September 17, 2019 — The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the wildest rivers in the contiguous United States, is prime fish habitat. Cold, clear waters from melting snow tumble out of the Salmon River Mountains and into the boulder-strewn river, which is federally protected.
As Bering Sea ice melts, Alaskans, scientists and Seattle’s fishing fleet witness changes ‘on a massive scale’
September 16, 2019 — Derek Akeya hopes for calm waters and a lucrative catch when fishing from a skiff in the Bering Sea that surrounds his island village.
But on this windy late summer day, waves toss about the boat as Akeya stands in the bow, straining to pull up a line of herring-baited hooks from the rocky bottom.
Instead of bringing aboard halibut – worth more than $5 a pound back on shore – this string of gear yields four large but far less valuable Pacific cod, voracious bottom feeders whose numbers in recent years have exploded in these northern reaches.
“There’s a lot more of them now, and it’s more than a little bit irritating,” Akeya says.
The cod have surged here from the south amid climatic changes unfolding with stunning speed.
For two years, the Bering Sea has been largely without winter ice, a development scientists modeling the warming impacts of greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels once forecast would not occur until 2050.
Tuna Transshipment Management Compromised
September 16, 2019 — The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission’s (WCPFC’s) management of transshipments in its waters is compromised by significant gaps in reporting, monitoring and data sharing, according to a report released by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Transshipment is the transfer of fish from the vessel that caught the fish to a carrier vessel that will deliver the fish to port, an activity that often takes place on the high seas and outside the view and reach of authorities. The practice allows unscrupulous fishing vessel operators to obscure or falsify data on their fishing practices. This contributes to millions of dollars of illegally caught fish entering the seafood supply chain each year.
The Pew Charitable Trusts combined commercially available Automatic Identification System data with the application of machine learning technology to analyze the track histories of carrier vessels operating in WCPFC convention area waters in 2016. Researchers then compared this analysis with publicly available information on transshipments and carrier vessels.
NOAA moves ahead with whale-safety rules
September 16, 2019 — The National Marine Fisheries Service has announced it is reviewing claims by the Maine Lobstermen’s Association that a goal to reduce the industry’s risks of harming North Atlantic right whales by 60% is too high. But the federal agency said it will move ahead with crafting federal rules to reduce the risk to the whales of vertical fishing rope associated with trap and pot fishing.
“In the coming months, we will proceed with rule-making as planned,” Chris Oliver, the agency’s assistant administrator, said in the statement Wednesday.
The fisheries service is in the midst of preparing a draft environmental impact statement on the proposed rule changes, based on a pact approved nearly unanimously in April by the 60 members of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team, including the Maine association.
West Coast whale entanglements reduced by half this season, but reason why is debated
September 13, 2019 — Whale entanglements involving fishing gear along the West Coast have dropped by more than 50% so far this year compared to 2018.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as of Aug. 23, the National Marine Fisheries Service reported 17 confirmed whale entanglements in 2019, compared to 40 for the same period a year prior.
In both years, entanglements involved commercial Dungeness crab gear and drift gillnets.
“Year to date, it’s lower and is encouraging,” said Justin Viezbicke, NOAA’s West Coast Stranding coordinator. “We’ve seen spikes where we’ve seen seven or eight in a month and with three months left this year, things could still change.”
The North Atlantic right whale will soon be extinct unless something is done to save it, researchers warn
September 13, 2019 — The fate of the increasingly rare North Atlantic right whale has always been left up to humans.
Once hunted nearly to extinction, their population is sharply declining again. Any hope for their survival, researchers say, demands immediate action.
A new report from Oceana, a non-profit ocean advocacy group, says unless protections are put in place, the North Atlantic right whale will die out.
“At some point, if trends continue, recovery will simply become impossible,” researchers wrote.
There are only 400 of them left, and less than 25% of them are breeding females responsible for the species’ survival. At least 28 have died in the past two years, Oceana campaign director Whitney Webber told CNN.
It’s a sharp decline driven by fishing, boating and climate change that impacts their food supply, according to the report.
“We’re really not seeing the whales die of natural causes anymore,” she said. “They’re dying at our hands.”
US biologists eye unusual deaths of Alaska ice seals
September 13, 2019 — Seals that rely on sea ice off Alaska’s northwest coast have been dying at uncommon rates, and federal marine mammal biologists Thursday declared an “unusual mortality event.”
The cause of death for nearly 300 ringed, bearded and spotted seals since June 1, 2018, is not known, according to the fisheries arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the management agency for the marine mammals.
“We’re looking at a broad spectrum of possible causes and trying to rule out what we can and narrow it down,” NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman Julie Speegle said.
Viruses, bacteria and algal blooms are possible causes. Water temperature in the northern Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea the last two summers have been higher than normal. The agency is looking at possible ecosystem influences, including diminished sea ice, Speegle said.
Alaska Native coastal communities hunt all three seals for meat and hides as part of a subsistence life.
Congress could provide $50 million for right whales
September 13, 2019 — Legislation to provide $5 million in annual federal funding for reducing North Atlantic right whale deaths from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement was introduced in the U.S. Senate Tuesday.
Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) co-sponsor S-2453, dubbed the “Scientific Assistance for Very Endangered (SAVE) Right Whales Act.” The measure would authorize $5 million in annual grant funding over the next 10 years for cooperative projects between state governments, nongovernmental organizations and the shipping and commercial fishing industries.
With a surviving population of around 400 animals, the North Atlantic right whale is one of the world’s most endangered species. Ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement are major causes of mortality. Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence has been particularly deadly in recent summers and Canadian authorities have enforced vessel speed restrictions in an effort to reduce the risk, which has led to 28 deaths in the last two years, according to NOAA.
Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world
September 12, 2019 — The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory.
It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a foot deep into the sand along a 13-mile stretch of beach near Barra del Chuy, just south of the Brazilian border. Agüero had been digging up these clams since childhood, a livelihood passed on for generations along these shores.
But on this day, Agüero returned to find a disastrous sight: the beach covered in dead clams.
“Kilometer after kilometer, as far as our eyes could see. All of them dead, rotten, opened up,” remembered Agüero, now 70. “They were all black, and had a fetid odor.”
He wept at the sight.
The clam die-off was an alarming marker of a new climate era, an early sign of this coastline’s transformation. Scientists now suspect the event was linked to a gigantic blob of warm water extending from the Uruguayan coast far into the South Atlantic, a blob that has only gotten warmer in the years since.
West Coast marine life endangered by ‘blob’ heatwave
September 12, 2019 — A “blob” of warm water in the Pacific Ocean could disrupt the marine ecosystem off the coast of California, similar to an event that occurred five years ago, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The patch, designated the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019 and also referred to as a “blob,” is the second-biggest such mass in four decades and, according to experts, is on a similar path to that of one that, from 2014 to 2016, caused toxic algae blooms and killed sea life ranging from sea lions to salmon en masse.
“I am surprised to see something like this develop again so soon after what looked like the end of the marine heatwave in 2016,” Nate Mantua, head of the Landscape Ecology Team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., told the newspaper.
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