Newfoundland Archives - Page 2 of 2

Salmon breakthrough was driven by chance

November 25, 2015 — It was the early 1980s, and a group of Canadian fish farmers was hoping to find a way for salmon to thrive in the region’s frigid waters. So scientists in Newfoundland began experimenting with how to inject them with antifreeze proteins from an eel-like creature known as ocean pout.

Instead, they found a way to make the fish grow more quickly.

That work, more than 30 years ago, led to the controversial breakthroughs that allowed AquaBounty Technologies, a biotechnology company in Maynard, to produce a rapidly growing salmon, which the Food and Drug Administration last week declared the first genetically altered animal fit for consumption.

“We thought if we can enhance the growth rate, that’s good for the industry, which can get fish to market faster,” said Garth Fletcher, a researcher at Memorial University in Newfoundland, who did the initial experiments that led to the creation of salmon that can grow twice as fast as those in the wild. Fletcher’s technique of inserting growth hormone from Chinook salmon and a “promoter gene” from ocean pout is now considered antiquated technology. But scientists say its commercial application heralds a new era of genetic engineering.

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a Massachusetts biotechnology company’s bid to modify salmon for human consumption.

Fletcher’s technique of inserting growth hormone from Chinook salmon and a “promoter gene” from ocean pout is now considered antiquated technology. But scientists say its commercial application heralds a new era of genetic engineering.

New techniques have allowed scientists to more precisely alter animal genomes by editing DNA to include or exclude beneficial or harmful traits. Researchers are now experimenting with modifying the genes of chickens so they don’t transfer avian flu, for example. They also want to develop pigs and cattle that are resistant to foot and mouth disease, and goats that produce a higher level of a microbial protein that may help treat diarrhea in people.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Scientists: Warming Ocean Factor in Collapse of Cod Fishery

October 29, 2015 — PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The rapid warming of waters off New England is a key factor in the collapse of the region’s cod fishery, and changes to the species’ management are needed to save one of America’s oldest industries, according to a report published Thursday in Science magazine.

Fishery managers say cod spawning in the Gulf of Maine — a key fishing area between Cape Cod and Canada that touches Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire — is only about 3 percent of sustainable levels, and participants in the fishery that dates to the Colonial era face dramatic quota cuts as a result.

The scientists behind the Science report say the warming of the Gulf of Maine, which accelerated from 2004 to 2013, reduced cod’s capacity to rebound from fishing pressure. The report gives credence to the idea — supported by advocacy groups, fishing managers and even some fishermen — that climate change has played a role in cod’s collapse.

The lead author of the study, Andrew Pershing of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, said the gulf is warming at a rate 99 percent faster than anywhere else in the world, and as a result, too many of the fish aren’t living past age 4 or 5. Cod can live to be older than 20.

“Every animal has a temperature range that they prefer. The Gulf of Maine, for cod, is really at the warm end of that,” Pershing said. “If you warm it, you push it somewhere that’s really uncomfortable.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Cod Could Recover in Warming Waters

October 28, 2015 — The first clue came in 2008, recalled George Rose, a marine biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, when he saw the cod aggregating in large numbers offshore during the spawning season. It was a sight he had sorely missed in 15 years. In the early 1990s, cod fisheries suffered such a dramatic collapse that they emerged as an aquatic poster child for fisheries mismanagement, according to Rose.

In a paper published yesterday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Rose and his colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, document the comeback of the Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade. The fact that they have shown that the cod stock there is on the way to recovery is good news, Rose said, as “it shows that it is not all gloom and doom.”

Their study attributed the recovery to improved environmental conditions, better fish management and the availability of an important food source, capelin, whose populations also fell drastically in the early 1990s and have recently bounced back, too. The rebound of Atlantic cod in this region contrasts with their rapidly declining populations off the northeastern coast of the United States, where until last year the stocks remained significantly below sustainable levels. Previous research has associated this persistent population slump with the pressures of overfishing and also warming waters. The warming temperatures, however, seem to be favoring a cod fishery revival in Newfoundland and Labrador, or at least not hampering its recovery.

Read the full story at Scientific American

Fish Success Story: Cod Makes a Comeback

October 27, 2015 — The cod is coming back.

The species that was for centuries a mainstay of the American and Canadian economies had virtually vanished off the Northeastern North American coast by the 1990s owing to overfishing. That led regulators in 1992 to impose a moratorium on cod fishing.

It appears to have worked.

New research shows that cod biomass has increased from the tens of tons to more than 200,000 tons within the last decade. This spring, scientists documented large increases in cod abundance and size for the first time since the moratorium in the more northerly spawning groups, according to a study published Monday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

“Cod was historically one of the most important fish stocks in the world,” said George Rose, director of the Center for Fisheries Ecosystems Research at the University of Newfoundland in Canada and author of the new report on the cod’s recovery. “When the stocks collapsed in the 1990s, it became the icon of all the bad things we are doing to the ocean, and in many ways, it changed how we deal with our oceans worldwide.”

Read the full story at TakePart

The Great Northern Cod Comeback

October 27, 2015 — Once an icon of overfishing, mismanagement, and stock decline, the northern Atlantic cod is showing signs of recovery according to new research published today in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

This research, led by Dr. George Rose, tracks what is arguably the most important comeback of any fish stock worldwide. Studying the great northern Atlantic cod stock complex off Newfoundland and Labrador, once considered among the largest cod stocks in the world before its disastrous decline in the 1990s, Dr. Rose documents the stock’s rebound over the past decade from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand tonnes and growing.

Read the full story at Science Codex

Cod bones from Mary Rose reveal globalised fish trade in Tudor England

September 9, 2015 — New stable isotope and ancient DNA analysis of the bones of stored cod provisions recovered from the wreck of the Tudor warship Mary Rose, which sank off the coast of southern England in 1545, has revealed that the fish in the ship’s stores had been caught in surprisingly distant waters: the northern North Sea and the fishing grounds of Iceland – despite England having well developed local fisheries by the 16th century.

Test results from one of the sample bones has led archaeologists to suspect that some of the stored cod came from as far away as Newfoundland in eastern Canada.

The research team say that the findings show how naval provisioning played an important role in the early expansion of the fish trade overseas, and how that expansion helped fuel the growth of the English navy. Commercial exploitation of fish and the growth of naval sea power were “mutually reinforcing aspects of globalisation” in Renaissance Europe, they say.

“The findings contribute to the idea that the demand for preserved fish was exceeding the supply that local English and Irish fisheries were able to provide in order to feed growing – and increasingly urban – populations. We know from these bones that one of the sources of demand was naval provisions,” said Dr James Barrett, from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.

“The existence and development of globalised fisheries was one of the things that made the growth of the navy possible. The navy was a key mechanism of maritime expansion, while at the same time being sustained by that expansion. The story of the cod trade is a microcosm of globalisation during this pivotal period that marked the beginning of an organised English navy, which would go on to become the Royal Navy,” he said.

Read the full story from the University of Cambridge

COMMERCIAL FISHERIES NEWS: Reflections from the other side of a cod crisis on “The Rock”

September 2, 2015 — A few weeks ago, I traveled with a film crew from New Hampshire Public Television (NHPTV) to Newfoundland.

While there, we visited with scientists and fishermen to see what we could learn about their experiences since the 1992 Cod Moratorium.

The trip was for a new NHPTV documentary being produced in partnership with NH Sea Grant/UNH Cooperative Extension about the groundfish crisis here in the Gulf of Maine.

We were particularly curious about what we’d find since cod stocks are finally beginning to recover and Newfoundlanders may be on the ‘other side’ of their cod crisis.

Read the full opinion piece at Commercial Fisheries News