Conservation & Environment Archives - Page 45 of 456

Ocean Temperatures Keep Shattering Records—and Stunning Scientists

February 15, 2024 — FOR NEARLY A year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world’s oceans. In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs, and have stayed that way since.

You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. That solid black line is where we are so far in 2024—way, way above even 2023. While we’re nowhere near the Atlantic hurricane season yet—that runs from June 1 through the autumn—keep in mind that cyclones feed on warm ocean water, which could well stay anomalously hot in the coming months. Regardless, these surface temperature anomalies could be triggering major ecological problems already.

Read the full article at WIRED

Rope removed from dead right whale from Maine lobster gear, NOAA says

February 15, 2024 — Federal fisheries officials said Wednesday that the rope found on a dead right whale that washed ashore on Martha’s Vineyard last month is from Maine.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found purple markings on the gear recovered from the young female, known as right whale #5120. NOAA officials said the rope and its markings are consistent with those that Maine lobstermen and pot and trap fishermen use.

Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Kehiler said he also reviewed the gear in person and confirmed the purple markings.

“This is very unfortunate — our goal is zero entanglements,” Keliher said Wednesday in a message to the lobster industry. “Certainly, this is a rare event, in fact it is the first right whale entanglement with known Maine gear since 2004. It is also the first right whale mortality with known Maine gear that DMR is aware of since the establishment of the Take Reduction Plan.”

But scientists caution that the vast majority of right whale entanglements are undetected and the gear historically has not been recovered or identified.

The Maine lobster fishery began consistently marking its gear a few years ago. And as Maine Public reported last year, the most common color that NOAA officials have recovered from other types of entangled whales, such as minkes and humpbacks, has been purple, the Maine mark.

Read the full article at Maine Public

Rope removed from right whale found washed up on Martha’s Vineyard may be from Maine buoy line, officials say

February 15, 2024 — The rope found embedded in a juvenile North Atlantic right whale that washed up on Martha’s Vineyard on Jan. 28 was consistent with water traps and buoy lines from Maine, federal officials said Wednesday.

NOAA Fisheries said that its analysis of the fishing gear, “including the purple markings on the rope,” found it was consistent with lines used in Maine waters.

The endangered whale, a female, was found near Joseph Sylvia State Beach on the Vineyard, officials said. NOAA Fisheries worked with the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other partners to recover the carcass and conduct a necrop

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

Endangered Species Protections Sought for Prehistoric Creature

February 14, 2024 — Ancient creatures with 12 legs, 10 eyes, and blue blood were once so prevalent on southern New England beaches that people, including children, were paid to kill them.

Their helmet-like bodies can still be seen along the region’s coastline and around its salt marshes, but in a fraction of the numbers witnessed seven decades ago. There are many reasons why.

In the 1950s coastal New England paid fishermen and others bounties to kill the up to 2-feet-long arachnids — horseshoe crabs are more closely related to spiders, scorpions, and ticks than to crabs — because they interfered with human enjoyment of the shore and were viewed as shellfish predators.

People, not just fishermen, were reportedly encouraged to toss horseshoe crabs above the high-tide line, so they would dry out and die. They were labeled “pests” and ground up for fertilizer. Beachfront property owners were apparently concerned the creature’s presence and their decaying death would impact real estate values.

Those ignorant days may be over, but horseshoe crabs are facing other threats to their existence.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based nonprofit, and 22 partner organizations recently petitioned NOAA Fisheries to list the Atlantic horseshoe crab as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. Horseshoe crab populations have crashed in recent decades because of overharvesting and habitat loss, according to the petitioners.

“Horseshoe crabs are imminently threatened by habitat loss, overexploitation, inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms, and other natural and manmade factors, including climate change,” according to the 142-page petition. “They are in danger of extinction across a significant portion of their range, and threats are likely to persist and worsen in the foreseeable future.”

The body-armored arthropods — also known as the American horseshoe crab, because they are the only living species of horseshoe crab native to the Americas — are used by the biomedical industry, which takes the animal’s copper-based blood for tests to ensure that medical devices, vaccines, and intravenous solutions are free of harmful bacteria.

Horseshoe crab blood harvests have doubled since 2017, with nearly a million horseshoe crabs harvested for their blood in 2022, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The petition noted synthetic alternatives to horseshoe crab blood tests are already being used in Europe, but companies in the United States have been slow to adopt the alternatives.

Read the full article at ecorRI

Rope Found on Dead Right Whale is From Maine

February 14, 2024 — The rope embedded in the tail of a dead young right whale that washed up on the Vineyard last month is consistent with buoy lines used by trap fishermen in Maine, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

An analysis of the rope recovered from the whale found purple markings that are used to identify trap fishing gear from the Pine Tree State, NOAA wrote in a statement Wednesday. The finding is another clue into the whale’s death, though final results from the investigation led by the International Fund for Animal Welfare have yet to be released.

Preliminary results show the whale suffered from chronic entanglement. The whale’s death was a blow to the species, which now has dwindled to fewer than 360 whales.

“Entanglements are a constant threat to right whales, cutting their lives short and painting a disheartening future for this species,” Conservation Law Foundation senior counsel Erica Fuller said in a statement.

