Saving Seafood

Striped bass decline spurs new look at mycobacteria

November 6, 2019 — When Wolfgang Vogelbein peered at striped bass sores through a microscope 22 years ago, he knew he was looking at something very different than what was grabbing headlines at the time.

Pfiesteria piscicida — the so-called “cell from hell” — was being blamed for fish kills in Maryland and making people sick.

But what Vogelbein saw through his lens wasn’t the result of a harmful algae toxin. It was a nasty bacterial infection, creating ugly sores on the outside of fish and lesions on the inside.

The infections were caused by mycobacteria, a type of bacteria that are widespread in the environment, but not typically associated with problems in wild fish. Suddenly, though, it was turning up in large numbers of the Chesapeake Bay’s most prized finfish.

“I thought I would be spending the rest of my career working on myco,” recalled Vogelbein, a fish pathologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Student-developed app will help public remove derelict crab traps

October 16, 2019 — The following was released by William & Mary:

Kirk Havens of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science says a question regularly asked by community clean-up groups is whether they can remove derelict crab traps from the Chesapeake Bay. Research shows these “pots” both harm marine life and cut into watermen profits.

To date, the answer has been no — in Virginia, it requires special permission to recover derelict traps, even if they are clearly abandoned or illegally present during the fishery off-season. Scientists estimate that baywide, tens of thousands of traps are lost or abandoned each year.

Now, funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Covanta, and NOAA’s Marine Debris Program will allow Havens and colleagues to address the derelict-trap issue by working with local high school students to develop a “Crab Trap App” for the cell phones of trained and authorized users. The project will also re-animate an earlier program that paid watermen to find and remove derelict traps from crabbing “hot spots.”

“Having students, trained citizens, and conscientious watermen working together to address lost, abandoned, or discarded crab pots is a great way to help lessen the impact of these pots on the Chesapeake Bay,” says Havens, assistant director of VIMS’ Center for Coastal Resources Management. Joining him in planning and implementing the project are VIMS Asst. Professor Andrew Scheld; Research Associate Professor Donna Bilkovic, Kory Angstadt, Karen Duhring, Dave Stanhope, and Dave Weiss of CCRM; and Cara Simpson, a master’s student at W&M’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business.

Read the full release here

Sea Grant Research Could Help Commercial Fishers Keep Sharks off Gear

October 4, 2019 — North Carolina Sea Grant is collaborating on a new project to keep sharks away from commercial fishing gear. A team from NC State University, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and Indiana University-South Bend are partnering with the private sector to pilot test a device that deters the predators.

“Several sharks are overfished or are experiencing overfishing on the U.S. East Coast,” says Sara Mirabilio, a fisheries extension specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant, a statewide program based at NC State University. “Populations of scalloped hammerhead, dusky, sandbar and blacknose sharks all could benefit from an effective deterrent from commercial fishing gear.” Most often, sharks are caught unintentionally in a fishery that is targeting other fish, she explains. This is referred to as bycatch.

The project is one of three announced today by the National Sea Grant College Program to better understand highly migratory species, such as sharks, along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Mirabilio and colleagues, including Richard Brill at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Peter Bushnell at Indiana University-South Bend, are testing a state-of-the-art electronic device that could help conserve species of sharks whose populations fishery managers are trying to rebuild. Unlike other fish, sharks possess an electrosensory system that equips them to detect close-range movements of predators or prey.

Read the full story at Island Free Press

Local News Consortium earns funding to enhance oyster breeding

September 23, 2019 — A consortium of 14 shellfish geneticists from 12 East Coast universities and government agencies has won a 5-year, $4.4 million grant from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to develop new tools to accelerate and localize selective breeding in support of oyster aquaculture.

The project team was assembled by Stan Allen, professor and director of the Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science; Ximing Guo, distinguished professor and shellfish geneticist at Rutgers Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory; and Dina Proestou, a scientist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. Guo will serve as the consortium’s principal investigator.

