Saving Seafood

Science

New buoys listen for critically endangered right whale sounds off Massachusetts coast

March 26, 2025 — Researchers are listening for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales off the coast of Massachusetts with the help of two new buoys in the water.

The high-tech buoys were deployed last month in Cape Cod Bay and off Cape Ann thanks to a partnership between the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They are part of a larger East Coast network of buoys that the state says will “listen for, detect, classify, and report vocalizations of large whales in near real-time.”

“Within a few hours of the buoys being in the water, they were already picking up detections, including vocalizations of right whales in Cape Cod Bay,” said Erin Burke, the protected species program manager with Marine Fisheries.

Buoys detect right whales off Massachusetts

Data shows the Cape Cod Bay buoy has detected a right whale every day since Feb. 23. The Cape Ann buoy has picked up sounds from fin whales on most days, with possible detections of right and humpback whales so far.

Data from the buoys is sent back to shore every two hours, which will inform management decisions about fishing restrictions, speed limits for boats and other conservation measures.

Read the full article at CBS News

Researchers use light traps to illuminate Dungeness crab decline

March 24, 2025 — Researchers are waging a quiet battle in the Pacific Northwest to protect one of the region’s most iconic species — the Dungeness crab.

Using light traps, scientists at the MaST Center Aquarium in Des Moines are gathering data that could help safeguard the future of Washington’s most valuable wild-caught fishery.

The study aims to fill in gaps in the biological data on Dungeness crabs. Researchers hope by monitoring the early stages of their development, they can better predict crab populations and avert crises like the one that closed the fishery in South Puget Sound a few years ago.

According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, tribal and recreational crabbing plummeted in South Puget Sound in the last 15 years, dropping from 214,404 pounds harvested in 2012 to only 8,679 pounds in 2017.

“That was a big wake-up call for fisheries, co-managers, and part of the reason the Pacific Northwest Crab Research Group (PCRG) formed,” said Ally Galiotto, Puget Sound Restoration Fund. “We still don’t know exactly what happened. It’s a sobering reality that sudden drops in population could happen elsewhere, and we won’t necessarily know why or when they will happen.”

To capture crab larvae, a light trap is deployed from docks in Washington and British Columbia. Each trap consists of a transparent bucket with an LED light strip that activates at night. The light mimics moonlight, drawing in the larvae, while a funnel prevents larger creatures from entering the trap. Once the larvae are captured, the samples are sifted, counted, and analyzed before being returned to the water.

Read the full article at KREM

Pacific studies axed in Pentagon research cuts

March 24, 2025 — Steven Mana ‘oakamai Johnson, a Cornell University professor who grew up on Saipan, has devoted his life to studying the ocean and how people in the Pacific depend on the fish in it to feed themselves and support their economies. Lately he’s been studying when they fight over them.

He has been working on a Pentagon-funded project called “Future Fish Wars : Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth, ” for which the military awarded a grant in 2023. It was looking at how illegal fishing, climate change and changing migration patterns of fish species could contribute to new conflicts between rival fishermen that could escalate into much larger confrontations—looking mostly at the Pacific and the Arctic.

“All the fisheries climate research shows that there’s going to be a reshuffling of the deck of where these trans-boundary fish stocks are going to end up, ” said Johnson. “It might be important to understand, you know, what is the texture of that scenario ? Who’s involved ? You know, where has fisheries conflict happened in the past, what was driving it ?”

The South China Sea, once considered among the world’s richest fishing grounds, has been depleted by years of industrialized fishing methods. Today, Chinese fishermen—backed by the Chinese military—have clashed violently with fishermen from neighboring countries, creating an increasingly militarized standoff. China has also sent its vast state-subsidized fishing fleet across the globe, with large groups of vessels descending on South America’s coastlines.

Read the full articles at Yahoo! News

From Krill to Elephant Seals, Sentinel Species Detect Hidden Ocean Shifts that Forecast Change

March 14, 2025 — Northern elephant seals weigh in at several thousand pounds and quickly put on more weight when catching squid, fish, and other prey. They feed off the California coast in the so-called “twilight zone” of the ocean (200 to 1,000 meters deep) where sunlight disappears. The ocean’s twilight zone holds most of the world’s fish, but is difficult to assess on a large scale.

However, elephant seals may help. Scientists have found that just as elephant seals gain substantial weight in good times, they gain little when prey are scarce.

A new research paper published in Science recognizes northern elephant seals as an “ecosystem sentinel” that can provide fishing fleets, fisheries managers, and others with low-cost but high-value insight into how the ocean is changing and why. The finding builds on two earlier research papers published last year that help scientists identify which species respond to changes quickly enough to make good sentinels. They also looked at how to assemble a series of sentinel species to inform decisions affecting the West Coast economy and the environment.

