Saving Seafood

Science

Gulf of Maine Sea Scallop Surveys Planned

June 9, 2017 — Sea scallops in the Gulf of Maine will be the focus of surveys this summer, initiated by NOAA Fisheries and the New England Fishery Management Council.

The council needs updated scallop biomass estimates from the area to support upcoming management decisions.

At their request, NOAA Fisheries will add portions of the Northern Gulf of Maine Scallop Management Area to two existing surveys already planned on Georges Bank.

The additional work will be done through the Atlantic Sea Scallop Research Set-Aside (RSA) Program under two current grants.

The Coonamessett Farm Foundation will survey portions of Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge with the Habcam optical imaging system, complemented by the deployment of a scallop survey dredge to collect biological samples.

The University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, School for Marine Science and Technology will conduct a high-resolution drop-camera survey of a portion of Stellwagen Bank.

These additional surveys will generate scallop biomass estimates that will be provided to the council to support the development of Gulf of Maine management measures later this year.

Research set-aside programs are unique to federal fisheries in the Greater Atlantic Region.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Scientists Warn About Effects Of Seismic Blasting Off Of East Coast

June 8, 2017 — Scientists are concerned about a proposal to search for oil and gas below the Atlantic Ocean floor. The proposal comes after President Donald Trump’s executive order to roll back a 5-year ban on drilling for oil off the East Coast.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is looking to authorize seismic air-gun surveys. That means explosions go off in the ocean looking for signs that oil may be available underneath.

The explosions would happen every ten seconds. Senior Science Advisor at the New England Aquarium Scott Kraus said adding sound in the water would be a problem for marine mammals like whales, who depend on sound for survival.

“So they use acoustics for finding food, finding mates, maintain social cohesion, they use sound for migration, they use sound for everything that is critical for their lives,” said Kraus.

Read the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio

Ray Hilborn, others launch I-FIN, a new fisheries data network

June 7, 2017 — A new scientific advisory group called International Fisheries Information Network (I-FIN) is refuting a commonly held belief that all fisheries are in decline.

I-FIN believes that there are highly sustainable fisheries in the developed world and that lessons from those fisheries can be used to improve fisheries in the developing world, according to Saving Seafood, a news and advocacy organization for the U.S. domestic seafood industry.

The group is headed by internationally recognized marine scientists, economists, and fisheries managers and launched ahead of this year’s SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

I-FIN has set an ambitious goal of being a global clearinghouse for information concerning how fisheries are managed, which management styles are successful and how those successes can be adopted to create a more sustainable global fishery, according to its mission statement.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Scandinavian biologists see threat in crossbreeding by American, European lobsters

June 7, 2017 — Scandinavian biologists say American and European lobsters are crossbreeding and their offspring can survive in European waters, but it is too early to tell if the hybrids can reproduce.

Susanne Eriksson of the University of Gothenberg in Sweden and Ann-Lisbeth Agnalt of the Institute of Marine Research in Norway presented their findings on the threat that American lobsters found in the northeast Atlantic Ocean pose to their smaller European cousins Tuesday during the second day of the International Conference and Workshop on Lobster Biology & Management in Portland.

“American scientists said your lobsters couldn’t survive in European waters, but we have proof they are not only surviving, but competing with the European lobster for food, shelter and mates,” Eriksson said. “They are crossbreeding, the hybrid eggs are hatching, and the larvae are surviving in our tanks, and in our oceans. We don’t know if they can reproduce yet, that’s a year or two away, but we know the males can produce sperm.”

Last year, Sweden asked the European Union to list the American lobster as an invasive species after scientists there found evidence of crossbreeding. The EU bans the import of invasive species, so a listing would have put an end to the $200 million annual export business. The evidence persuaded the forum of EU scientists who study alien species to support a ban, but not the EU politicians who must approve such a listing.

The EU said it might one day explore other protective measures that would not be so disruptive to trade if Sweden returns with further proof of an invasion.

That’s why Scandinavia is continuing to look at how American-European hybrids will fare in the northeast Atlantic, especially once they hit sexual maturity.

