Saving Seafood

UMass Dartmouth to break ground on $55m facility

October 22, 2015 — UMass Dartmouth will break ground Friday on a $55 million expansion to its School for Marine Science and Technology.

The new 76,000-square-foot facility will be next door to the existing School for Marine Science and Technology, according to a university statement Wednesday. It is being built in collaboration with the state Division of Marine Fisheries.

The university hopes the expansion will create a more comprehensive marine science campus for education and research of commercial fishing, coastal preservation, ocean observation, and climate change.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Massachusetts: Gov. Charlie Baker approves $30 million for SMAST expansion in New Bedford

October 15, 2015 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Gov. Charlie Baker approved $30 million in state funding Thursday for the long-planned SMAST expansion at the UMass Dartmouth campus in the South End, clearing the way for a groundbreaking ceremony Oct. 23 and spurring excitement from politicians and UMass administrators.

“I’m ecstatic about this,” said state Sen. Mark Montigny, D-New Bedford. “This project is one that, in the past few weeks, I thought we were going to lose.”

Baker’s administration has been scrutinizing proposed bond projects across the state since he took office in January. The administration put a hold about two months ago, Montigny said, on SMAST expansion funding that had been ostensibly secured through a prior agreement with former Gov. Deval Patrick.

Montigny and New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell both said Thursday that they had been pushing hard for several weeks to secure the funding under the Baker administration.

“I’m thrilled that this project is at last going forward,” Mitchell said. “SMAST will continue to be a major counterpoint to federal government-sponsored fisheries research. And in that way, SMAST will continue to help level the playing field for our fishing fleet.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

SMAST researchers employ new methods of fish geolocation

October 9, 2015 — Researchers at the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology are hoping that new methods of figuring out where fish go in the Gulf of Maine will begin to lead to a much better understanding of what is happening below the surface, aiding in stock assessments.

Dr. Geoffrey Cowles and his research assistants, graduate students Doug Zemeckis and Chang Liu, are partners in a multi-institution effort to tag yellowtail flounder, monkfish, and now cod to learn much more than past methods could tell them.

Called geolocation, the multi-partner research is using new measurements to begin to sort out where fish go after they are tagged and before they are (hopefully) recaptured.

Zemeckis went to sea on a state research vessel, and tagged dozens of cod with lipstick-sized devices that record temperature and pressure. Those can tell researchers quite a lot about where the fish spend their time.

Unlike simple tags, which just show where the fish was released and where it was caught, these devices record the data, which is being recovered and analyzed using methods that are still being developed.

Zemeckis said that since GPS signals do not penetrate water, global positioning doesn’t work for tracking fish.

Read the full story from the New Bedford Standard-Times

UMass Dartmouth researchers developing open-source system for assessing fish movement

October 7, 2015 — UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST) Associate Professor Geoffrey Cowles is leading a collaborative research effort to develop geolocation methodologies to improve understanding of fish movement patterns of Atlantic cod, yellowtail flounder, and monkfish. The project will focus on the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank and includes researchers from SMAST, Northeastern University, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, along with the fishing industry.

Geolocation, which is the process of taking data recovered from a fish archival tag and coming up with the best estimate of positions between release and recapture, can provide insights into catchability and fishery interactions. Using this technique, the research team will be able to guide behavior-dependent aspects of the model parameterization, as well as interpret the geolocated tracks. Researchers will also employ their collective skills in computer programming, oceanographic modeling, statistical analysis, and fisheries biology to assist in furthering the development of technology to geolocate fish.

This study will also use data acquired from previous studies on each of the example species, which all have their own characteristic behaviors and were tagged in different areas of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank region. Most studies of fish movements have relied on fishery recaptures of conventional tags, which provide only the locations of release and recapture. Such tagging studies may bias perceptions of movement patterns.

Archival tags, which are attached to fish internally or externally to record temperature and pressure at regular intervals, enable estimations of fish location while at large. This type of information is often not fully utilized due to the technical difficulties of producing such movement histories via geolocation techniques.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard- Times

 

Fishermen’s Steering Committee Meeting – Monday, August 24th – 10:00 am

August 17, 2015 — The following was released by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST):

We will be holding the Fishermen’s Steering Committee meeting on Monday, August 24th at 10:00 a.m.  The meeting will be held in room 157, on the second floor of the ATT building (200 Mill Road, Fairhaven MA).

