Saving Seafood

Researchers poised to study the joint effects of climate change and offshore wind energy development on U.S. West Coast fisheries

December 21, 2023 — Offshore wind energy is just around the corner for the United States’ West Coast, in an effort to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy generation. As the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) begins to issue leases for several offshore wind energy projects off the West Coast within the next decade, potential conflicts arise. How will offshore wind development affect the fishers who use the same stretch of the Pacific? How will climate change affect these uses?

These are the questions before researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Environmental Markets Lab (emLab), who work to align environmental objectives and economic incentives in support of sustainable livelihoods and a resilient planet. The installation of floating wind turbines is expected to generate complex issues of space and safety between all users of the offshore region. In previous research, emLab scientists investigated the potential effects of offshore wind infrastructure on West Coast fish stocks and fishers. Armed with a new $1.1 million grant from BOEM, emLab is ready to add climate change to the mix, incorporating climate model projections of ocean warming along the U.S. West Coast.

Read the full article at UC SANTA BARBARA

Using machine learning to map where sharks face the most risk from longline fishing

January 13, 2023 — The ocean can be a dangerous place, even for a shark. Despite sitting at the top of the food chain, these predators are now reeling from destructive human activities like overfishing, pollution and climate change.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara focused on a particularly troublesome issue for : tangles with the longline tuna fishery. Using data from regional fisheries management organizations and  algorithms, the scientists were able to map out hotspots where shark species face the greatest threat from longline fishing. The findings, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, highlight key regions where sharks can be protected with minimal impact on tuna fisheries.

Offshore longline fisheries take an especially heavy toll on ocean life. The non-selective technique has the highest rate of shark bycatch. “Longline fishing gear is exactly what it sounds like: a long line with lots of hooks attached to it that are baited. And they can be left in the water, waiting for fish to bite, for a very long time,” explained co-lead author Darcy Bradley, who heads UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean & Fisheries Program at the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab). These baited hooks catch predators like tuna, but many nearby sharks will also converge on the bait.

Rather than simply report how many sharks were caught and where, the authors aimed to assess the relative risk sharks faced across different areas of the ocean. “One of the main questions was ‘Where is the risk for catching sharks the highest, and does that overlap with fishing effort?'” said co-lead author Echelle Burns, a project scientist at emLab.

Read the full article at phys.org

New Research Could Help U.S. Fishing Communities Adapt to a Changing Climate, Fishermen and Conservationists Say

December 19, 2022 — The following was released by UC SANTA BARBARA:

Fishermen and conservationists are praising a new paper from the University of California-Santa Barbara that provides recommendations for helping U.S. fisheries and fishing communities adapt to the effects of climate change. The paper, published this week in Fish and Fisheries, identifies actionable steps fishing managers can take to adjust the rules that guide how much of a stock can be fished, known as Harvest Control Rules (HCRs). “While climate change is undoubtedly affecting fishing communities across our coasts, new management approaches can help reduce these impacts,” said Eric Schwaab, senior vice president at Environmental Defense Fund. “UCSB’s research and recommendations lay out the concrete actions for more resilient management.”

Fisherman Chris Brown, president of Seafood Harvesters of America, said this is the kind of work that will help create climate-resilient fisheries and protect fishermen’s livelihoods. “We are the canary in the coal mine—we are already seeing the impacts of climate change out on the water every day. Black sea bass and fluke have moved north,” said Brown. “We are alldeck hands on planet Earth. We need unconventional thought that leads to reasonable solutions.”

The recommendations laid out in the paper include using catch limits based on stock population size, accounting for potential impacts of climate change in the rules, and evaluating which management approaches are best for a specific fishery. They were developed by a team of researchers led by Chris Free at UCSB, who evaluated the management of over 500 fisheries across the United States with a specific focus on the HCRs.

“The recommendations in our paper will help fisheries managers improve the climate resilience of the nation’s fisheries in the short and long term,” said Free.

Read the full study here and see a summary of the recommendations below.

● Adjust fishing rates based on stock status. Too often, managers will allow a certain percentage of a fish stock to be caught regardless of the current size of the population. But use of what’s known as “ramped harvest control rules” aligns the percentage that can be caught with the current size of the stock. This helps avoid overfishing and makes harvest levels more responsive to changing conditions.

● Better buffers. Managers need to fine tune and adapt the precautionary buffers that are used when calculating catch limits. Precautionary buffers essentially set the catch limits lower than the maximum that could be caught before the stock is overfished. This helps avoid overfishing, given increasing uncertainties due to climate change.

