Saving Seafood

Low-Cost Technology Helps Connect Fishermen and Students to Science

June 23, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Northeast Fisheries Science Center oceanographer Jim Manning has spent more than 35 years studying the ocean. He has sought ways to test ocean circulation models with direct observations and helped others use the data collected for a variety of needs.

Collaborations and partnerships have developed along the way. One of his earliest collaborative projects is the Environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps, or eMOLT. The program was initiated by Manning and the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in 1995, when he handed a fisherman a temperature probe. Since 2001, when it officially began, and to this day about 50 lobstermen have been installing temperature sensors on their traps. The program is now administered by the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation.

Through the years, eMOLT has expanded to include other gear types like trawls, scallop dredges, and longlines. It remains devoted to monitoring the physical environment of the Gulf of Maine and Southern New England shelf. More than 100 fishermen along the New England coast have worked with Manning and his colleagues in the center’s Oceans and Climate Branch. Together they have developed low-cost strategies to measure physical conditions, primarily bottom temperature, of interest to them and their livelihoods.

“Our primary goal is to supply fishermen with the latest in low-cost instrumentation so they can maintain continuous time series of physical variables throughout their fishing grounds,” Manning said of eMOLT.

Read the full release here

Citizen scientists on the seaboard: How lobstermen gather data from the bottom of the ocean

July 5, 2017 — A few decades ago, Jim Manning wanted to know what was at the bottom of the sea. And after years of studying waterways on the Atlantic coast, he says he’s seen a steady change in ocean temperatures that he calls ‘unprecedented.’

Manning is an oceanographer at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He partners with lobstermen on the Northeast Shelf from Maine to New York, attaching low-cost temperature and depth loggers to some of the millions of lobster traps deployed throughout New England.

The project, called eMOLT (Environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps) records and plots long-term seabed temperature records.

Fishermen use bottom water temperatures to look for changes over time in their favorite locations, which might indicate lobsters are moving in or out of that area.

“Every day they go out, they wonder why does their catch change from day to day and what is it that drives the animals to one day go in the trap and others not,” Manning said. “Almost all of the hundreds of lobstermen that I’ve talked to are convinced that temperature is the big driver and what moves the animals. The more the temperature changes, the more the lobsters move. The more they move, the more [they are] exposed to the traps.”

About a dozen boats are outfitted with wireless sensors that can deliver data immediately as the fishing gear surfaces, allowing near real-time data transfer to NOAA.

Read the full story at FOX News

Marine scientists use drifters to explore regional currents

June 27, 2017 — We know Clint Eastwood was the High Plains Drifter. And we’ve heard Bob Dylan’s tale of the Drifter’s Escape. But now the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole is employing drifters not on the plains but on the waves around Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine.

“I’m excited about our latest drifter project,” proclaimed NMFS Oceanographer Jim Manning. “It’s one of many we’ve had and it seems like a real application for drifters. We’ve used them for a lot of fun educational purposes but our recent project in the Bay of Fundy has real purpose.”

They’ve been used with purpose in Cape Cod Bay as well. But, you might ask, what exactly is a drifter? It’s not a shiftless character begging at the kitchen door for scraps.

“It looks like an underwater kite, like a box kite,” Manning explained. “It’s a meter by a meter of cloth sails and they only thing that sticks out is a satellite transmitter. It provides us an estimate of the surface current.”

Its function is similar to that of a glass bottle with a note in it. You toss it in the ocean, it drifts somewhere, and you find out where it went.

With the old bottle you had to wait months or years until someone wrote back but a transmitter can tell you where it is today. It reveals where the surface currents are headed and can tell you where anything drifting along, like a cold-stunned sea turtle in Cape Cod Bay, or a swath of toxic algae in Maine, might wind up.

The current project Manning is excited about focuses on Alexandrium fundyense, the plankton that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning in anyone that eats a shellfish, usually a clam, that has filter fed on it. It’s the same algae that lives in the Nauset Marsh between Orleans and Eastham, and causes annual shutdowns of shellfishing harvests.

The plankton has a resting stage where it sits as cysts in the mud. When conditions are right and the water warms the cysts germinate, it swims up towards the surface and the currents carry it away. In Nauset Marsh it doesn’t go far and stays in the marsh but in the Bay of Fundy it’s carried down the coast.

“The main objective is to help numerical modelers try to simulate the ocean,” Manning said. “A couple of universities have big computer models. These models are used for a variety of things. We’ve deployed the drifters north of Grand Manan Island up in the Bay of Fundy to demonstrate how complicated the currents are. Every time we put one out it goes in a different direction.”

Read the full story at Wicked Local