Saving Seafood

Tracking tools identify regional hubs of whale shark activity

August 17, 2018 — Where do the biggest fish in the sea go to find enough food? Turns out, not too far, if they live in a region with lots of food.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) swim about 25 kilometers (15 miles) per day and can make some tremendous long-distance oceanic movements. Scientists recently tracked a female whale shark from the eastern Pacific to the western Indo-Pacific for 20,142 kilometers (more than 12,000 miles) over 841 days, the longest whale shark migration route ever recorded.

Juvenile sharks in a series of four studies, one in the Philippines and three in the western Indian Ocean, apparently prefer to swim laps around their favorite feeding grounds.

Whale sharks are the world’s largest fish, growing up to 12 meters (40 feet) long and weighing up to 25 tons; even juveniles are 7 to 9 meters (23 to 30 feet) long. Scientists are keen to understand where these huge fish spend their time to better conserve them.

Fishing activity threatens whale sharks through direct killing, capture as bycatch, and boat strikes. Half of the world’s whale shark population has been killed since the 1980s, primarily by fisheries in China, India, the Philippines and Taiwan, and Chinese fisheries still target whale sharks for their fins and meat. The rapid decline in whale sharks’ global population prompted the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to reclassify the species as endangered in 2016.

Read the full story at Mongabay News

MARYLAND: After 42 years of fishing, he’s never seen anything like this 310-pound bull shark

August 15, 2018 — In the picture, the bull shark towers over the Maryland fisherman.

Larry “Boo” Powley stares into the camera, seemingly unfazed.

The story of how the 65-year-old commercial fisherman came to pose with a 310-pound bull shark began Monday morning when Powley set out on the Patuxent River in Southern Maryland.

Powley, who has been on the water for 42 years, said he was planning to catch his usual crop of menhaden, a common fish often used in fish oils for humans and bait for blue crab. Menhaden measure 15 inches at most, so the 8.6-foot-long bull shark that got stuck in his trap off Cedar Point, in St. Mary’s County, around sunrise wasn’t hard to notice.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Why sharks are thriving near the North Carolina coast

August 15, 2018 — Climate change is negatively impacting our relationship with our state’s coast. Our famous beaches are taking a heavy hit from rising sea levels. Meanwhile, loss of property, loss of natural coastal habitats, and changes to our fisheries threaten our economic well being.

Sea levels are rising especially fast in the southeast, bringing potentially devastating losses to property values and real estate. Hurricane damage and chronic flooding due to rising seas a huge concerns. By 2045, more than 15,000 homes are at risk of being flooded on more than 26 days every year.

In addition to the property losses, so much sand is being eroded from beaches at Nag’s Head that the state spent $36 million to pump new sand from the sea floor onto beaches in 2014 and will spend $48 million in 2018. This brings total state spending on beach nourishment since 1990 to $640 million. The rising costs of beach nourishment impacts our state’s coastal tourism economy, which brought in an estimated $3 billion in 2013 according to N.C. Department of Commerce. With sea level predicted to rise at least 1 foot and by as many as 8 feet by 2100, there is much at risk.

Sea-level rise is not our only problem. Pamlico Sound had changed from an occasional feeding ground to a shark nursery as a direct result of climate change. Pamlico Sound already had many of the features of a good bull shark nursery: ocean access, proper salinity, and plenty of prey fish. The only missing piece was warmer water temperature. While adult bull sharks have been occasionally encountered in the sound for a long time, the sudden appearance and consistent presence of juveniles after 2011 signaled a change that has been correlated with rising water temperatures, particularly during late spring and early summer when bull sharks give birth.

Read the full story at The News & Observer

War on sharks: How rogue fishing fleets plunder the ocean’s top predator

August 8, 2018 –It was billed as the biggest poaching bust in history, a monumental win for conservationists.

An Ecuadorean Navy patrol vessel, guided by advanced radar and a small plane, bore down on a ship the length of a football field making a beeline across the Galapagos Marine Reserve—probably the most fiercely protected waters in the world. Filling the freighter’s freezers: 150 tons of dead , most of them endangered and illegal to sell.