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald 

SeaWeb Seafood Summit Panel Tackles Impact of Climate Change on Fisheries and Aquaculture

SEATTLE (Saving Seafood) — June 7, 2017 — Conference sessions on climate change generally include lots of tables and figures illustrating projected changes in greenhouse gas emissions, ocean temperatures, ocean pH, etc. under a range of scenarios. But while projections were discussed at Monday’s session on climate change at the SeaWeb Seafood Summit, “Adaptation and Infrastructure: Fisheries and Aquaculture in a Changing Climate,” the panel emphasized the reality that we are already seeing marine ecosystem changes, and that these changes can only be expected to become more severe. In different ways, each of the four speakers began with this premise, and discussed strategies for adaptation.

Two of the speakers, John Norgren of the Climate Resilience Foundation and Lara Hansen of EcoAdapt, spoke directly to the strategic challenges posed by climate change. Mr. Norgren discussed the process of initiating and maintaining change; the need to be intentional and holistic; and the importance of considering human dimensions and responses, both to change itself and to actions intended to address climate change. He highlighted issues such as changing baselines (when the past is a poor predictor of the future), the importance of monitoring and adjusting approaches, and the value of online resources.

While similarly concerned with strategy, Ms. Hansen focused on the marine sectors and fisheries. She spoke about adaptation strategies, changes in distribution and abundance of fish stocks, and concerns about future access to ports and processing facilities. She drew the audience’s attention to work by NOAA and other agencies on the vulnerability of marine populations and coastal communities to climate change. Ms. Hansen emphasized the importance of building capacity, addressing broad policy challenges, establishing priorities for conservation and natural resource management, and the necessity of fully recognizing infrastructure needs in the planning process. She shared a positive outlook on processes already underway as well as future opportunities, and recommended two important online sources: The State of Climate Adaptation in U.S. Marine Fisheries Management and the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange.

Bob Young of the Center for Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University spoke about failures by the U.S. government to rebuild and protect eroding shorelines. With sea level rise and increasing storm activity, shoreline erosion will only increase. Across the U.S., but especially along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico, erosion and retreat of shoreline has been addressed through beach nourishment, which moves large quantities of sand from offshore to replace sand lost at the shoreline. This destroys benthic habitat. Furthermore, rebuilding coastal infrastructure following major storms precludes any possibility of allowing marsh and wetland development inshore of the current coastline, as would occur naturally. Ultimately, important nursery areas for marine stocks are lost, and coastal fish stocks and fisheries are harmed. Mr. Young emphasized the need for greater understanding and awareness of this process, which is greatly exacerbated by climate change.

Joseph Gellins of the Port of Seattle spoke about the Port’s strategies and actions to address climate change. He described the engineering and hydrological challenges associated with increased storm surges and sea-level rise and how this is taken into account in daily operations and future planning. He discussed the importance of tracking how other Pacific Rim ports, many of which are trading partners, adapt to the impacts of climate change, since changes to these ports could directly impact operational demands on the Port of Seattle itself. He also mentioned the importance of Seattle as a home port for many Alaskan fishing fleets, although one member of the audience pointed out that many of these vessels dock at Fishermen’s Terminal, which is protected from seal level change by the sea locks between Puget Sound and Lake Union.

Even though the audience for the climate change session was small, an energetic discussion followed. The conversation addressed topics like the impact of climate change on fish stocks and ecosystem dynamics, including the potential consequence of reduced catch levels due to reduced productivity and increased uncertainty. An audience member also raised, and the panel discussed, the impact of shifting distributions on regional fisheries, and the associated need to adjust regional and fleet allocations of harvested stocks.

Researcher says young lobsters on decline in Gulf of Maine

June 6, 2017 — While landings of lobster in the Gulf of Maine have hit recordbreaking highs, the number of young lobsters appears to be declining, and marine scientists are trying to figure out why.

That’s just one of the many topics being examined at the 11th International Conference and Workshop on Lobster Biology and Management that’s taking place in Maine this week.

This marks the first time the conference has been held in New England. Previous editions of the conference were held in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Japan, and Norway. The only other time it was hosted in the United States was in 2000, when it was held in Florida.

Richard A. Wahle of the University of Maine says the number of young lobsters is falling in the Gulf of Maine despite years of record-breaking harvests, according to the Associated Press.

