Saving Seafood

Where will the whales be? Ask the climate model

December 11, 2023 — The opening of California’s commercial crab season, which normally starts in November, is delayed once again to protect humpback whales foraging for krill and anchovies along the coast.

This region of the Pacific has been under the grip of a marine heat wave since May. “The Blob,” as this mass of warm water has become known, is squeezing cooler water preferred by whales and their prey close to shore, where fishers set their traps.

This crowding can lead to literal tangles between whales and fishing equipment, endangering the animals’ lives and requiring grueling rescue missions.

In a new study, scientists say they can now use global temperature models, commonly used in climate science, to predict up to a year in advance when hot ocean temperatures will raise the risk of whale entanglements. This lead time could allow state regulators, fishers and other businesses that depend on the fishery — as well as Californians hoping for a Dungeness crab holiday meal — to plan ahead for potential fishing restrictions.

“It really just helps give a lot more information and reduce some of that uncertainty about the future,” said Steph Brodie, lead author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. Brodie is currently a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency but conducted this research while working at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The tool analyzed in the new study, called the Habitat Compression Index, works by feeding sea-surface temperature measurements into an equation that estimates the likelihood of whale habitat shrinking closer to shore. Previously, the index analyzed only recent conditions, using data from the previous month.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Reducing fishing gear could save whales with low impacts to California’s crab fishermen

October 2, 2023 — Sometimes simple solutions are better. It all depends on the nature of the problem. For humpback whales, the problem is the rope connecting a crab trap on the seafloor to the buoy on the surface. And for fishermen, it’s fishery closures caused by whale entanglements.

Managing this issue is currently a major item on California’s agenda, and it appears less fishing gear may be the optimal solution. So says a team of researchers led by Christopher Free, at UC Santa Barbara, after modeling the benefits and impacts that several  would have on whales and fishermen. Their results, published in the journal Biological Conservation, find that simply reducing the amount of gear in the water is more effective than dynamic approaches involving real-time monitoring of whale populations. There may even be solutions on the horizon that provide these benefits with fewer drawbacks.

“We were trying to figure out what types of management strategies would work best at reducing whale entanglements in the Dungeness crab fishery while also minimizing impacts to fishing,” said first author Free, a researcher at the university’s Marine Science Institute. “And what we found is that some of the simpler strategies, such as just reducing the amount of gear allocated to the fishermen, outperformed a lot of the more complex management strategies.”

Management falls into two basic categories. Static strategies remain the same regardless of conditions. These include gear reductions, season delays and early closures. Meanwhile, dynamic strategies adapt based on incoming information. These come in proactive and reactive flavors, depending on whether the change is based on surveys determining where whales are abundant or observed entanglements indicating where risk might be high.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

NOAA Is Rolling Out a Plan to Radically Expand Offshore Aquaculture. Not Everyone Is Onboard.

August 16, 2023 — The cardboard gravestones read “RIP Local fisherman,” “RIP Wild Fish,” and “RIP Humpback Whales.” Assembled in response to new aquaculture sites planned off the coast of California, the gravestones were brought to the offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Long Beach, California, in April by activists keen to register their discontent.

The sites pave the way for possibly dozens of new open-pen fish farms as far as three miles offshore, the future home of species that range from carp to salmon. Chief among the protesters’ concerns were entanglement of marine mammals, the expansion of dead zones caused by fish excrement, and infringement on wild fishing grounds.

Such has been the pushback to the announcement of the site plan following NOAA’s first-ever five-year strategic plan for aquaculture. The plan, released last October, outlines national goals for a thriving and sustainable domestic farmed seafood sector. Central to its aim is using science and best-practice approaches to identify areas in the U.S. suitable for development. Pro-aquaculture proponents have touted its potential to reverse a growing seafood trade deficit and provide Americans with seafood for years to come. However, not everyone sees it this way.

Opponents to the plan point to known risks, including ecological disasters like the infamous 2017 salmon spill that took place in Washington State waters when a salmon net pen collapsed, releasing roughly 300,000 Atlantic salmon in Puget Sound. The spill wreaked havoc, and scientists, environmentalists, and policymakers worried escaped salmon could spread disease or parasites to native Pacific varieties.

