Saving Seafood

Are offshore wind turbines changing Jonah crab behavior?

July 29, 2026 — Researchers at the University of Rhode Island (URI) are studying whether offshore wind turbines are changing the movement and feeding behavior of Jonah crabs, work they say could have implications for fisheries management and future offshore wind development.

According to ecoRI, first-year URI Ph.D. student Emmanuel Oyewole is using isotopic analysis to determine whether Jonah crabs found around offshore wind turbines are migrating from traditional fishing grounds or spending their entire lives at turbine sites. The research is being conducted with Kelton McMahon, an associate professor of oceanography at URI.

“It’s really, really important for understanding the impact of these wind farms on biodiversity, on ecosystem structure and function, and on fisheries production,” McMahon told ecoRI.

The study builds on years of research showing that offshore wind turbine foundations can act as artificial reefs, supporting algae, coral and other marine life that create habitat for a range of species.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

URI Studying Jonah Crabs to Learn about Offshore Wind Turbines’ Effect on Underwater Ecosystems

July 28, 2026 — Since the first offshore wind project was developed in Rhode Island in 2016, University of Rhode Island researchers have been attempting to understand their impacts on local marine ecosystems. That work is continuing with first-year URI Ph.D. student Emmanuel Oyewole’s study of the artificial reefs that are often found at the base of turbines.

It’s been established through research surrounding offshore wind that the base of turbines serves as a foundation for algae and coral, which acts as a base for a booming ecosystem

In an attempt to find the cause of this blossoming of aquatic activity, Oyewole is studying the movement and dietary habits of one special creature found at the base of offshore wind turbines: Jonah crabs. He’s working with his academic advisor, Kelton McMahon, an associate professor of oceanography.

“It’s really, really important for understanding the impact of these wind farms on biodiversity, on ecosystem structure and function, and on fisheries production,” McMahon said.

Jonah crabs were often overlooked by Rhode Island commercial fishermen and were thrown away when caught in lobster traps, according to Oyewole, but as the local lobster population has declined due to overfishing and warming waters, the Jonah crab population has become a viable source of income.

Oyewole said Jonah crabs have seen an increase in market value and about 70% to 85% of all Jonah crab stock is from the Rhode Island area. Jonah crab fishing doesn’t require new equipment or infrastructure; lobster boats can use the same lobster cages to catch the crabs. Although the market for Jonah crabs is new and growing, understanding the impacts of offshore wind is important in understanding the future of the market.

“If [the turbines] are aggregating different biomasses from different areas, that means that you’re having a lot of stock like Jonah crab stock coming from fishable areas to that particular area, which is less fishable,” Oyewole said.

Read the full article at ecoRI

The URI fisheries and technology program legacy

June 11, 2026 — When it comes to breadth and depth, few fisheries education programs today can rival the University of Rhode Island’s two-year Fisheries and Marine Technology degree program, which ran for almost 20 years from 1967 to 1985. “The market doesn’t need it anymore,” said Dr. Joe DeAlteris, who was hired in 1983 to transition the associate degree program to a four-year bachelor’s degree. “Most of what we taught back then is obsolete now, anyway.”

True enough. Technology has replaced many of the skills taught in the intensive, 19-credit-per-semester program. “We taught students how to make nets, for example,” said DeAlteris. “Nobody makes their own nets now. A lot of times, they don’t even repair them; they bring them to a net loft. And who uses celestial navigation?”

Andreas Holmsen, a Norwegian resource economist, and Bert Hillier, a retired fisherman from Newfoundland, started the associate degree program in 1967. Besides navigation and net building, students learned everything that would be expected of them on a commercial fishing vessel. Courses included vessel safety and stability, COLREGS rules of the road, diesel and hydraulic engineering, welding, fish processing and preservation, commercial fishing gear types, and the micro- and macroeconomic basics needed to run a business. But by 1985, New England fisheries were contracting, and the Fisheries and Marine Technology program was folded into a broader bachelor’s degree major.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Warming R.I. marine waters force iconic species out, disrupt catch limits

August 9, 2021 — For generations, winter flounder was one of the most important fish in Rhode Island waters. Longtime recreational fisherman Rich Hittinger recalled taking his kids fishing in the 1980s, dropping anchor, letting their lines sink to the bottom, waiting about half an hour and then filling their fishing cooler with the oval-shaped, right-eyed flatfish.

Now, four decades later, once-abundant winter flounder is difficult to find. The harvesting or possession of the fish is prohibited in much of Narragansett Bay and in Point Judith and Potter ponds. Anglers must return the ones they accidentally catch to the sea.

Overfishing is easily blamed, and the industry certainly bears responsibility, as does consumer demand. But winter flounder’s local extinction isn’t simply the result of overfishing. Sure, it played a factor, but the reasons are complicated, from habitat loss, pollution and energy production — i.e., the former Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset, Mass., pre-cooling towers, when the since-shuttered facility took in about a billion gallons of water daily from Mount Hope Bay and discharged it at more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Read the full story at The Westerly Sun

Rhode Island Oyster Farmer Leads the Way in Aquaculture

September 25, 2020 — Nearly 20 years ago when Perry Raso leased a 1-acre piece of Potter Pond in South County to farm oysters, aquaculture was in its infancy in the Ocean State.

Raso, then in his early 20s, was only the 15th person to obtain a lease from the state and called himself a stockholder in the pond where he spent part of every day.

Today, the entrepreneurial owner of the Matunuck Oyster Farm and the Matunuck Oyster Bar nurtures 16 million oysters in different stages of growth on 7 acres in the saltwater estuary a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

His farm is now one of 70 similar aquaculture operations across the state.

The farmed oysters mature slowly under about 4 feet of water in polyethylene bags that are open to the sea at one end of the pond.

