Saving Seafood

Wind energy gets scrutiny following whale deaths

February 10, 2023 — Politicians, citizens and some environmentalists are calling for a slow-down or complete halt of wind energy activity off the East Coast as officials examine the cause of a rash of marine animal deaths, but neither action nor an answer appears to be imminent.

In January, the debate landed on the shores of Worcester County with the body of a humpback whale, which immediately led to speculation regarding the cause of its death.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is examining samples taken from the whale, but representative Allison Ferreira said that it will take “weeks to months” to receive the necropsy report.

“Given that necropsy reports provide a comprehensive account of the stranding event, ranging from a description of external observations and internal examination findings to the diagnostic results of samples taken, they can take several weeks to months to complete and finalize,” Ferreira said in an email.

A few days later, Ferreira added that preliminary findings from the necropsy indicate vessel strike as the cause of death.

“But we do not know (definitively) if it was struck before or after death,” she said. “Results from samples taken from the whale may help inform this, but we may never know.”

Read the full article at Ocean City Today

NOAA Testing Ropeless Lobster Fishing Gear

February 10, 2023 — Ropeless lobster fishing gear is being tested by federal officials off the coast of Massachusetts.

NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center has partnered with dozens of commercial lobster fishing boats permitted by the government to assess the ropeless gear, which is also referred to as on-demand gear

The testing will take place in federal zones that are typically not open to fishing with vertical lines. Inspections are also being conducted off of Rhode Island.

Read the full article at CapeCod.com

Zooplankton Research Reveals a Glimpse of the Potential Future Northern Bering Sea Ecosystem

February 10, 2023 — The following was released SeafoodSource:

From fish to whales, nearly every predator in the sea eats zooplankton, or eats something that does. Understanding how climate impacts zooplankton can help us predict ecosystem changes to build resilient, climate-ready fisheries and communities.

A new collaborative NOAA Fisheries study looked at northern Bering Sea zooplankton over 17 years (2002–2018) of both cold conditions and unprecedented heat. The research revealed that loss of sea ice resulted in dramatic shifts. Large, high-fat copepods that are important food for many predators dwindled, while small zooplankton expanded in both number and range. This altered prey field may have contributed to ecosystem-wide impacts on fish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

“Zooplankton are near the base of the marine food web. If the base changes, we will see changes higher in the foodweb. There will be species that respond better than others,” said study lead Dave Kimmel, NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Fisheries Science Center EcoFOCI program. “By studying zooplankton we can see what the future ecosystem might look like. That knowledge can help people who make a living on it, or manage it, adapt and prepare.”

Read the full release here

NOAA introduces new electronic monitoring tablets to increase observer data accuracy

February 10, 2023 — NOAA Fisheries observers on the U.S. West Coast are moving to the use of tablet-based electronic systems to gather data on fishing vessels, replacing the outmoded pencil-and-paper system previously used.

Two of these systems are the ORCA 1 and 2 systems used by the West Coast Regional Observer Program and OPTECS system used by the West Coast Groundfish Observer Program.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Alaska’s Bering Sea crab crisis is a sign of big changes in the future, scientists warn

February 9, 2023 — The first-ever cancellation of Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab harvest was unprecedented and a shock to the state’s fishing industry and the communities dependent on it.

Unfortunately for that industry and those communities, those conditions are likely to be common in the future, according to several scientists who made presentations at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium held in late January.

The conditions that triggered the crash were likely warmer than any extreme possible during the preindustrial period but now can be expected in about one of every seven years, said Mike Litzow, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric scientist based in Kodiak. By the 2040s, those conditions can be expected to occur one out of every three years, he said.

Blame “borealization” for the disaster befalling snow crab, which is an Arctic species, Litzow said. That term refers to an ecosystem becoming boreal, with groups of organisms – called “taxa” by scientists – that have been south of the Arctic until recently.

