Science

October 3, 2012 — A new study recently published in the journal Science features an innovative method developed by SFG researchers Costello, Ovando, Gaines, and Lester for assessing the status of the world’s data-poor fisheries.

The paper, “Status and Solutions for the World’s Unassessed Fisheries”, provides insight on the health of thousands of previously unassessed fisheries – that is, fisheries for which the fish stock size and condition has not been evaluated – that account for more than 80% of the world’s catch. Until now, our understanding of the status of fisheries has been based on a tiny fraction of the world’s fisheries – the large, valuable ones for which we have ample data. However, these well-studied fisheries only represent a few hundred of the over 10,000 fisheries worldwide, providing a skewed view of the overall health of the world’s fisheries. The Science study provides a new global status report that includes these previously unmeasured fisheries.

This new research confirms suspicions that previously unassessed fisheries are in poor condition, as indicated by low current biomass levels relative to the biomass that would be achieved from harvesting the fish populations for maximum sustainable yields (B/Bmsy; see figure). At present, about 18% of unassessed stocks are collapsed. And the future does not look bright for many unassessed fisheries, at least if fishing continues at the current levels: although large-scale unassessed stocks are performing about as well as assessed stocks right now, they show a trajectory of continued decline. Small-scale unassessed stocks, which are important for local food security and economic well-being (especially in the developing world), are in particularly bad shape and declining. But, ailing unassessed fisheries are not just a developing world problem; many small-scale fisheries in developed nations, including the United States, are in similar condition to those in developing nations. Assessed stocks, on the other hand, show signs of ongoing recovery and stabilization at sustainable levels, a trend that is consistent regardless of the country that manages them. While management institutions play an important role in fishery condition, the biological characteristics of the target species can also render a fishery vulnerable to overfishing; the study found that many struggling fisheries share the common thread of targeting species with life history traits including slow growth, late maturation, and large body sizes.

 

Read the full article at Sustainable Fisheries Group

 

 

OSLO– September 30, 2012 — Fish are likely to get smaller on average by 2050 because global warming will cut the amount of oxygen in the oceans in a shift that may also mean dwindling catches, according to a study on Sunday.

Average maximum body weights for 600 types of marine fish, such as cod, plaice, halibut and flounder, would contract by 14-24 percent by 2050 from 2000 under a scenario of a quick rise in greenhouse gas emissions, it said.

"The reductions in body size will affect whole ecosystems," lead author William Cheung of the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Reuters of the findings in the journal Nature Climate Change.

His team of scientists said a trend towards smaller sizes was "expected to have large implications" for ocean food webs and for human "fisheries and global protein supply."

"The consequences of failing to curtail greenhouse gas emissions on marine ecosystems are likely to be larger than previously indicated," the U.S. and Canada-based scientists wrote.

They said global warming, blamed on human burning of fossil fuels, will make life harder for fish in the oceans largely because warmer water can hold less dissolved oxygen, vital for respiration and growth.

"As the fish grow bigger and bigger it will be difficult to get enough oxygen for growth. There is more demand for oxygen as the body grows. At some point the fish will stop growing," Cheung said of the study, based on computer models.

 

Read the full story from Reuters at the Huffington Post

 

 

September 30, 2012 — In the past five years, the fact that human-generated carbon emissions are making the ocean more acidic has become an urgent cause of concern to the fishing industry and scientists.

The ocean absorbs about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide we put in the air through fossil fuel burning, and this triggers a chemical reaction that produces hydrogen, thereby lowering the water’s pH.

The sea today is 30 percent more acidic than pre-industrial levels, which is creating corrosive water that is washing over America’s coasts. At the current rate of global worldwide carbon emissions, the ocean’s acidity could double by 2100.

What impact it is having on marine life, how this might vary by geography and species, and what can be done about it if humans do not cut their carbon output significantly are some of the difficult questions scientists and policymakers are seeking to answer.

The decline in pH will likely disrupt the food web in many ways. It is making it harder for some animals, such as tiny pteropods and corals, to form their shells out of calcium carbonate, while other creatures whose blood chemistry is altered become disoriented and lose their ability to evade predators.

To study what is happening off the West Coast, Gretchen Hofmann, a professor of marine biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has recruited everyone from sea-urchin divers to Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement officials.

She calls it “an all-hands-on-deck moment in our country, and it’s happening before our eyes.”