Allen says, “Our respective breeding programs at Rutgers and VIMS are at the core of the new consortium approach. The project is a terrific opportunity to develop further ground-breaking approaches with Ximing’s team and our other East Coast collaborators, and will hopefully deliver all the more results for industry.” Guo and Allen previously partnered to create the world’s first tetraploid oysters at Rutgers in 1994.

Read the full story at the Williamsburg Yorktown Daily

Scientists Are Trying to Keep Sharks From Commercial Lines

August 5, 2019 — Scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Wachapreague are doing research this summer that could result in a way for commercial fishermen to keep sharks from interfering with their fishing lines.

VIMS Eastern Shore Lab has the advantage of being right on the water and near the last undeveloped stretch of barrier islands on the East Coast.

“There is only one lab in all of Virginia that has running seawater, which you need to keep sharks,” said VIMS scientist Richard Brill.

That lab is in Wachapreague.

Read the full story at U.S. News

Chesapeake Bay health dips, but still rates a C in annual report card

May 22, 2019 — Bay health took a hit from record rainfall last year, but experts claim the Chesapeake’s growing resilience managed to keep a bad situation from getting worse.

The 2018 Chesapeake Bay Report Card was released by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, one of several groups that assess the bay’s health each year. It put the bay’s overall score at 46% — a drop from the previous year’s 54%, but still a C on its 20-point grading scale.

Bay resilience is critical because very wet years may no longer be an anomaly. Climate models predict an increase in weather extremes, and local marine experts are seeing some evidence of that.

“We’re encouraged that, in spite of the fact that we had a major insult to the bay with all the runoff and rainfall in 2018, that we took a dip but we didn’t crash,” said Bill Dennison, vice president for science applications at the center.

“Many of the living resources appear to be fairly resilient,” said Mark Luckenbach, associate director for research and advisory services at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “But we need to understand that that’s likely to become more frequent — these really high rainfall events.”

VIMS, affiliated with the College of William and Mary, collected much of the data used to compile the report, particularly for bay-wide seagrass, Virginia fish and blue crabs.

Read the full story at The Daily Press

VIMS: Antarctic krill declines as South Atlantic Ocean warms

February 4, 2019 — When biological oceanographer Deborah Steinberg bundles up and steps onto the deck of the Laurence M. Gould research vessel, this is what she sees: ice, ice and more ice.

“I see icebergs, I see sea ice, I see crabeater seals floating by on ice floes, the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula,” Steinberg said in a shipboard phone interview Friday. “It’s gorgeous.”

But it’s what she can’t see, what lies beneath the icy waters of the South Atlantic Ocean off northwestern Antarctica, that concerns Steinberg and an international team of marine researchers: krill.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

VIRGINIA: Watermen get say on how to tackle ‘ghost pots’ in the Chesapeake Bay

January 29, 2019 — “Ghost pots” remain a menace in the Chesapeake Bay, but how big a menace and what to do about them is anybody’s guess.

That could change now that the 1,056 hard crab fishermen licensed in Virginia are getting a chance to have their say.

Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are mailing surveys to watermen asking for their ideas on the countless crab pots that, for any number of reasons, end up haunting the bay, trapping and killing crabs and other hapless creatures that crawl or swim inside.

“This is really to try to find out, what do the watermen want, what do they think,” said Jim DelBene, the VIMS graduate student who developed the Derelict Blue Crab Pot Survey.

In doing so, he researched what other states with blue crab fisheries, from Connecticut through Texas, are doing to reduce ghost pots. He sought out experts at VIMS and at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission and held focus groups for commercial watermen to help choose and frame the survey questions.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Science Center for Marine Fisheries Continues Work with New National Science Foundation Grant

January 23, 2019 — The following was released by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries:

Following the completion of its initial 5-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCeMFiS) has been awarded a new Phase 2 grant by the NSF to continue its work. SCeMFiS will use the new grant to further its track record of quality, collaborative research with its fishing industry and academic partners.

The grant is part of NSF’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) program, which was developed to initiate long-term partnerships among industry, academia, and government. SCeMFiS is the only Phase 2 IUCRC program dedicated exclusively to fisheries and marine science research.