The oysters extract algae from the water that flows through the baskets on the rising and falling tides, said Raso, 39.

He has about 2,000 bags of oysters growing in the pond at any one time. The farm crew tends the operation daily and passes the oysters through a tumbler apparatus frequently to separate them by size in the growing process.

Read the full story at Lancaster Farming

Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Seeking Rhode Island Climate Action

September 1, 2020 — Last week Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Melissa Darigan dismissed a complaint filed by Nature’s Trust Rhode Island against the Department of Environmental Management (DEM). On behalf of 13 young Rhode Islanders and the Sisters of Mercy Ecology, the group filed suit after DEM had rejected an attempt that would have forced the state to address, systematically and meaningfully, the climate crisis and to take responsibility for its share of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Peter Nightingale, president of the Nature’s Trust Rhode Island board, said the judge’s recent ruling “makes it clear that the Rhode Island courts shirk their responsibility to protect the environment.”

The University of Rhode Island physics professor pointed to House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s statement at the beginning of this year that “there’s nothing Rhode Island can do to address climate change in a way that is real or impactful” as perhaps the most vivid example of political negligence.

Read the full story at ecoRI

URI researcher to map commercial fishing activity to help reduce conflict between fishing, wind industries

July 27, 2020 — The following was released by The University of Rhode Island:

A University of Rhode Island natural resource economist has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to create a new way of documenting where commercial fishing is conducted in southern New England waters. The project is aimed at reducing conflict between the fishing industry and offshore wind farm developers.

“I’m exploring a new way of improving spatial planning for offshore wind,” said URI Associate Professor Thomas Sproul. “One of the biggest sources of delay in the regulatory process for offshore wind has been because of the conflicts with commercial fishing.”

He said that while the National Marine Fisheries Service collects a variety of data about the fishing industry, limited information is available about where commercial fishing occurs.

“There isn’t a consensus map of the ocean that says, for instance, if you put a wind turbine here, it affects 30 percent of the squid fishery,” Sproul said.

He will be taking a novel approach to the problem by combining existing data from numerous sources, including the Automatic Identification System, which identifies the location of every fishing vessel over 65-feet long every minute of every day it is at sea. It will be combined with the government’s vessel monitoring system and vessel trip reports, along with seafood dealer reports, Coast Guard registry records, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ship-board observer program.

Read the full release here

URI researchers awarded multiple grants to study aspects of aquaculture industry

October 10, 2019 — Several scientists at the University of Rhode Island have been awarded grants to study oyster genetics, breeding and diseases as part of a region-wide effort to support the growing oyster aquaculture industry in the Northeast and assist efforts to restore wild oyster populations.

“Wild and farmed oysters are facing major threats from water quality and disease,” said Marta Gomez-Chiarri, a URI professor of animal science who has studied oyster diseases in Narragansett Bay for more than 20 years. “Even though local water quality has improved in Rhode Island, oysters across the United States face localized threats from pollution and eutrophication while at the same time dealing with multiple factors of global ocean change, like ocean acidification, as well as changes in salinity and dissolved oxygen. We are only beginning to understand the effects of these multiple stressors.”

Gomez-Chiarri — along with URI Assistant Professor Jonathan Puritz and U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Dina Proestou — have teamed with shellfish geneticists and breeders from 10 other East Coast universities to form the Eastern Oyster Genome Consortium to develop genetic tools to accelerate selective breeding efforts. The consortium, in a proposal led by Rutgers University, has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to accelerate the pace of identifying the genes responsible for desirable traits like disease resistance.

Read the full story at The Westerly Sun

URI Leads Effort To Reform Commercial Fisheries in the Philippines

April 25, 2018 — Researchers at the University of Rhode Island are leading a new project in the Philippines to increase the number of fish in their waters.

The Philippines is one of the biggest fish producing nations in the world. The U.S., for example, depends on the country for crab and tuna.

However, the majority of their fishing grounds are overfished, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based environmental advocacy organization.

URI and other Filipino universities and organizations will be working throughout the next five years to develop better fishery management plans for municipalities.

Read the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio

 

Narragansett Bay temperature extremes signal trouble below

February 6, 2016 — Aboard the Cap’n Bert — A harbor seal pokes its mottled head out of the water, soulful eyes visible above a bristly mustache, before diving back down to snatch fish from the net being winched aboard the trawler.

“Gettin’ a free meal,” Captain Tom Puckett remarks with a shake of his head.

As the otter trawl net is hoisted up on the A-frame across the boat’s stern, it’s clear that it’s nowhere close to full. But it doesn’t matter. The Cap’n Bert is not a commercial fishing trawler. It’s a research vessel owned and operated by the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

The 53-foot stern trawler is out on Narragansett Bay on this winter day carrying out its weekly ritual of testing the water temperature and other indicators and taking samples of marine life.

Doctoral student Joe Langan pulls open the net, spilling fish and shellfish unceremoniously onto the deck. He sorts the catch, just as he has done every week since September and as others have done before him, stretching back more than five decades as part of one of the oldest continuous marine research projects in the world.

From the wet and writhing pile, he picks out sea robin and skate, silver hake and red hake, rock crabs, spider crabs and lobsters — all species that are normally found in the Bay this time of year.

But when Langan gets to the bottom, he carefully picks up a flat, light-brown fish and pauses to study it.

“A Gulf Stream flounder,” he finally says. “Which should not be here.”

The little flounder is a warm-water species that shows up in May but would usually be gone by the time the temperature drops in December.

It is of course only one fish, but its presence here in the waters off Whale Rock on this January morning is yet another sign that Narragansett Bay is changing.

“And we’re seeing it happen,” Langan says.

Read the full story at Providence Journal