Accidents like these are why some governments are moving away from the practice, opponents say. Argentina, Washington State, and British Columbia recently banned net-pen salmon aquaculture. So why, then, is the U.S. moving ahead?

The goal to increase farmed seafood production in America dates back to the National Aquaculture Act of 1980 when the U.S. established aquaculture as a national policy priority. Thanks to an acceleration of scientific improvements in the field, the effort has gained momentum over the past decade.

Read the full article at Civil Eats

Ninth whale death renews calls in New Jersey to halt offshore wind projects

February 15, 2023 — A whale washed ashore in Manasquan, New Jersey, on Monday – the ninth whale found dead since early December on the New York-New Jersey shores — further stoking the debate about what’s causing the frequent mortalities along the Atlantic Coast.

“I’m currently standing on the beach a few hundred feet from the Manasquan Inlet watching yet another dead whale wash into the surf,” Point Pleasant Beach Mayor Paul Kanitra posted on Facebook on Monday. “Governor, when do these stop becoming coincidences? How many more will it take?”

What’s behind the whale mortalities has not been clearly established, but theories abound. Some local activists and officials blame offshore wind development in the region, claiming construction of the sites causes harm to marine animals. But federal officials have pushed back, saying that’s not what the evidence shows.

Read the full article at CBS News

Whales Are Dying Along the East Coast. And a Fight Is Surfacing Over Who’s to Blame

February 14, 2023 — In mid-January, threatening social media messages started showing up on the accounts of a small New Jersey organization devoted to rescuing ocean mammals that wash up on the beach. Some said “we’re watching you.” Others accused staff of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center (MMSC) being “whale murderers.” Some people wrote that they were going to show up at the group’s Brigantine, N.J., headquarters and “make” members of the wildlife organization “come to [their] side.” “You don’t know what they’re gonna do,” says Michele Pagel, 49, the group’s assistant director. “Are they gonna march in here and put a gun to somebody’s head?”

Staff members contacted local police, and they started locking the doors to the group’s office. In late January, someone left the door unlocked, and a man burst into the office and approached the secretary. “He just starts [yelling], ‘I want to know, I demand to know,’” says Shelia Dean, 75, the group’s director. “He was very frightening.”

Along with picking up sick baby seals and dolphins, the MMSC helps to carry out examinations on the bodies of dead whales when they wash up on the shores of New York and New Jersey in order to collect scientific data, and hopefully help determine a cause of death. And in recent months, whales have been washing up on these shores with alarming frequency. Eight large whales, including sperm whales and humpbacks, have washed up in the area since December. Those deaths have become a focal point in the clean energy culture war, with conservative media commentators blaming them on preliminary site-mapping work for offshore wind developments. But evidence to support those claims hasn’t turned up. That’s brought down the ire of many people opposed to offshore wind on small animal welfare organizations like MMSC for supposedly hiding the truth of what killed those whales.

The work to actually examine those carcasses is grueling and tedious. It involves sourcing backhoes or other construction equipment to maneuver the school bus-sized animals, taking measurements, and then, when possible, undertaking difficult necropsies. A trailer parked in front of the MMSC’s offices houses the necessary equipment: smocks and boots, along with large knives and hooks for pulling off layers of cetacean skin and blubber to examine the animal and take tissue samples. It’s a messy, smelly business. In humpback whales, gasses from the whale’s putrefying innards often begin to swell the sack under the whale’s mouth. If it bursts, it can splatter anyone standing nearby with whale guts. If a whale had broken bones from being hit by a ship, for instance, the necropsy can help examiners tell if the ship strike occurred before or after the whale died. MMSC and other groups that collaborate on the necropsies then forward that information to the federal government, which provides some of their funding.

Read the full article at Yahoo News

An unusually high number of whales are washing up on U.S. beaches

February 6, 2023 — Researchers are trying to figure out a mystery: Why are so many humpback whales, right whales, and other large mammals dying along the U.S. East Coast? One possible explanation is a shift in food habits. And while theories are circulating that blame the growing offshore wind industry, scientists say there’s no proof to support that idea.

