Saving Seafood

Foraging seals enable scientists to measure fish abundance across the vast Pacific Ocean

February 14, 2025 — Over the past 60 years, marine biologists at UC Santa Cruz have monitored the behavior of northern elephant seals that journey to nearby Año Nuevo Natural Reserve. With the seals gathering on the beach by the thousands to breed and molt, generations of researchers have been able to amass more than 350,000 observations on over 50,000 seals.

With the help of powerful technologies and the intrepidness to get close enough to carefully tag, weigh, and observe these loud and lumbering marine mammals, the long-term research project has extensive historical and real-time data on their fitness, foraging success, at-sea behavior, and population dynamics.

Roxanne Beltran is next in line to lead the project, and her new study being published as the February 14 cover story for Science reports that seals can essentially act as “smart sensors” for monitoring fish populations in the ocean’s eerily dim “twilight zone.” This is the layer of water between 200 and 1,000 meters below sea level, where sunlight penetration all but stops, and today’s ocean monitoring tools cannot reach with ease. Ships and floating buoys only allow measurements of a tiny fraction of the ocean, while satellites can’t measure below the surface where fish occur.

Importantly, this zone holds the majority of the planet’s fish biomass. Because this is also where the seals feed, seals whose foraging success is tracked can provide a previously impossible way to measure the availability of fish populations across a vast ocean. This, Beltran said, represents a significant discovery because humans are considering harvesting these fish populations to satisfy humanity’s ever-increasing need for protein-rich foods.

Read the full article at UC Santa Cruz

Filipino fishermen claim they were abandoned by US company, fight for allegedly withheld wages

September 17, 2024 — A group of Filipino fishermen are continuing to deal with the fallout of allegedly being abandoned by their employer in a port in the U.S. state of Washington.

The group of Filipino fishermen, dubbed the “United 6,” claim they were abandoned at Westport Marina, Washington, after signing on to work for California-based McAdam’s Fish. The fishermen claim they worked a tuna season for the company and were then left at the dock when the fishing boats docked at the marina in September 2023.

According to the United 6, the fishermen signed for employment with Manila, Philippines-based hiring agency Pescadores International and worked the tuna season for four months in the Pacific Ocean. At the end of the season, the boats docked at the marina to unload, after which all but one captain left the boats, leaving 24 Filipino fishermen on board unable to come ashore as they did not have U.S. visas.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

As heat waves warm the Pacific Ocean, effects on marine life remain murky

September 29, 2023 — Scientists are pretty good at recognizing marine heat waves: A global network of thousands of oceanic buoys and orbiting satellites allow them to see, in real time, ocean surface temperatures, changing currents and storm systems as they develop, move or stall from the Antarctic to the North Pole.

What’s harder to see is what’s happening to the marine ecosystems below — to the fish, invertebrates, plants and mammals.

“There’s sort of a disconnect between temperature and how something like temperature impacts species distribution patterns or how fisheries are operating or how protected species might be responding,” said Jarrod Santora, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “There’s a big jump between what we identify as a temperature anomaly and process in the ocean.”

Some animals may move down the water column to darker, colder waters. Others may move north — or south — depending upon where the cooler waters are. Many may flourish; others will perish.

And some may not be affected at all, said Santora.

“We’re just looking at temperature anomalies that focus on the skin of the ocean; we don’t know what’s happening inside,” he said.

Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times

Scientists detected 5,000 sea creatures nobody knew existed. It’s a warning.

May 26, 2023 — There are bright, gummy creatures that look like partially peeled bananas. Glassy, translucent sponges that cling to the seabed like chandeliers flipped upside down. Phantasmic octopuses named, appropriately, after Casper the Friendly Ghost.

And that’s just what’s been discovered so far in the ocean’s biggest hot spot for future deep-sea mining.

To manufacture electric vehicles, batteries and other key pieces of a low-carbon economy, we need a lot of metal. Countries and companies are increasingly looking to mine that copper, cobalt and other critical minerals from the seafloor.

A new analysis of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast mineral-rich area in the Pacific Ocean, estimates there are some 5,000 sea animals completely new to science there. The research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology is the latest sign that underwater extraction may come at a cost to a diverse array of life we are only beginning to understand.

