Saving Seafood

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

Harvest of popular sushi fish shut down until March

November 6, 2018 — The federal government is shutting down a chunk of the Atlantic Ocean fishery for a species of mackerel for several months.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says commercial harvest of the Atlantic’s migratory Spanish mackerel in federal waters is shut down until March 1. The closure went into effect on Nov. 4.

The closure applies from North Carolina to New York. Over the years, Spanish mackerel have been harvested from Florida to Maine, though the northern edge of the fishery is typically closer to Rhode Island. The biggest producer is Florida.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: Losing lobster lines

November 6, 2018 — Scientists from the New England Aquarium will spend much of next year testing ropeless lobster gear as part of the escalating effort to mitigate entanglements with right whales and other marine species.

The research project, funded with a $226,616 grant recently received from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will involve co-operative research with active lobstermen, possibly including some from the state’s most lucrative lobster port in Gloucester, according to one of the aquarium’s chief scientists.

“We want to get good technology in the hands of fishermen so they can evaluate its potential,” said Tim Werner, the aquarium’s senior scientist and director of its Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction. “They need to be able to use it and find out what it needs to be functional.”

Werner said researchers already have begun to develop various types of ropeless traps, using different technologies to achieve the same goal of drastically reducing or eliminating entanglements of leatherback sea turtles and whales in the forest of vertical lines stretching from fishing gear on the ocean floor to the ocean’s surface.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times