Science

PORTLAND, Maine — September 18, 2012  Ocean temperatures off the northeast United States reached a record high for the first half of 2012, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday.

The average sea surface temperature for the waters over the Northeast continental shelf, from North Carolina to Canada, was a little over 50.5 degrees from January through June, breaking the previous record of 50.45 degrees for the same six months set in 1951. The average temperature for those months during the past three decades has been about 48 degrees.

The rising temperatures impact virtually all ocean life, said Kevin Friedland, a scientist who works in Narragansett, R.I., for NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

Atlantic cod and other commercially valuable fish, for instance, have been shifting northeast from their historical distribution centers in recent years because of warming waters. Warm water was blamed for lobsters shedding their shells a month or more earlier than usual in Maine waters this past spring, leading to a strong early harvest that created havoc within the industry.

As cold-water species move north in search of colder waters, warmer-water species will do the same as their waters warm up as well, Friedland said. The rising ocean temperatures could also affect the biological clocks of many species, which spawn at certain times based on environmental signals such as water temperature.

 

Read the full story by the Associated Press in the Boston Globe

 

 

WOODS HOLE, Mass. — September 18, 2012 — During the first six months of 2012, sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem were the highest ever recorded, according to the latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). 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.

"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."

Friedland said the average sea surface temperature (SST) exceeded 10.5 degrees C (51°F) during the first half of 2012, exceeding the previous record high in 1951. Average SST has typically been lower than 9 degrees C (48°F) over the past three decades. Sea surface temperature in the region is based on both contemporary satellite remote-sensing data and long-term ship-board measurements, with historical SST conditions based on ship-board measurements dating back to 1854.

Atlantic cod distribution in the Gulf of Maine continues a northeasterly shift, with the spring 2012 data consistent with a response to ecosystem warming. Warming ocean temperatures and the resulting impact on the distribution of 36 fish stocks was reported by the Center in a 2009 study published in Marine Ecology Progress Series. That study analyzed annual NEFSC spring survey data from 1968 to 2007 and other information and found that about half of the 36 fish stocks studied in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, many of them commercially valuable species, have been shifting northward over the past four decades, with some disappearing from US waters as they move farther offshore.

 

Read the full article from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center

 

 

Sept. 14, 2012 — The public is invited to help identify objects they see in images of the seafloor through a new interactive website called "Seafloor Explorer." The result of a unique collaboration between oceanographers studying seafloor habitats, Web programmers and social scientists, Seafloor Explorer (www.seafloorexplorer.org) launches September 13.

The team has more than 40 million images, but are launching the site with a preliminary set of 100,000 all of them taken by HabCam, a habitat mapping underwater vehicle. HabCam was developed and built by the HabCam group, which comprises marine biologists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) as well as fishermen and other scientists. The Seafloor Explorer interactive website was funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and built in collaboration with the HabCam Group by the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), the developers behind interactive sites found on Zooniverse.org.

Public contributors to the website will say whether they see fish, scallops and other organisms in each image, provide basic measurements, and describe whether the seafloor is sand or gravel, and whether they see boulders and other interesting objects in the frame.

"We're really excited about this project," says Dr. Scott Gallager, a WHOI biologist in the HabCam Group and Principal Investigator of the Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration project to develop the next generation HabCam imaging system, the first project to use the new annotation tool. "We'll gain a greater understanding of organisms living on the seafloor and create maps of habitats at a resolution that we would not be able to do without this kind of help because of the manpower required."

Ultimately contributions by the public will help scientists answer questions about the distribution of scallops and other resources relative to their predators such as starfish and the composition of their habitat. Along the way, the contributors have a chance to enjoy working with seafloor imagery that has never been seen before, through a unique Web interface.

"There's a lot of technology under the hood to make this a compelling user experience," says Dr. Arfon Smith, director of Citizen Science at The Adler Planetarium, home of the Zooniverse websites.

