Saving Seafood

Bay State lobstermen press pols to ease access to restricted areas

September 22, 2016 — BOSTON — Bay State lobstermen want federal fishing regulators to work with them to ease restrictions on lobstering in Massachusetts Bay and two areas east of the South Shore, proposing new safety measures that would allow boats to continue to operate while also protecting endangered whales.

Local lobstermen and leaders of the South Shore Lobster Fisherman’s Association met Wednesday at the State House with legislators and representatives for members of the state’s Congressional delegation to discuss their pitch for preventing whale entanglements without having to remove all traps from February through April.

“The point is not to repeal the closure. It’s to reach a compromise,” said Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester.

John Haviland, president of the association who lobsters out of Green Harbor, said lobstermen are proposing to open three sections — representing a fraction of the larger 2,965 square nautical mile restricted area — for parts of the three-month ban as long as traps are retrofitted with sleeves for their vertical lines that would break every 40 feet under 1,575 pounds of pressure.

Haviland said the line-safety improvement proposal is based on research done by the New England Aquarium and Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute showing that right whales would be as much as 85 percent less likely to become entangled in lines engineered to break at those specifications.

Beginning in 2015, the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a rule designed to protect right and humpback whales that prohibits lobster traps in an area stretching from Cape Cod Bay to Boston between Feb. 1 and April 30.

Read the full story from State House News Service at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Climate change causes 4 degree rise in Buzzards Bay

January 22, 2016 — Climate change has caused a four-degree rise in water temperature and a decline in water quality over the past two decades in Buzzards Bay, according to a study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Buzzards Bay Coalition.

“We have seen a widespread and rapid increase in water temperature from 1992 to 2013 and this agrees with other regional studies so we are fairly confident that this is related to climate change,” said Jenny Rheuban, a research associate at WHOI and lead author of the study.

The study — which involved data collected by more than 1,000 trained citizen scientists involved with the coalition over 22 years — also revealed an increase in algae growth, a cause of poor water quality.

“Algae like phytoplankton are the reason that when you go to the beach the water is murkier and not as clear as you’d like,” said Rachel Jakuba, science director for the Buzzards Bay Coalition and co-author of the study.

The levels of chlorophyll, an indicator of phytoplankton or algae, in the water nearly doubled, according to the study, despite the fact that nitrogen levels remained relatively constant.

Read the full story at New Bedford Standard- Times

 

Study uses information from shark strikes on underwater drone to understand behavior

January 11, 2016 — In 2012, when state shark scientist Greg Skomal and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution engineers Amy Kukulya and Roger Stokey first envisioned tracking and filming great whites underwater using a self-propelled torpedo, they worried about disturbing the natural movements and activities of these huge predators.

What they didn’t anticipate was that the REMUS, at about 6 feet long and weighing around 80 pounds, would become the prey, surviving nine attacks and four bumps by great whites weighing thousands of pounds during a week of research in 2013 off Guadalupe Island in Mexico.

Video: See up-close shark video from WHOI’s REMUS “SharkCam”

In a world where there is very little documented about the life of great white sharks, you take what you can get. While they weren’t what researchers anticipated, the attacks on the REMUS at around 160 feet below the surface mark the first time such predatory behavior has been filmed deep underwater.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Biology, co-authors Skomal, Kukulya, Stokey and Mexican shark researcher Edgar Mauricio Hoyos-Padilla, described how the hunter got captured by the game, as the torpedo they hoped would document a predatory attack on a seal or other marine animal became an unintended lure that attracted great whites and then recorded the attack in a panoramic view on six high definition underwater cameras.

“I was extremely surprised by it,” Skomal said of the REMUS’ mysterious appeal as a potential meal for so many of these sharks.

Read the full story from the Cape Cod Times

 

RHODE ISLAND: Beaked whale dies in Provincetown Harbor

September 24, 2015 — PROVINCETOWN — A necropsy is planned for today at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on a rare beaked whale that was stranded and then died Wednesday afternoon in the west end of Provincetown Harbor.

The 14-foot beaked whale was reported by beach walkers to the U.S. Coast Guard as it was thrashing around at about 1:45 p.m., according to Doug Sandilands of the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. The harbormaster staff, the police and the center’s staff went to the scene to assess the situation. At that time, the whale was alive and about a half mile east of the west end breakwater. At around 2:15 p.m the whale stopped breathing, but the rescuers waited more than an hour to see if it was actually dead. The whale’s body was then brought closer to shore, and then towed by boat to the east side of MacMillan Pier by Provincetown Harbormaster Rex McKinsey and his staff.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Times