August 28, 2014 — Scientists are set to begin reviewing an assessment of the Gulf of Maine cod population that says the species is spawning at an all-time low.
A spokeswoman for the New England Fisheries Management Council said the scientists are reviewing the assessment Thursday and Friday in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The management council will consider the scientists’ report in late September and early October.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald
PORTLAND, Maine — August 28, 2014 — Scientists are set to begin reviewing an assessment of the Gulf of Maine cod population that says the species is spawning at an all-time low.
A spokeswoman for the New England Fisheries Management Council says the scientists will review the assessment Thursday and Friday in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The management council will consider the scientists' report in late September and early October. The spokeswoman says the council might use the report to make an emergency action or to craft new regulations for the fishery.
Read the full story from The Republic
August 26, 2014 — To designers building better nets and lines, bycatch isn’t viewed as an inevitability, but as something we can phase out, piece by piece. It’s also seen as a battle that needs to be fought alongside fishermen, not against them.
Six years ago, the Norwegian coast guard filmed a Scottish fishing vessel riding gray swells, dumping 5 metric tons of dead fish back into the North Sea. Over the European Union catch quota, and so unable to keep all the fish they’d caught, the fishermen had to ditch some. To the Norwegians, who aren’t part of the EU and hold a strict discards ban, the waste was shocking.
When this news reached Dan Watson, a young British designer, it became the inspiration for SafetyNet, an ocean fishing net that allows certain fish to escape via lighted rings, offering more catch selectivity. The Scottish fishermen’s predicament, he believed, was driven by their lack of control. “There can be no villains, there can be no victims, there are just problems,” Watson says. “I started this project because I wanted to go some way towards solving that problem.”
Watson joins a growing number of innovators designing more selective fishing gear to reduce bycatch—the unwanted fish, dolphins, whales and birds that get scooped up by longlines, gillnets and trawlers each year and then discarded. Globally, the amount of marine life that is wasted or unmanaged—which makes it potentially unsustainable—forms about 40% of the catch. “The way we catch now is to catch everything, decide what we want to keep, and discard the rest,” says Martin Hall, head of the bycatch program at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, which regulates tuna fishing in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Bycatch can result in overfishing, reduces the population of species that might already be endangered and, on the largest scale, interrupts food chains and damages whole ecosystems. It also amounts to an enormous waste of valuable fish protein.
To designers building better nets and lines, bycatch isn’t viewed as an inevitability, but as something we can phase out, piece by piece. It’s also seen as a battle that needs to be fought alongside fishermen, not against them.
Read the full story from Quartz
August 26, 2014 — More than 100 researchers and three dozen projects are underway to find clues as to why Alaska’s Chinook salmon production has declined since 2007.
The ambitious effort marks the start of a state-backed five year, $30 million Chinook Salmon Research Initiative that includes 12 major river systems from Southeast Alaska to the Yukon. And while it will be years before the project yields definitive data, the scientists have pinned down some early findings.
“It’s not the fresh water production of the juvenile Chinook that is the reason this decline is occurring, it’s being driven by poor marine survival,” said Ed Jones, the lead for the Initiative and Sport Fish Coordinator for the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game.
“We don’t know why, but once these juvenile Chinook salmon are entering the ocean they are not surviving at the rates they once did,” Jones added. “And at the same, we also are seeing younger and smaller Chinook returning to spawn and this obviously results in smaller fish being caught.”
At each river system, the Chinook team is estimating how many young fish are going to the ocean, refining estimates of how many older fish are returning to spawn, and tracking the marine catches.
“That’s an effort to estimate the harvests of these 12 indicator stocks in detail,” he explained. “So we’re going to implement tagging programs on the juveniles and as they go out to the ocean they’ll be marked with an adipose fin clip. We also will include a tiny coded wire tag in their heads and those will be sent to the Juneau lab where we can tell when and where those fish were released. With those three components we can do full stock reconstruction.”
Jones said his primary focus is on the Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers because of the importance of Chinook salmon to subsistence users.
“A major part of this initiative is to make sure we can help those folks fish when there’s fish around and pull the reins back when they are not around. But we need to gather the information that allows us to do that accurately each and every year. We are trying to learn from the users and gather information on historical harvests, what the people know and what they’ve learned for centuries. We’ll feed that information into our stock assessment program,” he said.
Read the full story from The Fish Site
August 24, 2014 — Scientists have discovered methane gas bubbling from the seafloor in an unexpected place: off the East Coast of the United States where the continental shelf meets the deeper Atlantic Ocean.
The methane is emanating from at least 570 locations, called seeps, from near Cape Hatteras, N.C., to the Georges Bank southeast of Nantucket, Mass. While the seepage is widespread, the researchers estimated that the amount of gas was tiny compared with the amount released from all sources each year.
In a paper published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, the scientists, including Adam Skarke of Mississippi State University and Carolyn Ruppel of the United States Geological Survey, reported evidence that the seepage had been going on for at least 1,000 years.