Wahle’s American Lobster Settlement Index quantifies the population of baby lobsters at dozens of sites in New England and Canada every year. Most monitoring sites from New Brunswick to Cape Cod reported some of the lowest levels since the late 1990s or early 2000s, and scientists and fishermen are working to better understand this trend, according to the Associated Press.

The conference, which is being chaired by Wahle and Kari L. Lavalli of Boston University, kicked off Sunday with informal icebreaker activities, live music by a fiddle band, and plenty of New England clam chowder.

The confab, which runs until Friday in Portland, is expected to draw more than 200 lobster biologists, oceanographers, fishery managers, and lobstermen.

The schedule includes dozens of presentations and panel discussions, and sessions with titles like “The Hunger Games: how starvation affects attractiveness of lobsters used to bait traps in the Florida spiny lobster fishery,” and “From lobsters to dollars: an economic analysis of the distribution supply chain in Maine.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

New Scientific Organization Launches to Share Successful Fisheries Management Across Globe

SEATTLE (Saving Seafood) — June 5, 2017 — Fisheries in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world have provided a blueprint for successful fisheries management globally, according to a newly formed scientific advisory group that plans to take the lessons learned from these successes and apply them to developing fisheries in the rest of the world.

The organization, the International Fisheries Information Network (I-FIN), debuted ahead of this year’s SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Seattle. Headed by internationally recognized marine scientists, economists, and fisheries managers, I-FIN hopes to be a global resource on where fisheries are being managed successfully, why they’re successful, and how those successes can be adopted elsewhere.

“We’ve got a team of people who can provide the most authoritative, scientific advice on what’s happening in global fisheries, and what has been shown to work to improve the performance of fisheries,” said Dr. Ray Hilborn, professor of marine science at the University of Washington and one of the members of the I-FIN steering committee.

Ray Hilborn on I-FIN from Saving Seafood on Vimeo.

According to I-FIN, over the last several decades, fisheries in much of the developed world have quietly transformed themselves into global leaders in sustainable management. In places like the United States, Iceland, and New Zealand, fishing mortality has been reduced, abundance of many fish species has increased, and more species than ever before are being harvested at a sustainable rate.

“The greatest insight that we’ve uncovered so far is that there are a lot of really sustainable fish stocks,” said Chris Costello, professor of natural resource economics at UC Santa Barbara. “Many people don’t realize that in the U.S., most of our fish are some of the most sustainable on the planet, and there are other places where you find a similar story.”

Chris Costello on I-FIN from Saving Seafood on Vimeo.

Successful fisheries, like those in the U.S., have several traits in common. Their fisheries are closely monitored and collect significant amounts of data, their management adheres to scientific advice, and their regulations are strictly enforced. Many fisheries in the developing world, in contrast, are data poor, which, combined with weak enforcement, increases the likelihood of overfishing. Identifying and closing these data gaps is one of I-FIN’s top priorities.

“We know a lot about fisheries in some areas of the world and not very much about fisheries in other areas of the world,” said Mike Melnychuk, a research scientist at the University of Washington. “In the developing world, mostly, we know very little. What we’re trying to do is address some of those data gaps by looking at other methods, other kinds of approaches for advancing our understanding in what’s going on with fisheries there, and how we can improve fisheries for people’s livelihoods.”

Mike Melnychuk on I-FIN from Saving Seafood on Vimeo.

Much of North America and Europe have collected significant amounts of data on their fisheries, as well as certain fisheries in South America, such as Peruvian anchovetta. However, many fisheries in Africa and Asia have relatively little data collected on them. Compounding this data gap are the unique challenges posed by small-scale fisheries, which make up around 90 percent of fisheries in the developing world and have not traditionally been closely monitored. Successfully managing these fisheries will likely require a different approach than in larger-scale fisheries.

“In the developed world context, where the rule of law is strong, where there are highly evolved processes for doing stock assessments, or making a bridge between research and management, there’s a different set of opportunities for having research make a difference. When you move to the developing world, that really is not appropriate, because of capacity, because of the nature of the fisheries, because of the remoteness of the people, language, politics, many different things,” said Neil Andrew, a professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Neil Andrew on I-FIN from Saving Seafood on Vimeo.

