Pacific Ocean Archives - Page 4 of 6

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

Coastal governors oppose Trump’s offshore drilling plan

January 5, 2018 — Governors along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts are opposing the Trump administration’s proposal to open almost all U.S. waters to oil and natural gas drilling.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Thursday a draft proposal that would allow offshore drilling for crude oil and natural gas on the Atlantic Coast and in the Arctic, reversing the Obama’s administration’s block in those areas. It also permits drilling along the Pacific Coast as well as more possibilities in the Gulf of Mexico. Under the plan, spanning the years 2019 to 2024, more than 90 percent of the total acres on the Outer Continental Shelf would be made available for leasing.

Zinke said the Interior Department has identified 47 potential lease sales, including seven in the Pacific and nine off the Atlantic coast. That would mark a dramatic shift in policy, not just from the Obama era. The last offshore lease sale for the East Coast was in 1983 and for the West Coast in 1984.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican and ally of President Trump, quickly said no thanks to Zinke’s plan, citing drilling as a threat to the state’s tourism industry.

Read the full story at the Washington Examiner

Trump proposes massive expansion of offshore drilling

January 4, 2018 — The Trump administration is proposing to greatly expand the areas available for offshore oil and natural gas drilling, including off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

In the first major step toward the administration’s promised expansion of offshore drilling, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said nearly all of the nation’s outer continental shelf is being considered for drilling, including areas off the coasts of Maine, California, Florida and Alaska.

The proposal, which environmentalists immediately panned as an environmental disaster and giveaway to the fossil fuel industry, is far larger than what was envisioned in President Trump’s executive order last year seeking a new plan for the future of auctions of offshore drilling rights. That order asked Zinke to consider drilling expansions in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

“This is a start on looking at American energy dominance and looking at our offshore assets and beginning a dialogue of when, how, where and how fast those offshore assets should be, or could be, developed,” Zinke told reporters Thursday.

Read the full story at The Hill

NOAA wants to fund more fish farming to offset trade gap

December 14, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — Federal marine regulators are making $450,000 available to try to foster more seafood farming on the East Coast.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it’s providing $450,000 to expand aquaculture operations and production off the eastern states. The agency says it wants to offset the U.S.’s $14 billion seafood trade deficit.

NOAA saying it’s looking to fund pilot projects for fish, shellfish, seaweed and other facets of the domestic aquaculture industry that it considers “newcomers.” It also wants to help develop environmentally sustainable ocean farming.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Times

Zinke backs shrinking more national monuments and shifting management of 10

December 7, 2017 — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Tuesday called on President Trump to shrink a total of four national monuments and change the way six other land and marine sites are managed, a sweeping overhaul of how protected areas are maintained in the United States.

Zinke’s final report comes a day after Trump signed proclamations in Utah that downsized two massive national monuments there — Bears Ears by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly 46 percent. The president had directed Zinke in April to review 27 national monuments established since 1996 under the Antiquities Act, which gives the president broad authority to safeguard federal lands and waters under threat.

In addition to the Utah sites, Zinke supports cutting Nevada’s Gold Butte and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou, though the exact reductions are still being determined. He also would revise the proclamations for those and the others to clarify that certain activities are allowed.

The additional monuments affected include Northeast Canyons and Seamounts in the Atlantic Ocean; both Rose Atoll and the Pacific Remote Islands in the Pacific Ocean; New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and Rio Grande Del Norte, and Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

LED Lights Show Promise for Decreasing Salmon Bycatch in West Coast Whiting Fishery

November 10, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Light-emitting diodes – LEDs – are proving effective for lowering bycatch in fisheries besides West Coast pink shrimp.

A study by the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Northwest Fisheries Science Center shows that LEDs are very effective in directing Chinook salmon to escape windows in Pacific hake trawl nets, according to a statement from the National Marine Fisheries Service. Chinook salmon bycatch in the hake fishery, the largest groundfish fishery on the West Coast, can be an issue; if too many Chinook salmon are caught, management measures may be implemented to conserve salmon stocks.