 

Read the full story at the Washington Post

 

 

September 30, 2012 — Fish species are expected to shrink in size by up to 24% because of global warming, say scientists.

Researchers modelled the impact of rising temperatures on more than 600 species between 2001 and 2050.

Warmer waters could decrease ocean oxygen levels and significantly reduce fish body weight.

The scientists argue that failure to control greenhouse gas emissions will have a greater impact on marine ecosystems than previously thought.

Previous research has suggested that changing ocean temperatures would impact both the distribution and the reproductive abilities of many species of fish. This new work suggests that fish size would also be heavily impacted.

The researchers built a model to see how fish would react to lower levels of oxygen in the water. They used data from one of the higher emissions scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

 

Read the full story at the BBC

 

 

September 29, 2012 — The Daily Telegraph recently ran the headline: "Just 100 cod left in the North Sea". It sounded fishy. Trawlermen were furious.

"It just makes my blood boil – 100 cod in the North Sea?" fumes Brian Buchan, who's been fishing in the North Sea for more than 30 years. "More like 100 million cod in the North Sea."

It's not a trivial issue. Over-exploitation and conflicts over fisheries cause major problems worldwide.

The story was picked up by other media, including the Atlantic Wire and Canada's Globe and Mail, but it started in the The Sunday Times which reported there were "100 adult cod in North Sea". A different claim – but still wildly wrong.

The Sunday Times chose to class an adult cod as aged over 13. But that's not merely an adult cod. It's an ancient cod.

"Cod start to mature at ages one and two and they're fully mature by six," says Dr Carl O'Brien, the UK's chief fisheries science adviser.

So we shouldn't be surprised that there are very few cod aged over 13 (in fact fewer than 60 have been recorded in the North Sea in past 30 years) just as we shouldn't be surprised there aren't very many humans over 100.

Given what we know about when cod mature, just how many "adult" cod are there in the North Sea? Remember, the Sunday Times said there were just 100. The right answer? Well, using the same dataset, the right answer appears to be rather more than 100 – 21 million, in fact.

A spokesperson for the Sunday Times told the BBC: "The headline and the first sentence of the article over-simplified a complicated issue, which we regret. However, the rest of the story made clear that we were referring to cod over the age of 13 and the figures cited were accurate."

And what of that other headline – "Just 100 cod left in the North Sea"? Looking at the data, it seems a more accurate headline would read "Just 436,900,000 cod left in the North Sea". Wrong by about half a billion, then, which is perhaps a new record for the most inaccurate headline ever covered by More or Less.

 

Read the full story at the BBC

 

 

September 20, 2012 — Aquaculture is the world’s fastest-growing form of food production and a vital component of our food supply. But the industry’s growing demand for fish feed, which is derived mainly from wild populations of smaller fish such as anchovies and sardines, will soon outstrip supply.  Can we replace wild-caught fish in the diets of farmed fish so that the aquaculture industry’s continued growth will be sustainable? Researchers from NOAA and the US Department of Agriculture have been working on this problem and a report released this month, The Future of Aquafeeds, details their progress.

Most of the finfish that people like to eat – such as tuna, salmon, and bass – feed on smaller fish and shellfish in the wild. Traditional aquaculture feeds are based on fishmeal and oils that mimic that natural diet. But it turns out that, when raised on a farm, carnivorous fish don’t need to eat fish.

According to Dr. Michael Rust, Aquaculture Research Program Manager at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, “All fish—carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore—require about 40 nutrients in the correct ratio. It doesn’t matter to the health of the fish where the nutrients come from. By incorporating marine algae, fish processing trimmings, and a variety of plant products, we can formulate high quality fish feeds without relying on wild-caught fish."

Scientists have been working to substitute ingredients in aquafeeds for years. But the NOAA-USDA Alternative Feeds Initiative has accelerated this progress by supporting federal scientists and their partners in academia and industry. “We are getting to the point,” says Rust, “that substituting for fishmeal and oil is an increasingly viable option.”

 

Read the full story from NOAA

 

 

September 20, 2012 — Are the codfish packing their bags and hightailing it out of the area?According to NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center, warmer ocean temperatures have caused codfish to begin shifting their range more to the northeast.

“A pronounced warming event occurred on the Northeast Shelf this spring, and this will have a profound impact throughout the ecosystem,” said Kevin Friedland, a scientist in the NEFSC's Ecosystem Assessment Program.

