New England Aquarium’s Animal Care Center in Quincy for treatment.

The recent rescues bring the total number of turtles recovered since the fall to more than 500, the second-highest number per season in history.

Kemp’s ridley and loggerhead turtles are both endangered species that come to the waters of New England to feed in warm weather. As the water cools, they attempt to migrate south, but many become stranded by the hook of the Cape.

The colder it gets, the more hazardous conditions become for the animals.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe