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Divers haul in large amount of debris from marine monument

November 13, 2018 — A team of divers hauled in nearly 165,000 pounds (75,000 kilograms) of abandoned fishing nets and plastic waste during a cleanup expedition at Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, federal officials said.

The 18 divers left Sept. 19 and returned Oct. 29 from a trek to the chain of isles and atolls located 1,200 miles (1,931 kilometers) northwest of the main Hawaiian islands, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the expeditions.

The divers hauled in about 82 tons (74 metric tons), which is comparable to the weight of 45 mid-sized cars or one space shuttle, NOAA said.

The team of divers from NOAA Fisheries and University of Hawaii’s Joint Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Research sorted out the debris Friday.

The group split the debris into categories such as plastic laundry baskets, fishing nets, tires, buoys and smaller personal-care items such as plastic toothbrushes and combs.

Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument is uninhabited by humans. But due to its central location in the system of circulating currents called the North Pacific Gyre, the debris has been carried by currents to its shores for decades.

NOAA’s marine debris team has been going on expeditions to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands almost yearly to survey and remove litter since 1996. Cumulatively, including the last mission, teams have collected about 2 million pounds (0.91 million kilograms) of debris.

The litter does ecological damage at Papahanaumokuakea, said NOAA’s Kevin O’Brien, who served as chief scientist for the mission this year.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Hawaii Tribune-Herald

Veterans get foothold in marine science through NWFSC internship

November 13, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA:

Two veterans will mark this Veterans’ Day as part of research teams at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC), one focused on the ecological response to dam removal and the other on the effects of ocean acidification on Dungeness crab and krill.

Katherine Rovinski, who served seven years in the Navy as a surface warfare officer, and Shawna Worley, an Army intelligence analyst for six years, just began NWFSC’s internship program for veterans, known as the Washington Veterans Corps Fisheries Program. The program offers veterans a foothold towards a career in marine science, while also supplementing the Science Center’s research staff.

“This is the perfect opportunity for me to learn more about the science, and what it’s like to work at NOAA,” said Worley, 33, who is working with NWFSC researcher Sarah Morley’s team tracking changes in the Elwha River system following the removal of two large dams that once blocked it. “This is exactly what I’m interested in studying and learning more about.”

NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region and the NOAA Restoration Center created the internship program in 2016 in partnership with NWFSC, Washington’s Department of Veterans Affairs and Veterans Conservation Corps. This is its third year. Barney Boyer, the first veteran to complete the program, started graduate school in fisheries last year on a full scholarship.

Rovinski, 29, said she is impressed at how widely NOAA Fisheries staff share information in all directions, avoiding silos that otherwise can form. She noted regular webinars and cross-division meetings that help employees learn more about science and the surrounding issues. “There is a lot of cross-pollination going on,” she said.

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Maine Maritime Academy and a master’s from the University of Washington, Rovinski spent last summer aboard Sound Experience’s Adventuress, a tall ship that sails the Salish Sea on educational trips for schools and other youth groups. She heard about the NWFSC’s internship program, and immediately thought, “That’s what I’m looking for.”

“I’ve known about NOAA since the first time I looked at charts,” so it didn’t need much explaining, she said.

Rovinski is working out of the Mukilteo Research Station, just across the water from Whidbey Island, where she lives. She is assisting with research looking at the effect of ocean acidification on Dungeness crab, a staple of coastal life in the Northwest, and krill, the tiny, plankton-like organisms that support much of the marine food chain including salmon, steelhead, and other key species.

One of the first challenges is keeping the krill alive in the laboratory environment. “We’re trying to recreate the conditions in the environment so they will eat,” she said.

Worley has spent the first few weeks of her internship cataloging samples collected from the Elwha River, where NWFSC scientists are documenting ecological changes following dam removal. She is particularly interested in how marine nutrients move from fish into the environment, fertilizing its productivity.

She is also reading everything she can on the Elwha.

“I cannot say how great it is to have someone so engaged, so dedicated, and so sharp to help support our work,” said Morley, who leads the lab at NWFSC’s Montlake campus where Worley is based. “It’s been a great fit.”

Read the full release here

Warm temps hurt shellfish, aid predators

November 13, 2018 — Valuable species of shellfish have become harder to find on the East Coast because of degraded habitat caused by a warming environment, according to a pair of scientists that sought to find out whether environmental factors or overfishing was the source of the decline.

The scientists reached the conclusion in studying the decline in the harvest of four commercially important species of shellfish in coastal areas from Maine to North Carolina – eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams and northern bay scallops. They reported that their findings came down squarely on the side of a warming ocean environment and a changing climate, and not excessive harvest by fishermen.

One of the ways warming has negatively impacted shellfish is by making them more susceptible to predators, said the lead author of the study, Clyde MacKenzie, a shellfish researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is based in Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

“Their predation rate is faster in the warmer waters. They begin to prey earlier, and they prey longer into the fall,” MacKenzie said. “These stocks have gone down.”

MacKenzie’s findings, the product of a collaboration with Mitchell Tarnowski, a shellfish biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, appeared recently in the journal Marine Fisheries Review. The findings have implications for consumers of shellfish, because a declining domestic harvest means the prices of shellfish such as oysters and clams could rise, or the U.S. could become more dependent on foreign sources.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Express

NOAA Issues Report on Protecting North Atlantic Right Whales

November 12, 2018 — NOAA Fisheries researchers have been looking into how to preserve the shrinking population of critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

Officials have concluded that the surest way of protecting the species is by preserving the lives of adult females in the population as a way to promote population growth and recovery.

