Saving Seafood

Black Sea Bass Sensitive to Ocean Noise in Wind Energy Development Areas

October 27, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Scientists looking at the effects of underwater pile driving and construction noise on sea life have found that black sea bass can hear these sounds. The noise may interfere with their natural behavior.

Their study is the first to look at the impact of ocean noise on this fish species. It found that younger fish were more sensitive to sounds than older fish. The frequencies at which the fish are most sensitive to sound directly overlap with frequencies of human-produced noise pollution. This noise comes from activities like shipping and the underwater construction required for offshore wind farms.

“No one knew for sure how much black sea bass can hear and how that changes as they age,” said Beth Phelan, a fishery biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s laboratory at Sandy Hook, New Jersey and a co-author of the study. “We do know that black sea bass are attracted to underwater structures, and have anecdotal information that they move away from noise. We had to first determine the range of sounds they can hear by giving them a type of hearing test, much like we do to humans.”

Black sea bass are a commercially and recreationally important fish in the Mid-Atlantic Bight, the coastal region from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina to southern New England. Wind farms planned in the region overlap with current black sea bass habitat, exposing fish to construction and operational noises. Pile driving, for example, produces sounds that might stress fish, impacting their choice of habitat, feeding, social interaction and reproduction.

Read the full release here

Long-Running Plankton Survey to Resume in the Gulf of Maine

October 23, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

A new agreement between NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, England and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will allow a plankton survey to resume. The survey was originally conducted across the Gulf of Maine from 1961 to 2017.

NOAA Fisheries is providing funding for the survey through the NOAA Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region, hosted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The Marine Biological Association manages merchant vessel-based plankton surveys around the world. The association will run and maintain the resumed Gulf of Maine survey through 2024 under this agreement.

“Continuing a long-term time series like the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey is essential to understanding the impact of climate change to marine ecosystems,” said Chris Melrose, a research oceanographer at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s laboratory in Narragansett, Rhode Island and NOAA representative on the agreement.

“Many marine species are shifting their distributions as ocean waters warm,” explained Melrose. “Because plankton are an important food source for many species, including the endangered North Atlantic right whale, knowing about changes in the plankton helps us to understand other changes we see in the ecosystem.”

Read the full release here

Lobstermen: Documents Reveal ‘Catastrophic Impact’ Right Whale Protections Could Have On Industry

October 19, 2020 — Newly released documents by Maine’s Department of Resources are providing a glimpse of what federal action to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales could look like — including the closure of extensive areas of offshore ocean to lobstering.

In an August letter to the head of the agency that reviews proposed federal regulations, DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher asked for a meeting to go over options for reducing the risk of right whales becoming dangerously entangled in lobster trap gear and rope.

That was after conversations with the federal Northeast Fisheries Science Center that brought to light a proposal that could put big swaths of ocean off-limits to lobstering — in federal waters known as Lobster Conservation Management Areas, or LCMAs.

LCMA 1, in particular, is heavily fished by Maine lobster boats.

“The concern was those areas in Area 3 could come across to Area 1 if, in fact, we don’t meet our risk reduction target,” Keliher says.

Read the full story at Maine Public

NOAA Supports American Lobster and Jonah Crab Research Fleet Led by Fishermen

October 14, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The Lobster and Jonah Crab Research Fleet, organized by the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF), was established in 2013. It has collected biological data from nearly 160,000 American lobsters and about 90,000 Jonah crabs from the Gulf of Maine and south to the Mid-Atlantic.

In September, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center provided funding to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to support the research fleet’s work.

“I am thrilled that we were able to work with the Commission to provide support for the Lobster and Jonah Crab Research Fleet,” says Anna Mercer, Science Center  Cooperative Research Branch Chief. “The project exemplifies the value of working with fishermen to address science needs and has tangible impacts on the stock assessments and management of these valuable species. I look forward to following along as this research continues and expands.”

Read the full release here

Meet the Fishermen Involved in Cooperative Research

October 8, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s works with our region’s commercial fishing community to collect data that help us better understand ocean ecosystems and improve fisheries management. Their partnership is critical to the future of sustainable fisheries in our region. It helps us feed data-hungry climate models, estimate fishing effort and catch, and understand potential conflicts with wind energy areas. Here are just a few of our commercial fishing partners helping to make that happen.

As a bonus, we asked our commercial fishing partners to share their best seafood tips. Cooking seafood at home can be tricky, but with their tips, you’ll find it a lot easier and stress free!

Read the full release here

Call for Butterfish & Squid Working Group Members

October 6, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

We are currently soliciting working group members for both the butterfish and Illex squid research track stock assessments.  The research track peer review meeting will occur in November 2021.

If you are interested in being a member of either working group, please fill out the online questionnaire (a Google form) by October 16, 2020.

The specific tasking for the butterfish and Illex squid working groups is detailed in the questionnaire.

The Role of Working Groups in Northeast Fishery Stock Assessment

Working groups carry out the analytical work required for the stock assessment or topic, including developing and implementing the research plan and terms of reference that are provided by the Northeast Region Coordinating Council.

Questions?

