July 5, 2017 — Last night, to celebrate the fourth of July, the air over the U.S. filled with fireworks. The noise they created was extremely loud and, mercifully, brief. But imagine having to listen to even louder explosions once every ten seconds, for days or weeks on end. Starting this fall, that may be the new reality for whales, fish, and other marine life off the eastern seaboard, if the Trump administration’s plans go ahead.
From Beaches to the Bottom of the Sea, Microplastics Are Everywhere
July 5, 2017 — The following was released by NOAA:
Each year, millions of tons of plastic debris, from water bottles to fishing nets, plastic bags and anything else made of plastic, enters the ocean as marine debris through beach littering, road runoff, sewage, and illegal dumping.
Microplastics, defined as pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size (less than 1/5th of an inch), are everywhere – in the sediments and in the water column, on beaches and in the deep sea. Some microplastics are manufactured at that small size as microbeads for use in cosmetics, toothpaste and facial scrubs, or made as microfibers in synthetic items such as fleece or rope. Others come from larger pieces of plastic that are broken down over time by waves and sunlight into smaller fragments.
Marine animals, from shellfish and fish to larger marine mammals, ingest them through the water or eat prey that contains them. The impact can be serious, affecting an animal’s feeding and reproduction.
Chemists Ashok Deshpande and Beth Sharack of the NEFSC’s Sandy Hook Lab study the impact of chemicals in the marine environment, using analytical tools like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, commonly known as GC/MS, to look much more closely at the chemical components of plastic pollution. It’s a detective story, as they identify different types of polymers, how they change over time, and where they may have come before they are found in fish and shellfish and in marine sediments.
Their latest tool adds pyrolysis to GC/MS, a technique known as Pyr-GC/MS. In simple terms, a very small piece of plastic, or microplastic, less than 1 milligram in size is placed in a narrow quartz tube which is then placed in a platinum coil and heated to 750 degrees C (about 1,382 degrees F). The intense heat breaks down the large polymer chain into smaller fragments which are then analyzed by the GS/MS to identify the specific chemicals and contaminants in that sample – a chemical fingerprint of sorts.
“Information on polymer chemistry will help identify plastic products and perhaps help in the mitigation, control, and monitoring of the status and trends of plastic pollution,” said Deshpande, a research chemist in the Habitat Ecology Branch at the Sandy Hook Lab. “Different polymers, which are large molecules made up of many smaller molecules or monomers, have different toxicities and adsorb or bind contaminants in different ways.”
Deshpande said marine animals exposed to microplastics are subjected to a triple threat. “There is the toxicity of the plastic polymer itself, toxicity of the contaminants adsorbed on the plastics, and the nutritional challenge due to the consumption of plastics with literally no food value. It is an area of concern in the management of fisheries resources and endangered species. Some scientists refer to plastics as the next wildlife predator due to their potential behavioral, morphological, physiological, and life cycle effects on wildlife.”
Deshpande, Sharack and colleagues have developed a baseline library of the pyrolysis GC/MS spectra – the chemical fingerprints – from commonly used plastic polymers. They are currently testing the proof of concept of this novel method by analyzing routine plastic items used in our daily lives and the broken pieces of plastics from field collections. The results so far are encouraging.
Understanding what the microplastic pollution is made of, where it is being found and how it is affecting marine species and their habitats will help improve fisheries and habitat management.
Changes to cod, haddock, flounder quotas eyed in New England
July 3, 2017 — Federal fishing regulators are planning a host of changes to the quota limits of several important New England fish, including cod.
New England fishermen search for cod in two key fishing areas, Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. Regulators have enacted a series of cutbacks to the cod quota in those areas in recent years as cod stocks have dwindled.
This year, regulators want to trim the Georges Bank cod quota by 13 percent and keep Gulf of Maine’s quota the same. They also want to keep the Georges Bank haddock quota about the same and enact a 25 percent increase for the Gulf of Maine haddock quota. Changes are also planned for some flounder species.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald
Feds reviewing status of New England’s endangered salmon
July 2, 2017 — The federal government is starting a five-year review of the Gulf of Maine’s population of Atlantic salmon, which are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Atlantic salmon were once plentiful off New England, but dams, loss of habitat, pollution and overfishing dramatically reduced the population. The National Marine Fisheries Service says it is reviewing the health of the stock to get more updated information on its current status.