Read the full article at Washington Post

Biden administration proposes new Pacific marine sanctuary

March 27, 2o23 — The Biden administration announced March 21 that Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo will consider creating a new marine sanctuary that would protect roughly 770,000 square miles in the mid-Pacific Ocean.

The new sanctuary would be created around the Pacific Remote Islands using the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, and according to a release from the administration is intended to continue Biden’s commitment to conserving 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030 – commonly referred to as the “30 by 30” plan. The full conservation area would represent the largest sanctuary of its kind in the world, and would include the existing Remote Island Marine National Monument and “currently unprotected submerged lands and waters.”

“Such protections would encompass areas unaddressed by previous administrations so all areas of U.S. jurisdiction around the islands, atolls, and reef of the Pacific Remote Islands will be protected,” a White House press release said.

Advocates for the protection said the waters are home to endangered species, and  Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) also came out in support of the effort.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman 

Transition into El Nino could lead to record heat around globe

January 30, 2023 — When the world’s largest and deepest ocean basin warms, satellites will be busy over the Pacific Ocean detecting analogous water temperatures but also, if history repeats itself, landmasses across the globe will have to deal with heat that could be record-breaking.

Since reliable technology started keeping track of world temperatures in the 1950s, the warmest year of any decade were periods dominated by an El Niño event, and the coldest were from La Niñas.

“During El Niño, unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the central/eastern tropical Pacific lead to increased evaporation and cooling of the ocean. At the same time, the increased cloudiness blocks more sunlight from entering the ocean. When water vapor condenses and forms clouds, heat is released into the atmosphere. So, during El Niño, there is less heating of the ocean and more heating of the atmosphere than normal,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts wrote in a 2022 ENSO blog.

Read the full article at Fox Weather

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL CAUSE PACIFIC’S LOW-OXYGEN ZONE TO EXPAND EVEN MORE BY 2100

November 30, 2022 — For thousands of kilometers along the western coasts of the Americas, low-oxygen waters known as oxygen minimum zones stretch out into the Pacific. In part due to climate change, this oxygen-starved region is likely to get wider and deeper, expanding by millions of cubic kilometers by the end of the century, models in a new study predict. Larger oxygen minimum zones threaten marine ecosystems and species, along with the industries that depend on them.

Oxygen minimum zones are located 200 to 2000 meters (656 to 6560 feet) beneath the surface, in the “shadow regions” of the tropical ocean, and are driven by factors such as water temperature, nutrient supply and ocean circulation patterns. Predicting how they will respond to climate change has proven difficult and the Pacific oxygen minimum zone, which is the largest in the world, is no exception. Part of the difficulty in predicting changes arises from disagreements on how to define “low” oxygen levels, which the new study explores.

Read the full article at AGU

Helping Hawaii: Non-profit removes 200,000 pounds of debris from Pacific

November 17, 2022 — Marine debris is an accumulating problem for Hawaiian wildlife at 57 tons per year, so one non-profit group is working to give their water and wildlife the best chance for long-term survival.

“Anything from motorcycle helmets to car bumpers to baseball bats and recently a lot of Wilson volleyballs is, believe it or not, due to a container spill that happened near Hawaii,” Kevin O’Brien told FOX Weather Monday. “And this time, we actually found a lifeboat that was part of a fire at sea from a large container ship.”

O’Brien is the president and co-founder of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project (PMDP), a non-profit dedicated to cleaning up the Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Monument. He organized and trained a group of 16 free divers to collect dangerous debris from a 185-foot ship. Animals eat the plastic and get entangled in it.

Read the full article at Fox Weather

Mission to remove tons of garbage from marine sanctuary underway

September 14, 2022 –A million-dollar mission to remove garbage from an important marine sanctuary is underway.

Kevin O’Brien, founder of Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project, and his crew of 16 are preparing for their fifth mission to clean the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Sanctuary in the Northern Pacific, more than 1,000 miles away from Honolulu.

“There’s the main Hawaiian islands,” O’Brien explained pointing at a map. “Big Island, Kauai — and then we’re headed up here. This little string of tiny dots is Papahanaumokuakea.”

They depart Thursday for the month-long expedition.

According to O’Brien, they’ll likely return with garbage weighing as much as a small commercial jet airplane. He said it will fill three shipping containers and be piled in a huge mountain of garbage on the deck.

Read the full article at KHON

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