“You need to take a philosophically different approach to improving fisheries,” he said. “I think we take the best of the lessons from the developing world—and there are some fundamental ecological truths about catching fish—but I think we need to think about it differently and with a different skill set, which is much more social, which is much more invested in the management process rather than the provision of data.”

I-FIN’s current efforts are an outgrowth of previous efforts to monitor progress in fisheries management at the global level, particularly the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database. The information gathered by the RAM Database, particularly the positive developments, has helped I-FIN identify trends in global fisheries, and informs the organization’s current message.

“The motivation was that we were seeing all these very bad, sad pictures of fisheries going really in the wrong direction, and we thought ‘well, there are all these NGOs and all these processes that are painting a picture that is probably worse than it is,’” said Ana Parma, a researcher with the Research Council of Argentina. “That was our impression from the fisheries people, because we have seen some improvement in many of them and we thought ‘the only way is to ground these statements on real data.’ That was the motivation to collect RAM.”

Ana Parma on I-FIN from Saving Seafood on Vimeo.

I-FIN hopes that its efforts will change the way the fisheries are perceived, and that successful management receives more recognition.

“The common perception that fish stocks everywhere are in decline are wrong, and we now have very strong evidence, and I would argue irrefutable evidence, that that’s the case,” said Dr. Hilborn. “So we’re hoping to change the general perception about the status of global fisheries.”

Authors of New Research on Forage Fish Respond to Critiques from Lenfest Task Force

June 5, 2017 — The following was written by authors of a new paper on forage fish that found that previous research likely overestimated the impact of forage fishing. The piece addresses criticisms made by the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force. The authors are Dr. Ray Hilborn, Dr. Ricardo O. Amoroso, Dr. Eugenia Bogazzi, Dr. Ana M. Parma, Dr. Cody Szuwalski, and Dr. Carl J. Walters:

First we note that the press releases and video related to our paper (Hilborn et al. 2017) were not products of the authors or their Universities or agencies. Some of the authors were interviewed for the video, and each of us must be prepared to defend what was said on the video. The LENFEST Task Force authors criticize our statement in the video that:

“What we found is there was essentially no relationship between how many forage fish there are in the ocean and how well predators do in terms of whether the populations increase or decrease.”

Our paper was specifically about U.S. forage fish, where we found very few relationships that were stronger than one might expect by chance. It is certainly likely that there are places where there is a significant relationship, but we noted that the LENFEST report did not include any analysis of the empirical data and relied only on models. Our point is that the models used by the LENFEST Task Force assume there will always be such a relationship, whereas in many, and perhaps most cases there may be little if any impact of fishing forage fish on the abundance of their predators. The scientific literature suggests that central place foragers, such as seabirds and pinnipeds at their breeding colonies, may be exceptions, and we acknowledge as much in our paper (p. 2 of corrected proofs, paragraph starting at the bottom of first column).

Specific response to the “shortcomings” of our study listed in the LENFEST Task Force response