The fisheries service says the review will be based on scientific and commercial data. One group, the New Brunswick, Canada-based Atlantic Salmon Federation, says recent data are troubling. The group says total estimated returns of the fish to North America in 2016 showed a 27 percent decrease from the previous year.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Daily Progress
US House panel votes to keep funding marine research program
July 3, 2017 — In a vote Thursday by a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, lawmakers pushed back on President Donald Trump’s proposal to de-fund the national Sea Grant program.
The program, which is overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides approximately $1.2 million each year to roughly a dozen full-time researchers affiliated with the University of Maine.
Paul Anderson, who heads the Sea Grant program in Maine, said Thursday that a subcommittee of Appropriations that oversees funding for commerce, justice and science had voted earlier in the day to support funding the national Sea Grant program at $63 million.
If the subcommittee’s funding proposal makes it through to the final version of the 2017-2018 annual federal budget — which Congress is expected to approve by the end of September — it would keep alive a program that proponents say is vital to sustaining Maine’s $1.5 billion-plus commercial fishing industry.
“It’s way better than zero [dollars],” Anderson said of the subcommittee vote. “It’s very promising. We feel our advocacy [in support of the Sea Grant program] around the country has been effective.”
Regardless of the subcommittee’s support for the program, the chances of Trump’s proposed budget being approved without significant changes by Congress is unlikely, as several national media outlets have reported.
Congress has ultimate say over federal spending, not the president, and typically drafts its own budget proposals that then are revised through congressional committee negotiations before being approved and enacted.
WESPAC’s Work To ‘Define Cultural Fishing’ Could Impact American Samoa
June 29, 2017 — An attorney with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has hinted to a federally established group that its work to define cultural fishing will have an impact on future issues pertaining to fisheries in American Samoa.
One of the main issues on the agenda at last week’s three-day meeting of the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council, held in Honolulu, dealt with defining cultural fishing in American Samoa, following a Honolulu federal judge’s decision in March, that the US National Marine Fisheries Services failed to consider the Deeds of Cession, when implementing the 2016 amendment to the Large Vessel Prohibited Area in territorial waters.
US District Court Judge Leslie Kobayashi said the NMFS’ 2016 LVPA Rule disregards its obligations under the Deeds of Cession to “protect and preserve cultural fishing rights in American Samoa.” (The Deeds for Tutuila and Aunu’u were signed in 1900, and 1904 for Manu’a — with the US.)
There were several discussions during the Council’s three-day meeting on ways to define cultural fishing and what is considered cultural fishing, as well as protecting and preserving cultural fishing in the territory.
What was clear from the speakers and answers from NOAA officials as well as others, is that ASG, the local fishing community, and others in the territory need to be consulted for a final definition.
Among the many questions raised, were those from American Samoa Council member, Christinna Lutu-Sanchez, who wanted to know if once the cultural fishing definition is finalized, would that cultural fishing definition apply to anyone fishing within the LVPA, and not necessarily just the US longline fleet based in American Samoa.
‘Fishal recognition’ for better fisheries management
June 29, 2017 — To monitor fish stocks in about 3 million square miles of ocean including the North Pacific Ocean and East Bering Sea, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center turned to facial recognition technology — or more accurately, “fishal recognition.”
Part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service, the center is working to get more accurate counts of marine life by applying the same facial recognition techniques that identify people to recognize fish according to their facial features underwater.
The agency began experimenting with this technology several years ago and is now on its second generation of camera-based trawl, or CAM-Trawl. It has worked with ADL Embedded Solutions on hardware improvements, such as small form factor embedded Vision Boxes — the image acquisition computers — a Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor to enable real-time processing of image data and waterproof enclosures and connectors.
