Science

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 

 

 

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