Saving Seafood

New study: Industry conservation ethic proves critical to Gulf of Maine lobster fishery

January 22, 2018 — A new study, led by scientists at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and colleagues at the University of Maine and NOAA, demonstrates how conservation practices championed by Maine lobstermen help make the lobster fishery resilient to climate change.

For generations, lobstermen in Maine have returned large lobsters to the sea and have designed a special way of marking egg-bearing lobsters to give them further protection. This conservation culture distinguishes the Gulf of Maine fishery from southern New England, where fishermen have not historically taken the same steps to preserve large, reproductive lobsters.

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows how warming waters and contrasting conservation practices contributed to simultaneous record landings in the Gulf of Maine fishery and  collapse in southern New England.

Led by Dr. Arnault Le Bris, the research team used advanced computer models to simulate the ecosystem under varying conditions, allowing them to understand the relative impacts of warming waters, conservation efforts, and other variables. Their results show that, while temperature change was the primary contributor to population changes, conservation efforts made a key difference in population resiliency.

Impacts of warming

Over 30 years (1984-2014), ocean temperatures increased rapidly in both regions. Warming in both regions shifted optimal summer ocean temperatures northeast, causing the southern New England  population to decline and the Gulf of Maine population boom. The researchers estimate that, during this 30-year period, the Gulf of Maine population increased by 515%, while the southern New England population declined by 78%. Challenges associated with warmer temperatures include decreased survival of larval lobsters, increased incidence of shell disease, and increased predation.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

 

Researchers and fishing companies form coalition for sustainable seas

August 16, 2017 — A new paper by Henrik Österblom, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Carl Folke and Johan Rockström describes how the authors engaged with large seafood producers to coproduce a global science–business initiative for ocean stewardship. They suggest that this initiative is improving the prospects for transformative change by providing novel links between science and business, between wild-capture fisheries and aquaculture, and across geographical space. They argue that scientists can play an important role in facilitating change by connecting knowledge to action among global actors, while recognizing risks associated with such engagement.

The authors argue that the methods developed through this case study contribute to identifying key competences in sustainability science and hold promises for other sectors as well.

The following is taken from the abstract of “Emergence of a global science-business initiative for ocean stewardship,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The ocean represents a fundamental source of micronutrients and protein for a growing world population. Seafood is a highly traded and sought after commodity on international markets, and is critically dependent on healthy marine ecosystems. A global trend of wild stocks being overfished and in decline, as well as multiple sustainability challenges associated with a rapid growth of aquaculture, represent key concerns in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Existing efforts aimed to improve the sustainability of seafood production have generated important progress, primarily at the local and national levels, but have yet to effectively address the global challenges associated with the ocean.

This study highlights the importance of transnational corporations in enabling transformative change, and thereby contributes to advancing the limited understanding of large-scale private actors within the sustainability science literature.

Read the full paper here

University of Washington: Bottom-trawling techniques leave different traces on the seabed

July 18, 2017 — The following is excerpted from an article published yesterday by the University of Washington:

Fishing fleets around the world rely on nets towed along the bottom to capture fish. Roughly one-fifth of the fish eaten globally are caught by this method, known as bottom trawling, which has been criticized for its effects on the marine environment.

An international group has taken a close look at how different types of bottom trawling affect the seabed. It finds that all trawling is not created equal — the most benign type removes 6 percent of the animal and plant life on the seabed each time the net passes, while most other methods remove closer to a third. A University of Washington professor is among the main authors on the study, led by Bangor University in the U.K. and published July 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The meta-analysis looks at 70 previous studies of bottom trawling, most in the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe. It looks across those studies to compare the effects on the seabed of four techniques: otter trawling, a common method that uses two “doors” towed vertically in the water or along the bottom to hold the net open; beam trawls, which hold the net open with a heavy metal beam; towed dredges, which drag a flat or toothed metal bar directly along the seafloor; and hydraulic dredges, which use water to loosen the seabed and collect animals that live in the sediment.

“We found that otter trawls penetrated the seabed 2.4 cm (0.94 inches) on average and caused the least amount of depletion of marine organisms, removing 6 percent of biota per trawl pass on the seabed,” first author Jan Geert Hiddink at Bangor University said in a statement. “In contrast, we found that hydraulic dredges penetrated the seabed 16.1 cm (6.3 inches) on average and caused the greatest depletion, removing 41 percent of the biota per fishing pass.”

Depending on the type of fishing gear, penetration depth and environmental variables such as water depth and sediment composition, it took from 1.9 to 6.4 years for the seabed biota, or marine plants and animals, to recover.

“These findings fill an essential science gap that will inform policy and management strategies for sustainable fishing practices by enabling us to evaluate the trade-off between fish production for food, and the environmental cost of different harvesting techniques,” said Ray Hilborn, a UW fisheries professor and one of four co-authors who designed the study.

