Saving Seafood

The Sonar Challenge: Seapix drills down

January 10, 2022 — About 10 years ago, iXblue — a French tech company headquartered on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea — identified fisheries as a potential market and began asking fishermen what they wanted in a sonar.

“We found that fishermen want two things,” says Christophe Corbières, Fishery sales developer at iXblue. “They want to know the volume of the target shoal, and they want to be able to discriminate species.”

To that end, iXblue designed the Seapix sonar system, a pricey but top of the line tool for fishermen who want to have a good idea what they’re setting their nets on. The system begins with a Mills Cross transducer with 256 beams on each axis.

“It looks ahead and the side 120 degrees,” says Corbières. “We are using the same transducer geometry that astronomers use to listen to deep space, adapted for the sea.” iXblue made the transducer 48 centimeters in diameter, so it could fit the housing size of comparable transducers.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

MASSACHUSETTS: Local lobsterman to test ropeless buoy equipment

July 2, 2018 — Sonar technology used in Australia for southern rock lobster commercial fishing will be tested in July, possibly in Cape Cod Bay, as a method to better protect imperiled North Atlantic right whales from rope entanglements.

“Getting these and other systems into the hands of the fishermen and incorporating their ideas and feedback into their development is the key,” said Patrick Ramage, marine conservation program director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which has its operations center in Yarmouth Port.

IFAW will pay $30,000 to provide the equipment, a trainer and onboard support for what is expected to be a test by one member of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association of the acoustic release equipment manufactured by Desert Star Systems, a company based in Marina, California, and founded by Marco Flagg.

The equipment replaces the typical surface buoy and vertical rope that lobstermen attach to their traps on the seafloor to identify the trap locations. Instead, the new equipment has a bottom-anchored mesh bag full of rope and floats that can open and pop up to the surface with an acoustic command from a boat. The equipment dates from the mid-1990s when a lobster fisherman in Australia wanted to prevent trap losses from gear entanglement with ships.

The equipment was tested earlier this year by five commercial snow crab fishermen in Canadian waters, Flagg said.

“The Massachusetts test is on the small side but I’m happy it’s happening,” Flagg said of what is the first pilot of the product in United States waters. Each release mechanism costs about $1,500 to $1,700 and lasts for 10 years, he said.

A Sandwich-based lobsterman is expected to pilot the equipment, according to the lobstermen’s association president Arthur “Sooky” Sawyer.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Navy’s submarine hunts are too disturbing for marine life, California court rules

July 20, 2016 — They came as a wave, some 150 to 200 melon-headed whales churning into Hawaii’s Hanalei Bay like a single mass. It was a strange sight for the Kauai islanders to behold. Melon-headed whales live in the deep ocean, feasting on squid. But here they were, swimming in the shallows no more than 100 feet from shore.

Over the course of July 3 and 4, 2004, volunteers and rescuers shepherded the animals back to sea, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s account of the mass stranding. The Washington Post reported at the time that it was the largest event of its kind in 150 years of Hawaiian history. Almost all the whales made it back out into the open water. But not the entire pod.

A young calf, split off from the rest of the herd, perished the next day.

A year later, 34 whales died when they were stranded at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Three years after that and half the world away, 100 melon-headed whales were again stranded en masse, this time on the shores of Madagascar. The reasons why whales beach themselves are not always clear — strandings have been likened to car crashes in that the causes are myriad but the conclusion is never good. With the melon-headed whales, however, something was different. The events were unusual enough, and involved such large numbers, to prompt scrutiny. In both cases, a prime suspect emerged: sonar.

Controversy over these sound waves continues today. And in the latest skirmish over oceanic noise pollution, a victory went to the whales. On Friday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the Navy violated marine mammal protection laws, reversing a lower court’s decision that allowed military vessels to use a type of loud, low-frequency sonar approved in 2012.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Navy sonar that harms whales and dolphins was improperly approved, US court finds

July 19, 2016 — The US Navy is now using a particular type of sonar in more than half of the world’s oceans under an illegal permit. That sonar harms marine mammals like whales, dolphins, seals, and walruses. On Friday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in California found that a 2012 regulation that allowed the Navy to use a low-frequency active sonar for training and testing violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

“The court found that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which gave the authorization, isn’t doing enough to avoid harming or killing marine mammals under the law. The Marine Mammal Protection Act calls for the “least practicable adverse impact” on marine mammals and their habitats. The court also found that the federal agency failed to protect areas of the world that its own government experts had flagged as “biologically important” to protect marine life. Such areas include the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off of Hawaii, and Challenger Bank off of Bermuda.