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

Endangered species listing sought for horseshoe crabs

February 13, 2024 — Apetition filed Feb. 12 with NOAA Fisheries seeks federal Endangered Species Act protection for the American horseshoe crab, a long-ubiquitous species whose populations have “crashed in recent decades because of overharvesting and habitat loss,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

The center and 22 other environmental groups from the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico states want regulators to restrict horseshoe crab harvests for commercial whelk and eel fisheries, and for crab blood used by biomedical companies.

“We’re wiping out one of the world’s oldest and toughest creatures,” said Will Harlan, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These living fossils urgently need Endangered Species Act protection. Horseshoe crabs have saved countless human lives, and now we should return the favor.”

Horseshoe crabs come ashore in spring along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, laying their eggs in massive beach spawning events. One of the largest gatherings happens on Delaware Bay beaches, where the concentrations of crabs eggs attract migrating shorebirds including red knots.

But “horseshoe crab populations have declined by two-thirds in the Delaware Bay, their largest population stronghold,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Early alarms over declining crab and shorebird numbers led New Jersey officials to first restrict commercial crab harvests in the late 1990s.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Scientists look for clues to right whale death on Martha’s Vineyard. It could take weeks.

February 10, 2024 — For about half her life, the North Atlantic right whale that washed up dead Jan. 28 on a Martha’s Vineyard beach lived with fishing rope wrapped around her tail and flukes, making her existence increasingly difficult and painful as she grew.

A team of more than 20 scientists last week conducted a necropsy on the 3-year-old female whale, looking for clues about her cause of death, which has yet to be determined, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Division. Researchers at the New England Aquarium‘s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life were able to identify her as the 2021 calf of the right whale known as Squilla, the now approximately 17-year-old’s only known calf.

The dead whale is listed in the North Atlantic right whale catalog as #5120 and was last seen alive in Cape Cod Bay in January 2023. Found washed up on Jan. 28 just south of Joseph Sylvia State Beach — a barrier beach along Nantucket Sound between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown — she was moved to Aquinnah for the investigation.

Read the full article at Cape Cod Times

Marine Stewardship Council Fisheries Head Jay Lugar clarifies revision process for Version 3.0 standard

February 10, 2024 — Jay Lugar is the head of fisheries for the Marine Stewardship Council. In an SeafoodSource interview, Lugar addressed in more detail the problems with MSC’s Version 3.0 standard that have resulted in a delay in its implementation.

On 9 February, activist coalition Make Stewardship Count, which has been sharply critical of the Marine Stewardship Council for years, said it opposed the delay.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

New England marshes and seagrasses have huge potential to combat climate change

February 8, 2024 — As states across New England rush to meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, a massive carbon reservoir sits just below the tide: reed marshes and seagrass beds.

Scientists call these coastal habitats “blue carbon,” because the plants, and importantly, the sediment underneath them, can sequester a lot of carbon — several times more than a terrestrial forest, for example.

At least 7.5 million metric tons of carbon are held beneath New England’s salt marshes and eelgrass meadows, tall grasses that grow beneath the water, according to a first-of-its-kind report published by the US Environmental Protection Agency last year.

The EPA’s findings were highlighted at an event celebrating a new temporary exhibit at the New England Aquarium on Wednesday. Massachusetts has by far the most blue carbon habitats in New England — more than 112,000 acres, or about half of the region’s total salt marshes and seagrass beds.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

Microplastics prevalent in Kenai Peninsula waterways

February 8, 2024 — A study of Southcentral Alaska bodies of water found microplastics in 100% of locations tested, including sites on the Kenai Peninsula, according to a report released last month.

The Alaska Environment Research and Policy Center released the report on Jan. 25. AERPC State Director Dyani Chapman and University of Alaska Southeast Sea Grant Fellow Joi Gross, who conducted the study, found microplastics in 100% of their samples taken from all 39 Southcentral Alaska water bodies tested between June and September 2023.

“Alaska has international renown for its pristine environment and is relatively geographically isolated from other watersheds, so it’s especially disappointing to find microplastics in every sample we took,” Gross was quoted as saying in a Jan. 25 press release.

What are microplastics?

Microplastics are defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service as extremely small pieces of plastic debris measuring less than 5 millimeters in length that come from a variety of sources, including from larger plastic debris that degrades into smaller and smaller pieces.

According to Chapman and Gross’s report, a “large share” of the plastic debris present in the environment consists of pieces measuring less than 5 mm, or 0.2 inches.

The problem with plastic pollution is that it doesn’t simply break down or biodegrade like other types of waste that are animal- or plant-based.

“Neither bacteria nor fungi have much success breaking (plastics) down into their basic components,” the report states. “Over time, friction and heat will break the plastic into smaller and smaller pieces, but they’ll still be plastic and unable to nourish new life for a very long time.”

Microplastics have been found not only in the environment, but also in human and animal bodies, thus threatening both wildlife and public health. Toxic chemicals present in and attracted by plastics in the environment can bioaccumulate through the food chain, the report states. Microplastics mistaken as food by wildlife can lead to internal lacerations and digestive problems including starvation, according to the release. When microplastics are ingested by humans, they can cause cancer, endocrine disruption and reproductive disorders.

Read the full article at Homer News