“Changes in ocean temperatures and the timing of the spring plankton bloom could affect the biological clocks of many marine species, which spawn at specific times of the year based on environmental cues like water temperature.”

Their data, released this week in a study, shows that during the first six months of 2012, sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem were the highest ever recorded. The ecosystem extends from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

The above-average temperatures were found in all parts of the ecosystem, from the ocean bottom to the sea surface and across the region, and the above average temperatures extended beyond the shelf break front to the Gulf Stream.

 

Read the full article at My Central Jersey

 

 

WASHINGTON — September 19, 2012 — What’s it like to be half-asphyxiated twice a day, suffer through 90-degree swings in temperature and be forced to eat everything that happens to come by your mouth?

Welcome to life as an oyster.

Starting today, biologists have a clearer window into what it takes for complex organisms to survive — and flourish — under such difficult circumstances.

An international team of 75 researchers on Wednesday published the full genome — the entire DNA message — of the Pacific oyster. The toothsome Crass­ostrea gigas is the first mollusk whose genome has been fully sequenced.

The information will shed light on the biology and evolution of one of the planet’s largest animal phyla, with more than 100,000 species. Mollusks comprise the largest category of animals in the world’s oceans.

More than 180 species have fully sequenced genomes. The best-known is the human genome, completed in 2003.

Most of the sequenced organisms are microscopic — bacteria, fungi, protozoans. But larger organisms of commercial, cultural or medical interest have also been done. The latter include the dog, the cat, the cow, the rat, the mouse, the mosquito and the honeybee, as well as lab workhorses such as the fruit fly and the transparent roundworm.

Comparing genomes helps scientists understand the levers and gears driving activities special to certain types of organisms as well as the essential tasks shared by most (or all) of them.

 

Read the full story at the Washington Post

 

 

FALMOUTH, Mass. — Spetember 20, 2012 — What is the acidification of the oceans going to do to the scallop population? That's the question the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will try to answer with a $682,000, three-year, federal grant, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday.

The oceans are absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and it is believed that scallops are quite sensitive to those changes.

"Species such as scallops and coral are vulnerable," NOAA said in its announcement. Changing conditions "can affect the growth of their shells and skeletons."

The grant is part of nearly $1.6 million going to three institutions involved in similar research.

The State University of New York at Stony Brook gets $533,000 to tackle acidification and its effect on bay scallops.

 

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times

 

 

September 19, 2012 — As scientists continue to research ways in which the oceans are changing – and what these changes mean for fish populations, three new research projects will receive funding to examine the effects of ocean acidification on fisheries, and the coastal economies that depend upon them.

Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it more acidic. Species as diverse as scallops and coral are vulnerable to ocean acidification, which can affect the growth of their shells and skeletons.

The grants, totaling nearly $1.6 million over three years, will go to:

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: $682,000 to understand the connection between fluctuations of carbon dioxide levels and ocean scallop populations, harvest and economic conditions;

The State University of New York at Stony Brook: $533,000 to examine bay scallops and hard clams to determine acidification’s effects on each species and identify the most vulnerable regions of estuaries; and

The University of Washington: $374,000 to study a large climate model with fish populations and economic models in order to predict ocean conditions and economic effects.

“Efforts to estimate the effect of ocean acidification on fishery populations will be valuable to our own work,” said Jonathan Hare, oceanography branch chief of NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center. “The goal is to incorporate the effects of ocean acidification into advice provided to the regional fishery management councils.”

The monetary value of scallops and clams both as seafood and for their ability to clean the water surrounding them is in the billions of dollars annually, according to a NOAA study. Knowing how increased acidity will affect shellfish and the communities who depend on them will help resource managers develop strategies to prepare for the future.

Valuable Pacific fish, such as sablefish, hake, and rockfish depend upon food sources vulnerable to more acidic seas. But scientists know less about how ocean acidification can affect the whole ecosystem surrounding these species. Some species may be more susceptible to ocean acidification than others, and these species might need closer management.  Knowing where and when any effects might be felt is also important to developing fishery management plans.

NOAA works closely with regional fishery management councils as fishery management plans are developed, and then reviews, approves, and implements the plans. This research will help the councils plan for future effects of ocean acidification.

 

Read the full story on the NOAA website