Saving Seafood

Cape scientists forge ahead with right whale research

April 7, 2020 — Over the past week, New England Aquarium scientist Philip Hamilton, manager of the right whale identification catalog at the aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, has received photos of about 30 right whales taken by people walking the shoreline around Race Point and off Nahant.

Unfortunately, researchers hoping to see them from the air and sea during what they consider the epicenter of right whale migration into Cape Cod Bay essentially have been grounded by weather and coronavirus.

“We lost 22 days there,” said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, a senior scientist and director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown.

COVID-19 fears forced the New England Aquarium to close March 13. Admission fees account for 80% of their $3.5 million in annual operating expenses, and the aquarium announced layoffs and furloughs last week to cut costs.

The Center for Coastal Studies did not lay off anyone, spokesperson Cathrine Macort said, but its offices and lab are closed. The center is watching expenses and applying for federal payroll aid.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Endangered right whales spotted in Cape Cod Bay during spring feeding season

April 6, 2020 — An increasing number of endangered North Atlantic right whales have been spotted feeding off of Massachusetts’ coast in recent weeks, a sign that spring is finally here, researchers at the New England Aquarium said.

The right whales live in shallow waters off the southeastern United States during late fall and winter, the aquarium said. After pregnant whales give birth to their calves while living with juvenile and male whales in the region during those months, the whales migrate to Cape Cod Bay during the spring to feed before heading further north.

“In a time when so much is changing around us, I find the appearance of right whales feeding in these waters as they have for hundreds, if not thousands, of years reassuring. Some ancient behaviors remain,” said Philip Hamilton, a research scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the aquarium.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Pop-up pots and the search for ‘whale-safe’ gear

April 2, 2020 — I lay becalmed one summer night trying to sail from Cutler, Maine, to Nova Scotia. I drifted in the dark, laying across the cockpit in my survival suit and listening for the thrum of a freighter that might run me downhill. Out of the inky black came a blast like a tire exploding, followed by a ringing like bellows, the sound of a great inhalation. It was a whale. I sat up, startled, but could see nothing. Right whales had been in the area that summer and frequented the channel where I lay adrift. They passed me for 15 minutes or so and then were gone.

The morning broke with the wind driving me right back to Cutler, through a carpet of lobster buoys. There are an estimated 3 million traps off the coast of Maine, ground zero for a $483 million dollar industry. Unfortunately, the last 400 North Atlantic right whales are an endangered species with a propensity to get tangled in the buoy lines of fixed-gear fishermen anywhere between Florida and Newfoundland. According to the New England Aquarium, 83 percent of these whales show signs of having been entangled at least once and 59 percent more than once.

While right whales also die from ship strikes and other causes, the environmental groups that are part of NOAA’s Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team are calling for eliminating rope in the water column.

Fixed-gear fishermen on the West Coast have a similar problem. A spike in humpback whale entanglements in 2014 and 2015 led the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity to sue the commonwealth of California in 2017, resulting in a settlement that will require fishermen to limit spring fishing and pursue a conservation plan that could include ropeless or “pop-up” gear, as they call it in California.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Sale of monkfish will pay for science to study them

March 20, 2020 — An Arizona university will be able to use about money generated from the sale of monkfish to study the monster-like sea creatures.

Monkfish are harvested as food off the East Coast, where they are brought to land in states such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine. The New England Fishery Management Council said a program called the “research set-aside” will allow Arizona State University to use new tagging technology to investigate the movements of the fish.

The university will collaborate with the New England Aquarium on the project, which is valued at about $4.2 million. The research set-aside program generates money for science from the harvest and sale of fish that are “set aside” for this purpose.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

FishOn: Virus impacts fish-related events

March 16, 2020 — The event closures, postponements and cancellations flooded into the news at the end of last week and the reality of life in the time of novel coronavirus was driven home with extreme prejudice. The far-flung FishOn staff seems to be holding up well in these early days of the burgeoning public health crisis and we hope the same for you and yours. By now, surely you know the drill. Go wash something.

There were a few fishing-related events — some of which we’d already advanced in the pages of the Gloucester Daily Times and on our online platform, gloucestertimes.com — that have been impacted and may have escaped your notice:

* NOAA Fisheries canceled the scoping meetings for revisions to the management plan for the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary that were scheduled last week at the New England Aquarium and Maritime Gloucester on Harbor Loop, and this Wednesday, March 18, at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. NOAA said it is organizing an online meeting via webinar for later in March. More details to come.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Entangled right whale found near death off Nantucket

March 2, 2020 — A North Atlantic right whale is near death after becoming entangled in fishing gear, a serious blow to the endangered species.

