Saving Seafood

Feds triple the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s largest coral sanctuary

January 20, 2021 — The Gulf of Mexico’s largest coral sanctuary just got a lot bigger.

The federal government on Tuesday formally approved the expansion of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, increasing its size from 56 square miles to 160 square miles.

Tripling the sanctuary’s size will better protect fragile coral reefs that support a variety of fish and other marine life off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, said G.P. Schmahl, the sanctuary’s superintendent.

“From an economic point of view, it’s critical for fish that are important both recreationally and commercially,” he said, noting the abundance of red snapper, grouper and mackerel in the sanctuary. “If you fish the Gulf of Mexico, these areas are where the fish you want to catch have spawned and grown.”

The expansion “has been a long haul,” Schmahl said. Initially proposed under the administration of President George W. Bush and formalized under President Barack Obama, the process finally concluded concluded during the final week of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Read the full story at NOLA.com

Prolonged government shutdown could spell trouble for coral reef in Gulf of Mexico

January 8, 2019 — As the days of the federal government shutdown increase, so, too, do the chances of an emergency happening on the coral reef system 100 miles off the coast of Galveston.

And if an oil spill or a major mortality event occur during the shutdown, those who work in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary office will be powerless to mitigate it.

“If some sort of emergency occurs … the staff will have limited capacity to respond and basically the response would occur by the Coast Guard,” said Adrienne Correa, a Rice University researcher who serves on the sanctuary’s advisory council. “But the staff have a different type of knowledge of the reef … the Coast Guard lacks the tools and place-based knowledge.”

The sanctuary is a network of federally protected coral reef systems in the Gulf of Mexico. And at a time when a quarter of coral reefs worldwide are considered damaged beyond repair, it’s home to some of the healthiest reefs in the region.

Scientists say it’s because of its location: 70 to 115 miles off shore and 55 to 160 feet deep.

But the sanctuary has had problems in the past: 2016 brought the worst bleaching year for the sanctuary in more than a decade when 2 percent of the reef, inexplicably, died.

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle

Lionfish invasion in the Gulf of Mexico expected to worsen as the climate changes

November 15, 2018 — Scientists desperately trying to combat coral reef deaths 100 miles off the coast of Galveston caused by warming ocean waters might now have another climate change-related problem to battle in the coming decades: the hostile takeover of the zebra-striped lionfish.

Lionfish — brought to the U.S. from their Indo-Pacific home to stock aquariums and later dumped by owners unable to care for the constantly hungry vertebrate — have no known North American predators to stop their spread. As a consequence, they’ve been decimating reef populations from New York to Florida since the 1980s, arriving at the Gulf of Mexico’s Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in 2011.

A recent study published in the Wilderness & Environmental Medicine journal suggests that venomous creatures like lionfish will become more prevalent as the oceans warm.

Lionfish “are the cockroaches of the sea,” said Michelle Johnston, a sanctuary research biologist. “They reproduce every four days and every four days they can release up to 50,000 eggs. Plus, nothing really eats them, they have venomous spines and the native fish are terrified of them.”

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle

NOAA to hold public meetings on proposed sanctuary expansion

July 18, 2016 — BATON ROUGE, La. — Federal wildlife and fisheries regulators have scheduled two meetings in Louisiana to get feedback on their proposal to expand the boundaries of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will convene the public meetings on Tuesday, July 19, at the Hilton New Orleans Airport hotel in Kenner and on Thursday, July 21, at the Estuarine Habitats and Coastal Fisheries Center in Lafayette. Both meetings will be from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the LMT Online