Since Dec. 1, at least 18 reports have come in about large whales being washed ashore along the Atlantic Coast, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. The losses are hitting populations that were already under watch, due to ongoing rises in unexpected deaths.

“Unfortunately, it’s been a period of several years where we have had elevated strandings of large whales, but we are still concerned about this pulse” in deaths that’s now been going on for weeks, as Sarah Wilkin, the coordinator for the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, said on a recent call with journalists.

Read the full article NPR

NEW JERSEY: 12 Jersey Shore mayors call for moratorium on offshore wind following whale deaths

January 31, 2023 — A group of Jersey Shore mayors are calling for an “immediate moratorium” on offshore wind energy development until federal and state scientists can assure the public that ocean noise related to underwater seabed mapping, soil borings and other turbine construction activities poses no threat to whales.

The announcement followed news that another humpback whale had died off of the coasts of New Jersey and New York and washed ashore in Lido Beach, Nassau County, New York, according to numerous reports.

“While we are not opposed to clean energy, we are concerned about the impacts these (offshore wind) projects may already be having on our environment,” the 12 New Jersey mayors wrote in a joint letter to Washington officials.

The mayors include six from Ocean and Monmouth counties: Joseph Mancini of Long Beach Township, Samuel Cohen of Deal, Paul M. Kanitra of Point Pleasant Beach, William W. Curtis of Bay Head, Lance White of Mantoloking, and Jennifer Naughton of Spring Lake.

Read the full article at MSN.com

NEW JERSEY: A Battle Over Wind and Whales Is Brewing in New Jersey

January 20, 2023 — Several New Jersey environmental groups are defending offshore wind development after seven dead humpback and sperm whales washed up along New York and New Jersey coasts in the past month.

Last week, environmental group Clean Ocean Action called for a pause in ocean-floor preparation work for future wind projects. The group and other supporters called on President Joe Biden to investigate the recent whale deaths recorded in New Jersey and New York. “The federal government should have been here with busloads of people really doing an examination if they were taking this seriously,” Cindy Zipf, the executive director of Clean Ocean Action, told NJ.com.

Read the full article at Gizmodo

Whale incidents raise pressure on offshore wind advocates

January 17, 2023 — Another dead humpback whale washed ashore on a New Jersey beach – apparently struck by a vessel – brought renewed demands from local critics of offshore wind projects to halt survey work.

Meanwhile an entangled right whale spotted off North Carolina – and the discovery of a dead right whale calf near shore – added pressure for the federal government to do more to protect that highly endangered species.

The ongoing protests from wind project opponents did not sway New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat whose administration strongly backs offshore wind development. Murphy said Friday he did not think work on the state’s Ocean Wind 1 and Atlantic Shores projects should be suspended as critics demanded.

Two days earlier, Murphy announced that Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind LLC had signed a letter of intent with the state Economic Development Authority to lease and develop 35 acres of land at the New Jersey Wind Port, to be a construction base for its 1.5-gigawatt project planned off Long Beach Island.

The nearly 33-foot long humpback whale was reported late in the afternoon Thursday, Jan. 12 at Brigantine, N.J., a few miles north from where two dead humpbacks beached at Atlantic City two weeks apart in December.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Calls mount to stop offshore wind project as more whales wash up dead: ‘Need to take a very hard look at this’

January 17, 2023 — Lawmakers, fishermen and marine activists are calling for an investigation into whether offshore wind projects are killing marine life after a recent spate of dead whales washing up along the New Jersey-New York coastline.

Seafreeze fisheries liaison Meghan Lapp told Fox News that the Biden administration’s initiative to build wind farms to combat climate change could be threatening the lives of whales as an increasing number have turned up dead in various states across the country.

“I can’t authoritatively say that all off the whales that are washing up are because of offshore wind farms. But what I can tell you is that the seven whales that washed up off New Jersey in the past month have all washed up during intense geotechnical surveying of wind farm leases off of New Jersey,” Lapp said Friday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Read the full article at Fox News