At this meeting we will be holding the lottery for the RSA compensation trips associated with the scallop program awards, and the SMAST Bycatch Avoidance program. Participants in the SMAST Bycatch Avoidance program have been automatically entered into the Bycatch Avoidance RSA lottery.

To be entered into the lottery for the RSA compensation trips, associated with the scallop program, please email your name and vessel names, to ekeiley@umassd.edu no later than Thursday, August 20th, close of business day.

 

UMASS’ SMAST SHARES A $335,000 GRANT FROM SCIENTIFIC CONSORTIUM

July 10, 2015 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Fishermen will be directly involved in a research project announced by the Northeast Consortium, a University of New Hampshire-based organization that fosters collaborative research.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology will share a $335,000 contract to support research into the spawning habits of cod on Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine.

The work is under contract from the New England Fishery Management Council, which in recent years has driven the decisions to virtually shut down the cod fishing in those areas.

The research at SMAST will include data from interviews with current or retired fishermen who fish for cod on Georges Bank.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Northeast Consortium and NEFMC Announce Funding for New Collaborative Research Projects

NEWBURYPORT, Mass. — July 8, 2015 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The Northeast Consortium, a University of New Hampshire-based institution established in 1999 to foster collaborative research, under contract to the New England Fishery Management Council, announces funding for three new research projects that will focus on spawning groundfish in waters off the New England coast.

Awards totaling over $335,000 will support a mapping study examining the distribution of spawning cod on Georges Bank, an acoustic and trawl survey of winter-spawning cod in Ipswich Bay, an inshore area off the coast of MA, and work on winter flounder spawning activities offshore in the Gulf of Maine.

The result of a supplemental request for proposals issued last February, projects were required to articulate collaborations between commercial fishermen and scientists, and could include, among other approaches, research that enables the Council to improve groundfish spawning protection by increasing the understanding of groundfish spawning activity or aggregations of spawning groundfish.

Here are more project details.

Project Title: Mapping the distribution of Atlantic cod spawning on Georges Bank using fishermen’s ecological knowledge and scientific data
Lead Institution: University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, School for Marine Science and Technology; Co-Principal Investigators: Steven X. Cadrin, Gregory DeCelles, and Douglas Zemeckis

Purpose: To map the spatial and temporal distribution of cod spawning on Georges Bank using existing scientific information and data acquired from interviews with current and retired fishermen who fish for cod on Georges Bank. The information is needed to better understand cod population structure and essential fish habitat in this region.

Project Title: Synoptic acoustic and trawl survey of winter-spawning cod in Ipswich Bay, western Gulf of Maine Lead Institution: Gulf of Maine Research Institute; Project Leader: Graham Sherwood
Purpose: To expand our knowledge of the winter-spawning component of Atlantic cod by conducting a synoptic acoustic and trawl survey of Ipswich Bay. Improved knowledge of spawning dynamics in this area will lead to more fine-scale (in both time and space) management options.

Project Title: Identifying offshore spawning grounds of Gulf of Maine winter flounder
Lead Institution: University of New Hampshire; Project Leader: Elizabeth A. Fairchild
Purpose: To determine where winter flounder in the Gulf of Maine are spawning offshore and when, by studying their populations during the spawning season at offshore sites identified by commercial fishermen as locations where large numbers of adult winter flounder are seen during the spawning season.

 NEC/NEFMC – Cooperative Research Projects Funded 

These awards represent a continuation of the 2014 partnership established between the Consortium (NEC) and the Council. The NEC has representation from four research institutions: the University of New Hampshire, University of Maine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with Dr. Chris Glass at the University of New Hampshire, in the lead as its Director.

The Council is a group of 18 fishery officials that includes representatives from each New England coastal state, the federal government, and appointees from the region, all of whom are charged with managing the groundfish complex (cod, haddock, pollock and several species of flounder), in addition to other regional fish stocks. Funding collaborative research is fully consistent with its interest in understanding and improving this resource.

Read the release here