Saving Seafood

Project to study pandemic impacts on Alaskan salmon season

June 29, 2020 — The following was released by Penn State:

Bristol Bay, Alaska is home to the world’s largest commercial sockeye salmon fishery, attracting thousands of fishermen, crews, and seasonal workers and tripling the region’s population. Running from early June to late July, the short salmon season is facing a new challenge this year, the coronavirus pandemic.

Penn State is part of a research team conducting surveys with fishery participants and residents to better understand the costs and benefits of varied mitigation policies and is developing pandemic preparedness scenarios. This collaborative project is being funded by a $200,000 National Science Foundation RAPID Response grant.

The concern for this year’s fishing season stems from the 13,000 commercial fishers, crew, and fish processor workers who are descending upon the Bristol Bay region. The largest hospital in the region only has 16 beds and two ventilators and, as of May 2020, was not prepared for an outbreak of coronavirus.

Because the overall economic value of the fishing season is estimated to be around $1.5 billion dollars and the region is dependent on the fishing industry, canceling the season is not economically feasible.

Read the full release here

5,000-year-old corals are now threatened

December 1, 2016 — Coral genotypes can survive for thousands of years, possibly making them the longest-living animals in the world.

Researchers have determined the ages of elkhorn corals, Acropora palmata, in Florida and the Caribbean and estimated the oldest genotypes to be more than 5,000 years old. The results are useful for understanding how corals will respond to current and future environmental change.

“Our study shows, on the one hand, that some Acropora palmata genotypes have been around for a long time and have survived many environmental changes, including sea-level changes, storms, sedimentation events, and so on,” says Iliana Baums, associate professor of biology at Penn State.

“This is good news because it indicates that they can be very resilient. On the other hand, the species we studied is now listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act because it has suffered such sharp population declines, indicating that there are limits to how much change even these very resilient corals can handle.”

Many people mistake corals for plants or even non-living rocks, but corals actually consist of colonies of individual invertebrate animals living symbiotically with photosynthetic algae.

Read the full story at Futurity