The research supports NOAA Fisheries’ mission of tracking and forecast ocean changes that affect commercial and recreational fishing. The insight helps fisheries managers make more timely decisions and accurate decisions about fishing seasons and levels. Ocean sentinels may help gather the data more quickly and at lower cost than research ships, for instance.

The scientists, led by Roxanne Beltran at University of California at Santa Cruz, examined four decades of data on California’s burgeoning northern elephant seal population. They compared those numbers with recorded changes in the ocean and found that even small differences in how much prey mother elephant seals consumed made big differences in their body mass and survival of their pups. They found that the connection was so strong that it helped the scientists hindcast the abundance of prey in the twilight zone as far as 5 decades into the past, and predict it 2 years into the future.

“In an ideal world, we would have daily mapping of phytoplankton and zooplankton abundance throughout the entire California Current,” says Elliott Hazen of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. In a 2019 paper, Hazen proposed that marine top predators make effective ecosystem sentinels. “That way, we could see how the ecosystem is responding to various changes in real time. But we don’t. So we rely on predators, like the northern elephant seal, to tell us about larger ecosystem trends. Are they fatter or are they skinnier? This tells us whether there is enough prey, which is an indicator of ecosystem health.”

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

Growing consumption of the American eel may lead to it being critically endangered, study finds

March 11, 2025 — High demand for eel combined with a decline in stock have resulted in soaring prices for this food item, which, in many cultures, is considered a delicacy. This has fueled concern globally as the prized food item is now being illegally traded from Europe to Asia.

Current research has focused on the critically endangered Anguilla anguilla, commonly known as the European eel. While its export outside the European Union is tightly regulated, large quantities of A. anguilla juveniles continue to be smuggled out of the EU to Asia where they are grown in eel farms until reaching a marketable size.

To investigate the prevalence and consumption of endangered eels—particularly the European eel—a Yale-NUS College research team examined 327 individual eel products purchased across 86 retailers throughout Singapore. However, instead of the prevalence of the European eel, the team identified 70% of another species in the sample—Anguilla rostrata, commonly known as the American eel.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

El Niño Yields to Upwelling in the California Current, Renewing Productivity of West Coast Ecosystem

March 10, 2025 — According to the NOAA California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment’s annual report, the California Current Ecosystem pulled out of a strong El Niño pattern in 2024. That El Niño delayed the onset of the annual spring upwelling of nutrient-laden water that, was nevertheless strong enough to fuel the rich West Coast ecosystem and improv environmental conditions  for salmon.

NOAA Fisheries scientists presented the report to the Pacific Fishery Management Council to inform upcoming decisions on fishing seasons. The report provides a snapshot of ocean conditions, fish population abundance and habitat, and fisheries landings and fishing communities’ conditions. It gives short-term forecasts and longer term projections of how conditions across the ecosystem may evolve in 2025 and beyond.

Report Highlights

  • Upwelling resumed even more strongly and consistently than normal, supplying a greater influx of nutrient-rich waters that improved forage conditions for many species
  • Productive waters supported abundant forage speciessuch as anchovy and krill and strong production of young hake and juvenile rockfish that could contribute to commercial fisheries in future years
  • Improved freshwater streamflows should support survival of juvenile salmon migrating downstream in California to the ocean
  • California sea lions found enough prey amid the El Niño warming, while experiencing harmful algal blooms that led to premature birth of pups and strandings along the coast

“Each year we learn more about how this marine ecosystem functions and what we should be watching to anticipate change,” said Andrew Leising, a research oceanographer at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center who coauthored the new report. “We’re getting better at forecasting what is coming at us, at the same time we see some new twists.”

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

Projects in the Field: Saving money and time with an EM Pilot Program in the U.S. sea scallop fishery

March 8, 2025 — Reprinted with permission of EM4Fish:

A project led by the Coonamessett Farm Foundation (CFF) and Saltwater, Inc (SWI). is testing the feasibility of voluntary, cost-shared electronic monitoring (EM) on six commercial sea scallop fishing vessels in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Turbulent outlook for the fishery

After ranking among the most economically important fisheries in the United States (U.S.) over the last decade, accounting for more than $480 million of commercial landings in 2022 alone, the Atlantic sea scallop fishery is bracing for a few challenging years ahead. The total exploitable biomass of sea scallops appears to be on a downward trend, with climate change threatening the long-term health of the population. The New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) estimated annual projected landings for the 2025 fishing year to generate only about $348.3 million (19.8 million pounds) in landings, a 28% reduction from 2024.