“Our new Phase 2 grant will allow SCeMFiS researchers to continue our collaborative work with the fishing industry,” said Center Director Dr. Eric Powell, of the University of Southern Mississippi, one of the academic members of SCeMFiS. “The Phase 2 grant will enable SCeMFiS to continue to fund the groundbreaking research necessary to maintain healthy fish stocks and healthy fisheries at a time when reliance on the best available science is increasingly critical.”

As it moves into Phase 2, SCeMFiS will focus on reducing scientific uncertainty; the effects of climate change on fish stocks and fishing communities; resolving issues between fishing and offshore energy interests; and developing sound ecosystem-based fisheries management.

“Our priorities for Phase 2 reflect the biggest challenges in the future of the fishing industry,” said Center Site Director Dr. Roger Mann, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, another SCeMFiS academic institution. “To meet these challenges, the industry and fisheries managers will need the kind of innovative research that SCeMFiS has regularly produced over the last 5 years.”

In its first 5 years, SCeMFiS has done groundbreaking research on finfish and shellfish. Among other projects, the Center produced the first age-frequency distributions for ocean quahog, one of the longest-lived species in the ocean. SCeMFiS scientists conducted the first benthic survey on important ocean habitat east of Nantucket, and mapped the shifting range of surfclams, documenting how climate change is beginning to affect the species.

SCeMFiS has also designed a pelagic survey for Atlantic menhaden and provided recommendations to improve port sampling for the species, carried out the only scientific work to date on Atlantic chub mackerel, and carried out an economic analysis for longfin squid.

All of these projects were reviewed, approved, and funded by the industry members on our Industry Advisory Board, who rely on sound science for the health of their fisheries and businesses.

“Fisheries management is only as good as the science it’s based on,” said Greg DiDomenico, Executive Director of the Garden State Seafood Association and a member of SCeMFiS’ Industry Advisory Board. “That’s why it’s so important for the fishing industry to maintain its partnership with SCeMFiS. We need to promote the best available science.”

URI and VIMS Researchers Show Aquaculture Oysters Can Limit Spread of Dermo in Wild Oysters

December 19, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Recent research carried out at the University of Rhode Island and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has found that growing farmed oysters can reduce disease loads in wild oysters.

This counter-intuitive finding is based on the fact that the primary killer of wild oysters is Dermo, a parasite that occurs naturally in the environment, and lives in the tissue of oysters.  The single celled parasite is harmless to humans, and has nothing to do with bacteria such as vibrio.

“The very act of aquaculture has positive effects on wild populations of oysters,” said Tal Ben-Horin, a postdoctoral fellow at the URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences. “The established way of thinking is that disease spreads from aquaculture, but in fact aquaculture may limit disease in nearby wild populations.”

Working with colleagues at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Rutgers University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Ben-Horin integrated data from previous studies into mathematical models to examine the interactions between farmed oysters, wild oysters and the common oyster disease Dermo.

Basically, Dermo is spread through an oyster reef when infected oysters die, and their tissues decay.  But aquaculture, particularly caged or bagged oysters off the seabed, act as filters, and take in the Dermo parasite, but they are harvested and sold before the parasite has any lethal effects.

The net result is that near oyster farms, the incidence of wild Dermo goes down.

According to Ben-Horin, diseases are among the primary limiting factors in wild oyster populations. There are few wild populations of oysters in New England because of Dermo and other diseases, and in the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay, wild oysters are managed with the understanding that most will die from disease.

“As long as aquaculture farmers harvest their product before the disease peaks, then they have a positive effect on wild populations,” Ben-Horin said. “But if they’re left in the water too long, the positive effect turns negative.”

The study’s findings have several implications for the management of wild and farmed oysters. Ben-Horin recommends establishing best management practices for the amount of time oysters remain on farms before harvest. He also suggests that aquaculture managers consider the type of gear – whether farmers hold oysters in cages and bags or directly on the seabed – when siting new oyster aquaculture operations near wild oyster populations.

This story was originally published by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.