Pacific Ocean Archives - Saving Seafood

China Eyes 4 Unsecured U.S. Marine National Monuments In The Pacific

August 10, 2022 — In the deep Pacific Ocean, America’s four enormous Marine National Monuments are under siege by China. More than just ecological gems, the sprawling refuges are also underappreciated national security resources, offering quiet hiding places for America’s missile submarines, out-of-the-way testing-grounds, and training areas for various U.S. Defense Department assets.

In total, America’s deep-ocean National Monuments lay claim to almost 1.2 million square miles of pristine ocean, and China, as it pours billions of dollars into seizing much of the 1.4 million square mile South China Sea, is already looking to grab other unsecured Pacific territories, positioning to compromise the sanctity of American’s big Marine preserves. To prevent international encroachment, poaching and other sovereignty-degrading insults, America’s fragile Pacific frontiers need far more dedicated wildlife management and enforcement resources.

The current marine monument managers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with NOAA, are insufficiently resourced to manage over a million square miles of strategic ocean. Aside from bulking up their small law enforcement ranks, both agencies can use more funding for timely intelligence support, and procuring drones, helicopters, and some larger enforcement craft to better detect, track, document and then intercept and prosecute illegal activity in the deep Pacific.

Read the full article at Forbes

Hawai’i Longliners Partner with Researchers to Chart Marlin Migration in the Pacific

August 10, 2022 — The following was released by the Pacific Islands Fisheries Group and the Large Pelagics Research Center:

The most comprehensive effort to date to characterize striped marlin (Kajikia audax) movements in the Central North Pacific has revealed unexpectedly broad movements among tracked specimens, with some traveling to the east coast of Australia or halfway to California from their dispersal points around Hawai‘i.

The original research, funded by a NOAA Saltonstall-Kennedy Program grant, was conducted by scientists associated with the Hawai‘i-based Pacific Islands Fisheries Group (PIFG) and the Large Pelagics Research Center (LPRC) in Massachusetts. It was recently published across two papers in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

The papers’ findings could inform future fisheries management measures affecting striped marlin, at a time when K. audax – a top incidental catch of the longline fishery – is considered overfished in the Western and Central North Pacific.

“There is a major lack of information on the movement and ecology of striped marlin in the Central North Pacific,” said co-author and LPRC Director Molly E. Lutcavage.

“The last dedicated study of striped marlin in the Central North Pacific was almost two decades ago, and involved only a handful of marlin captured by recreational, or sport, fishers.”

Lead author Chi Hin Lam, Clayward Tam and Lutcavage partnered with commercial vessels belonging to the Hawaii Longline Association to deploy 31, $4,000 popup archival satellite tags (PSATs) on striped marlin between 2016 and 2019. Tam’s cooperative, science-based relationships with skilled longline captains made the partnerships successful.

“This is another example of the Hawaii longline vessels playing a significant role in cooperative research with leading scientists,” said Eric Kingma, Executive Director of the Hawai’i Longline Association (HLA). “We have a long history of scientific collaboration and our fleet has served as a research platform for decades. HLA congratulates the authors on their important findings and looks forward to working with PIFG and other scientists on future fisheries management and marine conservation research.”

The PSATs recorded vast horizontal movements throughout the Pacific Ocean, challenging previously-held notions that striped marlin are highly localized in their regional, coastal aggregations.

The tagged marlin, which were tracked for up to one year, routinely crossed multiple fisheries management boundaries and ocean features like seamounts and fracture zones.

One tagged marlin, PG01, made a trans-Pacific journey not previously observed for its species. Having been tagged in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, PG01 eventually made its way thousands of miles to the central east coast of Australia.

“We didn’t expect a tag showing up off Australia,” Lam said. “I would say that was 50% luck and 100% hard work. Consulting with our captains and tagging partners docked at Pier 38 in Honolulu and providing first-hand training for scientific tagging paid off.”

The tags also showed the striped marlin spent 38 and 81% of their day and night, respectively, in the top five meters of the water column.