Only small pieces off those 6,000 carcasses were actually of much value. The fins.

Shark fins are a delicacy in China, the feature ingredient in an expensive soup served at banquets and fancy restaurants. At peak, dried fins have sold for more per pound than heroin. That price, coupled with high demand from a booming Chinese economy, has created a brutally efficient industry capable of strip-mining sharks from the sea.

With fishing lines over 75 miles long, commercial shark fishermen catch hundreds of sharks in a single try. Tens of millions of sharks are fished from the world’s oceans every year, and some scientists have estimated that number to be over 100 million.

“The amount of sharks that we are pulling in all over the world, it seems insane that there should be any left at all,” said shark conservationist Ben Harris, director of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Panama Chapter.

Shark poaching happens everywhere, from Florida to French Polynesia, but it’s the Pacific Ocean off Central America that has become ground zero in the battle to protect sharks. Even here—by many measures the richest shark waters on the planet—biologists fear relentless overfishing could spiral populations of the most sought-after species into irreversible collapse and take the entire marine food chain down with them.

The big question has become which will disappear first—sharks or the shark fin trade.

“It’s a very close race right now,” said Harris, who has spent decades in small speedboats chasing shark poachers out of Central American marine reserves.

This two-year investigation first published by “Reveal,” a radio show and podcast supported by the Center for Investigative Reporting, found that despite stricter protections enacted by many coastal countries, international trade in shark products remains strong in the Eastern Pacific. Reporting in port towns across five countries from Ecuador to El Salvador showed in some cases new laws intended to curb the slaughter of sharks appear to have had the opposite effect.

Read the full story from the Miami Herald at PHYS.org

How many sharks are there off the Jersey Shore? This scientist wants to find out

August 1, 2018 — Shark fishing is big business in New Jersey.

People come to the Shore from across the state and throughout the region for their chance to hook the ocean’s apex predator. But the thrill only happens if the sharks show up.

But studies of the sharks in Jersey waters have been few and far between. Little is known about how many sharks there are, and when they migrate.

Now, a Monmouth University professor is working with local fishermen to get answers.

Enter Keith Dunton.

A native of Long Island, Dunton came to Monmouth University from Stony Brook University three years ago for the chance to the study sharks. Dunton said he was drawn to New Jersey because there was a lack of shark research in the Garden State, despite the popularity of shark fishing.

Last summer, shark research group OCEARCH conducted their first scientific voyage into New Jersey waters, with the goal of tagging white sharks in the deep ocean.

And the National Marine Fisheries Service has studied the shark population of Delaware Bay. But Dunton aims to create a definitive understanding of the sharks that live off of New Jersey.

Read the full story at NJ.com

 

Sharks Are Creeping Into the Northeast Because of Climate Change

July 30, 2018 — Warmer waters are pushing the animals further north into previously shark-free waters. Should we be worried?

Shark Week, Discovery Channel’s annual homage to the ocean’s most infamous predator, comes to a close this weekend.

But residents of northeastern states like New York—long considered a relatively shark-free zone—might not have to wait until July 2019 to see more, as global warming has been linked with a significant northern shift in the habitats of most marine animals, including most sharks.

“There’s an astounding mass migration of animal life towards the poles,” Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, told The Daily Beast. In his work with spiny dogfish, a thin, small shark that lives along most of the East Coast, he’s seen their habitat shift “quite substantially.”

Pinsky isn’t the only scientist to make this observation. In April, researchers in North Carolina published a paper in Nature’s Scientific Resources that documented the northern migration of bull shark nurseries.

By analyzing data from North Carolina’s Division of Marine Fisheries (NCDMF), the researchers found that between 2003 and 2011, when water temperatures in the sound were hovering closer to 22 degrees Celsius, only six juvenile sharks were caught in the area. But as temperatures began to rise, a group of bull sharks migrated from their previous home in Northern Florida and established a nursery in Pamlico, causing a drastic uptick in juvenile shark presence. Between 2011 and 2016 alone, NCDMF found 53.

