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FLORIDA: Agricultural and marine industries take hit from COVID-19, says UF/IFAS survey

May 20, 2020 — New numbers show agricultural and marine industries are taking a huge hit from the coronavirus pandemic.

The University of Florida and the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences held a virtual news conference Tuesday to reveal the findings of a month-long survey conducted with members of the agricultural and marine industries in Florida.

Almost every marine industry lost revenue according to the survey’s results. Andrew Ropicki, an assistant professor specializing in marine resource economics, noticed that despite this decrease, some businesses relatively fared better.

Read the full story at WCJB

FLORIDA: UF survey assesses coronavirus effect on marine businesses, aims to help industries

April 23, 2020 — A Fort Pierce commercial fishing wholesaler has begun selling freshly caught seafood directly from its boats, docked on the northwest side of the North Causeway.

Walk-up customers can buy fresh snapper, swordfish and yellowfin tuna at discounted rates as long as supplies last each day.

It’s how Day Boat Seafood LLC is adjusting to a drop in demand caused by closed restaurants and fewer dinners being sold by those that remain open for takeout or delivery, said managing partner Scott Taylor.

“Fortunately, we did see some grocery store chains step up to buy more domestically caught seafood, since imported seafood sources have not been able to deliver product,” said Taylor. About 80-90% of seafood bought in the U.S. comes from other countries, he said.

Such effects of the coronavirus pandemic on marine businesses are what a University of Florida research branch is trying to learn about through a new survey open until May 15.

Read the full story at TC Palm

Open Sores, Lower Numbers Likely Not Invasive Lionfish’s End

February 4, 2020 — A new disease has caused open sores that can eat into the muscles of invasive lionfish and appears to have contributed to an abrupt drop in their numbers in the northern Gulf of Mexico, scientists reported Tuesday. But they hasten to say it’s probably far from the end of the showy invader with long, venomous spines.

Lionfish may even already be bouncing back, said University of Florida doctoral student Holden Harris, lead author of the article published online in Scientific Reports. Numbers of the smallest lionfish taken by spearfishers were way down in 2018, indicating a possible reduction in spawning, but were rising late that year and in early 2019, he said.

“It’s too early, really, to say if that’ll become a full population recovery,” he said.

It’s an interesting development, said Matthew Johnston, a Nova Southeastern University researcher who has written scientific papers about invasive lionfish but had not known about the lesions or population changes. “We’ve always been wondering if they’re ever going to reach their limit in certain locations,” he said. “To date it seemed the populations just kept getting larger and larger and larger.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

TOMORROW–Webinar on Genomics for Fisheries Management: An Application to the Thorny Skate

September 17, 2019 — The following was released by the Lenfest Ocean Program:

Join the Lenfest Ocean Program on Wednesday, September 18 at 10:00 am EDT/2:00 pm GMT for a webinar featuring Dr. Gavin Naylor of the University of Florida to discuss his project on thorny skate genomics in the North Atlantic.

Dr. Naylor and his team are using modern genomic tools to tease out the spatial population structure of thorny skates and to investigate factors that may have contributed to past changes in abundance. The findings could help managers determine the appropriate spatial scale for thorny skate management and lead to the development of effective conservation strategies across the North Atlantic. The project began in 2017.

Download the project fact sheet to learn more.

Upcoming Webinar: How Genomics Can Inform Fisheries Management

September 6, 2019 — The following was released by Lenfest Ocean Program:

Join the Lenfest Ocean Program on Wednesday, September 18 at 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm GMT for a webinar featuring Dr. Gavin Naylor of the University of Florida to discuss his project on thorny skate genomics in the North Atlantic.

Download the project fact sheet to learn more.

JACK PAYNE: Endangered species science is itself endangered

December 19, 2018 — Catching chinook salmon today requires gear, technique, experience and luck. Catching salmon a year or a decade from now requires science.

That means local science. The recent National Climate Assessment notes that Alaska’s temperature has been warming at twice the global rate. To get at what this means for Alaskans, we need University of Alaska scientists.

Alaskans are getting a better handle on what a warming world does to salmon runs through the work of a federally funded corps of local fisheries researchers based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Known as the Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, its researchers address climate questions from an Alaska perspective.

For example, they research how melting glaciers can increase or diminish salmon numbers and for how many years. They consider how the increasing frequency of wildfires plays out on salmon streams. They compare how the same conditions can have different effects on sockeye, coho and chinook salmon.

It’s not the gloom and doom of a planet in peril. In some ways, climate change appears to have boosted some salmon counts, at least temporarily.

An accurate salmon count depends in part on a good scientist count. Here, the news is not good. Until I hired Alaska assistant unit leader Abby Powell to come run the University of Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit three years ago, the Alaska unit had five faculty members. It’s down to two.

Slowly starving for lack of federal funding, Alaska’s fish and wildlife species science is itself becoming an endangered species.

The national Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (CRU) program was established in 1935 on the premise that science, not politics, should guide management of national treasures such as eagles, bison, and moose. An administration proposal to de-fund it does away with that premise.

Read the full opinion piece at Anchorage Daily News

Gulf of Mexico red snapper get traded like stocks. So just how big is the market?

December 5, 2017 — For the next two years, a team of researchers studying red snapper — the sweet and nutty star of seafood menus that also happens to be at the center of a heated regulatory battle — will do the seemingly impossible: count the number of fish swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.

The $10 million study, meant to provide an independent tally for fishermen around the Gulf, may ultimately offer the largest fish survey ever performed, and lead to more accurate counting tools for the complex job of assessing fish stocks. It’s also a stab at resolving the ongoing dispute over strict snapper rules that critics say favor commercial fishermen, allowing a few powerful ones to control lucrative catch limits traded like shares in the stock market.

“It’s a very touchy subject,” said Bob Spaeth, former owner of the Madeira Beach Seafood Co. on Florida’s Gulf Coast and executive director of the Southern Offshore Fishing Association. “We have some unintended consequences.”

Red snapper once filled the Gulf and supplied an industry that made fried, grilled or blackened snapper a staple at seafood restaurants and markets. But by the 1980s, the population had dropped to unsustainable numbers, with an absence of long-lived adults, which can live to age 50. That spawned years of shifting regulations, scrutinized stock assessments and debates between commercial and recreational fishermen who were regulated differently.

Read the full story at the Miami Herald

Two-year study to assess microfibers’ threat to the oceans

March 16, 2017 — Comfortable clothes are emerging as a source of plastic that’s increasingly ending up in the oceans and potentially contaminating seafood, according to Gulf Coast researchers who are launching a two-year study of microscopic plastics in the waters from south Texas to the Florida Keys.

The project, led by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, will rely partly on volunteers in coastal cleanup events. It also will expand a year’s worth of data collected around Florida that predominantly found microfibers – shreds of plastic even smaller than microbeads flowing down bathroom sinks and shower drains.

Yoga pants, fleece jackets, sweat-wicking athletic wear and other garments made from synthetic materials shed microscopic plastic fibers – called “microfibers” – when laundered. Wastewater systems flush the microfibers into natural waterways, eventually reaching the sea.

“Anything that’s nylon or polyester, like the fleece-type jackets,” University of Florida researcher Maia McGuire said.

When McGuire set out to study the kinds of plastic found in Florida waters, she expected to mostly find microbeads – the brightly-colored plastic spheres the U.S. government banned from rinse-off cosmetic products in 2015 because of the potential threat to fish and other wildlife.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

These Fish Evolved to Live in Extremely Toxic Water

December 9th, 2016 — Minnow-like Atlantic killifish spend their entire lives swimming in a toxic stew of chemicals in some of the United States’ most polluted waters. Now scientists have figured out why they are not just surviving, but thriving.

In four severely polluted East Coast estuaries, these little striped fish have evolved with genetic mutations that leave them tolerant of normally lethal doses of industrial pollution, according to a study led by University of California, Davis researchers to be published Friday in the journal Science.

Experts say this discovery may hold clues for better understanding how chemical pollutants affect people and animals.

“A big question has been: how quickly or readily do populations adapt in highly contaminated areas? This study really gets at that question,” says Christopher Martyniuk, a fish biologist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the new study.

Killifish, sometimes called mud minnows or mummichog, are abundant in the brackish waterways and marshes along the Atlantic coast. They’re an indicator species—one that is used as a barometer to gauge the health of ecosystems—because they are typically really sensitive to pollution, says lead study author and environmental toxicologist Andrew Whitehead.

Read the full story at The National Geographic

Researchers register success in breeding Pacific blue tangs aka ‘Finding Dory’ fish

July 25, 2016 — You can call it ‘Finding Dory’ effect, as a rise has been witnessed in the sales of Pacific blue tang since the movie has been released. Blue tangs can only be captured in the wild. As per experts, the methods used for the same are environmentally harmful.

For past many years, researchers have been tried to replicate the species; mating, hatching and growing behavior. Researchers from the University of Florida have achieved success in the same and have been able to breed Pacific blue tangs.

The research was carried out by the university researchers along with Rising Tide Conservation and the SeaWorld-Busch Gardens Conservation Fund. The species is considered to be the most difficult fish. In fact, only 12.5 to 15% of aquarium creatures can be bred in captivity. It has now become vital to increase the percentage.

As mentioned above, only method to get them is from the wild. Blue tangs are not going to become extinct, as they reproduce in large number and live in reefs across the world. But reefs are what giving concerns to scientists.

Read the full story at NorcalNews