As the fishery looks for novel cost-cutting measures to weather the coming reductions in catch, the Industry-Funded Scallop (IFS) Program sticks out as large annual expenditure for all fishermen. Observers for the sea scallop fishery are managed though the IFS. In this program, vessels selected to carry an observer must pay for that coverage, equal to ~$800 each day of the trip. Although, the IFS sets aside 1% of the annual catch limit that is redistributed back to vessels to partially offset their costs for carrying an observer. In 2025, this 1% set aside would amount to about $3.5 million in landings.

In addition to observer costs, another systematic inefficiency associated with current sea scallop fishing management is the days-at-sea (DAS) calculation methodology. Currently it is not possible to determine whether a vessel is fishing or transiting from the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) alone, days-at-sea are currently calculated by transit time after a vessel crosses the VMS Demarcation Line, which runs parallel to the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine, and notifies the Coast Guard of its fishing activity. As a result of this rule, vessels that depart from ports closer to productive fishing regions are at an advantage. For example, a sea scallop vessel based in New Bedford, MA planning to fish on Georges Bank in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean could transit along an efficient, straight pathway. Whereas a vessel departing from Cape May, NJ might elect to transit along the U.S. coast to Nantucket before darting out of the VMS Demarcation Line to fish the same area.

By hugging the coast, vessels departing from the Mid-Atlantic consume more fuel and waste time. Furthermore, these vessels are not permitted to transit over several closed rotational sea scallop access areas, which further restricts their trajectories. If DAS could be determined based on the exact time a sea scallop dredge enters the water for the first time during a trip, individual vessels could save hundreds of thousands of dollars over a season, while spending fewer consecutive days away from their families.

Read the full article at EM4Fish

NOAA-Funded Research Highlights Economic Effects of Oyster Reef Restoration

March 8, 2025 — Researchers at Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Laboratory quantified how restored oyster reefs in the NOAA Middle Peninsula Habitat Focus Area in Virginia would affect the local economy. They found that oyster reef restoration in the York and Piankatank rivers has a meaningful effect on the area’s economy. Results of their work, which was funded through the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Fisheries Research Program, were published in Ecological Modelling.

Oyster reefs provide habitat and food for commercially important species, including blue crabs. More healthy reef habitat means more blue crabs are available for harvest and for your dinner table. That provides financial benefits to watermen and supporting industries along the way.

In recent years, the York and Piankatank rivers have been the site of large-scale oyster reef restoration projects. That effort has led to 204 acres of restored oyster reefs in the York River and 497 acres in the Piankatank River. These projects have been spearheaded by members of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Virginia Oyster Restoration Workgroup, including:

  • NOAA
  • Virginia Marine Resources Commission
  • U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
  • The Nature Conservancy

These reefs support commercial and recreational fishing. But what would happen if there were more—or fewer—oyster reefs in the river? What other changes might affect the blue crab fishery?

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

‘I’m Heartbroken’: California Scientists Left Adrift by Mass Federal Layoffs at NOAA

March 6, 2025 — Many in California’s science community are reeling after last week’s mass firings within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration upended workers’ lives and raised dire concerns for the climate agency’s work going forward.

At least seven people, including National Weather Service employees and staff at the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NOAA Fisheries, lost their jobs along the Central Coast.

Their stories are similar and heart-wrenching. The early-career federal workers are planning marriages, recently signed mortgages and were saving to buy their first homes. But last Thursday, they got an email saying they were “not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge, and/or skills do not fit the agency’s current needs” — many of them before their supervisors even knew.

Read the full article KQED

Local Marine Research Takes a Hit, Following Federal Firing Edict

March 6, 2025 — The mass firing of probationary employees at federal agencies and other cuts by the Trump administration reached the epicenter of marine research for the Cape and Islands last week, leaving Vineyarders wondering about the potential ripple effects in the coming years.

Several scientists in Woods Hole were terminated Feb. 27, part of the Elon Musk-led layoffs by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to former employees and other scientific leaders in the seaside community.

The firings, expected budget cuts and disbanding of diversity initiatives, both in Woods Hole and beyond, have cast a pall of fear and anger over the scientific community.

“The body of knowledge and expertise that these agencies hold, and the staff within them, is immense, whether it’s their laboratory that we are able to access or their field expertise,” said Emily Reddington, the executive director of the Great Pond Foundation here on the Island. “We couldn’t do our work to help protect the ponds without them.”

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazzette