Saving Seafood

Decision time: Will Barbara Creecy put an end to fishing around dwindling penguin colonies?

August 19, 2021 — Editor’s Note: The debate over how to manage forage fisheries to account for the needs of their predators is prevalent in American fisheries as well as international ones. The study described in this article reached conclusions similar to a broader study recently published in the journal Conservation Biology, which found that in most cases, reducing the catch of forage species is unlikely to benefit their predators, and availability of forage is one of many complex environmental factors that plays a role in the size of predator populations.

Environment minister Barbara Creecy has a decision to make – does she allow fishing to continue around endangered penguin colonies or not?

Daily Maverick recently reported on the endangered African penguin and how conservation groups like the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob) and BirdLife SA believe the biggest threat to colonies is prey availability, which is likely influenced by a combination of both environmental variation and resource competition by the pur-seine the fishing industry.

They want Creecy to ban fishing within a 20km radius of the six major penguin colonies – Dassen Island, Robben Island, Stony Point and Dyer Island in the Western Cape, and Bird and St Croix islands in the Eastern Cape.

Their recommendation is based on results of the island closure experiment that ran from 2008 to 2019. It was put in place to see if closing fishing around penguin colonies had a positive effect on penguin populations.

The South African Pelagic Fishing Industry Association (Sapfia) does not support a ban. Their position is based on UCT’s Prof Doug Butterworth’s recent assessment of the experiment – that closing fishing around colonies had no significant effect on halting the decline in penguin numbers.

Butterworth, who was contracted by the fisheries branch of the DFFE to do this research, and the Marine Resource Assessment and Management Group (MARAM) from UCT hold this view, but there are opposing views from other UCT groups including the FitzPatrick Institute and the Marine Research Institute and some individual academics like Professor Lynne Shannon who endorse the closure.

Read the full story at The Daily Maverick

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: Marine Protected Areas Won’t Matter

May 10, 2018 — New research from the University of North Carolina concludes that most marine life in marine protected areas will not be able to tolerate warming ocean temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

There are 8,236 marine protected areas around the world covering about four percent of the surface of the ocean. They have been established as a haven to protect threatened marine life, like polar bears, penguins and coral reefs, from the effects of fishing and other activities such as oil and gas extraction.

The study found that with continued “business-as-usual” emissions, the protections currently in place won’t matter, because by 2100, warming and reduced oxygen concentration will make marine protected areas uninhabitable by most species currently residing in those areas.

The study predicts that under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 emissions scenario, better known as the “business as usual scenario,” marine protected areas will warm by 2.8 degrees Celsius (or 5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Mean sea-surface temperatures within marine protected areas are projected to increase 0.034 degrees Celsius (or 0.061 degrees Fahrenheit) per year.

Read the full story at the Maritime Executive

 

The Secret Life of Krill

October 19, 2016 — SYDNEY, Australia — On an August morning aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel floating at the bottom of the world, Christian Reiss was listening for acoustic signals bouncing off krill, a pinkish, feathery-limbed crustacean that is the lifeblood of the Antarctic ecosystem.

It was the last month of the Southern Hemisphere winter, and conditions were good: There was no thud from sea ice pancakes bumping together to distort his tests in the clear waters of the South Shetland Islands, about 500 miles south of Cape Horn.

Dr. Reiss, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and his team were studying where krill live in winter.

Low levels of sea ice gave them access to bays that in previous winters were closed. They wanted to know if a lack of sea ice, where krill gather to feed off the algae that live on the underside, was threatening the ocean’s largest biomass. Krill form schools that can be miles long and miles deep.

Whales, sea birds, penguins, squid and seals all feed off krill. And they compete with commercial fisheries in the same waters, who sell the tiny creatures to be used as fish food or to make omega-3 fish oil for human use.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Study predicts alarming krill drop by end of the century

August 30, 2016 — Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) habitat is undergoing a continuous deterioration process, which could lead to a reduction of up to 80 per cent by the end of the century.

Given the key role that this small crustacean plays in the marine food chain, its decline would cause other problems for species that depend on it as a food source, such as whales, penguins, seals, squid and fish, among other marine organisms.

This dark forecast comes from a study performed at Yale University by Andrea Piñones, a researcher at the Research Centre for High Latitude Marine Ecosystem Dynamics (IDEAL) and the Advanced Study Centre in Arid Zones (CEAZA), along with Alexey Fedorov, a researcher at Yale University.

Piñoness explains that the krill population has already fallen between 80 and 90 per cent since 1970, a situation that has generated a broad scientific debate on the causes of this decline.

In this regard, many believe that this is related to the changes in the environment, particularly with warming Antarctic waters.

To carry out the study, whose results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers combined climate simulations — based on the projections of the international panel of climate change –, with a krill growth model. Thus, they determined that with an increase in water temperature and sea ice melting, its habitat could reduce up to 80 per cent by 2100.

Read the full story at FiS United States