Science

August 2, 2014 — An unprecedented tagging study led by Gloucester-based researchers from UMass-Amherst’s Large Pelagics Research Center shows bigeye tuna have extraordinary range, traveling largely in north-to-south arcs from Georges Bank to the Brazilian shelf, a distance of more than 4,700 miles.

The cooperative-research study, funded by NOAA and using longline fisher FV Eagle Eye II out of Fairhaven, improved on two earlier studies by providing a more extensive record of bigeye movement and should provide the basis for more comprehensive research into the fish’s habitat, according to Molly Lutcavage, the director of the research center in Gloucester’s Hodgkins Cove.

“This is the type of fishery-independent study that everyone calls for,” Lutcavage said Friday. “These results point to the need to do more of these research projects rather than just depending on catch data. And we couldn’t have done this work without having longline partners so adept at this type of research.”

Read the full story from The Gloucester Daily Times

August 1, 2014 — A federal agency has awarded a University of New England researcher and his colleagues $1.7 million for a research project they hope will help increase revenues for the fishing industry.

UNE announced the award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday, saying the project will research the mortality rate of winter skates, a cartilaginous fish closely related to stingrays, when discarded from catching nets.

James Sulikowski, a professor in UNE's department of marine sciences, will be accompanied by commercial fisherman Captain Ted Platz and researchers from the New England Aquarium in Boston, Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the NOAA-backed research project.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

 

PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — August 1, 2014 — "It's not your average camp."

Ventisca and her humpback calf stole the show Thursday off Race Point. Not by the typical humpback acrobatics and flipper-slapping, but just by lolling on the surface, as though napping together, close to the Dolphin Fleet whale-watch boat.

"How cool was that?" fishery biologist Christin Khan said to one of her students. Khan brought seven boys along with her on the trip, part of the first "The Biology and Behavior of Whales" summer class at Falmouth Academy.

"It was fabulous," Dario D'Urso, 12, of Miami, Florida, said. "It was moving a lot slower than I thought it would."

Around them, the other 270 or so people on the boat were pretty much saying the same thing, cooing as though seeing an infant, even though the infant humpback probably weighed in at close to a ton. The calf was probably born between January and April, and was still nursing, Carole Carson, the Dolphin Fleet's director of research and education, said over the sound system as the boat floated without the engine running near the pair.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

BALTIMORE — July 31, 2014 — "The vision is to have huge tanks, land-based, in a facility like what you see here, having bluefin tuna that are spawning year-round, on demand, producing millions of eggs."

In a windowless laboratory in downtown Baltimore, some tiny, translucent fish larvae are swimming about in glass-walled tanks.

They are infant bluefin tuna. Scientists in this laboratory are trying to grasp what they call the holy grail of aquaculture: raising this powerful fish, so prized by sushi lovers, entirely in captivity. But the effort is fraught with challenges.

When I visited, I couldn't see the larvae at first. They look incredibly fragile and helpless, just drifting in the tanks' water currents. But they're already gobbling up microscopic marine animals, which in turn are living on algae.

"It's amazing. We cannot stop looking at them! We are here around the clock and we are looking at them, because it is so beautiful," says Yonathan Zohar, the scientist in charge of this project.

It's beautiful to Zohar because it's so rare. Scientists are trying to raise bluefin tuna completely in captivity in only a few places around the world. Laboratories in Japan have led the effort. This experiment, at the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, is the first successful attempt in North America.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at WBUR – Boston NPR

 

July 29, 2014 — A recent article in Nation’s Restaurant News calls the scallop “the mollusk of the moment,” but just 20 years ago, the U.S. fishery for Atlantic sea scallops was unsustainable, with the population near record lows and fishing at a record high.

Fortunately, the industry underwent a complete turnaround in the late 1990s through the collaborative work of scallop fishermen, scientists, fishery managers, and environmentalists. Now, a research set-aside program, funded entirely by proceeds from selling a portion of the annual sea scallop quota, is helping to ensure that the fishery remains healthy.

Art Trembanis, associate professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of Delaware, is one of more than 30 researchers from 14 organizations to be awarded a research grant through the 2014-15 set-aside program, which is administered by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Trembanis leads the Coastal Sediments, Hydrodynamics, and Engineering Lab (C-SHEL) at UD.

Collaborators on the two-year $1.6-million project, which is addressing incidental mortality in sea scallops exposed to commercial dredging, include Doug Miller, a benthic oceanographer and ecologist in the School of Marine Science and Policy at UD, David Rudders from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and brothers Arthur and Kenneth Ochse, captains of the F/V Christian and Alexa.

Dredging it up

Atlantic sea scallops are the nation’s highest-valued single species commercial fishery, with the industry valued at more than $500 million a year.

Trembanis explains that the popular mollusks are typically harvested by dredging, with rings on the equipment designed to catch mature scallops and allow small ones to fall through.

Some are inevitably lost to the process. For example, smaller scallops that pass through the rings may get raked over and crushed by the dredge. Others that are too small to keep may get caught by the dredge anyway and then die after they’re returned to the ocean.

“While scallops are one of the most lucrative fisheries on the East Coast, dredging can be a destructive sampling method that damages much of the seafloor and leaves many animals compromised,” says Danielle Ferraro, a master’s candidate in oceanography who is part of the research team.

