Saving Seafood

Research on environmental DNA in salmon monitoring could have economic benefits

January 22, 2019 — Each year wild salmon return to the streams in which they were born to spawn and die. Salmon fishery managers must ensure that adequate numbers of fish return each year to spawn and produce offspring for future harvest. It is expensive and labor intensive to count returning salmon, especially in remote streams.

Researchers at the University of Alaska Southeast, Auke Bay Laboratories, Oregon State University, the UK and China have found that  DNA collected in water samples from Auke Creek can be used to infer the number of salmon passing upstream to spawn. Two of the authors on the published paper who contributed to the research are former UAS Biology students now in graduate school, Josh Russell and Donovan Bell. Russell is currently enrolled in the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences program, and Bell is in the biology graduate program at the University of Montana.

This form of DNA, termed “environmental DNA” or “eDNA”, can be collected from water samples. Water samples are then filtered and probed using molecular genetic techniques to quantify the amount of DNA belonging to each salmon species, providing insights into the number of salmon upstream.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

OSU scientist studies slimy new way to count salmon

January 3, 2019 — Scientists have published a novel method for counting Pacific salmon – analyzing DNA from the slime the fish leave behind in their spawning streams.

The study, funded by The National Geographic Society, is published in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources.

“When we analyzed the environmental DNA sloughed into water from salmon tissues, including mucus and skin cells, we got very accurate counts,” said Taal Levi, an ecologist at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. “This is a major first step for more informed salmon management decisions because it opens up the possibility to affordably monitor many more streams than the few that are currently monitored.”

Pacific salmon are a keystone resource in the Pacific Northwest, with an economic impact of well over $500 million each year in Alaska alone. Currently, spawning salmon are counted at just a few streams due to the reliance on human counters, or in rare cases, sonar. Five species of Pacific salmon – pink, chum, sockeye, coho, and chinook – are distributed through more than 6,000 streams in southeast Alaska alone. More than 1,000 of those streams host spawning salmon.

Salmon are anadromous: They migrate from home streams to the ocean as juveniles, and return a few years later as adults to spawn. Anadromous fish such as salmon provide a straightforward scenario for testing whether environmental DNA (eDNA) can be used to count fish, because large numbers of salmon release their DNA as they pass a fixed sampling point, either as they swim up a river or stream as inbound adults or swim downstream as outbound juveniles.

In many rivers and streams, including the majority of freshwater systems in Alaska, adult salmon returning to spawn are poorly monitored, as are fry and smolt production resulting from spawning salmon.

For the study, researchers collected water samples in 2015 and 2016 near the Auke Creek research weir, nearly 16 kilometers north of Juneau. Weirs consist of a series of closely spaced bars across an entire stream to prevent the passage of salmon, except through a single, narrow gate over which a human observer tallies and identifies salmon as they file through.

The Auke Creek weir, cooperatively operated by the National Marine Fisheries Service, in collaboration with the University of Alaska and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, is known as one of the most accurate fish counters in the world, Levi said.

Read the full story at KTVZ

U.S. Coast Guard will help researchers track whales along the West Coast

October 24, 2018 — The Oregon crab industry is putting up money to launch a new research study on where whales swim and feed along the Pacific Coast. The study stems from growing concern West Coast-wide about whales getting tangled in fishing gear.

Many of the confirmed entanglements in the last few years involved whales snagging crab pot lines.

The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to underwrite the first year of a three-year aerial survey of humpbacks, gray whales and blue whales off the coast. Oregon State University researcher Leigh Torres said the Marine Mammal Institute, which she leads, and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife hope to win a federal grant to cover years two and three.

“One of the best known ways to reduce whale entanglements is to reduce the overlap between where fishing gear is and where whales are,” Torres said. “In the state of Oregon, we have pretty good information about where the fishing gear is, but not that great information about whale distribution in our waters. So that is really the knowledge gap that this project wants to fill.”

Torres said the best way to track whales is typically from the air.

“But hiring a plane to fly regular surveys monthly over a long period can be quite costly,” Torres said in an interview Tuesday. “So we were trying to brainstorm about ways to do that more cost effectively. And we had the idea to reach out to the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Torres said she was uncertain if the Coast Guard would let whale spotters ride along on routine helicopter patrols twice per month. She was delighted when her request was greeted positively.