 

Read the full article at Phys

 

 

September 11, 2012 — At a hatchery sitting near Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island, Robert Saunders harvests scallops, oysters and mussels. During his 21 years of raising shellfish larvae in water pumped out of the Georgia Strait, mortality levels would rear up periodically for reasons unbeknownst to the aquaculture farmer. But nothing came close to matching his abysmal yield at Island Scallops Ltd. in 2010 when Saunders set out to grow 12 billion larvae and only seven million survived.

“I was tearing my hair out. I didn’t know what was going on,” he recalls.

“We had continuous failures in the hatchery… but never to this extent where batch after batch, spawn group after spawn group died.”

Saunders usually produces 40 to 50 million shellfish from a stock of less than one billion larvae, but attempted to raise significantly more that year because they kept dying.

Hunting for an explanation, he screened his hatchery for bacterial disease and was stumped when results came back normal.

He finally hit a break after reading a paper linking the death of a small mid-water fish to high concentrations of carbon dioxide in ocean water.

“It was the same thing we were seeing in our scallop larvae,” he says. “The fish didn’t swim very well, wouldn’t eat and died very easily.”

That’s when Saunders decided to artificially lower the carbon dioxide levels in the water used to raise his stock.

“It wasn’t until we actually started to degas the CO2 that we saw, it was miraculous, suddenly everything was living and growing,” he says.

Rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the waters in and around Baynes Sound, a channel regarded as the heart of British Columbia’s shellfish industry, have farmers like Saunders fearful about the future of their businesses.

“Basically, if you are harvesting shellfish with a shell, so clams, geoducks, urchins, scallops, muscles, then you should be worried,” Chris Harley reaffirms from his office at the University of British Columbia’s zoology department.

As an associate professor, Harley researches how creatures on the province’s coast are affected by ocean acidification – a term used to describe the continual decrease in the pH level of oceans worldwide that many scientists believe is caused by human emissions.

For shellfish, the resulting shift in ocean chemistry makes it a struggle for them to form their outer layer as a crucial ingredient to the process slips away.

“As you add carbon dioxide to seawater, the pH drops and carbonate ion availability goes down,” Harley explains.

“It’s just so energetically expensive to get those last few carbonate ions, or they just can’t find enough, that they can’t build their shells at the same rate they used to.”

In Saunders’s case, his larvae will perish when carbon dioxide levels are above 500 parts per million (ppm), although he says growing them below 400ppm is ideal. But lately, his work has been cut out for him as he is seeing water with concentrations as high as 750 and 800ppm.

While he can alter the pH levels of the water in the tanks and nursery where he raises larvae and juvenile-stage shellfish, he’s unnerved by his lack of control once the larger animals must be transferred into Baynes Sound.

“We can manage around the problem onshore, but of course in the ocean we can’t,” Saunders says.

“We’ll never be able to grow (shellfish) in tanks; we couldn’t produce enough food. So it is conceivable that we will not be able to grow it in the ocean.”

 

Read the full story on CTV News

 

 

September 5, 2012 — Trawlers are smoothing the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, much as farmers flattened fields across Europe centuries ago. And it's likely that similar smoothing is occurring wherever bottom trawlers operate across the Seven Seas.

New research published online by Nature on September 5 reveals that bottom trawling—dragging massive nets across the seafloor to catch food such as deep-sea shrimp—is pushing sediment to fill in gaps on a daily basis, resulting in smooth undersea plains. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) "Fishermen are not doing anything different than farmers many decades ago," explains marine scientist Pere Puig of La Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Barcelona, who led the research. "Fishing grounds could be seen as farm fields, but there has to be some limitations to avoid the extension of trawling impacts."

Puig and his colleagues started analyzing the impact of bottom trawling after noticing in 2002 that the fishing technique was stirring up and transporting more sediment than natural processes in an area off the coast of Spain. The La Fonera undersea canyon, near the port of Palamos, sees fishing from some 180 bottom trawlers.

The scientists moored an instrument 980 meters deep in the canyon to measure the flow of sediment from both natural processes and bottom trawling. The daily mud slides and their attendant currents, which moved as fast as 38 centimeters per second, transported more than a metric ton of sediment per square meter. All told some 5,378 metric tons of sediment moved this way over the course of 136 days of monitoring—and the fishing technique has been in place since the 1970s.