“There’s a common perception that you trawl the bottom and the ecosystem is destroyed,” Hilborn said. “This study shows that the most common kind of trawling, otter trawling, does not destroy the marine ecosystem, and places that are trawled once a year really won’t be very different from places that are not trawled at all.”

Read the full report here

Ray Hilborn fights back against Greenpeace accusations

July 15, 2016 — Global fisheries expert and University of Washington Professor Ray Hilborn is fighting back against accusations made in May by the environmental activist group Greenpeace alleging he did not appropriately disclose funding he received from the seafood industry.

In an email to SeafoodSource, Hilborn denied any conflict of interest in his work and attached copies of emails sent from representatives of the academic journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Science backing the integrity of his contributions to both publications. Hilborn also attached a copy of an email from Mary Lidstrom, the vice provost for research at the University of Washington, showing that a university review of Hilborn’s actions did not reveal any violations of the university’s policies or procedures governing conflicts of interest or outside consulting.

“As UW, PNAS and Science concluded, I complied with the regulations required by the University and journals,” Hilborn told SeafoodSource. (See the full interview here).

In her email, which was sent to PNAS Deputy Executive Editor Daniel Salsbury, Lidstrom said the university reviewed Hilborn’s funding types and sources, publication history and disclosures, as well as approvals for outside consulting and checked them against UW policies.

“We have not identified any actions or lack thereof, engaged in by Dr. Hilborn which violate University policies or procedures governing conflicts of interest or outside consulting,” Lidstrom wrote.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Like a Slimy Taser, Electric Eels Can Leap Out and Zap Their Prey

June 7, 2016 — This summer’s science horror blockbuster is a remake: Return of the Leaping Electric Eel!

If you have any kind of phobia of slimy, snakelike creatures that can rise from the water and use their bodies like Tasers, this story — and the accompanying video — may not be for you.

The original tale (there was, alas, no video) dates to 1800 when the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt was in South America and enlisted local fishermen to catch some of these eels for the new (at the time) study of electricity.

He wrote that the men herded horses and mules into a shallow pond and let the eels attack by pressing themselves against the horses. The horses and mules tried to escape, but the fishermen kept them in the water until the eels used up their power. Two horses died, probably from falling and drowning.

Or so Humboldt said. Though the story was widely retold, no other report of this kind of fishing-with-horses phenomenon surfaced for more than 200 years, according to Kenneth Catania, a scientist with a passion for studying the eel species in question, electrophorus electricus.

Read the full story from The New York Times

Here’s How the Number of Fish in the Ocean Could More Than Double by 2050

March 31, 2016 — Fish populations around the world have been decimated by overfishing — but new research suggests that this could soon change if the world got its act together.

Fishermen around the world could haul around 16 million more metric tons of fish than they do today and generate $53 billion more in profits while more than doubling the amount of fish left in the oceans by 2050 if they adopted sustainable fishing practices, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Those practices would involve a so-called “catch share” model of fisheries management. In catch share systems, regulators figure out the maximum number of fish that can be hauled from the sea without hurting future fish populations. The regulators then divvy up that amount of fish into shares that are distributed to individual fishermen. Each fisherman has a set amount of fish they are can catch in the year.

“If you can reform fisheries and eliminate their competitive nature, there’s enormous room for profits, catch, and abundance,” said Ray Hilborn, a professor of marine biology and fisheries science at the University of Washington who co-authored the study with researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Read the full story at VICE News

Good Management can Lead to a More Sustainable Future

March 30, 2016 — A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows that there is a triple bottom line, that abundance, catch and profit can all be increased by reforming fisheries management in places where it has not been reformed. It provides the most comprehensive estimates of the status of global fisheries and shows that the large fish stocks of the world that provide 95% of global catch on average are at about the abundance that would produce long term maximum yield, and fishing pressure on average is below traditional targets. Less than 20% of fish stocks appear to be overfished by U.S. standards.

Comment by Ray Hilborn, University of Washington, @hilbornr:

The paper by Costello and others (including myself) Global fishery prospects under contrasting management regimes that appeared March 28 in PNAS, provides the most comprehensive assessment of the status and potential of global fisheries. Its key finding is that when stocks are overfished, most can recover within 10 years if the appropriate management measures are taken. This means that globally we could have more catch, more fish in the ocean and more profit. Most of the potential for this “triple bottom line” comes from Asia where fisheries are both large, and at present, mostly unmanaged. We must distinguish between fisheries that are reformed and those that are poorly regulated and remain in a race to fish.

