Science

April 24, 2012 – Industry leaders will discuss global fishmeal and fish oil supply developments as part of the 6th World Fisheries Congress (WFC), taking place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre from 7-11 May 2012.

Organised by The World Council of Fisheries Societies, the congress will address “Sustainable Fisheries in a Changing World”, examining current and future issues surrounding sustainable fishing and exploring informed global solutions.

In the fishmeal sector there are several sessions which industry representatives and members can attend, including:

· Global fishmeal and fish oil supply – the first step in a responsible aquaculture value chain – Andrew Mallison, IFFO Ltd, (Wednesday 9 May,11.00am);

· Global fishmeal and fish oil supply – inputs, outputs, and markets – Jonathan Shepherd, on (Wednesday 9 May, 11.30am).

Felicity Huntingford, World Council of Fisheries Societies President, said: “Fishmeal is always high on the agenda amongst industry and will be an important area of discussion at the World Fisheries Congress. These sessions promise to be an engaging opportunity to find out the latest developments in this sector.”

Read the full article here.

 

 

April 24, 2012 – More than 2,000 scientists from 67 nations have signed an open letter calling for the development of an international fisheries agreement that would protect the waters of the Central Arctic Ocean. The letter was released by the Pew Environment Group on the opening day of the International Polar Year conference in Montreal.

As Pew's Henry Huntington pointed out at the Second International Marine Conservation Congress in Victoria, British Columbia, last May, there has to this point been no commercial fishing industry in the so-called Arctic "donut hole" — the region of the High Arctic beyond the 200-mile exclusive economic zones of the five Arctic coastal states (Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States). The reason for that, simply, is that, until very recently, it has been covered year-round by sea ice. That, however, is changing.

Indeed, in September 2007, when the summer sea ice extent of the Arctic Ocean fell to its lowest level on record, fully 40 percent of the Arctic donut hole was open water.

The reason the existence of a donut hole is of particular concern, Huntington pointed out, is that, absent an agreed management regime, such international waters are a potential free-for-all beyond national control. There is a precedent. A similar donut hole exists in the Bering Sea; its existence led to rampant overfishing of pollack in the area until alarm over drastic declines in pollack numbers led to a 1994 treaty to manage the fishery.

 Read the full article at Discovery News.

 

 

April 19, 2012 – BARATARIA BAY, La. (AP) — When fishermen returned to the deep reefs of the Gulf of Mexico weeks after BP's gushing oil well was capped, they started catching grouper and red snapper with large open sores and strange black streaks, lesions they said they'd never seen and promptly blamed on the spill.

Now, two years after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, killing 11 men and touching off the worst offshore spill in U.S. history, the latest research into its effects is starting to back up those early reports from the docks: The ailing fish bear hallmarks of diseases tied to petroleum and other pollutants.

Those illnesses don't pose an increased health threat to humans, scientists say, but they could be devastating to prized species and the people who make their living catching them.

There's no saying for sure what's causing the diseases in what's still a relatively small percentage of the fish, because the scientists have no baseline data on sick fish in the Gulf before the spill to form a frame of reference. The first comprehensive research may be years from publication. And the Gulf is assaulted with all kinds of contaminants every day.

Still, it's clear to fishermen and researchers alike that something's amiss.

Read the full story from the AP.

 

 

April 18, 2012 – Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause.

New Orleans, LA – April 18, 2012 — "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan's findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP's oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP's 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Read the full story at Al Jazeera.

 

 

April 16, 2012 – The true lesson of this book is that fisheries science is complicated; that the management of any given species must be considered in terms of its ecosystem; that fishing for one species alters the food web as a whole — and that sometimes there is not enough data to make good recommendations.

To hear some people tell it, the increasingly energetic and sophisticated fishing industry has left the world's oceans a shambles, with species of cod, sharks, tuna and other fish hunted almost to extinction and vast stretches of the ocean floor wrecked by bottom-scraping trawlers.

To hear some other people tell it, many depleted stocks are recovering nicely.

Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, wades into this disagreement in his new book and comes out with a lucid explication of a highly tangled issue.

And he gets into the issue of trawling, in which boats drop weighted nets to the bottom and drag them along, scraping up everything in their path. Critics liken trawling to harvesting timber by clear-cutting. For Dr. Hilborn, this analogy is not always apt, since in some areas the creatures rapidly repopulate the ocean floor.

Some countries do well by their fish, he writes, but with one exception they are relatively small: New Zealand, Iceland and Norway. The exception? The United States.

Read the full article at the New York Times.

 

 

Sweden's grey seal was once terribly endangered, its population thinned almost to nothing in the 1970s from pollution and hunting in the Baltic Sea. But then the seal population began to bounce back in the 1980s. And today, in the coastal waters off Sweden, there is a pitched battle going on between the restored ranks of grey seals and the Swedish fishing industry. A new study reveals that the seals are eating as many fish as the fishing industry brings in each year, and that they're doing it in part by stealing from fishing boats and traps.

