Saving Seafood

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

Thousands of Sharks, Other Sea Life Mysteriously Die in San Francisco Bay

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife isn’t dedicating any funding toward determining the cause, says resources are needed elsewhere

October 5, 2017 — As many as 2,000 leopard sharks have mysteriously died in the San Francisco Bay over the past few months. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife says determining the cause is not a priority for the state since the sharks are not threatened or endangered, however, scientists say additional research and resources are crucial since the threat is now believed to be preying on other marine life.

“This year is unusual in that there has been a large number of other species that have also been dying,” said Dr. Mark Okihiro, a research scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “This pathogen can tackle a variety of different species … we’ve had a much more diverse group of fish that have been found dead in the San Francisco Bay.”

At least 500 bat rays, hundreds of striped bass, 50 smooth-hound sharks and about 100 halibut died in the bay between February and July, according to Okihiro’s estimates.

Tiny Organism Blamed for Massive Shark Die-Off

Similar shark deaths in the area date back 50 years and have gone unexplained. Okihiro, however, now believes a parasite may be behind the mysterious die-off that has plagued the Bay Area.

“We’re pretty confident at this point,” Okihiro said. “It’s called Miamiensis avidus … it’s a small single celled organism. It’s very similar to the common amoeba.”

Okihiro regularly performs necropsies on stranded sharks found along the bay and says researchers at UC San Francisco helped him identify parasite DNA in a large number of those shark samples.

Read the full story at NBC Bay Area

Could a Shark Fin Ban Actually Be Bad for Sharks?

Two scientists have argued that the United States’ proposed shark fin ban may not have the intended benefits.

September 26, 2017 — At first blush, a proposed national ban on shark fins in the United States would seem like a good thing for sharks. Shark fishing has been blamed for the decline in a number of shark species, and specifically fins, which typically find their way into shark fin soup, create their own problems. Since the fin is the most valuable part of a shark, some fisherman use a practice called “finning”—already banned in the U.S.—where the fins are removed from the shark (sometimes while still alive) and then the rest of the animal is disposed of. Banning the fins all together sounds like a simple way to end all these issues once and for all. However, in a paper published this month in the journal Marine Policy, marine scientists David Shiffman and Robert Hueter present a different argument: such a ban actually “would undermine sustainable shark fisheries.”

According to the office of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, over 100 scientists have come out in support of the bill he introduced this past March seeking to ban shark fins. But of course, there are two sides to every story, and according to the Associated Press, Shiffman and Hueter essentially state that when it comes to shark fishing, America is one of the few places that actually practices sustainability, so why mess it?

“Removing that from the marketplace removes a template of a well-managed fishery,” Shiffman told the AP. “It’s much easier for us to say, here’s a way you can do this.” His paper also suggests that since the U.S. is such a small part of the worldwide shark fin trade, a ban in the U.S. would simply be made up for by more fishing elsewhere.

Read the full story at Food & Wine

Shark fin bans might not help sharks, scientists say

September 25, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — As lawmakers propose banning the sale of shark fins in the U.S., a pair of scientists is pushing back, saying the effort might actually harm attempts to conserve the marine predators.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced a bill this year designed to prevent people from possessing or selling shark fins in America, much to the delight of conservation groups such as Oceana. But marine scientists David Shiffman and Robert Hueter said this approach could be wrongheaded.

Shiffman and Hueter authored a study that appears in the November issue of the journal Marine Policy, saying the U.S. has long been a leader in shark fisheries management and that shutting down the U.S. fin trade entirely would remove a model for sustainability for the rest of the world.

The U.S. also is a minor contributor to the worldwide shark fin trade, and countries with less regulated fisheries would likely step in to fill the void if America left the business altogether, Shiffman said.

“Removing that from the marketplace removes a template of a well-managed fishery,” Shiffman, a shark researcher with Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said. “It’s much easier for us to say, here’s a way you can do this.”

Shark fins are most often used in a soup considered a delicacy in Asia. Shark fins that American fishermen harvest are often shipped to Asia for processing.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Bangor Daily News

A US ban on shark fins is a bad idea, say researchers

September 22, 2017 — Earlier this year, United States senators put forth S.793, a bill they’ve named the “Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act”. With the noble goal of protecting shark populations, which are in decline all over the globe, the document proposes a total ban on the buying or selling of shark fins in the US. Sounds like an unambiguously good thing, right? Well, the straightforward answer to a problem is not always the best one – and some shark researchers worry that this approach could do more harm than good.

In a recently published paper, shark researchers David Shiffman and Robert Hueter argue that banning trade in fins would not prevent many shark deaths at all – but it might hinder successful conservation practices, and sow confusion by misrepresenting the true threats to these animals. What they recommend instead is prioritising the continued sustainable management of shark fishing.