They said the depths of the seeps suggested that in most cases the gas did not reach the atmosphere but rather dissolved in the ocean, where it could affect the acidity of the water, at least locally.
But methane is a potent, if relatively short-lived, greenhouse gas, so the discovery should aid the study of an issue of concern to climate scientists: the potential for the release of huge stores of methane on land and under the seas as warming of the atmosphere and oceans continues.
Read the full story at the New York Times
August 21, 2014 — Sea plankton has been discovered living on the outside of the International Space Station, Russian cosmonauts have claimed.
Scientists on board the ISS are reported to have discovered living organisms when taking samples from windows.
Head of the Russian ISS orbital mission Vladimir Solovyev said the results of the experiment “are absolutely unique”.
Solovyev told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency that the tiny marine life-forms were not native to the launch site in Kazakhstan.
“Plankton in these stages of development could be found on the surface of the oceans,” he said.
“This is not typical for Baikonur [in Kazakhstan]. It means that there are some uplifting air currents which reach the station and settle on its surface.”
Read the full story at The Telegraph
August 18, 2014 — The oceans, which make up more than 90 percent of the earth’s livable space, are full of almost invisible animals. That is because life there is different from everywhere else.
To illustrate why, Dr. Johnsen began a recent talk with a macabre scenario. Suppose just then a gunman burst into the room, shooting at the audience. Naturally, people would scramble for cover behind chairs and walls.
His point: There would be places to try to hide.
On land, many animals camouflage themselves amid the foliage and terrain; in coastal waters, sea creatures blend into the sand or find refuge among coral or rocks. But in the deep ocean, Dr. Johnsen’s realm of expertise, creatures floating in the water have nowhere to seek refuge from larger creatures that would eat them.
Sharks and whales can swim with impunity, but many other creatures need to hide in plain sight.
Transparency is the most obvious strategy — if light passes straight through, no one can see you — and the one Dr. Johnsen first began researching almost 20 years ago. In graduate school, he had been studying clear biological tissues like the lenses in eyes.
Read the full story at the New York Times
August 19, 2014 — The following was released by the NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center:
The Ecosystems Surveys Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center will hold a public meeting on Wednesday, September 3 from 10 – 12 at the New Bedford Public Library to discuss an upcoming project designed to estimate the efficiency of the Bigelow standard bottom trawl survey gear. We will outline the project as currently envisioned and discuss the potential importance of this project to stock assessment, particularly for many flatfish species. We hope to get feedback from the fishing community on ways to improve the study design and maximize the usefulness of the data collected. We hope that you will all be able to attend.
If you have any questions, please contact:
Michael Martin
Supervisory Fish Biologist
NOAA Fisheries – Northeast Fisheries Science Center
166 Water St.
Woods Hole, MA 02543-1026
telephone: (508) 495-2106
email: michael.martin@noaa.gov
LONG BEACH, Ca. — August 14, 2014 — Nearly two months after sailing from Long Beach to study the ocean surface for plastic pollution in the North Pacific Central Gyre, the founder of a marine research nonprofit and his crew will return on Friday with enough fish and debris from their travels to complete their work.
Algalita founder Captain Charles Moore and the crew are expected to arrive at Alamitos Bay Landing, where there will be a welcome home party for the researchers, who spent much of the summer studying the effects of plastic pollution on oceans.
The trip commemorated the 15th anniversary of Moore’s discovery of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” an area of plastic debris in the North Pacific Ocean.
Read the full story at the Press-Telegram
August 11, 2014 — The always cool great white shark is red hot recently. And it doesn't look like the popular predator will “jump the shark” anytime soon.
But well before the most recent spate of attention there was the Discovery Channel's Shark Week, which kicked off its 27th year of shows on all things shark on Sunday, and there were researchers trying to figure out better ways to understand the lives of its stars.
In the waters off Cape Cod now is the time when the action tagging great white sharks heats up, said Gregory Skomal, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries senior marine fisheries biologist and go-to shark guy.
“About 80 percent of our sharks are tagged between late July and the end of August,” Skomal said. “We typically anticipate that that will be our peak period.”
Skomal couldn't say yet whether this year, with two sharks tagged as of Sunday, was unusual.
Charter fishermen are saying everything is two weeks behind and that may be true for the sharks too, he said.
“I think things are going to pop especially if the two week delay is going to hold true,” he said.
Skomal is spending his tagging time this year onboard with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, which was formed in 2013 and has helped support the state's tagging operations off the Cape since then.
The group tagged the first white shark of the year on July 31 and a second one on Friday just north of the Chatham Harbor inlet, said Cynthia Wigren, conservancy executive director and co-founder.
They use acoustic or pop-up satellite tags and sometimes both.
The acoustic tags are picked up by receivers located on buoys in the water while the pop-up tags stay on the shark for 6-9 months before popping off and transmitting information on where the shark has been, depth, water temperature and light, Wigren said.
Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times