Saving Seafood

‘A risk for the future’: How warming oceans are disrupting America’s seafood supply

May 13, 2020 — Recorded temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are increasing at an “alarming” rate, according to one scientist, and forcing fisherman to confront a seafood industry primed for disruption.

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts recorded 2017 as the warmest year on record for water temperatures in the Northeast. Glen Gawarkiewicz, a senior scientist at the institution, said 2019 was equally “disturbing,” adding that over the past seven years, water temperatures off southern New England have increased by nine degrees Fahrenheit, faster than any region outside of the Arctic.

“The ocean is changing pretty rapidly,” Gawarkiewicz said. “Typically temperature variations might be two degrees Fahrenheit there, and fish are probably sensitive at about one degree Fahrenheit there. So it’s almost an order of magnitude more that you normally need to get some kind of change.”

Read the full story at Yahoo Finance

North Atlantic right whales are in much poorer condition than their Southern counterparts

April 27, 2020 — The following was released by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:

A new study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and their colleagues reveals that endangered North Atlantic right whales are in much poorer body condition than their counterparts in the southern hemisphere. The international research team, led by Fredrik Christiansen from Aarhus University in Denmark, published their findings April 23, 2020, in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Using drones and a method called aerial photogrammetry to measure the body length and width of individual right whales in four regions around the world, the team compared body condition of individual North Atlantic right whales with individuals from three increasing populations of Southern right whales: off Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.

From aerial photographs, the researchers estimated the body volume of individual whales, which they then used to derive an index of body condition or relative fatness. The analyses revealed that individual North Atlantic right whales—juveniles, adults and mothers—were all in poorer body condition than individual whales from the three populations of Southern right whales.

“For North Atlantic right whales as individuals, and as a species, things are going terribly wrong,” says WHOI researcher Michael Moore, a coauthor of the paper. “This comparison with their southern hemisphere relatives shows that most individual North Atlantic right whales are in much worse condition than they should be.”

Read the full release here

New tech helps scientists detect right whales off Maine’s coast

February 24, 2020 — New acoustic monitors off Maine’s coast have detected the presence of North Atlantic right whales this winter. Scientists are trying to gather new data on the endangered animals’ whereabouts.

In mid-December, scientists put a set of underwater drones in the Atlantic Ocean. One of them is charting a zigzag course to and from Maine’s coast, starting Down East and working its way southwest. It’s currently heading eastward off Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

During its cruise, the glider’s electronic ears have heard dozens of calls from finback and humpback whales and, on seven occasions, the call of the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

“We usually figure about a 10 kilometer of five-mile radius is on average where we can hear them,” said Genevieve Davis, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Davis is a coordinator for the project, which also includes researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Offshore Wind to Fund New Study of Right Whales

January 28, 2020 — Ørsted is funding a project to study and protect endangered North Atlantic right whale during surveys, construction, and operation of its U.S. offshore wind facilities such as Bay State Wind and Revolution Wind.

Using data collected from an aerial, unmanned glider and two sound-detection buoys, researchers from the University of Rhode Island, Rutgers University, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will examine the habitat and behaviors of right whales in the wind-lease areas awarded to Ørsted.

An estimated 400 North Atlantic right whales remain, fewer than 100 are breeding females.

The oceanographic data will help studies of additional fish species and improve forecasting for severe storms and other weather, according to Ørsted. The three-year initiative is called Ecosystem and Passive Acoustic Monitoring (ECO-PAM).

Read the full story at EcoRI

Acoustic survey to study right whales, fish around offshore wind projects

January 23, 2020 — Acoustic sensors on buoys and an undersea drone will be used to map out the movements of endangered northern right whales, marine mammals and fish around offshore wind energy sites, in a joint project with wind developer Ørsted and marine science institutions.

Ørsted on Wednesday announced the “Ecosystem and Passive Acoustic Monitoring” project is launching in cooperation with Rutgers University, the University of Rhode Island and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in addition to the company’s 2019 agreement to support Rutgers research related to wind energy development.

Rutgers will supply a Slocum electric glider, an undersea probe that can operate autonomously for weeks at a time, periodically surfacing to transmit its data back via satellite link. Now widely used in oceanography, the glider technology will be a first for Ørsted, one of the pioneer companies in European offshore wind.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Underwater pile driving noise causes alarm responses in squid

December 17, 2019 — Exposure to underwater pile driving noise, which can be associated with the construction of docks, piers, and offshore wind farms, causes squid to exhibit strong alarm behaviors, according to a study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers published Dec. 16, 2019, in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

“This study is the first to report behavioral effects of pile driving noise on any cephalopod, a group including squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses,” says lead author Ian Jones, a student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography.

Squid use natural alarm and defense behaviors like inking, jetting, and changing color and patterns on their skin for communication and also for survival when they’re trying to avoid capture. Squids’ changeable skin gives them the ability to create extraordinary camouflage, enabling them to blend into the background and avoid becoming a meal.