● Some rules are better than none. Even when budgets don’t allow for full stock assessments, managers can use indicators of stock health — like information from an ecosystem monitoring survey — to create harvest control rules that take current stock size into account, maintain profits and reduce the risk of overfishing.

● Consider climate change in the management of data-limited stocks. Multiple tools, including climate vulnerability assessments, can be used to determine catch limits that consider climate change for even the most data-limited stocks.

● Deprioritize rules that explicitly incorporate environmental factors. Some species are known to do better under certain environmental conditions (like water temperature), which makes it tempting to adjust harvest strategies based on those conditions. But ecosystems are complicated, and relationships between stock size and environmental condition are often more challenging to account for than anticipated. In most circumstances, it is more effective to base harvest rules on stock abundance data.

● Explore ecosystem-based catch limits. Instead of HCRs that are specific to a single species, managers can consider catch limits that account for the interactions between many species within an ecosystem.

● Compare strategies. A tool known as Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) can help managers and stakeholders transparently compare how different harvest strategies can meet the goals of the fishery and the comparative risks associated with each.

‘Blue Food Revolution’ to Tackle Climate Change and Malnutrition

September 22, 2021 — Doubling of global demand for aquatic foods calls for a ‘blue food revolution’ to tackle climate change and malnutrition, new research argues.

An unprecedented review of the aquatic foods sector has uncovered how fisheries and aquaculture can play a greater role in delivering healthy diets and more sustainable, equitable and resilient food systems around the world.

Five peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature highlight the opportunities to leverage the vast diversity of aquatic, or “blue,” foods in the coming decades to address malnutrition, lower the environmental footprint of the food system, and provide livelihoods.

“People are trying to make more informed choices about the food they eat, in particular the environmental footprint of their food,” said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, who with colleagues examined the environmental sustainability of aquatic foods, the potential for the growth of small-scale producers and the climate risks that face aquatic food systems. “For the first time we pulled together data from hundreds of studies on a wide range of seafood species to help answer that question. Blue foods stack up really well overall and provide a great option for sustainable food.”

The research projects that global demand for blue foods will roughly double by 2050, and will be met primarily through increased aquaculture production rather than by capture fisheries.

Investing in innovation and improving fisheries management could increase consumption even more and have profound effects on malnutrition. For instance, a “high growth” modeling scenario showed that increasing supply by 15.5 million tons (8%), causing a drop in prices, would reduce cases of nutrient deficiencies by 166 million, especially among low-income populations.

Read the full story at ECO Magazine

 

Low oxygen is pushing fish into shallower water

September 21, 2021 — Fish can drown. They require oxygen to breathe, and use the oxygen dissolved in water rather than that in the air. When there’s too little oxygen in the water, they have to move or suffer ill effects.

Unfortunately, oxygen concentrations are dropping throughout the oceans. The new research, published in Global Change Biology, spans 15 years of surveys and measurements. The authors stress the importance of accounting for the findings in fishery management and conservation, or risk implementing strategies wildly out of step with conditions under the waves.

“This study finds that oxygen is declining at all the depths we surveyed: from 50 meters (164 feet) to 350 meters (1,148 feet),” says lead author Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, “and so fish seem to be moving up to shallower regions to get to an area where the oxygen is relatively higher.” Now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, Meyer-Gutbrod started this analysis as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Oxygen concentrations are decreasing for a number of reasons, including changes in ecology, seasons, and storms. But perhaps the most significant reason is that warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen.

Read the full story at Futurity

 

Researchers offer approaches for the sustainable expansion of the U.S. seafood industry

January 8, 2021 — The “Executive Order on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth,” issued by the Trump administration in May 2020, lays out a plan to expand the U.S. seafood industry, especially aquaculture, and enhance American seafood competitiveness in the global market.

The goals of the directive are focused largely on growth and expansion of the industry, which includes wild-caught fisheries and farm-raised products, as well as recreation, processing and other industries that rely on fishing.

“The seafood industry in general is worth about $200 billion and accounts for 2 million jobs in the United States,” said Halley E. Froehlich, a professor of fisheries and aquaculture at UC Santa Barbara, who with her colleagues finds that the executive order “ends up being a complicated and opaque ask,” given the complexity of the seafood industry and the headwinds it has been experiencing of late.

