Saving Seafood

HAWAII: Sleuthing leads to new findings about opah

June 8, 2018 — The fish buyer noticed something different about the large, colorful, disc-shaped opah waiting to be sold at the auction house in Honolulu. Among the differences: One fish had a bigger eye than the other.

His curiosity set in motion DNA testing and more sleuthing that led to the identification of three new species of opah — a peculiar deep-diving fish recently found to be the first fully warmblooded fish.

“The more we looked, the more differences we could pull out,” said Karen Underkoffler, lead author of a recently published paper in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa that describes the anatomical characteristics of the different species of opah, including one marked by its big eyes and a purple tongue.

In all, the team of scientists with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries identified five distinct species of opah, revealing that there isn’t a single global species. Three are newly identified, one was already named and researchers better identified another that had been previously described.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Honolulu Star Advertiser

Updated Stock Assessment Improvement Plan Builds on Past Success

June 7, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA:

NOAA Fisheries released its new Stock Assessment Improvement Plan in 2018 to provide strategic guidance for its stock assessment enterprise. The plan is designed to complement other strategic guidance efforts to accomplish NOAA Fisheries’ mission of sustainable fisheries through science-based resource conservation and management.

In 2001, NOAA Fisheries published the first Stock Assessment Improvement Plan, in which we sought to bolster the capacity, content, extent, and infrastructure for conducting stock assessments. As a result, we have improved the scientific advice being provided to fishery managers allowing the recovery of many overfished stocks and dramatically reducing incidences of overfishing. However, given changes in legal mandates and decades of research and development of new scientific tools, there is a need for updating this important strategic document. In 2018, a new strategic document was published, titled Implementing a Next Generation Stock Assessment Enterprise: An Update to NOAA Fisheries’ Stock Assessment Improvement Plan.

This document describes the many challenges currently facing NOAA’s stock assessment enterprise, and some of the innovative research and operations that will meet these challenges. The next generation framework acts as a road map for addressing these needs and consists of three main themes. Collectively, these three foci constitute the Next Generation Stock Assessment (NGSA) Improvement Plan.

First, it advocates for expanding the scope of the stock assessment paradigm to be more holistic and ecosystem-linked. This means that more ecosystem and socioeconomic factors that affect the dynamics of fish stocks and fisheries are directly taken into account, and more goals of fishery management are taken into account in the evaluation of sustainable harvest policies.

A second focus is on the continued use of innovative science for data collection and analysis to reliably and efficiently provide data for maximizing use of advanced modeling methods. Examples of clear benefits from this emphasis include improved calibration of data collection methods, streamlined analytical processes, and establishment of robust harvest policies to manage fisheries between assessments.

Finally, the plan provides a method for objectively determining stock-specific goals that create a stock assessment process that is more timely, efficient, and effective at optimizing available resources and delivering results to fishery managers and the public.

The NGSA strategic vision is designed to complement other strategic efforts, particularly NOAA Fisheries’ Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management Road Map and Climate Science Strategy, in order to accomplish its mission of sustainable fisheries through resource conservation and management. The recommendations in this plan will be implemented through collaboration with regional partners and stakeholders to ensure that they improve stock assessment capabilities in accordance with existing regional processes.

Read the full release at NOAA Fisheries

Group Threatens Lawsuit Over Habitat Protection for Orcas

June 7, 2018 — A conservation group wants the federal government to move forward with protecting offshore areas along the U.S. West Coast to help endangered killer whales.

The Center for Biological Diversity told the National Marine Fisheries Service on Wednesday that it plans to take legal action if the agency keeps delaying a designation for offshore habitat where the Puget Sound orcas would be protected.

The fish-eating whales typically spend summers in inland waters of Washington state and winters foraging along the coast. They have struggled with food shortages, pollution, and noise and disturbances from boats. There are now just 76 of the animals, a 30-year low.

Most inland waters of Washington state, including Puget Sound and the waters around the San Juan Islands, received protection as critical whale habitat in 2006. Coastal and offshore areas in the Pacific Ocean weren’t included at that time.

In 2014, the conservation group petitioned the fisheries service to expand habitat protection. It asked the agency to add an area from Cape Flattery, Washington, to Point Reyes, California, extending about 47 miles (76 kilometers) offshore.

Satellite tagging surveys have shown that the whales forage for food along the coast in the winter, some traveling down to Northern California.

The fisheries service said in 2015 that it would move ahead with revising the orcas’ critical habitat and collecting and analyzing more data to develop a rule in 2017.

The group said in its letter Wednesday that the agency is violating U.S. law by not taking action in a reasonable time to protect habitat for the population of southern resident killer whales.