Contact Michele Traver, Northeast Fisheries Science Center

Predator-prey interaction study reveals more food does not always mean more consumption

September 30, 2020 — Scientists at the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center have developed an unusually rich picture of who is eating whom off the Northeastern United States. The findings, published recently in Fish and Fisheries, provide a close look at fish feeding habits for 17 fish species, predators, and their prey.

The predators are divided into 48 predator-size categories, and 14  species. Fish predators included Atlantic cod, Atlantic herring, haddock, goosefish, pollock, spiny dogfish, winter flounder, and yellowtail founder among others. Prey species included forage fish, squid, zooplankton, shrimp-like crustaceans, shellfish, brittle stars, sand dollars, and sea urchins.

“We have the largest, continuous dataset of fish feeding habits in the world at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and that enabled us to do a study of this scale and scope,” said Brian Smith, a food habits researcher at the center and lead author of the study. “We focused on common and important prey for the many predatory fishes of interest, and hopefully filled in some gaps in information relating prey availability to predation.”

Feeding patterns within and among different groups of fishes vary by the size of the fish, the abundance or density of the prey, and other factors. Researchers who study  need to account for this predation in their models. Few studies, however, have looked simultaneously at the feeding patterns among different groups of predatory fish—fish feeders, plankton feeders, and benthic or bottom feeders. The study also looked at how those groups interact with their prey throughout the water column.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

2020 NEFSC Fall Ecosystem Monitoring Cruise Cancelled

September 24, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries is cancelling the Northeast Fisheries Science Center 2020 Fall Ecosystem Monitoring Survey. The survey would have been conducted by the NOAA Ship Henry Bigelow, which is scheduled to begin a required drydock maintenance period on November 23, 2020, in Galveston, Texas. It is an 11-day transit from the ship’s homeport in Newport, Rhode Island, to the maintenance facility in Texas.

The maintenance is scheduled to be completed by February 19, 2021, positioning the ship to start the Spring 2021 Bottom Trawl Survey, as scheduled. Completing the Spring Bottom Trawl Survey is one of the highest priority surveys for the NEFSC in 2021.

The Fall Ecosystem Monitoring Survey captures seasonal changes in the ocean environment, information used for multiple scientific inquiries. Over its 33-year history, some seasons have been missed and the number of annual surveys has varied. Analytical methods have been developed to bridge these data gaps. Assuming surveys occur as planned in 2021, researchers can bridge the gap in 2020 data using these methods.

Read the full release here

Computers Now “See” Animals on the Ocean Bottom

September 8, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s annual sea scallop research survey uses a towed sampling device called the HabCam. It collects approximately 5 million images of the ocean bottom off the Northeast United States. Scientists and volunteers then manually examine an astonishing 100,000 of these images, roughly 2 percent of the number gathered. They focus on identifying just four targets: sea scallops, fish, crabs, and whelks.

So, a wealth of data is going uncollected owing to the sheer volume available and just how labor-intensive pulling it out of images can be.

Researchers have turned toward finding ways for machines to help identify sea life in these images, faster and more efficiently than humans can. This would improve population data for sea scallops. By more thoroughly examining each image, all kinds of information about other sea life and their habitats can also be captured.

Enter Dvora Hart, an operations research analyst at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. Hart has been at the forefront of estimating sea scallop populations numbers from images taken by devices like the HabCam. The upcoming 2020 sea scallop assessment will once again use improved population data collected from images.

“HabCam gives us photos of animals in their natural environment without disturbing them; however, much of the information in the images is not collected because human annotators can only mark a small percentage of the available images,” said Hart. “Automated annotators can mark all the images and, given proper training, can identify a multitude of different targets—not just sea scallops, fish, crabs and whelks.”

Hart is part of an interdisciplinary team that developed the world’s first advanced automated image analysis software for the marine environment. The Video and Image Analytics for the Marine Environment, VIAME for short, uses convolutional neural networks—a recent advance in artificial intelligence. These networks  teach computers to recognize species and features of their habitats in the images taken by the HabCam.

The work is so significant that Hart and her team won a 2019 Department of Commerce gold medal for their work. This recognition is the highest honor award offered to department employees.

Read the full release here

NMFS, fishermen partners launch ‘plan C’ survey in Gulf of Maine

September 3, 2020 — With their regular fisheries surveys thwarted by covid-19 precautions, researchers from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and a pair of Massachusetts fishing vessels have embarked on a three-week longline survey to compensate with new technology.

The 50-foot Mary Elizabeth out of Scituate and the 40-foot Tenacious II homeported at East Dennis have carried scientists on the Gulf of Maine longline research survey for six years, collecting data at 45 stations, according to a description of the program from NMFS officials.

The effort targets areas of rough bottom, where fish typically hide and are hard to sample with trawl gear. Covid-19 has complicated fisheries surveys off every U.S. coast, with NMFS cancel\ling many regularly scheduled 2020 research cruises over crew health and safety concerns.

That trend likewise closed the usual spring window for the Gulf of Maine longline survey.

“When it was clear we’d not be able to do our usual spring survey, we looked for ways to make the best of it,” said Anna Mercer, chief of the Center’s Cooperative Research Branch.

Read the full story at National Fisherman