“We started having some deep conversations about policy implications and what they meant relative to some massive disruptions,” she said.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Aquaculture can feed the world, new report claims

August 31, 2017 — A new study by University of California, Santa Barbara marine scientists led by Professor Rebecca Gentry, along with researchers from the Nature Conservancy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), shows considerable potential for aquaculture to develop around the globe.

Fish farming is now the fastest-growing food sector in the world, and is frequently cited as having the potential to address future global food security issues. In their study, the researchers estimated that 15 billion metric tons (MT) of finfish could be grown globally per year, which is 100 times more than current world seafood consumption.

The results of their study, “Mapping the global potential for marine aquaculture,” published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on 14 August, demonstrates the oceans’ vast potential to support aquaculture, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and report co-author Peter Kareiva said.

“We need to find more protein for our growing population, and we have pretty much tapped out wild fish as protein sources,” he said. “This study shows that farming fish in the ocean could play a huge role in feeding people without degrading our ocean or overfishing wild species.”

Both fish and bivalve aquaculture have potential for expansion in what the researchers termed “hot spots” – particularly in warm, tropical regions.

Indonesia, for example, was found to have one of the highest production potentials for fish and bivalves. Developing just one percent of Indonesia’s suitable ocean area could produce more than 24 million MT of fish per year. If this was used entirely for domestic consumption, it would increase seafood consumption per capita six-fold.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Can farmed fish feed the world sustainably?

September 14, 2016 — The world’s population is expected to soar by 2.5 billion people by 2050, bringing a host of global challenges – including how to feed so many hungry mouths.

If projections hold, the global demand for animal protein will double over the next four decades, rising along with pressure to find ecologically sustainable food production practices.

Could farmed fish save the day? Just maybe, says UC Santa Barbara’s Steve Gaines. He and his team looked at wild-caught fish, farmed fish and land-based farming to assess the most viable long-term options.

The surprise: Fish farming floated above the rest for ecologic and economic reasons.

But there’s one big catch: Aquaculture has gotten a bad rap with American consumers.

“I meet people all the time who say, ‘I will only eat wild fish because aquaculture is bad,’” said Gaines, dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara.

Gaines has been working to change minds about aquaculture, speaking at conferences around the country like this week’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Sustainable Foods Institute.

While some forms of aquaculture can harm the environment, others have a much lower impact, especially when compared to raising livestock – and in some cases even compare favorably to an entirely vegetarian diet, he said.

Read the full story from the University of California

Cod and climate: North Atlantic Oscillation factor in decline

July 28, 2016 — In recent decades, the plight of Atlantic cod off the coast of New England has been front-page news. Since the 1980s in particular, the once-seemingly inexhaustible stocks of Gadus morhua — one of the most important fisheries in North America — have declined dramatically.

In 2008, a formal assessment forecasted that stocks would rebound, but by 2012, they were once again on the verge of collapse. Two years later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration instituted an unprecedented six-month closure of the entire Gulf of Maine cod fishery to allow stocks to recover.

While overfishing is one known culprit, a new study co-authored by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Columbia University finds that the climatological phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is also a factor. And it contributes in a predictable way that may enable fishery managers to protect cod stocks from future collapse. The group’s findings appear in the journal PLOS ONE.

“In the 1980s, the North Atlantic was stuck in a positive phase of NAO,” said lead author Kyle Meng, an economist at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “We show not only that positive NAO conditions diminish a few consecutive cohorts of cod larvae but also that this effect follows a cohort as it matures.”

Read the full story at Science Daily

Overfishing Not Solely to Blame for New England Cod Collapse

July 28, 2016 — Overfishing is a known culprit of the decline of Atlantic cod off the coast of New England but now, a new study co-authored by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Columbia University has found that the climatological phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is also a factor. And it contributes in a predictable way that may enable fishery managers to protect cod stocks from future collapse.

“In the 1980s, the North Atlantic was stuck in a positive phase of NAO,” said lead author Kyle Meng, an economist at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

“We show not only that positive NAO conditions diminish a few consecutive cohorts of cod larvae but also that this effect follows a cohort as it matures.”

The NAO is a periodic climatic phenomenon that, like El Niño, causes changes in water temperatures, although the mechanism is different and the NAO affects the North Atlantic rather than the Pacific.

Also like El Niño, the NAO may be affected in terms of both strength and frequency by climate change. The researchers found that, since 1980, NAO conditions have accounted for up to 17 per cent of the decline in New England cod stocks.

“The Atlantic cod fishery has been the poster child of fishery science and challenges in the field,” said co-author Kimberly Oremus of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Read the full story at The Fish Site