Marine biologist Karl Lundström, a researcher with Sweden's University of Gothenburg, recently published the results of a long-term study of the grey seals' diet. Like their human counterparts in Sweden, the seals are mostly eating herring, but they're also chomping on salmon and pretty much every other fish they can. They are, as Lundström put it, "fish-eating predators at the top of the marine ecosystem." And by "top," he means above humans. Though the Swedes have built fishing nets that are supposed to be humane and seal-proof, the seals turn out to be fairly ingenious at figuring out new ways to steal fish from them.

Read the description of Dr. Lundstrom's work and watch videos from io9 (Gawker Media)

Read the thesis "Assessment of dietary patterns and prey consumption of marine mammals: Grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) in the Baltic Sea"

Article as published in Ices Journal of Marine Science

Watch a video of a seal entering a commercial trawl at a depth of 400 meters. 

 

 

 

 

 

In an article for the Breakthrough Journal, Kareiva, along with Marvier and TNC colleague Robert Lalasz, say that even though conservationists have succeeded in putting ten times more land under protection since the 1950s — bringing the total to roughly "13 percent of the world's land mass… an area larger than all of South America" — this preservationist model is inadequate given what Fareed Zakaria and others have called "the rise of the Rest."

Brazil will no more wall off the Amazon than settlers in America walled off its forests. At the same time, Brazil will almost certainly protect more of its forests than either the US or Europe did. But "whether or not the developing world sets aside a large percentage of its landscapes as parks or wilderness over the next hundred years," Kareiva, Marvier, and Lalasz write, "those protected areas will remain islands of 'pristine nature' in a sea of profound human transformations through logging, agriculture, mining, damming, and urbanization."

Conservationists need to work with development, not condemn it as leading to the end of nature. In truth, nature's resilience has been overlooked, its fragility "grossly overstated." Areas blasted by nuclear radiation are bio-diverse. Forest cover is rising in the Northern Hemisphere even as it declines globally.

And it's time to stop prioritizing being alone over being with others. Thoreau, Muir, Abbey — the inventors of the solitude myth — were around other people in nature, from Walden to Yosemite. They suffered loneliness (sometimes of a quite prosaic sort, as in Abbey's case) when they were alone in nature. There is still room for solitude, but conservation must make room for society. "Nature could be a garden – not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life. "

Happily, Kareiva and coauthors are not alone in suggesting humans may find a new kind of power through planetary gardening, not planetary preservation. Nature
correspondent Emma Marris offered a philosophical embrace of creating new natures outside of parks in her sharp-minded 2011 book, Rambunctious Garden. Too often, an attempt to protect nature in its pristine state "thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature," Marris wrote.

Read the full article here.

 

April 5, 2012 – New England is expected to experience a "moderate" regional "red tide" this spring and summer, report NOAA-funded scientists working in the Gulf of Maine to study the toxic algae that causes the bloom. The algae in the water pose no direct threat to human beings, however the toxins they produce can accumulate in filter-feeding organisms such as mussels and clams — which can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) in humans who consume them.

Under a newly developed rating system, a moderate bloom could cause the closure of shellfish beds along an estimated 126 — 250 miles of coastline.

The 2012 outlook is based on the quantities of the algae Alexandrium fundyense in its dormant — or cyst — state detected in Gulf of Maine sediments last fall. These data are combined with computer simulations that model a complex range of meteorological and oceanographic conditions — winds, sunlight, rainfall, tides, and currents — that impact the size of the bloom.

Read the complete story from Science Daily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 30, 2012 – Rising water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have some scientists concerned about the impact on ocean life — and the ripple effects.

This winter's warmth has helped drive up water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, and the warm waters could lead lobsters to molt their shells and ocean algae to bloom earlier than usual.

The continuing trend raises long-term questions about how rising ocean temperatures might affect the growth and reproduction cycles and distribution of fish and shellfish, whales, zooplankton and other marine life throughout the gulf.

Temperature affects all life processes, but it's too soon to say whether changes brought on by rising water temperatures will be good or bad, said Jeffrey Runge, a biological oceanographer at the University of Maine and a researcher at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.

"Higher temperature means higher growth rates, but it also means they require more food in order to attain those higher growth rates," he said. "But whether there will be more food around, I don't know."

Read the full article from the Associated Press.

March 28, 2012 – Anglers are required to use circle hooks in some fishing tournaments because they are less likely to cause lethal injuries in billfish, such as marlin. However, research from North Carolina State University shows that broadening circle hook requirements could adversely impact charter and recreational fishing, since they make it more difficult to catch non-billfish.

"We wanted to know whether circle hooks are effective as conventional J hooks when angling for non-billfish – such as yellowfin tuna – in North Carolina waters," says Paul Rudershausen, a research assistant in NC State's biology department and lead author of a paper describing the research. The NC State team worked with charter boat captains and mates who were experienced with use of circle hooks to look at the efficacy of circle hooks versus J hooks when trolling offshore with rod and reel. The findings are relevant for similar fishing efforts in other waters where these same species occur.

Studies have found that circle hooks are less likely to mortally wound billfish during recreational or charter fishing. As a result, the National Marine Fisheries Service instituted regulations requiring anglers in Atlantic billfish tournaments to use circle hooks when using natural baits. J hooks are still permitted if an angler is using purely artificial bait.

Read the complete story from Science Daily.