The researchers also mapped the canyon using sonar pings, revealing "a noticeable smoothing of bottom topography," they write. This smoothing occurred at depths shallower than 800 meters, which corresponds to the deepest trawls undertaken by the fishing fleet. In addition, plotting the navigation tracks of the fleet via global positioning satellite data from 2007 to 2010 showed a match between the fleet's course and the smoothing.

The effects of this smoothing on the creatures that make a home on the seafloor remain unknown, though the activity could conceivably have impacts ranging from a loss of species diversity due to the loss of unique habitats, to changes in how the ecosystem as a whole functions, Puig notes. He adds that the researchers have "no idea" how ecosystem impacts from seafloor smoothing compare with ecosystem impacts from other bottom trawling-related changes, such as the destruction of deep-water corals. But, unlike farmers, fishing fleets tend to "plough" the deep sea almost every day.

Leveling of the seafloor by bottom trawlers is unlikely to be confined to the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Trawling is an important fishing technology in most of the world's most productive fisheries, from the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana to the southwestern Pacific Ocean near Australia and New Zealand. "Intensive bottom trawling has also occurred during several decades in continental slopes elsewhere," Puig says. In effect, human reshaping of the bottom of the sea is another unforeseen sedimentary side effect of the dawning geologic era some scientists have dubbed the Anthropocene.

 

Read the full story in Scientific American 

 

 

 

 

September 5, 2012 — On this edition of Fish Facts, Dr. Bob Shipp talks about the plentiful Menhaden and its uses by industry and the need for conservation.

Watch the video here.

 

 

GLOUCESTER, Mass. — Sept 3, 2012 — Linked to but overshadowed in the hoopla of the first Bluefin Blowout tuna tournament anchored last week at the Cape Ann Marina, the fifth annual “Tag a Tiny Tuna” effort raised an estimated $5,000 and $10,000 for the Large Pelagics Research Center.

The research center is enjoying its first season on the former pier of the former Cape Ann Granite Co. at Hodgins Cove of Ipswich Bay in Bay View.

While 30 boats competed for high stakes in the more traditional tournament which produced two trophies and more than $13,000 in prize money — the keepers and winners combined weighed nearly 1,000 pounds of the most valued sushi flesh — another 19 boats committed to catch, tag and release 19 more tuna that are still swimming, albeit now carrying a tag.

“The whole point was to raise money for Dr. Molly,” said Heidi Burgess, 25, who grew up in Manchester, the daughter of a fisherman, and now works in marketing and promotions in Boston.

“Dr. Molly” is Molly Lutcavage, the admired director of the research center and a world renowned research scientist” who with persistence and tenacity helped relocate the research center from University of New Hampshire to Bay View.

The facility is a part of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst academic system.

She and Mark Godfried, one of Gloucester’s most experienced and respected fishermen, organized the first Tag a Tiny Tuna tournament five years ago. Her father, Richard Burgess, is a tuna fisherman and owner of a small, multiple boat gillnet fishing business in Gloucester.

Heidi Burgess said they charge boats $200 to participate in the tagging program.

“We give out art related to tuna instead of cash prizes,” she said.

Since the program began, she said, “off the top of my head,” the program has generated about $30,000 for the research center. Cape Ann Seafood Exchange in Harbor Loop has also backed the project, with a $500 donation to the Zeus Packaging.

 

Read the full article at the Gloucester Times

 

 

BOSTON (AP) — A new underwater explorer hit the seas this summer, armed with cameras, strobes and sonar and charged with being a protector of sorts to a half-billion dollar resource — the Atlantic scallop catch.

The stainless steel Seahorse, which gets its nickname from its s-shaped silhouette, traces its roots to a conversation a decade ago between a biologist and a fisherman who was seeking a better way to track the scallop population.

This summer, the instrument was towed over miles of seafloor, from Virginia to Cape Cod, taking millions of images and capturing details about marine life and the ocean floor that stretched beyond just the number of scallops.