The finning issue

Let’s start with the broad problem: sharks are in trouble. And losing them is a threat not only for the ecosystems in which they serve important roles, but also for economies all over the globe that rely on them for food, including the United States. Worldwide, many populations are dwindling, their decline driven largely by overfishing, including hunting for meat, bycatch, as well as the lucrative fin trade, which supplies demand in some countries for a delicacy known as shark-fin soup.

This fin trade has led to a phenomenon called shark finning. As the bill describes, “Shark finning is the cruel practice in which the fins of a shark are cut off on board a fishing vessel at sea. The remainder of the animal is then thrown back into the water to drown, starve, or die a slow death.” This practice is not only cruel, but also wasteful – in contrast with conservative shark-fishing practices that make use of meat and parts from the entire body.

Shark finning has actually been banned in the US since the 1990s, but as long as the animal’s body is not discarded at sea, fishers are generally free to do what they will with the fins; indeed, these are typically harvested along with the meat. The new bill, however, presented by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, proposes a total ban on possessing, transporting, selling or purchasing shark fins, under threat of a fine of up to $100,000 or more.

Read the full story at Earth Touch News

Shark Fin Ban Is Misguided, Would Undermine Sustainable U.S. Shark Fisheries, Say Experts

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – September 14, 2017 – A ban on shark fin sales in the United States would undermine some of the planet’s most sustainable shark fisheries while harming global shark conservation efforts, according to two prominent shark scientists.

In a paper published this month in Marine Policy, Dr. David Shiffman, a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., and Dr. Robert Hueter, Director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., call proposed Congressional legislation banning the sale or purchase of shark fins in the United States “misguided.” Environmental group Oceana is pushing the legislation, known as the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act.

In an interview with Saving Seafood, Dr. Shiffman said the legislation was “well-intentioned” but “overly simplistic.” By withdrawing from the global shark fin market, the United States would remove incentives for its trading partners to build sustainable shark fisheries, and would eliminate an important example of sustainable shark fisheries management, he said.

“We’re a relatively small percentage of the overall trade in shark fins, so banning the trade of shark fins within the U.S. will not have that much of a direct impact on shark mortality,” Dr. Shiffman told Saving Seafood. “But we’re a really high percentage of the sustainably caught, well-managed shark fishery. So removing us from the global marketplace for fins doesn’t help save that many sharks, but it removes this sustainable fishery from the marketplace as a template that can be copied.”

According to Dr. Shiffman, U.S. shark fisheries are built on a strong mix of “scientific research infrastructure” and “management and enforcement infrastructure,” which has helped make them some of the most sustainable in the world. His coauthor, Dr. Hueter, told Saving Seafood that enacting a shark fin ban would undermine decades of progress that went into building those sustainable fisheries.

“We have done a great job working together to rebuild the fish, and at least make the fisheries sustainable and profitable,” Dr. Hueter said. “And that is why this fin ban, in our opinion, is so misguided. Because after all these decades of work to get us to a great point with a bright future, this sort of ban would just cut the legs out from underneath the fishery. It would cause waste, put people out of business who are doing things right, and reward the folks in other nations who are not doing things well.”

Much of the public remains unaware of the sustainable status of most U.S. shark fisheries, a phenomenon the authors attribute to confusion over key issues related to shark conservation. In particular, many do not understand the difference between “shark finning” – the inhumane and illegal practice of removing a shark’s fins at sea – and sustainable landings of whole sharks required by U.S. law. Finning is “just this boogeyman of shark conservation activists,” Dr. Shiffman said. “People don’t understand what shark finning means in many cases.”

“We have sounded the alarm now for 20 years or more about this thing called finning to the point where we’ve gotten people so upset about it that they no longer listen to the subtle difference between finning and fishing,” Dr. Hueter said. “And they think that all sharks that are caught by commercial fishermen are finned animals.”

Should a total fin ban be enacted, rule-following U.S. fishermen would be economically harmed, the authors write in their paper, noting that nearly a quarter of the total value of shark meat sales comes from shark fins. Forcing fishermen to throw out fins from sustainably caught sharks would be wasteful, contradicting a United Nations plan of action to create “full use” in global shark fisheries, they write.

Instead of a fin ban, Dr. Shiffman and Dr. Hueter support policies focused on sustainable shark fisheries management. Dr. Hueter recommended five ways fishery managers could pursue this goal: increase penalties for those caught finning sharks, which Florida did earlier this year; stop imports of shark products from countries that don’t practice sustainable shark fishing; incentivize the domestic industry to process shark fins within the U.S. and provide for the domestic demand; closely monitor U.S. shark populations and support strict measures for sustainability; and increase public education about the problems facing global shark populations.