“The southern residents desperately need protected foraging areas full of salmon to feed them through the winter,” Catherine Kilduff, an attorney and marine scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “Without swift federal action, these whales will continue their steep slide to extinction.”

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

Smart Software Helps Fishermen Catch the Fish They Want, Not Endangered Species

June 6, 2018 — In the ocean, everything moves. Waves push around vast swaths of saltwater, tides ebb and flow, and over time tectonic rumblings transform the seafloor. With all that movement, marine life travels as well—making the oceans one of the most dynamic ecosystems on Earth. This constant shuffling can make it hard to predict where a particular marine species might be on any given day. But that is exactly what Elliott Hazen, a fisheries scientist from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association (NOAA), is trying to do through new modeling software.

Hazen and a team of other fisheries scientists developed EcoCast in an effort to reduce the unintended bycatch of protected marine species while supporting sustainable fisheries; their results were published last week in Science Advances. EcoCast is already being used to allow fishermen exemptions to fish in certain protected areas in California, and NOAA is working on a smartphone app that will give fishermen this dynamic data in real-time.

The team focused on the California Drift Gillnet (DGN) fishery, which targets broadbill swordfish along the U.S. West Coast. The fishery, which has declined in recent years, only brought in 176 metric tons of swordfish in 2017—down from a historical high of 2,198 metric tons in 1985. DGN fishermen use mesh nets that float vertically in the water to catch the swordfish, but the nets often trap additional species—a phenomenon known as bycatch—including the critically endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle, blue sharks, and California sea lions.

It’s not just an issue of protecting endangered species, explains Gary Burke, a fisherman in California and a member of the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara. “Fishermen don’t want bycatch. It breaks our gear and it’s expensive. So, we like to avoid it.”

EcoCast takes an array of oceanographic variables into account to generate a fluid map that highlights areas where fishermen are likely to find high concentrations of their target species and not the protected species they don’t want to catch.

Read the full story at Smithsonian.com

How Aquaculture is Feeding a Growing World: Saving Seafood Takes a Closer Look

June 5, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Global poverty and malnutrition are falling worldwide, and the availability of affordable, healthy protein is a key reason why. Aquaculture, as one of the world’s fastest growing sources of food production, has been an essential part of this development.

Saving Seafood is taking a closer look at the role that aquaculture plays as a source of food, nutrition, and employment for millions of people around the world in a new series, Aquaculture Today. We interview leading aquaculture experts on the latest breakthroughs and developments in farmed seafood, and the role it plays in the future of human health and the global food supply. 

Worldwide, protein consumption has more than doubled in the past 50 years, going from 9 kg per person per year to nearly 20 kg per person per year. Fish, as a cheap and readily accessible food source, has made up a large share of global protein consumption. As the demand for affordable sources of protein grows along with the world’s population, these fish are increasingly being produced through aquaculture.

“Aquaculture has been the fastest [growing] food production industry in the world for the last four decades,” says Manuel Barange, Director of Fisheries and Aquaculture at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “We need to make sure that is maintained, perhaps not at the same growth, but that it is maintained because it provides not just nutrition, but actually livelihoods and economic opportunities in places where there are not many other opportunities for economic development.”

The importance of aquaculture to global seafood production is only expected to increase, with the production of farmed seafood expected to dwarf that of wild-caught seafood in the next 15 years.

“The projections are that we’ll reach 62 percent of food fish coming from aquaculture by around 2030,” says Dan Lee, Standards Coordinator for the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s Best Aquaculture Practices Program.

This growth presents an opportunity for fishing communities, which have a chance to diversify to meet the needs of the global seafood market.

“One thing that I would really like to see the industry support [NOAA] stepping up with is dealing with this sort of issue, trying to help these communities start to either diversify their fisheries or thinking more about how they can move into aquaculture,” says Richard Merrick, former Chief Scientist at NOAA Fisheries.

Aquaculture Today comes from interviews conducted by Saving Seafood at the 2017 SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Seattle, Washington.

View the video here.

 

Fishing Industry Divided Over Push to Ease Catch Limits

June 4, 2018 — The number of fish stocks in the U.S. classified as “overfished” has reached an all-time low.

That was the headline of the annual “Status of Stocks” report compiled by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and released to Congress on May 17. The report found only 35 of 235 fishing stocks are overfished—the lowest number since the agency began tracking fish populations in 2000.

The news was hailed as proof, from sectors of the fishing and boating industries, that the time has now come to roll back certain fisheries regulations they view as overly burdensome and outdated.

Among the ideas being discussed are tossing out requirements that fisheries management decisions be based on peer-reviewed science, and instead giving Regional Fisheries Management Councils more “flexibility” in determining how fish stocks are divided between recreational and commercial interests.

Read the full story at Bloomberg News

New Tool Helps Fisheries Avoid Protected Species In Near Real Time

June 3, 2018 — New computer-generated daily maps will help fishermen locate the most productive fishing spots in near real time while warning them where they face the greatest risk of entangling sea turtles, marine mammals, and other protected species. Scientists developed the maps, the products of a system called EcoCast, to help reduce accidental catches of protected species in fishing nets.

Funded primarily by NASA with support from NOAA, California Sea Grant, and Stanford University, EcoCast was developed by NOAA Fisheries scientists and academic partners with input from fishermen and managers.

Using the swordfish fishery as an example, EcoCast incorporates data from tagged animals, remote sensing satellites, and fisheries observers to help predict concentrations of target species (broadbill swordfish) and three protected species (leatherback turtle, blue shark and California sea lion).

EcoCast will help fishermen, managers, scientists, and others understand in near real-time where fishing vessels have the highest probability of catching targeted species and where there is risk of catching protected species. In doing so, EcoCast aims to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of fisheries that sometimes inadvertently catch and kill sensitive species.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

Responsible Offshore Development Alliance Forms to Coordinate Fishing Industry Action on Wind Power

June 1, 2018 — The following was released by the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance:

With offshore renewable and wind energy development becoming increasingly common on the East Coast, a new alliance has formed to ensure that these developments are compatible with the existing interests of the nation’s fishing communities. The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) brings together a broad range of commercial fishermen from across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic to advocate for their shared concerns over emerging offshore developments.

RODA is seeking to coordinate the efforts of the fishing industry, offshore wind development interests, and federal, state, and local governments to promote effective offshore development policies, and to support more scientific research on offshore development impacts. Current regulatory efforts to assess the impact of offshore development on fisheries have been disconnected. Past offshore projects have not adequately engaged with the fishing industry and the regional fishery management councils, leading to offshore leases being awarded to projects located in prime fishing grounds.

“The current, splintered approaches to engaging fishing communities in the offshore wind leasing process are ineffective and inefficient, and the result is that critical fishing industry expertise is not being considered,” said Anne Hawkins, legal and scientific counsel for RODA. “Fisheries need a unified effort to ensure they get the best possible offshore outcomes.”

One of RODA’s first priorities is exploring partnerships with NOAA and the Atlantic states to develop collaborative scientific research. This research would address the lack of peer-reviewed information on the effects of offshore development to fisheries and fish populations. It would also be used to inform offshore developers and regulators in planning sites, awarding leases, designing operations plans, and developing mitigation strategies.

RODA is also working with its members in the fishing industry to provide a unified voice on industry-wide issues, such as consideration of new offshore developments, to ensure that these issues are adequately addressed.

“The industry needs to speak as one,” said Robert Vanasse, communications and media advisor to RODA. “The offshore wind energy industry, and regulators at the federal, state, and local levels need to hear clearly the concerns of participants in our domestic fisheries.  We will work to foster the productive dialogue among those parties that is urgently needed and sorely lacking.

Specifically, RODA will coordinate engagement between offshore development and affected fisheries to guide the planning of future offshore development sites, and to implement effective operations and mitigation programs for existing sites. By creating a united effort from fishing communities, RODA will facilitate more informed development of shared offshore resources.

 

NOAA Announces Recreational Rules for Summer Flounder, Black Sea Bass & Scup

June 1, 2018 — HYANNIS, Mass. — NOAA Fisheries has announced the 2018 recreational rules for summer flounder, black sea bass and scup.

Federal officials are continuing “conservation equivalency” for summer flounder and have waived the recreational bag limit, minimum fish size and fishing season for the fishery. Fishermen are subject to regulations set by the state where the fish land.

Read the full story at Cape Cod

UMass professor nets $300K for scallop research

June 1, 2018 — PROVIDENCE, R.I. — University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor Kevin Stokesbury was awarded $302,091 in grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of its 2018-2019 Sea Scallop Research Set-Aside program, the university announced Thursday.

Stokesbury, a professor of fisheries oceanography at the School for Marine Science & Technology, will use the funds to examine scallop populations around New England, including near the Nantucket Lightship shoals, the deep-water passage between Nantucket and Georges Bank, and select portions of the Northern Gulf of Maine. The three projects were awarded $95,721, $84,065 and $122,305, respectively.

Read the full story at the Providence Business News