Jones and his colleagues in the Sensory Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab at WHOI exposed longfin squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) to pile driving sounds originally recorded near the construction site of the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island. The squid exhibited the same types of natural alarm and defense behaviors when they were exposed to the noises, but it’s what they did next that surprised the researcher team.

“The alarm behaviors occurred within the first several noise impulses, but they diminished quickly within the first minute of playback,” Jones says. “That suggests a learned lack of response to the noise, as the squid perceive the noise stimulus may not pose an immediate threat, unlike the imminent threat of a nearby predator. This phenomenon is called habituation.”

Read the full story at Science Daily

Offshore Wind May Help The Planet — But Will It Hurt Whales?

December 5, 2019 — Tail! Tail!” shouts Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, a marine biologist, before grabbing his crossbow, as we close in on a humpback whale.

Rosenbaum gets into position on the bow of the boat, stands firmly with legs apart, takes aim, and fires at the 40-foot cetacean. The arrow that he releases doesn’t have a point – it has a hollow 2-inch tip to collect skin and blubber, and a cork-like stopper to prevent it from penetrating too deeply.

“Oh, yeah!” come shouts from the small research crew. The hit looks clean. Sure enough, when they scoop the floating arrow out of the water, its tip is filled with a small white sliver of whale flesh, containing DNA that will help identify the humpback and its pod and potentially say something about its migratory patterns.

This is the sort of research that Rosenbaum, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s “Ocean Giants” program, has been doing for decades around the globe. Recently, though, whale monitoring has taken on a new urgency in Rosenbaum’s own native habitat — the Atlantic waters off New York City and Long Island.

As whale populations have grown, the WCS and its collaborator, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, have been monitoring them, with an eye toward mediating conflicts with the ocean’s heaviest users: cargo ships, commercial fishing trawlers and the U.S. military.

Now, the whales are poised to get many new, potentially disruptive neighbors: hundreds of skyscraper-high wind turbines, rising from the ocean floor.

The New York Energy Research and Development Authority has awarded two large contracts for offshore wind and anticipates several more in the coming years. The first phase, expected to be complete by 2024, involves dozens of wind turbines in two different offshore plots, leased by energy companies from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. They would generate 1700 megawatts — enough to power more than one million homes.

Read the full story at NPR

Scientists meeting in Portland say right whales on the way to extinction

November 18, 2019 — The future continues to grow ever darker for the highly endangered right whale, a species that has been in decline every year since 2010 and is at the heart of regulatory protection efforts threatening to upend Maine’s valuable lobster fishery.

The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium estimates only 409 whales survived 2018, down from about 428 in 2017 and 457 in 2016. With seven births and 10 documented deaths in 2019 factored in, that tally is now probably about 406. Three of those are about to succumb to injuries.

“We are in yet another year of decline for the right whales,” said Mark Baumgartner, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and chairman of the consortium, which kicked off its annual right whale meeting Thursday in Portland. “This is extremely concerning.”

The meeting attracted hundreds of scientists, policymakers, animal rights advocates and several dozen curious fishermen. Topics ranged from new developments in how to safely tag a right whale to a review of right whale deaths in 2019 to the impact of whale-related fishery closures in Canada.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Why Are Birds and Seals Starving in a Bering Sea Full of Fish?

November 4, 2019 — The shipment arrived airfreight: 47 seabird carcasses collected by the Bering Strait villagers of Shishmaref.

Marine biologist Gay Sheffield drove to the airport on an August day to pick up the grisly cargo and bring it back to a laboratory just off the main street of this northwest Alaska town.

Inside a cardboard box, Sheffield found mostly shearwaters, slender birds with narrow wings — also kittiwakes, crested auklets, thick-billed murres, a cormorant and a horned puffin. Most were painfully skinny, bones protruding like knife-edged ridges.

“They starved to death,” Sheffield said. “Why?”

The birds should have been able to fatten on small fish, krill and other food that typically abound in the northern Bering Sea, a body of water so rich in marine life that gray whales, after they winter off Mexico, swim more than 5,000 miles north to feed here each summer.

But as climate change warms the die-offs of seabirds and marine mammals have been on the rise. The grim tally includes a nearly fivefold increase in ice-seal carcasses spotted on shore, strandings of emaciated gray whales, and near the St. Lawrence Island village of Savoonga, a discouraging spectacle: auklets abandoning seaside nests as their chicks succumb to hunger.

Read the full story at the Pulitzer Center

New paper shows evidence of tuna spawning in marine protected areas

August 30, 2019 — New research showed that there is evidence of tuna spawning inside the large marine protected area of the Phoenix Islands in the Pacific nation of Kiribati.

The research conducted by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution points to evidence that marine protected areas (MPAs) can play a critical role in protecting adult fish, including highly migratory species such as tuna, during spawning.

Read the full story at Seafood Source