“The potential loss of a mother is particularly devastating,” researchers at the New England Aquarium said in a statement Friday.

Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spotted Dragon, a 19-year-old whale who has given birth three times, while conducting an aerial survey about 45 miles south of Nantucket Monday.

Dragon was excessively thin, unusually gray, and had a buoy stuck in the right side of her mouth when researchers found her in a group of about 15 whales.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Rare blue whales spotted 130 miles east of Connecticut

February 27, 2020 — Blue whales have been spotted in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Connecticut shoreline.

This month, researchers from the New England Aquarium surveyed the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument about 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod, according to a release from the aquarium

Within six hours, the researchers had counted 322 whales and dolphins, including two blue whales.

“As marine mammal researchers, it’s such a thrill to fly in this area and see such a great diversity of animals,” researcher Orla O’Brien said in a release.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association lists blue whales as endangered. The exact population size is not known, but there were only 440 confirmed sightings in the Atlantic Ocean between 1979 and 2009.

Read the full story at the Connecticut Post

Gulf of Maine Longline Survey in Rocky Habitats Now in Sixth Year

February 21, 2020 — For fisheries managers around the world, trawl gear is an efficient way to sample species inhabiting the sea floor or the benthic column above. Depending on the size of the net, grid surveys will capture enough of the animals in the area at the time to compile data used in abundance models that go into stock assessments.  Unless the fish swim out of the net before it is hauled. Or unless the sea bottom is rocky or pinnacled.

In those areas, longline gear can help fill in the blind spots for regional surveys. Longline gear can be lain across rock piles, and retrieved without destroying the gear itself. It differs from a trawl net in several ways: the longline has baited hooks distributed evenly across its length, it is stationary, anchored to the sea floor with location buoys at the sea surface at each end, and it can be deployed by smaller vessels.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Why Scientists Are Counting Whales from Space

January 7, 2020 — Scientists from the New England Aquarium and the Massachusetts-based engineering firm Draper are teaming up to save the whales. The researchers are weaving together a myriad of data in order to create a probability map of where whales might travel to and why. Knowing where whales go can help scientists better understand the environmental conditions that most impact the various species, reports 90.9 WBUR.

Changing water temperatures, for example, can shift where populations of krill, plankton, and fish—common food sources for whales—may go. Shipping lanes can also impact how whale populations travel: From 2010 to 2014, there were 37 reported ship strikes along the east coast of Canada and the U.S. and in the Gulf of Mexico, according to NOAA Fisheries data. Recent evidence has suggested that the ocean is getting noisier, which can stress whales and alter their behavior. (Luckily, groups like the U.S. Navy are taking note.)

In order to track these whales, the team plans to tap reliable sources of sonar, radar and satellite data to keep a watchful eye on our planet’s largest mammals. Eventually, the team hopes to input this data—collected from European Space Agency satellites to amateur radio operators—into an algorithm that will process that data and then track whales’ movements.

Read the full story at Popular Mechanics

Ropeless Science Advances, Aiming to Save Right Whales

November 1, 2019 — With the North Atlantic right whale population inching ever closer to extinction, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association has awarded $350,000 in grants to help reduce large mammal bycatch in the heavily fished waters off the coasts of New England and Canada. The grants, which will go to the New England Aquarium and a research-based nonprofit called the Sea Mammal Education Learning Technology Society (SMELTS), were awarded last week to develop and study ropeless or breakable rope fishing technology for lobstermen and other trap fishermen. Although the technology has been in development for some time, a slew of money and research has been poured into making ropeless gear a commercial reality — especially as right whale mortalities continue to climb and many lobstermen have to halt their fishing operations due to federally-mandated area closures.

“We’re cranking on this,” said Richard Riels, an engineer with SMELTS who invented his organization’s ropeless fishing technology after seeing one too many entangled sea mammals. “I’m hoping to do more testing in the next couple of days with the grant money.”

With 30 deaths in the last three years, there are now approximately 400 right whales left in the Atlantic Ocean. According to data from NOAA, seven of the 21 deaths in Canadian waters showed evidence of gear entanglement. So did five of the nine in American waters—- meaning that nearly half of all mortalities in recent years resulted from fishing gear.

Read the full story at The Vineyard Gazette