Read the complete story by The AP at The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fish are very sensitive to any changes in temperature and with many of the commercial species in New England already at the southern limit of their range, there are fears that such warming may force some fish to abandon historically abundant areas such as Georges Bank for cooler waters. As these shifts in fish populations develop, more Southern species such as the Atlantic croaker could become common in New England.

In April, NOAA'a Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole released a report on the marine ecosystem for the northeast continental shelf showing that the summer 2011 surface temperature was the highest in 157 years it's been keeping records. The weather in the last decade is the warmest it has been in a century, according to Jeremy Collie, a biological oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island. "There is a trend in the temperature," he said. "We've had these warmer temperatures for longer." After this year's mild winter, the sea never cooled down, he said. In December 2011, ocean sensors south of the Vineyard registered a water temperature of 68 degrees in the waters next to the continental shelf, a very rare event. And the warming as accompanied by a corresponding jump in salinity.

As summer approaches its end on land, ocean water temperatures are now reaching their peak. And the changing conditions are now being observed year-round.

The warm coastal water in Rhode Island last winter attracted sea herring inshore for the first time. "We had herring trawlers fishing right off Jamestown," Collie said. "People weren't used to that. The warmer water could account for their changed distribution."

Butterfish, which have been scarce in the offshore waters, might simply have moved inshore also, he said.

Janet Nye is the lead author of a comprehensive 2009 NOAA study of 36 fish stocks, including cod, haddock, yellowtail and winter flounder. The study examined survey data from 1968 to 2007 to determine shifts in fish populations caused by ocean warming.

"We found the majority of the stocks were shifting to the north or moving into deeper water over the last four decades," said Nye, who now works as a biologist at the Environmental Protection Agency lab in Narragansett.

Fishermen agreed with her findings, she said. "They had to go further out or into deeper water to get the fish they need."

A more recent study on silver hake, also known as whiting, found the fish moving away to a number of new locations. "They were found in different places but the water temperature was always the same," Nye said.

Scientists also hypothesized that the warmer water is changing the food web for New England groundfish like flounder, cod and hake.

Read the complete story from The Standard-Times.

 

 

 

 

 

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — August 29, 2012 — The decision by the National Marine Fisheries Service to use new technology to assess the abundance of scallop stocks means the end for the annual survey that SMAST has been conducting in cooperation with the fishing industry for the past 10 years.

The decision has been met with resistance in New Bedford. "It's very disheartening," said SMAST's Kevin Stokesbury, a professor at the school's Department of Fisheries Oceanography who developed the SMAST survey. "Our survey estimates are accurate and precise and have been completely accepted by the fisheries service," he said, The data has been published in 25 scientific papers, according to Stokesbury.

"I don't think the new method has been subjected to the same amount of statistical review," he said.

The new apparatus, developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is known as the Habcam and features a high-definition camera mounted on a sled towed above the sea floor. Its adoption by NMFS means that SMAST will no longer receive any of the moneys set aside by the scallop industry to fund research. Last year 1.25 million pounds of scallops, valued at roughly $10 million, were sold to fund the set aside program. The bulk of that money is now being funneled to HabCam.

"Cutting SMAST out is a problem," Rep. William Straus, D-Mattapoisett said. "SMAST is one of the few outside parties doing review that will keep the feds honest, so to speak," he said.

In an April letter from Straus to the New England Fishery Management Council, he called the decision to consider the use equipment with no performance record "to border on recklessness, if not irresponsibility."

Now NOAA needs top to bottom oversight of the way in which their research is conducted, Straus said on Wednesday.

Scallop boat owner Harriet Didricksen, who also owns New Bedford Ship Supply, said she vehemently opposed the decision.

"We were starving in '97 and without SMAST, Brian Rothschild and Barney Frank we wouldn't have an industry today," she said. "Brian hired Kevin Stokesbury and they found a way to count the scallops."

SMAST's pyramid-shaped camera platform saved the industry by discovering that scallops were not being overfished, contradicting federal regulators assertions, she said.

 

Read the full story in the New Bedford Standard Times