Read the full story at Spokane Public Radio

 

Antarctic Penguins Find an Unlikely Ally: Fishermen

July 11, 2018 — In the waters off the northern tip of the world’s southernmost continent, one of the most important creatures is also the most profitable: pinky-length Antarctic krill.

These swarming, translucent, shrimp-like creatures are eaten by almost everything here—fish, penguins, seals, and whales. But krill also support a multimillion-dollar global fishing industry. They get sucked into nets and ground into meal to feed aquarium fish or farm-raised salmon and get squeezed for their oil, which is used in pharmaceuticals, including in the United States.

Now, with climate change rearranging life along the western Antarctic Peninsula, scientists and marine advocates have been warning that wildlife—particularly penguins—are under far too much stress. Krill fishing, they say, could be making things worse.

Monday, after years of negotiations, a majority of the fishing industry formally agreed to stop hauling in krill from around the peninsula’s troubled penguin colonies. The industry also committed to helping set up a network of marine protected areas in coming years to better protect marine animals.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Study finds tuna fishermen who fish along ocean fronts can significantly boost revenue

February 21, 2018 — CORVALLIS, Ore. – Savvy Northwest anglers have long known that when patches of warm Pacific Ocean water drift closer to shore each summer, it’s time to chase after the feisty and tasty albacore tuna.

Now a new study confirms that tuna are more likely to be found in regions of the California Current System with certain oceanographic conditions – and that commercial fishermen who work those areas more frequently bring in up to three times the revenue of other tuna anglers.

Results of the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and led by Oregon State University, were published today in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

These oceanographic conditions are more complex than simply being warmer temperatures, said James Watson, an OSU marine ecologist and lead author on the study. Their technical name is Lagrangian Coherent Structures, though scientists often refer to them as “the skeletons of the sea.”

“Essentially they are physical ocean fronts where surface waters converge,” Watson said. “If you toss two tennis balls in the water and they converge quickly, it is considered a Lagrangian Coherent Structure, or LCS.”

“What we’ve found is that the stronger the convergence, the more likely it is to attract certain things, beginning with the aggregation of phytoplankton, which in turn attracts larger organisms like tuna – and, ultimately, tuna fishermen.”

The researchers sought to discover whether anglers were utilizing these LCSs and if so, whether it had an economic impact. They compiled data from a vessel monitoring system on the location of more than 1,000 fishing vessels every hour in the U.S. California Current Large Marine Ecosystem for a four-year period – a total of more than 340,000 trips. They then collected fisheries catch and price data.

Read the full story at KVAL

 

At The Water’s Edge: Embracing Science and Education As Key Local Industries

January 4, 2018 — Many rural Oregon towns share the same problems; the natural resources they traditionally based their economies on no longer support them, and isolation and limited funds often make solutions hard to come by. But how these communities grapple with these changes can vary.

JPR’s Liam Moriarty takes us to Port Orford, on the state’s south coast, to see how people in one fishing town are working to carve out a potential future.

About two miles south of Port Orford — and less than a mile off the beach — is a cluster of rocks and reefs. Sitting in the cabin of his fishing boat on the dock at the Port of Port Orford, Orion Ashdown says the area known as Redfish Rocks has been a favorite fishing ground.

For years, the abundance of species there drew Ashdown and other Port Orford commercial fishermen. But that ended in 2012, when the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife closed what had by then become the Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve. Now, the only fishing done there is for scientific research …

Leesa Cobb, with the non-profit Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, says the idea of closing a productive local fishing ground was at best, counterintuitive.

Read the full story at KLCC

 

Oceans May Host Next Wave Of Renewable Energy

November 15, 2017 — Think “renewable energy” and the wind and sun come to mind, but someday it may be possible to add ocean energy to that list.

The fledgling wave energy industry is getting a boost from the federal government. The Department of Energy is spending up to $40 million to build a wave energy test facility off the Oregon coast.

Wave energy has a long way to go before it’s ready to power the lights in your house. At this point, engineers aren’t even quite sure how best to capture the power of the water.

“We don’t know what the right kind of wave energy converter is,” says Belinda Batten, executive associate dean of the College of Engineering at Oregon State University.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio

 

Japanese Animals Are Still Washing Up in America After The 2011 Tsunami

Plastics and metals have made it much easier for invasive species to raft across oceans.