“Banning is always the easiest thing,” Dr. Hueter said. “Making the fishery so it’s regulated and sustainable and smart, that’s hard. But we shouldn’t be choosing things based on what sounds good or what feels good. We should be doing things based on what works.”

There is broad support in the scientific community for sustainable shark fisheries. In a recent survey of over 100 members of scientific research societies focusing on sharks and rays, Dr. Shiffman and Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, a marine ecologist at the University of Miami, found that 90 percent preferred sustainable management to a total ban on the sale of shark products. Dr. Shiffman believes that sustainable fisheries can go hand in hand with shark conservation.

“I am glad to see that the best available data, over and over again, is showing that we can have healthy shark populations while still having sustainable, well-managed fisheries that employ fishermen and provide protein to the global marketplace,” said Dr. Shiffman, who also writes for the marine science blog Southern Fried Science and frequently comments on shark conservation issues on Twitter. “We don’t need to choose between the environment and jobs in this case if we do it correctly.”

MASSACHUSETTS: Aquarium hosting symposium of female shark scientists

September 12, 2017 — BOSTON — Girls interested in marine science will get a chance to hear from women making waves in the field this month at the New England Aquarium.

The aquarium and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy will host the symposium featuring 10 female shark experts from around the world who will present ideas and research on various shark topics to the general public and a group of 150 high school and college-aged women.

Titled ‘Shark Tales: Women Making Waves,’ the symposium is organized by the Gills Club, an education initiative of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy based around getting girls involved in science.

Read the full story at FOX 25

Study negates concerns regarding radioactivity in migratory seafood

September 5, 2017 — When the Fukushima power plant released large quantities of radioactive materials into nearby coastal waters following Japan’s massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it raised concerns as to whether eating contaminated seafood might impair human health—not just locally but across the Pacific.

A new study by an international research team shows that those concerns can now be laid to rest, at least for consumption of meat from migratory marine predators such as tuna, swordfish, and sharks.

The team focused on cesium, a silvery metal with a large number of radioactive isotopes. Two of these, 134Cs and 137Cs, form when uranium fuel breaks down in nuclear reactors. The cesium isotopes are of particular concern because they were discharged in large quantities following the disaster, exhibit relatively long half-lives (2.1 and 30 years respectively), and tend to accumulate in the muscle tissues that people like to eat.

However, the team’s sampling of tissues from predatory fishes and other large vertebrates collected across the northern Pacific between 2012 and 2015 revealed no detectable levels of 134Cs, and 137Cs concentrations that were generally consistent with background levels from aboveground nuclear testing during the 1940s and 50s. They collected the animals from waters near Japan, Hawaii, and California.

Read the full story at Phys.org

Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish

A new study suggests warming sea temperatures could result in smaller fish sizes.

August 22, 2017 — Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes.

Because warmer seas speed up their metabolisms, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures will need to draw more oxygen from the ocean. At the same time, warming seas are already reducing the availability of oxygen in many parts of the sea.

A pair of University of British Columbia scientists argue that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“What we found was that the body size of fish decreases by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature,” says author William Cheung, director of science for the university’s Nippon Foundation—Nereus Program.

These changes, the scientists say, will have a profound impact on many marine food webs, upending predator-prey relationships in ways that are hard to predict.

“Lab experiments have shown that it’s always the large species that will become stressed first,” says lead author Daniel Pauly, a professor at the university’s Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, and principal investigator for the Sea Around Us. “Small species have an advantage, respiration-wise.”

Still, while many scientists applaud the discovery, not all agree that Pauly’s and Cheung’s work supports their dramatic findings. The study was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.

Read the full story at National Geographic

NMFS Institutes More Swordfish Research Off Florida, Praised by EDF

August 16, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Dr. David Kerstetter of Nova Southeastern University will receive an exempted fishing permit (EFP) from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to conduct research in the East Florida Coast Pelagic Longline Closed Area. Dr. Kerstetter will be working alongside Atlantic swordfish fishermen in an effort to “improve understanding of encounter rates of juvenile swordfish and species like sharks, bullfishes and sea turtles in order to find the best ways to reduce their mortality.”

According to Katie Westfall, senior manager of highly migratory species advocacy for EDF’s Oceans Program, fishermen have already made sacrifices to help the Atlantic swordfish population rebound. However, this project will help by collecting data from fisheries that “interact with imperiled highly migratory species.”

“The project will also pioneer an approach to link catch data with oceanographic data, allowing researchers to learn over time where and when species will occur in order to help fishermen avoid bycatch of sharks, billfishes, and sea turtles,” Westfall added. “This has the potential to be transformative by dramatically minimizing unnecessary deaths of protected species while improving the catch of healthy target species like swordfish.”

Westfall is hopeful that the research will help “pave the way to responsibly increasing yield in domestic fisheries and strengthening revenues for American seafood businesses.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.