According to Royal Society Open Science, most right whale deaths are attributed to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Protecting Paradise: Marine Debris Team Does the Heavy Lifting

The team removed more than 160,000 pounds of lost or abandoned fishing nets and plastics from the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, an ecologically and culturally significant area, part of the Papahānaumokuāea Marine National Monument.

November 12, 2018 — Stretching 1,200 miles northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands, a chain of remote islands and atolls known as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are hundreds of miles from the nearest human populations. Yet, these beautiful coral reefs and uninhabited shorelines are centrally located in the North Pacific Gyre, where currents gather marine debris from all around the Pacific Ocean.

NOAA’s marine debris team travels from island to island by ship and small boat, carefully pulling derelict “ghost” fishing gear off of underwater reefs and collecting plastic debris from shorelines. They clean up nets and other debris that damage coral reefs and threaten wildlife, including endangered Hawaiian monk seals and green sea turtles. Hauling debris is often a dirty, exhausting, and sometimes fly-filled task, but the team loves its work.

Read and view the full story at NOAA Fisheries

New protections for herring but lobster bait crunch imminent

November 12, 2018 — Fishing managers are considering extending new protections to Atlantic herring, but catch quotas for the important bait fish are still likely to plummet before the end of the year, which is bad news for the American lobster industry.

Herring is the most important bait source for the lobster fishery, which is one of the most lucrative marine industries in New England. A recent scientific assessment of the herring population says the fish’s population has fallen in the past five years.

An arm of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted last month to initiate changes to try to better protect spawning herring off of New England.

The new protections are coming at a time when the lobster and herring fisheries are expecting a dramatic cutback in herring quota. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is expected to propose new rules about herring fishing this month and implement them by early 2019, when next year’s herring fishing season starts.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Bradenton Herald

Using Artificial Intelligence to Identify Humpback Whales

November 9, 2018 — Artificial Intelligence has been used for everything from teaching computers to play chess to helping speed ride-sharing services on their way. And now one government agency is using it to track humpback whales in the Pacific.

For more than a decade, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been tracking whales by recording them.

But there are challenges – like the sheer volume of data. Researchers have to sift through years of audio. Literally. Years.

“So far we’ve collected over 170,000 hours of data. Let’s put that in real terms. If you were to sit and listen straight, not sleeping, not eating, taking no breaks, it would take you 19 years to listen to all that data,” says Ann Allen, a research oceanographer with NOAA’s Cetacean Research Program at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.

Read the full story at Hawaii Public Radio

Fisheries Researchers Map Habitats Ahead of Offshore Wind Development

November 9, 2018 — HYANNIS, Mass. – NOAA Fisheries researchers are helping to inform federal managers and developers on the impacts that construction and operation of offshore wind facilities will have on ocean bottom habitats and fisheries.

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center conducted four years of research to build a database of information, including water temperatures, topography, sediments, currents and marine life in the eight Wind Energy Areas authorized by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management along the East Coast.

The designated WEAs encompass just over 4,000 square nautical miles of seafloor from Massachusetts to North Carolina. About 40 percent of the area has actually been leased to date, including the Vineyard Wind project development south of Martha’s Vineyard.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Key US Shellfish Quotas Will Remain the Same Next Year

November 8, 2018 — A couple of the most significant fisheries for shellfish on the East Coast will have the same catch quotas next year.

Fishermen harvest surf clams and ocean quahogs from the Atlantic Ocean every year for use in chowders, fried clam dinners and other popular seafood dishes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the quota for the two species will be unchanged in the new fishing year that begins on Jan. 1.

The quota will be 5.33 million bushels for ocean quahogs and 3.4 million bushels for surf clams. The quota for Maine ocean quahogs will be limited to 100,000 Maine bushels, which is also the same as the current year.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

Study says ocean oscillation changes reduced shellfish landings

November 6, 2018 — For years, Maine shellfish harvesters have been complaining that there are fewer softshell clams while arguing that the diggers who go out on the mud flats aren’t the cause of the problem.

A recent study by researchers from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources backs them up on both counts.

According to Clyde L. MacKenzie Jr. of NOAA and Mitchell Tarnowski from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, between 1980 and 2010, documented landings of the four most commercially important inshore bivalve mollusks along the Northeast coast — eastern oysters, northern quahogs, softshell clams and northern bay scallops — dropped by 85 percent.

The principal cause, they say, was warming ocean temperatures associated with a shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation which resulted in damaged shellfish habitat and increased predation from Maine to North Carolina.

“My first response is that the article confirms what I have been seeing with soft-shell clams over at least the last decade or so,” Brian Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine Machias and director of research at the Downeast Institute on Great Wass Island, said last week.

The North Atlantic Oscillation is a fluctuation of atmospheric pressure over the North Atlantic that affects both the weather and the climate along the East Coast, especially in winter and early spring.

According to NOAA, shifts in the oscillation can affect the timing of a species’ reproduction and growth, the availability of microscopic organisms for food and predator-prey relationships.

Over a period of several years, MacKenzie and Tarnowski interviewed shellfish wardens and harvesters along the New England coast, as well as examining landings records and other research in an effort to determine the “true causes” of the precipitous drop in shellfish landings.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American