Diving deeper into the estimated current status of fish stocks, we find it depends greatly on the size of the stock. Although the paper examined the status of 4,324 individual stocks, just 719 of them provide 96% of the catch. From the perspective of catch, profitability, and fish in the ocean, it is the 719 that are critical and feed us.

Read the full story at CFood

Environmental Bullies – Conservationists or Agenda-pushers?

March 22, 2016 (Saving Seafood) – Dr. John Sibert, an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii, has come to the defense of scientists whose research conflicts with the agendas of conservation ideologues. Dr. Sibert specifically targets Carl Safina and others who have painted recent research by Dr. Molly Lutcavage as “controversial.” Dr. Lutcavage’s research, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was featured in NPR, presented evidence that Western Atlantic Bluefin tuna may be more resilient to harvesting than previously thought.

In an article for CFOOD, a University of Washington project chaired by Dr. Ray Hilborn that corrects erroneous stories about fisheries sustainability, Dr. Sibert criticizes environmentalists who resort to personal attacks on researchers whose findings they oppose. Saving Seafood partners with CFOOD to help deliver these facts to the public.

“Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular,” Dr. Sibert wrote.

Last week, Dr. Lutcavage wrote a piece about her own struggles with environmental bullies.

Dr. Sibert’s full comments are below:

I, like many other scientists, practice my profession with the expectation that my work will be used to improve management policies. However, scientists who choose to work on subjects that intersect with management of natural resources sometimes become targets of special interest pressures. Pressure to change or “spin” research results occurs more often than it should. Pressure arrives in many forms— usually as phone calls from colleagues, superiors, or the media; the pressure seldom arrives in writing.

I have had a long career spanning several fields and institutions and have been pressured to change my views on restriction of industrial activities in intertidal zones in estuaries, on the necessity of international tuna fisheries management agencies, on the limited role of commercial fishing in the deterioration of marine turtle populations, on the lack of accuracy and reliability of electronic fish tags, and on the inefficacy of marine protected areas for tuna conservation.

My most recent experience with pressure came from a stringer who writes for Science magazine. Some colleagues and I had just published a paper that analyzed area-based fishery management policies for conservation of bigeye tuna. Although the paper was very pessimistic about the use of MPAs for tuna fishery management, this particular stringer contacted me about MPAs. We had an exchange of emails in which he repeatedly tried to spin some earlier results on median lifetime displacements of skipjack and yellowfin tuna into an argument supporting creation of MPAs. We then made an appointment to talk “face to face” via Skype. His approach was to play word games with my replies to his questions in order to make it seem that my research supported MPAs. I repeatedly explained to him that our research showed that closing high-seas pockets had no effect whatsoever on the viability of tuna populations and that empirical evidence showed that the closure of the western high seas pockets in 2008 had in fact increased tuna catches. We hung up at that point, and I have no idea what he wrote for Science.

When critics run out of fact, some resort to personal attack. During discussions about turtle conservation in the early 2000s, an attorney for an environmental group told a committee of scientists that we were in effect a bunch of fishing industry apologists with no knowledge of turtles or population dynamics. More recently, my friend and collaborator, Molly Lutcavage was recently subject of a personal attack by Carl Safina after she and her colleagues published an important discovery of a new spawning area for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. This discovery ought to push the International Commission of the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna to abandon its simplistic two stock approach to management of ABFT. (Whether ICCAT will actually change its approach is another question.) Safina made the outrageously false assertion that the authors’ “… main concern is not recovery, not conservation, but how their findings can allow additional exploitation.”   Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular.

Read the commentary at CFOOD

 

How In Trouble Are Bluefin Tuna, Really? Controversial Study Makes Waves

March 9, 2016 — Bluefin tuna have been severely depleted by fishermen, and the fish have become a globally recognized poster child for the impacts of overfishing. Many chefs refuse to serve its rich, buttery flesh; many retailers no longer carry it; and consumers have become increasingly aware of the environmental costs associated with the bluefin fishery.

But a group of scientists is now making the case that Atlantic bluefin may be more resilient to fishing than commonly thought — and perhaps better able to rebound from the species’ depleted state. In a paper published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers suggest that fishery managers reassess the western Atlantic bluefin’s population, which could ultimately allow more of the fish to be caught.

The 10 co-authors, most of whom are scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, say they’ve all but confirmed that bluefin tuna spawn in an area of the Atlantic Ocean previously suspected but not known to be a breeding ground. Not only that; the tuna spawning in this area off the Atlantic Coast are much younger and smaller than the age and size at which it was previously believed the fish become sexually mature, according to the scientists.

This, their paper claims, would make the western Atlantic bluefin tuna “less vulnerable to overexploitation and extinction than is currently estimated.”

But the study is controversial. Several tuna researchers we spoke with warned that the results are preliminary, and it’s much too soon to use them to guide how fisheries are managed

Read the full story from NPR