The papers’ horizontal and vertical movement data is important for fisheries managers and stock assessment scientists, who require timely, high-quality biological and habitat data to inform population modeling and stock status.

Such data also helps identify best practices to support sustainable harvest, which could include mandated live release and time-area restrictions.

“Longline fisheries targeting tuna and swordfish benefit from any scientific information that helps to reduce unintended interaction with non-targeted catch like marlin, while pursuing economic returns on targeted catch of tuna and swordfish,” Lutcavage said.

In addition to monitoring tagged fish, researchers collected fin clips from Hawai‘i-landed striped marlin. Genetic analyses of 55 striped marlin were assigned to two genetic groups: Australia, New Zealand and Hawai‘i (19 individuals) and Hawai‘i alone (36 individuals), suggesting the Hawai‘i-based longline fleet interacted with individuals from multiple populations.

Lam, Tam and Lutcavage believe more PSAT efforts and genetics analyses are called for, to fill in the scientific gaps underscored by their latest striped marlin research. Improved technology and knowledge of the species’ biology, physiology and life history will better inform management measures for the sustainable harvest of bigeye tuna and swordfish, and a reduction of incidental catch of non-target species like the striped marlin.

Nearly 100,000 pounds of debris and ghost nets removed from reefs off Hawaii by freedivers

August 4, 2022 — A team of free divers removed nearly 100,000 pounds of debris and ghost nets from reefs and beaches off of Hawaii.

Team members with the Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project (PMDP), a Hawaii-based non-profit organization, returned to Honolulu on Saturday aboard the 185-ft ship M/V Imua cleared 97,295 pounds of marine debris — including 86,000 pounds of ghost nets — from reefs and beaches of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (Northwestern Hawaiian Islands).

Ghost nets, or large, tangled masses of discarded fishing nets, get caught on shallow coral reefs of the Hawaiian Islands, which smother and break living coral colonies. The nets also threaten endangered marine wildlife.

Read the full article at KITV

HAWAII: Day without ahi affects Honolulu restaurants and customers

July 25, 2022 — A Manoa Poke Shop is back in business after an Ahi shortage forced them to close for a day earlier this week. Restaurants and wholesalers tell KITV4 no Ahi ships came in on Thursday.

Off the Hook Poke Market was deliciously busy Saturday. The same cannot be said for their Thursday.

The President of the Hawaii Longline Fishing Association, which represents commercial fishermen, is quick to dispel rumors Hurricane Darby had anything to do with the drought. Ahi fishing has been having a down year, but he thinks something else may be at work.

Still the fisherman, Off the Hook, and it’s customers are all optimistic. “By nature fishermen are positive thinking when it comes to fishing. the next fish is always going to be on the next hook,” said Martin.

Read the article at KITV

The US has spent more than $2B on a plan to save salmon. The fish are vanishing anyway.

May 25, 2022 — The fish were on their way to be executed. One minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine.

Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor. Hatchery workers in splattered chest waders gutted globs of bright orange eggs from the dead females and dropped them into buckets, then doused them first with a stream of sperm taken from the dead males and then with an iodine disinfectant.

The fertilized eggs were trucked around the corner to an incubation building where over 200 stacked plastic trays held more than a million salmon eggs. Once hatched, they would fatten and mature in rectangular concrete tanks sunk into the ground, safe from the perils of the wild, until it was time to make their journey to the ocean.

Read the full story at OPB

Salmon travel deep into the Pacific. As it warms, many ‘don’t come back.’

March 30, 2022 — During a typical fall, almost a million chum salmon pour into Alaska’s Yukon River, a torrent of wild fish that has sustained the economy and Indigenous culture in the far north for generations. Last year, that run collapsed, with salmon trickling upstream at a 10th of normal levels, forcing the state to airlift frozen fish from other regions to feed the population.

About 400 miles to the south, in Bristol Bay, the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery set a record last year, with more than 66 million salmon returning to the rivers in the watershed. That total is expected to be broken again this year.

