Saving Seafood

Conference Tackles Overfishing In The World’s Oceans

October 12, 2021 — Protecting the world’s oceans and its resources could be coming closer to reality as countries gather this week in China for the United Nations Conference on Biological Diversity.

Nations are expected to start keeping promises to protect 30% of the world’s oceans, including implementing or pledging support for the implementation of more Marine Protected Areas around the world.

The conference, to be held in Kunming, China starting Monday, follows a collective pledge from more than 100 countries to protect at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. Climate change was a major theme during the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September, and the goal remains lofty though conservationists remain hopeful.

The global Marine Protected Area Atlas that covers some 18,000 MPAs shows just 2.7% of the ocean is fully or highly protected from fishing impacts. A previous goal of protecting 10% by 2020 was missed.

And though it was expected that some nations would up their MPA coverage, management was still an issue, according to University of Hawaii marine researcher Alan Friedlander.

Friedlander was among a group of marine experts who called for more effective management strategies — a blueprint for future MPA management — as there was a broad range of interpretations and “not all MPAs are created equal.”

Management was of equal importance to designation, he said.

“It’s a big difference between what’s strongly protected and what’s declared protected,” said Friedlander. “We really need to have strong protection if the goal is biodiversity.”

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

 

HAWAII: UH Sea Grant shares in award to address marine debris, protect wildlife

August 31, 2021 — To address the devastating impacts of marine debris in the coastal environment, one of the leading causes of injury and death for sea turtles, seabirds and Hawaiian monk seals, the University of Hawaiʻi Sea Grant College Program (Hawaiʻi Sea Grant) and Hawaiʻi Marine Animal Response (HMAR), the largest Hawaiʻi-based marine species response and conservation nonprofit organization, received $50,000 from NOAA Sea Grant and the NOAA Marine Debris Program. This grant is matched by $50,000 from non-federal sources.

The funding is one of six new, creative projects to tackle marine debris challenges across the country awarded to Sea Grant programs in Hawaiʻi, Florida, Georgia, Illinois-Indiana, Puerto Rico and Wisconsin. These marine debris projects total $300,000 in federal funding and are matched by non-federal contributions, bringing the total investment to approximately $600,000.

“By preventing marine debris, we can reduce the impacts of this global problem,” stated NOAA Marine Debris Program Director Nancy Wallace. “We are pleased to partner with NOAA Sea Grant to provide support for projects that will help stop trash and fishing gear at their source.”

Read the full story at University of Hawaii News

Infectious disease found in Hawaiʻi dolphin could spark mass marine mammal deaths

August 9, 2021 — After two years of investigating the cause of death of a Fraser’s dolphin that was stranded on Maui in 2018, researchers discovered a novel strain of morbillivirus, a marine mammal disease responsible for deadly outbreaks among dolphins and whales worldwide. The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Health and Stranding Lab conducted the necropsy (an animal autopsy) and published the report of the morbillivirus discovery in Nature Scientific Reports. It is the first linked to this dolphin species.

“The 2018 stranding of the Fraser’s dolphin revealed that we have a novel and very divergent strain of morbillivirus here in Hawaiian waters that we were previously unaware of,” said Kristi West, associate researcher at UH Mānoa’s Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology who directs the Health and Stranding Lab. “Morbillivirus is an infectious disease that has been responsible for mass mortalities of dolphins and whales worldwide. It is related to human measles and smallpox.”

The discovery led to a suite of independent tests (immunohistochemistry, culturing of the virus and transmission electron microscopy) to confirm the finding and understand the role of this distinct morbillivirus in the pathology of the Fraser’s dolphin. The UH Health and Stranding Lab only recovers less than 5% of the dolphins and whales that die in Hawaiian waters, which makes detecting disease outbreaks very difficult.

Read the full story at University of Hawaii News

$210M federal award to fund UH research focused on how ecosystems are changing

June 10, 2021 — A small trap sits on the coral reef for four months, imprisoning tiny particles for environmental DNA analysis. These findings give researchers a snapshot in time of the microhabitats of our oceans, and in the long-term, a sense of how our ecosystems are changing.

This is just one of the many research projects developed by students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa through the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research — a partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last week, NOAA set plans to continue their 44-year-old partnership, awarding $210 million to the University of Hawaii — more than double the amount of previous funding. The money will go toward the next five years of research for NOAA’s new institute: the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research.

According to deputy director of NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center Tia Brown, CIMAR “will help NOAA achieve our mission to better understand the ocean and atmosphere, which depends on all the research that we do … as well as the data and information to make sound decisions for healthy ecosystems, communities and a strong blue economy.”

In fiscal year 2022, CIMAR will continue the work of JIMAR while expanding to eight new research themes: ecological forecasting, ecosystem monitoring, ecosystem-based management, protection and restoration of resources, oceanographic monitoring and forecasting, climate science and impacts, air-sea interactions, and tsunamis and other long-period ocean waves.

Read the full story at Hawaii News Now

HAWAII: UH selected to host NOAA’s new institute for marine and atmospheric research

June 2, 2021 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has selected the University of Hawai’i to host its new institute for marine and atmospheric research.

UH will receive up to $210 million over five years to conduct a wide range of environmental research, from studying the vog coming out of Kilauea to fishing activity to coral reefs.

“It’s almost all for the benefit of the local people, us, and those of us living on these islands, so we better know the environment, we can understand it, and we can prepare for changes that are coming and protect the environment,” said Doug Luther, Director of UH Manoa Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research.

Read the full story at KITV

ALEXIA AKBAY: Building A Post-COVID Oceans Economy For Hawaii

July 13, 2020 — The impact of COVID-19 is leading localities around the world to rethink their economies. With a record-high 39.4% of the workforce unemployed, Hawaii is no different.

As a global pandemic dries up tourist dollars and a climate crisis lurks in our future, it is clear that Hawaii’s economy, like our ohia forests and coral reefs, is a fragile ecosystem vulnerable to disruption.

A growing number of calls for a new economic model are gaining traction but they forget Hawaii’s crown jewel: 143,000 acres of mariculture-ready ocean and centuries of indigenous ocean stewardship knowledge.

As we consider Hawaii’s post-COVID economic future, we cannot miss this chance to build a blue economy that restores Hawaii’s self-sufficiency while bringing it forward to a climate-resilient future.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Aggressive new seaweed is killing coral reefs in remote Hawaiian island chain

July 8, 2020 — Researchers say a recently discovered species of seaweed is killing large patches of coral on once-pristine reefs in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and is rapidly spreading across one of the most remote and protected ocean environments on Earth.

A study from the University of Hawaii and others says the seaweed is spreading more rapidly than anything they’ve seen before in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a nature reserve that stretches more than 1,300 miles north of the main Hawaiian Islands.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

The algae easily breaks off and rolls across the ocean floor like tumbleweed, scientists say, covering nearby reefs in thick vegetation that out-competes coral for space, sunlight and nutrients.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Los Angeles Times

Climate warming promises more frequent extreme El Niño events

October 22, 2019 — El Niño events cause serious shifts in weather patterns across the globe, and an important question that scientists have sought to answer is: how will climate change affect the generation of strong El Niño events? A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team of international climate researchers led by Bin Wang of the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), has an answer to that question. Results show that since the late 1970’s, climate change effects have shifted the El Niño onset location from the eastern Pacific to the western Pacific and caused more frequent extreme El Niño events. Continued warming over the western Pacific warm pool promises conditions that will trigger more extreme events in the future.

The team examined details of 33 El Niño events from 1901 to 2017, evaluating for each event the onset location of the warming, its evolution, and its ultimate strength. By grouping the common developmental features of the events, the team was able to identify four types of El Niño, each with distinct onset and strengthening patterns. Looking across time, they found a decided shift in behavior since the late 1970’s: all events beginning in the eastern Pacific occurred prior to that time, while all events originating in the western-central Pacific happened since then. They also found that four of five identified extreme El Niño events formed after 1970.

Wang and his co-authors focused on the factors that seemed to be controlling these shifts, including increased  in the western Pacific warm pool and the easterly winds in the central Pacific, and found that with continued , those factors may lead to a continued increase in frequency in extreme El Niño events.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Pacific bigeye tuna fishery decline expected due to climate change

July 23, 2019 — A decline in Hawaii’s deep-set longline bigeye tuna fishery may be “inevitable” with climate change, according to a study by researchers in Hawaii and Australia.

Changes to bigeye tuna’s food supply, via changes to the plankton community, and temperature, will reduce yields because it will affect tuna’s fitness. This will impact tuna’s aerobic scope and ability to successfully forage, researchers from Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, and the Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania said.

Proactive fisheries management could be an effective tool for mitigating climate change, either by balancing or outweighing climate effects. “However, modeling these [climatic] stressors jointly shows that even large management changes cannot completely offset climate effects.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Place-Based Management Can Protect Coral Reefs in a Changing Climate

April 30, 2019 — Researchers from the state Department of Health and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa have developed and applied a new technology in Hawai‘i that identifies where coral reef ecosystems and associated fisheries are vulnerable to human activities and where to focus management actions to minimize anthropogenic impacts.

The authors of the newly published study in the journal Ecological Applications identified specific locations on land where improved wastewater management and landscape practices would yield the greatest benefits for downstream reefs in terms of mitigating harm to coral communities and associated reef fish populations.

Expansion of coastal development, along with wastewater discharge and fertilizers, can harm coral reefs and their fisheries through increases in sediment and nutrient runoff. Consequent reef degradation directly affects ecological resilience, food security, human well-being, and cultural practices in tropical island communities around the world.

The researchers focused on the ahupua‘a (land divisions) of Hāʻena on Kaua‘i and Ka‘ūpūlehu on Hawai‘i Island, at opposite ends of the main Hawaiian Islands, where native Hawaiian communities are taking action to manage their resources through a place-based management approach.

Read the full story at Big Island Now