September 29, 2017 — On March 11, 2011, an unprecedentedly powerful earthquake struck the Tōhoku region of Japan. It destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings, wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, created a tsunami that reached 40 meters in height, and shifted the entire planet a few inches on its axis. But among these catastrophic consequences, there were also subtler ones. For example, the tsunami inundated a small blue-and-white fishing boat called the Sai-shou-maru, ripping it from its moorings and casting it out to sea.

The boat drifted eastward through the Pacific, never capsizing. Then, on March 22, 2013, a couple weeks after the two-year anniversary of the quake, it washed ashore on Long Beach, Washington. Its hull was encrusted with seaweed and barnacles, and one of its compartments was full of water. And living in that water were five striped beakfish. The fish were youngsters, just four inches long. They had probably been swept into the boat as larvae, and spent their entire lives growing up within this ersatz aquarium. For two years, the boat was their entire world.

Four of those fish were euthanized by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, but the fifth—now known as the “tsunami fish” was relocated to Oregon’s Seaside Aquarium. Its story astonished John Chapman, an ecologist at Oregon State University who studies aquatic invasive species. Somehow, this coastal species had endured a two-year, 4,000-mile voyage across the open ocean, in the tiniest of living spaces. “We said this couldn’t happen,” Chapman told OregonLive. “And nature is like: Oh yes it can.”

Of late, nature has been saying that to Chapman a lot.

In the last five years, he and his colleagues have documented 634 pieces of debris that were swept away by the Tōhoku tsunami and eventually washed up on the coasts of North America. And it hasn’t stopped coming yet. Between them, these bits of ocean-hopping junk carried 289 species that are typically found along Japanese coasts—a vast horde of sponges, sea stars, sea anemones, mussels, limpets, barnacles, and fish.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

OREGON: Tour shows value of commercial fisheries

June 5, 2017 — Positive news about successful local efforts to build and maintain a strong fishing community in Clatsop County jostled with concerns about attracting workers at the first ever Clatsop Commercial Fisheries Tour Wednesday.

The tour, conceived of and hosted by Oregon State University’s Oregon Sea Grant, drew approximately 100 people, introducing them to fishermen working in the county’s Dungeness crab and groundfish fisheries and taking them through seafood plants and boat yards in Astoria.

The overall message was positive. Fishermen, seafood processors and boat builders talked about the sustainability of Oregon’s fisheries, the economic benefit the industry provides to the community as a whole, and the well-paying jobs that still exist on boats and in fish processing plants. “It’s organic, it’s free-range … it’s diet-free, whatever,” joked Scott McMullen, of the Oregon Fishermen’s Cable Committee, about rockfish and how certain stocks like canary rockfish have recently been delisted.

Some troubles

But concerns crept in, too.

For example, a species like canary rockfish has been off-limits and off the market for so long on the West Coast that fishermen are “fighting to get back into the shelf space,” McMullen said. While they were absent, other markets and countries filled the void.

Managers at Da Yang Seafood and processing giant Pacific Coast Seafood talked about the difficulty of recruiting labor to the area. People don’t seem to understand that processing jobs can be well-paid, they said. Pacific Coast Seafood has started to recruit farther afield and made do with fewer employees, while Da Yang has looked into automation. The lack of affordable, short-term rental housing options for seasonal workers complicates hiring, too, they say.

Read the full story at The Daily Astorian

West Coast Ocean Acidification Rates Among Highest In World

June 2, 2017 — Carbon emissions aren’t just causing climate change, they’re having a profound effect on ocean chemistry.

Our oceans are becoming more acidic and this is a major threat to fisheries.

Researchers have now recorded some of the highest levels of ocean acidification in the world,  right off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

When oceans absorb carbon, they become more acidic, preventing oysters and tiny marine snails at the base of the food chain from forming shells.

A new study from Oregon State University documents ocean acidification off the coast of California and Oregon.

“What we didn’t know is that if you’re an animal living on the shore, how often do you see a bad day?” Francis Chan, a lead author, said. “And now because we have sensors that are actually taking a measurement of ocean PH every 10 minutes throughout the summer, we can start to build that picture.”

The study found that while there were persistent hotspots of destructive acid levels, there were also areas that stayed within healthy ranges.

Read the full story at Northwest Public Radio