Read the full story at The Daily Beast

 

To great white sharks off Maine: Smile, you’re on research cameras

July 24, 2018 — Marine researchers have deployed underwater cameras in hopes of documenting great white sharks off the coast of southern Maine for the first time.

The effort is part of the first study dedicated to learning about the habits of the sharks near Maine. Scientists say great whites – the world’s largest predatory fish – have increased in number in the Atlantic Ocean and will continue to do so in the Gulf of Maine.

Two cameras, each attached to a crate of chum to attract large fish, were deployed by University of New England professor James Sulikowski and undergraduates two weeks ago near Stratton Island, 2 miles from Old Orchard Beach. The island was chosen because a radio receiver that Sulikowski placed on a nearby buoy detected a tagged great white shark last fall.

“The goal is to get a better understanding of the ecosystem and what white sharks are coming in, and to find out how prevalent they are,” said Sulikowski, a marine biologist.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Scientists Urge Congress to Support Ongoing Shark Research

July 19, 2018 — Fishermen and beachgoers alike have long viewed sharks with something less than admiration, but advances in technology have proven they are deeply valuable, scientists told lawmakers on Capitol Hill Wednesday. Yet that value could be lost if climate change and overfishing continue to threaten the predator and its habitat.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee heard testimony from several scientists about the value of shark research during a Wednesday morning session.

Among them was Dr. Robert Hueter, of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, who said he’s studied sharks for 40 years and that his most satisfying moments have come when he’s gotten to watch people shift from vilifying sharks to appreciating them.

“Now I see people on the coast watching sharks with tags swim by,” Hueter said. “They don’t want to kill them but instead, they’re rooting them on and sometimes, they even [figuratively] adopt them. They understand the shark isn’t looking to eat people but they’re doing what they have done for millions of years. We’re winning the battle [for conservation] and activism is spreading, so it’s very exciting.”

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Senators share their fascination with sharks at hearing

July 19, 2018 — Lawmakers on Wednesday held a hearing on sharks to examine new research, conservation techniques and ways to improve understanding of the unique animals.

The hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, titled simply “SHARKS!,” featured experts in shark research who told lawmakers how their discoveries are benefiting the medical and tech fields.

“Americans have been fascinated by sharks,” said Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.). “Aquariums and other educational programs have helped to demystify sharks and our initial fear has turned into fandom.”

The hearing also comes just before the start of The Discovery Channel’s 30th annual “Shark Week,” which is set to begin July 22.

Dr. Robert Hueter, the senior scientist and director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., credited the annual television event with leading to a better understanding of the complex creatures.

Americans are now “rooting the shark on,” Hueter said.

“They understand that that shark is not really threatening them, they’re not looking for people, that they’re there trying to do their thing and they’ve been there for millions of years,” Hueter said.

Read the full story at The Hill

FLORIDA: Shark fishing workshops, red snapper announcement coming soon

July 9, 2018 — In April, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission bridged a controversial topic among Florida’s millions of beachgoers and anglers — shore-based shark fishing. Emotional public comment presented by more than 25 speakers convinced the 7-member governor-appointed volunteer commission to request FWC staff to develop more comprehensive regulations to address shore-based shark fishing from the Sunshine State’s more than 2,000 miles of beaches.

That day in April, no one logged any comment in support of shore-based shark fishing. And I warned you all, if you don’t show up, your voice will not be heard.

Now, the FWC has announced a series of public workshops around the state beginning next week to further address the practice as a step in the process towards developing regulations aimed at conserving sharks better and protecting beachgoers, too.

The problem, according to recommendations provided to the FWC by David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter on Twitter), noted shark researcher at Simon Fraser University and marine conservation biologist and science writer, is several species commonly caught from the beach do not survive the fight very well, and if they do, they may not survive the photo session or release.

“Two of the top ways that angling stress kills fish are long fight times which exhaust the fish and air exposure,” Shiffman wrote in recommendations he provided to FWC — “Promoting Conservation-Friendly Shark Handling Practices in the Fishing Capital of the World: A Science-Based Proposal to Revise Florida’s Land-Based Shark Fishing Regulations.”

Read the full story at Treasure Coast News