Saving Seafood

Researchers are now fighting marine poaching with GPS-equipped sea birds

January 31, 2020 — Illegal fishing is one of the biggest threats to oceans today, responsible for roughly 20 percent of the global seafood catch, according to estimates by Pew Charitable Trusts. It devastates marine ecosystems and causes billions in economic damage, injuring and killing untold dolphins, sea birds and turtles, and pushing some species to near-extinction.

Marine poaching is so widespread, in part, because it’s fiendishly difficult to locate illegal vessels in the vast expanses of sea. But a team of researchers from France, New Zealand and the United Kingdom recently discovered a novel way for pinpointing the exact locations of such ships. And in a bit of poetic justice, the method relies on one of the animals at the greatest risk of harm from illegal fishing: the albatross.

Every year, thousands of albatross are inadvertently killed by legal and illegal fishing vessels. The massive birds are particularly vulnerable to longline fishing, which involves dragging thousands of baited hooks behind a boat. Albatross and other birds attempt to eat the bait and get caught on the hook and dragged underwater, drowning in the process.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Copepods: Cows of the Sea

October 6, 2017 — If you look very closely at a glassful of water from a bay or the ocean, you would probably be surprised by the life inside. You might see miniature crustaceans the size of the period at the end of this sentence or baby crabs and fish that spend only a short span of their lives this small. These creatures are zooplankton, aquatic animals that drift with the currents.

It’s the Little Things 

These tiny animals form the basis of the food web of estuaries, coastal waters, and oceans. Zooplankton feed on microscopic plant-like organisms called phytoplankton, which get their energy from the sun. Tiny crustacean zooplankton called “copepods” are like cows of the sea, eating the phytoplankton and converting the sun’s energy into food for higher trophic levels in the food web. Copepods are some of the most abundant animals on the planet.

Fish such as anchovies cruise through the water with their mouths wide open, filtering copepods and other zooplankton from the water. Anchovies and other planktivores (plankton-eaters) are prey for bigger animals, like tuna, sharks, marine mammals, and seabirds.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries GARFO

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