  1. We included species not considered by the LENFEST Task Force to be “forage fish.” We simply looked for harvested fish and invertebrate populations that were an important part (> 20%) of the diet of the predators, and thus we would argue that our analysis is appropriate and relevant to the key question: “Does fishing the major prey species of marine predators affect their abundance?”
  2. The LENFEST Task Force authors criticize our use of estimates of abundance of forage fish provided by stock assessment models, and then suggest that because these models were not designed to identify correlations between predators and prey we were committing the same error that the LENFEST Task Force did, using models for a purpose they were not designed for. This is wrong: the stock assessment models are designed to estimate the abundance of fish stocks and the estimates of forage species we used to examine correlations with predators were considered the best available estimates at the time of the analysis. Similarly, the stock assessment models used for the predatory fish species represent the best available estimate of the abundance, and rate of change in abundance, of these predators. We did not claim the stock assessment models told us anything directly about the relationship between forage abundance and predator rates of change. We simply asked “Is there any empirical relationship between forage species abundance and either the abundance or rate of change in abundance of their predators?” The answer, with very few exceptions, was “no.”
  3. The LENFEST Task Force authors criticize our use of U.S. fisheries because they are better managed than the global average. Most of the key criticisms we made of the LENFEST study were unrelated to how fisheries are managed, but to the basic biological issues: recruitment variation, weak relationship between spawning biomass and recruitment, relative size of fish taken by predators and the fishery and the importance of local density of forage fish to predators rather than total abundance of the stock. U.S. fisheries are not only better managed, but also often better researched, so U.S. fisheries are a good place to start examining the biological assumptions of the models used by the LENFEST Task Force.
  4. We did not argue that fisheries management does not need to change – instead we argued that general rules such as the LENFEST Task Force’s recommendation to cut fishing mortality rates to half of the levels associated with maximum sustainable yield for “most forage fisheries now considered well managed” (LENFEST Summary of New Scientific Analysis) are not supported by sound science. Our analysis suggests that there’s little empirical evidence that such a policy will increase predatory fish abundance. Instead, every case needs to be examined individually and management decisions should weigh the costs (economic, social, and ecological) of restricting forage fisheries to levels below MSY against the predicted benefits, while accounting for uncertainty in both. Our abstract concludes “We suggest that any evaluation of harvest policies for forage fish needs to include these issues, and that models tailored for individual species and ecosystems are needed to guide fisheries management policy.”
  5. Essington and Plagányi feel we incorrectly characterized their paper. We simply rely on the words from the abstract of their paper. “We find that the depth and breadth with which predator species are represented are commonly insufficient for evaluating sensitivities of predator populations to forage fish depletion. We demonstrate that aggregating predator species into functional groups creates bias in foodweb metrics such as connectance.” Carl Walters, one of our co-authors and the person who conceived and built the EcoSim model certainly agrees that the models the LENFEST Task Force used were insufficient for the task they attempted.

Moving forward

We agree that the next steps are to move beyond U.S. fisheries and we are doing so. We have current projects doing a global analysis of relationships between forage fish abundance and the population dynamics of their predators. We have an almost complete review of recruitment patterns in forage fish stocks. We are doing specific case studies of other regions with models explicitly designed to evaluate the impact on predators of fishing forage fish. Finally, we are exploring alternative management strategies for forage fish, considering alternative recruitment patterns, across a range of case studies. We hope that many of the authors of the LENFEST report will collaborate with us in these efforts.

Science center to fund research into surf clams, quahogs

May 30, 2017 — A fisheries science center is funding research projects designed to learn more about a pair of valuable ocean clams.

The work will concern the ocean quahog and surf clam, which are clams of high economic value that are fished along the East Coast. They are popular in chowders and other seafood dishes.

The Science Center for Marine Fisheries is funding the research as part of $200,000 it is allocating for a host of fisheries research projects. The science center is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center.

The research will include a project to try to explain changes in the abundance of ocean quahogs. There will also be a survey of surf clams southeast of Nantucket that the science center says will be the first of its kind.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at NH1

Science offers solutions as well as problems, fisheries experts maintain

May 24, 2017 — While celebrating their 50th year of advancing fish science, members of the American Fisheries Society Montana Chapter gathered in Missoula worried that their public was wriggling off the hook.

“We tend to deliver a lot of wha-wha-wha, and then a blast of data,” AFS President Joe Magraf told about 400 biologists, fisheries managers and policy makers gathered at the group’s annual conference on Tuesday.

“We don’t express things well when talking to decisionmakers. The Clark Fork River was not a place you wanted to dip your toes into 50 years ago. Now it’s a great place to fish. That’s what fisheries biology is all about — creating places like Missoula.”

Looking back on that half-century of fisheries science, University of Montana Regents Professor Emeritus Fred Allendorf recalled how DNA analysis went from almost nonexistent to become a driving tool for biology.

It explains what happens, for example, when artificially stocked rainbow trout interbreed with native cutthroats in Montana streams. The first generation of mutts lose the cutthroats’ preference for sticking to the streams of their birth and instead spread to any water with good spawning habitat.

Subsequent generations produce babies that have even less cutthroat genetics, which contain the adaptive tricks cutthroats spent millennia developing to survive in mountain waters. Five generations down the line, the hybrids have lost 50 percent or more of their reproductive fitness. In other worlds, the unfit fish populations start to crash.

Allendorf said that scientific process nevertheless becomes controversial when it gets displayed as evolution. He cited public opinion surveys showing Americans ranked 33rd out of 34 developed nations for general acceptance of evolution theory, just above Turkey.

Read the full story at the Independent Record