Saving Seafood

The COVID-19 Slowdown Will Show Whether Quieter Seas Help Killer Whales

June 30, 2020 — Deborah Giles and her dog are on a mad search for floating poop. Killer whale poop, to be precise.

Giles, a killer whale biologist at the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology, is cruising the Strait of Juan De Fuca, a roughly 15-mile-wide inlet between Canada’s Vancouver Island and Washington state. The coastal waterway is a hotspot for migrating killer whales. Lately, the waters have been calmer and quieter because of boating and border restrictions enacted in the wake of COVID-19. That is why Giles has brought her scat-tracking dog, Eba, who will sniff the air as the boat cruises then start licking her lips, whining, and barking as they get closer to killer whale excrement.

These buoyant, information-rich fecal samples ready for collection. Giles wants to know if the hushed waters are helping whales relax. “It’s just such a novel situation where we just don’t have people going out on their boats,” she says. “It’s markedly different.”

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine

International Fishery Experts Agree on Key Area-Based Management Concepts

June 22, 2020 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:

Area-based management has become a an international focal point for fisheries management with the United Nations advocating for some form of protected area in 30% of the ocean by 2030.

In response to this initiative and other issues, 34 fishery science and management experts from intergovernmental and nongovernmental agencies, regional fishery management organizations and academia convened by teleconference June 15-17 as a first step toward the development of a “Roadmap to Effective Area-Based Management of Blue Water Fisheries.” The workshop addressed emerging issues in national waters and in areas beyond national jurisdiction and called for clarity in objectives, monitoring and area-based selection. It also stressed comparing static vs dynamic area-based approaches.

The participants agreed that simply closing large sections of the ocean is not a silver bullet for managing blue water fisheries and their ecosystems and that marine protected areas (MPAs) are merely a single element within the tool box of area-based management.

“Area-based management tools are not exclusively MPAs or closures,” noted Ray Hilborn, professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington.

Convened by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council and co-chaired by Hilborn and Vera Agostini (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), the workshop included participants from the Americas, Australia/Oceania and Europe. Workshop contributors addressed the application of area-based management tools to reach objectives pertaining to sustainable food production (local and global), employment (local and global), economic health and welfare, communities and culture, protected and non-target species, ecosystem integrity and resilience to climate change and other stressors.

Area-based management may be static in nature (i.e., have a fixed spatial delineation) or dynamic, whereby portions of the ecosystem closed to fishing can change in space and time. The workshop called for clarity in objectives, monitoring and area-based selection and comparing static vs dynamic area-based approaches.

Participants pointed out that with rapidly emerging technologies to collect data and monitor fisheries, area-based management can be adaptive and more precise in its implementation. But these objectives and management capabilities are also linked with specific need for empirical evidence and research.

“We can’t really predict the impacts of many actions because of information gaps,” Hilborn said.

Stakeholders and leading scientists cautioned for clear planning on the use of area-based management tools in blue water ecosystems rather than strictly opportunistic or “set it and forget it” implementation. Highly migratory fish movements are dynamic and their distributions are often moving, so scientific evaluation in planning is critical.

“Economic, cultural and social objectives need to be considered thoroughly prior to implementation of area-based management, and industry engagement is critical,” noted Craig Severance, professor of anthropology emeritus, University of Hawai’i at Hilo.

Alternative management measures should be explored and evaluated alongside any area-based management measures considered, including take MPAs, the participants agreed.

The workshop will produce the “Roadmap” document by the end of 2020 for publication as peer-reviewed literature.

New Map Launching Today Helps People Find Local Seafood

May 28, 2020 — The seafood industry relies heavily on restaurants and retail stores for the majority of sales. With restaurant closures and coronavirus shelter-in-place orders, the seafood industry has been hit hard. The sudden drop in demand has forced fishers and fish farmers to get creative in their methods, turning to direct sales to stay afloat. A new tool through the University of Washington Sustainable Fisheries initiative has compiled information about where to find seafood in the form of a map that can be used to easily track down local, sustainable catch for delivery or direct sales.

The goal of the map is to support small seafood businesses by making their transition to direct sales just a little bit easier. Generally a supplier (fishing boat or farm) will deal with processors and distributors to sell their fish, and customers will purchase through a restaurant or grocery store.

Now that direct sales are the only option, the industry is scrambling to keep up and adapt to a new way of business and the map is meant to shoulder some of the burden. “They’re bringing in people from sales to pack boxes, the last thing they should have to worry about is finding new markets,” says Jack Cheney; a senior project manager at seafood sustainability organization FishWise, and contributor for Sustainable Fisheries UW, a grant-funded website dedicated to explaining the science of seafood, “this is the least we can do to try and promote them in some small way.”

Read the full story at Forbes

THE SEATTLE TIMES: New UW consortium will lead to a broader, deeper study of ocean health

May 28, 2020 — The University of Washington’s selection to host a new research consortium is a testament to the school’s well-earned reputation. It will help advance understanding of climate, ocean dynamics and marine ecosystems, building on the school’s track record of excellence in the field.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week that the UW will lead a new Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies, which includes Oregon State University and University of Alaska Fairbanks. The designation comes with up to $300 million in funding for research into areas such as climate and ocean variability, the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems, aquaculture and polar studies, in conjunction with the NOAA labs.

The selection is a testament to the UW’s research prowess: The commitment is nearly triple the last NOAA Cooperative Institute award to UW and formalizes longstanding collaborations among researchers along the West Coast.