Before using CAM-Trawl, the traditional method of measuring fish stocks had been to use trawlers to scoop up all the fish in a particular region of the ocean, bring them on deck, count them and then multiply that number out, according to said JC Ramirez, director of engineering at ADL. “If you did 10 square miles, multiply that by 10 for 100,” for example, he said.
But that method had several shortcomings, including extrapolation errors, high costs and ecological impacts on fish populations.
“They were looking for not only a more benign way to do that, but also perhaps a way that would allow them to cover more regions and get a little bit more specificity on the variations in the data from area to area,” Ramirez said.
Now researchers can pull a rig outfitted with the cameras that are linked back to ADL’s control computer, which typically resides in the wheelhouse. It monitors external sensors such as location, time, pressure sensors and radio frequency identification tag readings. It then, based on sensor input, communicates with one or more Vision Boxes to do the image capture, managing the remote on/off power, clock syncing, and starting and stopping of image collection.
North Carolina environmental groups readying for a fight against seismic testing in the Atlantic
June 29, 2017 — As the deadline for public comment regarding proposed seismic testing off the Atlantic Coast approaches, several local organizations are gearing up in opposition.
Dana Sargent, head of the Cape Fear Surfrider Foundation’s Offshore Drilling campaign, has helped rally the groups against the proposal.
Members of the Cape Fear Surfrider Foundation, The North Carolina Coastal Federation, Oceana, the Water Keepers Alliance, and others have pulled together to form Don’t Drill NC, an non-profit group dedicated to fighting this proposal.
The proposal, put forward by the Marine Fisheries Division of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), seeks to allow five separate entities to conduct seismic air-blasting tests of the seafloor from the coast of Delaware, to Cape Canaveral, Fla., in an area extending 350 nautical miles offshore.
Although exploratory in nature, these tests are being used to locate areas of valuable oil and natural gas, which, if found, leaves the potential for drilling off the coast of North Carolina.
President Trump issued an executive order, called the “America First Offshore Energy Strategy,” in April of this year, aimed at repealing Obama-era regulations designed to protect the Atlantic coast from offshore drilling.
Is the Cook Inlet beluga population stable or in danger? Depends on whom you ask.
June 29, 2017 — Alaska’s most urban whales have yet to show any meaningful increase in numbers, evidence that recovery remains elusive for the endangered population despite numerous protective measures imposed in recent years. On the plus side, the Cook Inlet beluga population has not declined notably in the past two years, scientists say.
The latest survey of the small and endangered white whales estimates the population at 328 animals, within a range of 279 and 386, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports.
That represents barely any change from the previous estimate of 340 animals, from 2014, but far below the 1,300 belugas that scientists say were swimming three decades ago in the silty, salty water between Anchorage and the Gulf of Alaska.
“Cook Inlet belugas are still in danger of extinction because the population is so small,” said Paul Wade, head of Cook Inlet beluga research at NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service. “The population trend over the last 10 years has been relatively stable compared to the steep decline seen in the 1990s, but there is some evidence the population has continued to decline slightly. We are concerned that the population is not yet increasing towards its former abundance level,” Wade said in a prepared statement.
The newest population estimate comes from the latest in a series of regular aerial counts conducted by NMFS. The estimate is based on thousands of photographs taken from the air a year ago; analysis of those images is a laborious process, so the count that emerged required a full year of work and review, officials said.
Fishing Report: NOAA seeks input on sanctuaries and monuments
June 29, 2017 — In a media advisory last week, NOAA said it’s soliciting public comment on National Marine Sanctuaries and Monuments designated or expanded since 2007 to determine if they should exist.
President Donald Trump’s Offshore Energy Strategy, outlined in his May executive order, has ordered the Secretary of Commerce through NOAA to review whether national monuments and sanctuaries present “lost opportunity” with regard to potential energy and mineral exploration and production.
Many in the fishing community are split about National Monuments. Some believe, as the president does, that profits and jobs should come first. However, a large part of the fishing and conservation communities believe it should be the environment and fish that should be first. Many believe that National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine Monuments serve as a sanctuary and spawning grounds for a variety of sea life and fish and should be left untouched.
For information on National Marine Monuments and Sanctuaries visit NOAA Fisheries website at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/.
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