By using a combined research platform consisting of a commercial scallop dredge and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), the researchers hope to quantify the incidental mortality of scallops as a result of dredging so that the fishery can be more effectively managed.

Read the full story from the University of Delaware

July 28, 2014 — A University of New England (UNE) researcher and colleagues have been awarded a $1.8 million National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grant to study incidental mortality of winter skates in the monkfish commercial fishery.

The grant, funded by NOAA's Monkfish Research Set Aside Program, awards $1.8 million for UNE and its partners to study "Evaluating the Condition and Discard Mortality of Winter Skate, Leucoraja ocellata, Following Capture and Handling in the Sink Gillnet Fishery." Principal investigators on the project are James Sulikowski, Ph.D., a professor in UNE's Department of Marine Sciences, and commercial fisherman Captain Ted Platz. They will be partnering with John Mandelman, Ph.D., from the New England Aquarium, David Rudders, Ph.D., of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and Dr. Hugues Benoît from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada. The researchers will investigate the rate of incidental mortality of winter skates exposed to commercial sink gillnets.

Read the full story at Digital Journal

July 27, 2014 — A fish farming technology company plans to begin construction of a huge, untethered and highly automated spherical pen for farming yellowfin and bigeye tuna off the Kohala coast.

Hawaii Oceanic Technology Inc. intends to deploy a prototype Oceansphere sometime next year, and contractors are working to finalize the design for the skeleton of the 180-foot wide geodesic sphere, HOTI’s CEO Bill Spencer said.

The deepwater pen will be capable of holding 1,000 tons of ahi at a depth of 1,300 feet. Fish grow faster in deep ocean settings, have fewer parasites and better food conversion ratios, according to the company.

HOTI officials don’t yet know how many of the spheres they will build.

“That depends on how well (the first one) goes,” Spencer said. “Our goal is to develop a new, environmentally responsible way to raise tuna in deep waters.”

The company received its final permit from the Army Corps of Engineers last year in a plan to build up to 12 of the spheres in a 247-acre area about three miles off of Malae Point near Kawaihae. The site is under a 35-year lease from the state.

Read the full story from the Hawaii Tribune Herald

July 23, 2014 — “The little girl did a science fair project based on my PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED DISCOVERY of lionfish living in low-salinity estuarine habitats. … [M]y years of groundbreaking work on estuarine lionfish are being completely and intentionally ignored.”

Thirteen-year-old Lauren Arrington has been busy on the media circuit these past few weeks, doing interview after interview about the sixth-grade science project that landed her in a published scientific paper.

Arrington’s experiment revealed that lionfish — the invasive, venomous species of fish thought to be native to saltwater oceans – could actually survive in nearly freshwater environments, which could potentially damage the marine ecology of estuaries, where salty ocean water and fresh river water mix.

The story went viral. Arrington’s work was featured in science magazines and local newspapers, and word of her “breakthrough” discovery made its way to major news organizations, including NPR, CBS and NBC.

But on Monday, a marine biologist by the name of Zack Jud made an explosive claim: All these stories were based on a “lie,” because Arrington was taking credit for research he’d published three years earlier.

“My name has been intentionally left out of the stories, replaced by the name of the 12-year-old daughter of my former supervisor’s best friend,” Jud wrote on Facebook. “The little girl did a science fair project based on my PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED DISCOVERY of lionfish living in low-salinity estuarine habitats. … [M]y years of groundbreaking work on estuarine lionfish are being completely and intentionally ignored.”

Read the full story from The Washington Post

July 23, 2014 — Lauren Arrington has discovered that lionfish can also survive in nearly fresh water, which has surprised conservationists who always believed that the invasive species could not survive in less saline water.

When Lauren started to study the lionfish for her sixth grade science fair, she did not know that her discovery would one day overwhelm conservationists. She started to study the creature with the help of her father, who has a Ph.D. in fish ecology. She initially thought that lionfish would not be able to survive in water with salinity less than 12 parts per 1,000. This level of salinity is one-third of the ocean salinity.

Lauren reduced the salinity beyond that and reached to six parts per 1,000. She was surprised to find that the fish was doing really well. However, Lauren decided not to further reduce the salinity, fearing that might kill the fish. North Carolina State University ecology professor Craig Layman tried to make use of findings available from the study of Lauren. He built upon her findings and found that the invasive lionfish is well capable of surviving in nearly fresh water.

Read the full story at UncoverCalifornia.com

 

TOKYO — July 22, 2014 — His aim is to establish a way to increase tuna production without harming the ecosystem.

The 2030s could find the world in the midst of a deepening food and energy problem due to an exploding population. But while most statistics paint a bleak picture of the future, there exists hope in the form of talented people and the innovative technology they are developing.

One such person is Goro Yoshizaki, a professor at the Graduate School of Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. Alarmed by the possibility that the bluefin tuna will become extinct, he has kicked off a project to develop a technology that enables the fish to be spawned via mackerel. His aim is to establish a way to increase tuna production without harming the ecosystem. One reason he chose mackerel for the project is that it grows quickly and does not cost much to raise.

The two fish have very different body sizes, but both belong to the mackerel family, making them "relatives." Yoshizaki has so far succeeded in developing a method to produce rainbow trout using "masu" salmon, both of which belong to the salmon family, and to yield expensive tiger puffer via the grass puffer.

Read the full story at Nikkei Asian Review