NMFS requested an Endangered Species Act Section 7 re-consultation on the take of salmon species in the West Coast groundfish fishery in 2013. Now, four years later, the biological opinion or “BiOp” and accompanying incidental take statement is scheduled to be completed in December.

However, avoiding salmon bycatch is an ongoing issue for the whiting fishery and the midwater rockfish fishery. The use of LEDs on the nets, similar to how they are used in the pink shrimp fishery to channel eulachon smelt out escape holes, may prove useful in the future. The LEDs researchers and fishermen used for this project were developed for use on longlines, designed for rugged use in the ocean environment.

The development of efficient, cost-effective LED technology has led to a growing list of innovative residential and industrial applications, according to the statement from NMFS. With NOAA Fisheries’ Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program funding, researchers found LEDs can play an important role in productive and sustainable fisheries as well.

Data show that Chinook salmon are much more likely to exit the nets where lights are placed—86 percent of escaped salmon used the well-lit, LED-framed openings. While further research is underway, the data suggest the LEDs can increase the salmon’s escapement overall, NMFS said.

Mark Lomeli, a researcher at the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, said the challenge was to develop a salmon excluder design to lower incidental salmon bycatch. He and other researchers worked with fishermen to use two sets of large, open escape windows that allowed salmon to swim out.

“Our data and video observations indicate that at deeper, darker depths where trawl nets go, light from the LEDs are enhancing the salmon’s ability to perceive the escape areas and the areas outside the nets,” Lomeli said in the NMFS report.

The key to keeping hake in and guide Chinook out is fish behavior. Salmon are stronger swimmers and can escape. By the time the whiting get to part of the net where the excluders are positioned, they are too fatigued to swim out.

Researchers said the technology could also be adapted for other fisheries, such as for reducing salmon bycatch in the Alaska pollock fishery.

“Many fishermen are aware of this technology now and use it if they think Chinook bycatch will be an issue,” Lomeli was quoted as saying in the statement. “It’s easy to use, relatively cheap, and widely available. You can easily clip the lights to the webbing of the net around the escape openings. With these research results in hand, the lights are on the shelf for them when they need them. We think these LEDs are low-hanging fruit for contributing to the recovery of this species, and can also play an important role in the stability of this fishery.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Eight Sustainable Seafood Businesses Win Top Honors at Fish 2.0 Finals

November 8, 2017 — PALO ALTO, Calif. — The following was released by Fish 2.0:

Fish 2.0 closed out its 2017 Innovation Forum today by awarding cash prizes to the eight seafood ventures earning the highest scores in this year’s Fish 2.0 business competition. The winners are simplifying supply chains while increasing income for fishers and farmers, bringing to market creative approaches to aquaculture production and traceability, and getting consumers excited about seafood.

Diverse panels of investor-judges chose the cash prize winners from among 22 presenters who came out on top in six regional and two global tracks. Judges picked the strongest business in each track based on the presenters’ 3-minute pitches and 5-minute question-and-answer sessions on stage at Stanford University. The winners by track are:

Sustainable Fishery Trade (Chile and Peru), a Lima, Peru–based social enterprise that works with artisanal fishers to provide high-quality, traceable seafood direct to restaurants.

Real Oyster Cult (New England), a Duxbury, Massachusetts, business that ships fresh oysters from all over North America direct to consumers overnight.

Didds Fishing Company (Pacific Islands), a Solomon Islands social enterprise that enables island communities to fish for premium bottom-water species offshore, relieving pressure on in-shore fisheries.

EnerGaia (Southeast Asia), a Bangkok-based company that farms spirulina, an algae superfood, on urban rooftops and in rural communities for use in a variety of food products.

Panacea Oyster Co-Op (South Atlantic and Gulf Coast Shellfish) of Spring Creek, Florida, which is restoring oyster farming in Apalachicola Bay by creating a unified brand and guaranteeing purchases to farmers.

Northline Seafoods (U.S. West Coast), an Alaska-based company whose unique floating processing facility eliminates waste and extends the shelf life of sustainable wild salmon.