Salmon in the Pacific Ocean face dramatically different fates from one river system to the next. As the planet warms, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, scientists say changes in ocean conditions are helping drive these wild swings and collapses of key stocks. These North Pacific fish account for most of the world’s wild-caught salmon, and their survival has implications for economies and cultures around the Pacific Rim.

During her three decades as a government scientist, as climate change has intensified, Laurie Weitkamp has watched these fluctuations in salmon numbers become bigger and the models that predict how many salmon will return from sea become more unreliable.

“Salmon will go out, in what we think is a really good ocean, and then it collapses,” said Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration based in Oregon. “They don’t come back.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

International fleet studying North Pacific salmon populations

February 9, 2022 — The largest-ever ecosystem survey of salmon across the North Pacific Ocean is bringing together 60 scientists from five nations and a flotilla of four research vessels to learn more about increasingly extreme climate variability and its effects on salmon survival.

The USD 10 million (EUR 8.8 million) research effort was organized through the International Year of the Salmon, a project support by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, a treaty organization including the U.S., Canada, Russia, Japan, and South Korea that was originally created to control high-seas driftnetting for salmon. The 2022 Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition will engage in detailed sampling, using the four research vessels to scan areas 60 nautical miles apart on the high seas. Researchers hope the sea sweep can offer some explanation for fluctuations in salmon populations in reaction to big swings in ocean temperatures, and better predict the future of key salmon spawning populations affected by climate change.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Floating Wind Farms are About to Transform the Oceans

November 5, 2021 — Alla Weinstein did not invent the floating wind turbine. This is something she wanted to make clear early in our Zoom call, as if she were worried I’d give her too much credit. “I don’t need to invent. There are plenty of inventions,” she said. “But a lot of inventions die on the grapevine if they aren’t carried through.” What Weinstein does is carry them through.

For that, she does want credit. When I asked if she’d put the idea of floating offshore wind generation in the minds of California’s energy commissioners, she bristled cheerfully. “I would put it more strongly than that,” she said, shaking her auburn curls. “I didn’t give anyone ideas. I basically told them, ‘This is what needs to be done.’” The state needed clean energy, she reasoned, and she knew a couple of inventors with the technology to produce it: a floating platform designed to support a wind turbine on the surface of just about any large water body in the world.

If you haven’t been following the tortured saga of offshore wind power—or even if you have—you may not recognize how completely floating offshore wind technology stands to alter the global energy landscape. Just 10 years ago, installing offshore wind in the Eastern Pacific Ocean was technologically impossible: Conventional wind turbines typically sit atop giant steel cylinders called “monopiles,” which have to be driven into the ocean floor and rarely sink deeper than 100 feet. Other structures, known as “four-legged jackets,” can go as deep as 200 feet. But the continental shelf off California breaks fast and steep, dropping to depths of more than 600 feet not far from shore. Floating platforms, meanwhile, can sit on the surface of oceans thousands of feet deep, and can be assembled onshore and towed to their various destinations—as far out as transmission cables buried in the seafloor can extend back to land.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Australian fisheries declared free from overfishing

October 1, 2018 — Commonwealth fisheries in Australia, the Southern Ocean and the south Pacific managed by Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) have been assessed as not subject to overfishing.

It is the fifth year in a row the fisheries, which include fisheries for southern bluefin tuna, toothfish, skipjack tuna, billfish, scale fish, squid and shark, have been been declared free from overfishing.

The assessments reported by Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) in its status reports 2018, assessed 95 species that are either solely or jointly managed by AFMA.

AFMA’s CEO, James Findlay, said the result is a credit to the Australian seafood industry, scientists and fisheries managers.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Declining species of shark added to endangered species list

January 31, 2018 — The federal government says the oceanic whitetip shark will be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act to help the species recover.

Scientists say the sharks have declined by 80 percent to 90 percent in the Pacific Ocean since the 1990s. They’ve fallen 50 percent to 85 percent in the Atlantic Ocean since the 1950s.

Conservationists blame commercial fishing and demand for their fins.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times