July 28, 2014 — A University of New England (UNE) researcher and colleagues have been awarded a $1.8 million National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grant to study incidental mortality of winter skates in the monkfish commercial fishery.
The grant, funded by NOAA's Monkfish Research Set Aside Program, awards $1.8 million for UNE and its partners to study "Evaluating the Condition and Discard Mortality of Winter Skate, Leucoraja ocellata, Following Capture and Handling in the Sink Gillnet Fishery." Principal investigators on the project are James Sulikowski, Ph.D., a professor in UNE's Department of Marine Sciences, and commercial fisherman Captain Ted Platz. They will be partnering with John Mandelman, Ph.D., from the New England Aquarium, David Rudders, Ph.D., of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and Dr. Hugues Benoît from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada. The researchers will investigate the rate of incidental mortality of winter skates exposed to commercial sink gillnets.
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