“If we think about an Arctic animal at the southern edge of its range that’s exposed to really rapid warming, that leads us sort of inevitably to the concept of borealization,” said Litzow, director of NOAA Fisheries Kodiak laboratory and shellfish assessment program. “As you warm Arctic ecosystems, those systems become prone to a state change, where Arctic taxa such as snow crab become replaced by subarctic taxa that are better able to tolerate ice-free and warm conditions.”

Snow crab are dependent on the winter sea ice and the cold conditions created even after the seasonal melt, he said. While they are widely dispersed through the Bering Sea, the sweet spot for the commercial harvest – the place where the crab are big enough to be commercially valuable – is in the southeastern Bering Sea.

Read the full article at Arctic Today

Gulf of Mexico has warmed at twice rate of global oceans

February 7, 2023 –A new study says sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have warmed about twice as much as global ocean waters since 1970.

Those findings indicate the Gulf of Mexico may be one more U.S. region where higher sea surface temperatures are outpacing global averages. Another is the Gulf of Maine, where the rate has been nearly triple of the world’s other oceans since the early 1980s.

The latest research comes from a joint effort between scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information and the Northern Gulf Institute (NGI), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Institute.  It quantifies the warming trend in the Gulf of Mexico’s ocean heat content over the past 50 years.

The study, published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, shows that waters closest to the surface in the Gulf of Mexico have increased at a rate approximately twice that of the global ocean in the decades between 1970 and 2020.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

U.S. takes aim at global shark fin trade

February 2, 2023 — The U.S. is about to take a bite out of the shark fin trade.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is currently reviewing the funding and implementation of a long-awaited ban on the trafficking of shark fins through U.S. ports, a move that could disrupt their broader global trade.

NOAA’s review comes after President Joe Biden signed the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act into law in December. It’s a move that some scientists and researchers have fought for years, pointing to a deep debate about just how the U.S. should use its influence to end the global fin trade.

On one side, many experts including some in NOAA and its parent agency, the Department of Commerce, have argued that the new law will undo decades of U.S. work to encourage sustainable practices.

Read the full article at NBC News

OPINION: A modest proposal for Alaska fisheries

February 2, 2023 — At the behest of Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young, in 1976 Congress enacted the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which authorizes the U.S. secretary of commerce to regulate commercial fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska seaward of Alaska coastal waters.

The Act established an 11-member North Pacific Fishery Management Council. While the Council purportedly is “advisory,” with only the rare exception, the secretary — in the guise of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — rubber-stamps whatever the Council recommends.

And there is the rub.

The Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game has a permanent seat on the council. The secretary appoints five of the 10 other members from a list of three names for each seat that the governor of Alaska submits to the secretary. That enables the six Alaska members to control Council decision-making if they vote together.

The Council’s principal task is to decide how commercial fishing for pollock and other groundfish is conducted. Since catcher and catcher-processor vessels participating in the groundfish fishery earned $811 million in 2020, even minor regulatory restrictions can have significant adverse financial consequences for the companies, most headquartered in Seattle, that own the vessels.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News 

Fishing Restricted Off Mass. to Protect Right Whales

February 1, 2023 — Citing threats to the endangered North Atlantic right whale, federal officials are invoking an emergency rule to ban lobster and crab trap and pot fishermen from working in a vast area of Massachusetts Bay over the next three months.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Tuesday said the emergency rule, which was also deployed in 2022, means that trap and pot fishermen fishing federal waters in an area known as the Massachusetts Restricted Area Wedge “must remove all trap/pot gear from this area, and may not reset trawls being actively fished, or set new trawls in this area for the period from February 1 – April 30, 2023.”

Read the full article at NECN

Third entangled right whale of 2023 found; Biden declines petition calling for measures to reduce ship strikes

January 30, 2023 — NOAA Fisheries announced a North Atlantic right whale was spotted entangled by ropes off the coast of Georgia, marking the third right whale entanglement discovered in 2023.

The whale, nicknamed “Nimbus,” was spotted entangled 13 miles off the coast of Jekyll Island, Georgia, U.S.A. According to NOAA, a team of authorized responders and experts managed to remove 375 feet of rope from the whale, leaving a “short segment” in its mouth that the responders are “optimistic” will dislodge over time.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource