Saving Seafood

Ocean warming is changing the relationship coastal communities have with the ocean

September 11, 2019 — Climate change has made record-breaking heatwaves all the more likely, both on land and beneath the ocean’s surface. As the world’s ocean sucks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—as well as most of the additional heat being trapped by global warming—it is undergoing some significant changes.

Marine heatwaves—prolonged periods of unusually —are one of those changes. These  are increasing in frequency around the globe and wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems.

As an oceanographer, I study the many ways oceans change—from week-to-week, year-to-year and, of course, over decades and centuries—to better understand the changes that are underway and the far-reaching impacts they may have on  and the communities that rely on them.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

U.S.-Canada dispute over fishing grounds focus of film

September 6, 2019 — Award-winning Boston filmmaker and journalist David Schwab Abel’s documentary “Lobster War: The Fight Over the World’s Richest Fishing Grounds,” about the conflict between the United States and Canada over waters that both countries have claimed since the end of the Revolutionary War, will be shown at 7 p.m. on Tuesday Sept. 10, in the Moore Auditiorium on the Schoodic Institute campus. Admission is free.

Abel, who was part of The Boston Globe team covering the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, covers fisheries and the environment for The Globe.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Upcoming Webinar: How Genomics Can Inform Fisheries Management

September 6, 2019 — The following was released by Lenfest Ocean Program:

Join the Lenfest Ocean Program on Wednesday, September 18 at 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm GMT for a webinar featuring Dr. Gavin Naylor of the University of Florida to discuss his project on thorny skate genomics in the North Atlantic.

Dr. Naylor and his team are using modern genomic tools to tease out the spatial population structure of thorny skates and to investigate factors that may have contributed to past changes in abundance. The findings could help managers determine the appropriate spatial scale for thorny skate management and lead to the development of effective conservation strategies across the North Atlantic. The project began in 2017.

Download the project fact sheet to learn more.

Register for the webinar

Another GBP 1 billion year for UK fishing fleet but profits fall

August 22, 2019 — The turnover achieved by the United Kingdom’s fishing fleet reached GBP 1 billion (USD 1.2 billion, EUR 1.1 billion) for the second consecutive year in 2018, although external factors such as fuel cost, weather, and the political landscape have led to a fall in profits, new figures released by seafood public body Seafish showed.

Seafish’s report, “Economics of the UK Fishing Fleet 2018,” which analyzes the performance of the catching sector and is based on the most recent annual accounts available for fishing vessels, also confirmed that operating costs for U.K. vessels increased by 2 percent last year to GBP 759 million (USD 922.9 million, EUR 832.6 million).

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Canada’s Nova Scotia province beefs up aquaculture escape rules

August 20, 2019 — The Canadian province of Nova Scotia is moving forward with aquaculture management regulations intended to make it more difficult for fish to escape from net pens and easier to trace escaped fish to their original farms later, bringing the new rules into effect last week, the CBC reports.

The news service quotes Keith Colwell, Nova Scotia’s minister of fisheries and aquaculture, as saying that the changes approved by his cabinet follow an earlier report by a committee looking at the issue of fish containment.

The tracking options including testing DNA or tagging fish, while other changes include rules on making sure fish pens are strong enough to withstand bad weather, requiring operators have farm management plans and creating separate ocean bottom assessment requirements for shellfish-based aquaculture projects.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Watch as a response team helps partially untangle a right whale

August 8, 2019 — A right whale received some extra help off the coast of Cape Cod as a response team partially disentangled him Aug. 2.

“Despite a horrific entanglement, the whale was highly mobile,” according to the Center for Coastal Studies.

This particular whale, a male, was initially discovered July 4 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. He was spotted again July 19, and a team from the New England Aquarium was able to attach a telemetry buoy to the whale to track his movements, the center said.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Scientists Say More Right Whales Are Dying Off Canada As Climate Change Disrupts Food Sources

August 6, 2019 — For the past several years, including this one, endangered North Atlantic right whales appear to have been bypassing traditional feeding grounds off Maine’s coast, congregating instead off Canada in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where some are dying.

Scientists are working hard to understand that shift, while lobstermen here in Maine say it shows the whales’ risk of entanglement in their gear is overblown.

For decades, the North Atlantic right whales’ annual migration took them from the Florida coast up past Maine and into the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, where, from midsummer to fall, they would feast together on massive plumes of tiny crustaceans.

But these days, the whales are showing up far from their usual haunts.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Two percent of the world’s North Atlantic right whales have died in the last two months

August 1, 2019 — A Canadian surveillance plane was scanning the waters of Gulf of St. Lawrence when it made a grisly discovery: The carcass of a North Atlantic right whale, one of some 400 remaining in the world, was drifting in the current, much of its skin sloughed off.

From there, the news would only get worse. The next day, another dead right whale was spotted in the same body of water. And an 18-year-old right whale was entangled in fishing gear near Quebec, with a rope cutting into its head and over its blowhole.

It’s been a devastating summer for the endangered marine mammal. Since the start of June, eight North Atlantic right whales — or 2 percent of the global population — have been found dead in Canadian waters, alarming scientists, conservationists and government officials who had believed they had begun to make progress in protecting the imperiled species.

“It’s a horrifying step toward extinction,” said Regina Asmutis-Silvia, the executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation USA. “They’re a quiet, understated superhero, and we’re losing them.”

Necropsy results are still pending for most of the whales, but preliminary findings for three of them suggest ship strikes.

Particularly troubling about this year’s deaths is that four of the whales were breeding females, of which fewer than 100 remain. Calving rates have dropped 40 percent since 2010, according to scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, making the deaths of the females a major blow.

“This is currently very clearly not sustainable,” said Philip Hamilton, a research scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. “At this rate, in 20 years, we’re going to have no more breeding females, and the population will be effectively extinct.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

KATHLEEN SAVESKY: Working together, we can save the North Atlantic right whale

July 31, 2019 — Last century, governments around the world came together to reduce commercial whaling, culminating in 1982 with the International Whaling Commission’s worldwide moratorium on that cruel and outmoded practice. Since the ban, cooperation among governments, conservationists, researchers and others have led to impressive recoveries for many threatened whale populations worldwide.

Today, just off our shores, Mainers face another historic threat to marine life that will require the same kind of commitment and creativity to solve.

Unfortunately, the North Atlantic right whale, a species whose ancient migratory pathway leads through Maine’s waters, is in crisis. The fate of this species, of which an estimated 411 individuals and fewer than 100 breeding females remain, depends not only on increased action from the governments of the U.S. and Canada, but also on the cooperation, coordination and creative collaboration of the fishing industry and responsible conservationists.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News

Following the food trail to help right whales

July 25, 2019 — Scientists are gathering data on a flea-sized, fat-rich organism that could be key to predicting where North Atlantic right whales venture in their search for food in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.

A team from Dalhousie University and the University of New Brunswick is taking samples of copepods—a tiny zooplankton that is the primary food source for the massive  who scoop them up in dense patches.

Hansen Johnson, a Ph.D. candidate in Dalhousie’s Department of Oceanography, says the information could help indicate where the whales may travel as they seek out food and better protect them against their : ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.

“It’s driven by this pressing need to figure out where  are going to be so management measures can be as effective as possible,” he says. “We think the whales are coming here to feed, so if we can find the food we can find the whales.”

Read the full story at PHYS.org