The Navy had been authorized to use the high-intensity long-range sonar — called low-frequency active sonar, or LFA — for five years across more than 70 percent of the world’s oceans, in areas of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. The NMFS has to set certain limits to activities, like military training, that could harm marine mammals. The goal is to reduce the impact on marine life to its lowest possible level.

Read the full story at The Verge

The Lost Whaling Fleet is finally found

January 18, 2016 — During the summer of 1871, a mini-armada of American whaleships hunting for bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean gambled against the weather, and lost. As the fleet sailed north, the temperature plummeted, and unrelenting winds pushed massive ice floes toward the coast, which first pinned the whaleships in place, and then began crushing their hulls. In the end, 32 whaleships were destroyed in what became the greatest single disaster in the history of American whaling.

For nearly a century and a half, the remains of those ships were hidden from view, but no longer. This past summer, archaeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, using sonar and sensing technology, found the hulls of two whaling ships in the same area where the disaster occurred. These ships, whose discovery NOAA only recently made public, are almost certainly part of that ill-fated fleet.

The story of the so-called Lost Whaling Fleet is one of the most dramatic in America’s long and turbulent history of whaling. Since the mid-1800s, American whalers had been pursuing bowhead whales in the Arctic. These massive creatures, which can grow more than 60 feet long and weigh up to 100 tons, yielded as much as 300 barrels of oil, widely used for lighting.

But by the time the whaling fleet headed north in 1871, the whale oil market had been virtually eliminated. After the discovery of petroleum in 1859, an ever-increasing amount of that “black gold” was pumped from the ground and refined into a flood of cheap kerosene that ultimately displaced whale oil and other illuminants.

What the whalers of 1871 wanted from the bowheads was not oil, but the hundreds of strips of baleen that were hanging down from the roof of their mouths. Whales use this keratinous material, which when viewed from the side resembles a comb with hairy fringes on the inner edge, for feeding. Baleen was valuable because it was made into hoops for hooped skirts, and stays for stomach-tightening and chest-crushing corsets, which were fashionable at the time. Bowhead whales were especially prized, because they had the longest baleen of any whale, reaching lengths of nearly 14 feet.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

 

CALIFORNIA: Anchovy population has not collapsed

November 11, 2015 — I’ve been fishing in Monterey and along the West Coast for more than 30 years and I’m one of only about eight fishermen who fish anchovy in Monterey Bay. I’m shocked at the recent outcry in the media that claims the anchovy population has collapsed!

Environmentalists who are calling for the immediate closure of our local anchovy fishery are basing their claims on a flawed study that deliberately omits data from recent years showing a huge upswing in the anchovy population.

Read the full story at Santa Cruz Sentinel

US probes dolphin death after Navy uses sonar

November 4, 2015 — HONOLULU (AP) ” The National Marine Fisheries Service on Wednesday said it was investigating the death of two dolphins found washed ashore in California shortly after Navy ships were using sonar in nearby waters.

The animals are being analyzed to try to determine what caused them to get stranded, agency spokesman Jim Milbury said.

The dolphins were common bottlenose dolphins, Navy spokeswoman Lt. Julie Holland said. They were found Oct. 21 at Imperial Beach and at Silver Strand beach in San Diego.

Two Navy ships were using mid-frequency active sonar 80 nautical miles away from where the dolphins were found, Holland said. They used the sonar for slightly more than an hour over two days from Oct. 19.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Navy, environmental groups settle lawsuit, limiting some training that harms whales in Pacific

September 14, 2015 — HONOLULU (AP) — The Navy agreed to limit its use of sonar and other training that inadvertently harms whales, dolphins and other marine mammals off Hawaii and California in a settlement with environmental groups approved Monday.

A centerpiece of the agreement signed by a federal judge in Honolulu includes limits or bans on mid-frequency active sonar and explosives in specified areas around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California, Earthjustice attorney David Henkin said.

Sonar at a great distance can disrupt feeding and communication of marine mammals, and it can cause deafness or death at a closer distance, Henkin said.

In some cases, training exercises can kill. Four dolphins died in 2011 in San Diego when they got too close to an explosives training exercise, he said.

The Navy estimated it could inadvertently kill 155 whales and dolphins off Hawaii and Southern California, mostly from explosives. It estimated it could cause more than 11,000 serious injuries off the East Coast and 2,000 off Hawaii and Southern California.

Lt. Cmdr. Matt Knight, a U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman, said the settlement preserves key testing and training.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News and World Report