ThisFish (Transparency and Traceability) a Vancouver, B.C., company whose traceability software helps seafood enterprises around the world record key supply chain data and improve business efficiency.

NovoNutrients (Supply Chain Innovation) of Sunnyvale, California, which is using food-grade bacteria to make fish food from industrial carbon emissions.

“We’re elated that we won and also humbled—there are so many bright lights in the industry right now, and so much innovation going on,” said Eric Enno Tamm, CEO of ThisFish. “Many of those companies approached me about our technology. It’s helpful to connect with the early adopters.”

Saumil Shah, managing director of EnerGaia, and Simone Pisu, CEO of Sustainable Fishery Trade, also cited the value of connections—and welcomed the attention of the global marketplace.

“Being in a competition with such a strong presence in the U.S. market is going to be a real launching point for us,” said Shah. “We are making great connections not only with investors but also with partners and buyers.”

“The Fish 2.0 award gives us the possibility to have the spotlight of the sector on us,” said Pisu. “Our mission is to improve the fishery sector in the region. We now have more potential to inspire other companies.”

Prizes include $40,000 cash, ICX (Industry Connection) awards
Each winner received a $5,000 cash prize. They and all the other finalists are also eligible for ICX (Industry Connection) prizes: unique opportunities for ventures to gain market insights and expertise from industry leaders that support growth and innovation in sustainable seafood. The Fish 2.0 advisory panel will announce the winners of those prizes in December.

“I was impressed with the range of businesses and innovations,” said Leigh Moran, senior officer, strategy, at Calvert Impact Capital, which is sponsoring an ICX prize. “This was the strongest group yet at Fish 2.0; I noticed more focus on brand and more sophistication, combined with a commitment to building the sustainable seafood sector overall.”

Participating in Fish 2.0, she added, “is a great way for us to stay up to speed on what’s going on in the sector. It’s an entirely unique event in terms of the different actors it brings together, the topics it addresses, and the focus on both good impact and good business.”

Audience chooses favorites in short-pitch session

The 17 remaining finalists delivered 90-second pitches directly to the audience of about 250 investors, business leaders and government representatives, who voted for the company they most wanted to follow up with. The top vote-getter was American Unagi, a Thomaston, Maine, company that grows locally harvested glass eels to market size in a land-based aquaculture system, providing a sustainable eel option for the domestic market while creating economic opportunity in a rural area.

The 39 companies presenting at the finals emerged with top scores from an initial field of 184 and prevailed in a particularly strong semifinalist field of 80 ventures. During Fish 2.0’s seven-month competition program, which took place online up to the finals, businesses received feedback from investor-judges and worked with business and impact advisors to develop their strategies, integrate positive impacts and metrics into their plans, and position their enterprise for investment. At least six judges scored each competitor that reached the finals.

“The power of this event is seeing a lot of different companies approaching similar problems with a variety of technologies,” said Dan Pullman of Fresh Source Capital, a judge on two panels. “I can compare their presentations, talk to them and get to know them. I’m impressed—the entrepreneurs are very well prepared. They are ready to be communicating to investors.”

Five global trends are driving innovation
Leading up to the Innovation Forum, Fish 2.0 analyzed the market demands that companies in the Fish 2.0 network are responding to and found that five accelerating global trends are driving transformation in the seafood industry: the need to predict and understand climate change impacts; wild fish stocks nearing maximum yield; product globalization and the rise of online sales; the worldwide growth of a health-conscious middle class; and aquaculture’s rapid expansion. These five trends are opening up new markets in the seafood sector, and ventures around the world are racing to capture a share of the opportunities.

“Innovation in the seafood sector is growing like never before,” said Fish 2.0 founder and executive director Monica Jain. “Rapid technology advances and new players are coming to this previously traditional sector. We’re seeing creative products, services and business models that solve problems and remove barriers to both sustainability and growth of the seafood supply. These innovations are poised to create significant changes in the way seafood is produced, harvested and marketed over the next decade.”

Learn more about Fish 2.0 by visiting their site here.