Read the full opinion piece at The Seattle Times

NOAA selects Univ. of Washington to host regional institute for climate and ocean research

May 22, 2020 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has selected the University of Washington to host a Pacific Northwest research institute focusing on climate, ocean and coastal challenges, supported by a five-year award worth up to $300 million.

  • The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies, or CICOES, will be a collaboration involving UW as well as the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and Oregon State University. It’ll build on the 42-year history of UW’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, under the continued directorship of UW marine biologist John Horne.

Read the full story at Geek Wire

Warming Oceans Choke Fish as Habitats Get Less ‘Breathable’

May 20, 2020 — The cool, nutrient-rich water of the California Current supports a variety of marine life, including invisible phytoplankton, economically important salmon, rockfish, and Dungeness crab, and majestic orcas.

For the study in Science Advances, researchers used recent understanding of water breathability and historical data to explain population cycles of the northern anchovy. The findings for this key species could apply to other species in the current.

“If you’re worried about marine life off the west coast of North America, you’re worried about anchovies and other forage fish in the California Current. Ultimately it’s what underpins the food web,” says lead author Evan Howard, a postdoctoral researcher in oceanography at the University of Washington.

Read the full story at Futurity

Researchers Probe Orca Poop for Microplastics: Part 1

May 19, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

You might worry about your toddler chewing on a plastic toy with toxic chemicals. Some orca researchers are beginning to worry about whales ingesting a gut full of microplastics, and what that might mean for their health.

Microplastics are everywhere. Millions of tons of plastic enter our oceans annually, and much of it breaks into tiny pieces. Microplastics are plastic particles five millimeters (about two-tenths of an inch) or smaller. They represent 92 percent of plastic pieces polluting the oceans’ surface waters. Researchers have found microplastics in all major seas and oceans. They’ve also found them in the intestinal tracts of organisms at all levels of the ocean food chain, from zooplankton to fish to marine mammals.

Some scientists are concerned that microplastics and their toxic effects are bioaccumulating in killer whales, the oceans’ top predators. Endangered Southern Resident killer whales spend much of their summers in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. Chemical contamination from pollution, particularly in young whales, is one of three primary threats to their population. Could microplastics be part of the problem?

A team of scientists with NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center (Center) and the University of Washington have started an investigation. They are looking at what microplastics the Southern Residents are ingesting, at what scale, and whether the whales are being exposed to toxic chemicals associated with microplastics.

Read the full release here

West Coast fishing communities’ vulnerability to climate change assessed in new study

April 17, 2020 — Climate change is warping the West Coast marine ecosystem. Warm waters are driving species north. Acidification and deoxygenation are threatening coastal species.

Fishermen are intimately familiar with these impacts. When the marine heat wave of 2014 and 2015 – dubbed “the Blob” – raised water temperatures for months on end, fishermen saw landing revenues of salmon and hake drop. That heat wave foreshadowed the increased and more severe heat waves that are likely to come.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Ray Hilborn is optimistic fishery management can work

April 9, 2020 — If you find it hard to imagine a college professor (of a subject other than epidemiology) drawing a crowd nowadays, I’m with you. Yet that is exactly what fisheries scientist Ray Hilborn did April 2.

To a sit-in-your-office, stare-at-your-monitor webinar, no less!

It’s conceivable that the size of the audience reflected a degree of covid-19-inspired restlessness. But ennui alone cannot explain the more than 450 people who signed up for Hilborn’s presentation on the status of fish stocks and the role of management. And rather than dwindle, as webinar audiences tend to do, by the time the session ended Hilborn’s audience had swollen to “an easy 600,” according to NOAA’s Tracy Gill, who coordinated the event.

To be fair, Hilborn was no stranger to his audience. A professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington, he’s written several books, including, most recently, “Ocean Recovery: A Sustainable Future for Global Fisheries” (co-authored by his wife, Ulrike Hilborn) as well as scores of peer-reviewed papers, and is respected by industry, academics, and NGOs.

His message Thursday was reassuring – more or less. Listen to scientists long enough, and you realize that you can get yourself into trouble reading between the lines.

Many of you, for example, will recall how in 2006, mainstream journalists leveraged a study led by the Canadian ecologist Boris Worm on the loss of biodiversity in ocean ecosystems services into the disappearance of fish by 2048. “One very small part of the paper,” Hilborn recalled, extrapolated from catch trends and came up with a downward curve that “hit the y axis,” in the professor’s words, at 100 percent collapsed in 2048.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

First Long Term Acoustic Study Tunes Into Cook Inlet Beluga Whale Foraging Ecology

February 19, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The first continuous multiyear acoustic monitoring effort across Cook Inlet provides the most comprehensive description of beluga whale seasonal distribution and feeding behavior to date.

This knowledge is critical for understanding and managing potential threats impeding recovery of this endangered population.

“Cook Inlet belugas were listed as endangered in 2008. Despite protective measures, the population continued to decline,” said Manuel Castellote, NOAA Fisheries affiliate/University of Washington/Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean biologist who led the study. “We undertook this study to provide information that managers needed to develop an effective recovery strategy.”

Castellote worked in partnership with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to develop a passive acoustic monitoring program. It recorded beluga movements and foraging behavior within their critical habitat year-round over five years.

“Summer beluga distribution has been well studied, especially in the upper inlet. But information on foraging behavior during the rest of the year was basically nonexistent,” Castellote said. “That knowledge is essential to identify threats impeding the whales’ recovery.”

Read the full release here