Science

Last Wednesday, in an old World War II bunker converted into a lecture hall on the campus of the Northeastern University's Marine Science Center here, lead scientists in the OAWRS project briefed a prestigious audience that included U.S. Sen. John Kerry and Congressman John Tierney on the evolution of the science and its potential for reducing uncertainty in fishery regulation.

"What you've got yourself," said Kerry, summing up, "is a fish-finder on steroids."

He and Tierney, however, seemed nonplused when told the research team, led by Nicholas C. Makris of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern's Purnima Ratilal, did not have funding to return to the field for a third time to validate their belief that the OAWRS technology can distinguish between species.

"NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) should put this in their budget," said Tierney.

"This makes me so angry," said Kerry. "We're going straight to the top."

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Daily Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The NEFSC Cooperative Research Program has posted a solicitation on FedBizOpps.GOV  for Study Fleet Northeast and Mid-Atlantic trawl vessels fishing for squid.  Vessels home ported outside of the New England/Southern New England area may be required to travel to Point Judith, RI or New Bedford, MA for program set-up and initial training.

This is the link to the solicitation (NFFM7003-10-12369).

Closing date for the solicitation is August 25, 2010. Quotes will be accepted electronically at the following email address: Roberta.H.Smith@noaa.gov and via facsimile at (757) 441-3786.   All questions should be addressed to Roberta Smith.

 

 

 

 

 

(July 29, 2010)    The East Hampton Town Trustees and the town’s Department of Natural Resources are working with scientists from the State University at Stony Brook to learn more about winter flounder in the hope of increasing their population.

For unknown reasons, the population of winter flounder, also called blackback flounder, has declined dramatically in recent years. Surveys conducted three years ago by the National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that the spawning stock biomass of the species in the Southern New England-Middle Atlantic area was only 9 percent of where fishery managers believed it should be.

For several years, Norman Edwards Jr., a town trustee who operates a small dragger in local waters, has been leading the trustees’ efforts to bolster the stock by farming flounder from larvae and then releasing them into the wild once they are old enough to elude predators.

Read the story in full from the East Hampton Star.

 

 

 

 

 

"The question of the influence of fishing and the influence of the environment is tangled up," said Brian Rothschild, a professor of marine science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, who has studied aquatic stocks for more than five decades.

"There is no question that as some of the environment changes occur, some of the fish stocks are going to change," he said. "We don't know enough about it to know what's going to increase and what's going to decrease."

"It's regulation after regulation after regulation," complained Michael Dearborn, 66, a commercial fisherman since 1969. "They treat the industry like a centipede, cutting off one leg at a time, snip, snip, snip, until it starves."

"Some of the fish stocks are showing improvement," acknowledged Maggie Mooney-Seus, a spokeswoman for NOAA, the agency responsible for enforcing the limits. "But there is too much fishing pressure on a lot of them. Right now, fishermen are going to have to have cuts."

Quotas on the fishermen remain the chief mechanism to react to dwindling stocks. Those quotas remain largely a function of numbers of fish caught versus a sampled estimate of the numbers of fish in any one stock; there is little room for forward calculations about how climate change will skew the future.

"I don't think the fisheries managers are equipped to quantify the effects of global warming at this point," said Peter Baker, manager of the New England Fisheries Campaign for the non-profit Pew Environment Group.  "They have no tools.

"I don't think we understand the impacts of climate change very well at all," said Paul Parker, who works with the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association. "We are struggling to understand it all. It's difficult to discern what causes what."

For example, the fishermen say there is a bumper crop of dogfish shark, which strip their hooks and gobble up groundfish. It is tough, they say, to sort out whether fish populations are hit harder by human fishing, the sharks' appetite, climate change or some other environmental shift.

Read the complete story from Scientific American.

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York, NY, United States (AHN) – An infectious disease is spreading among farm-raised fish, and scientists are warning it could spread to wild fish coming in close proximity to marine pens.

Columbia University researchers said the disease — heart and skeletal muscle inflammation — was first detected in salmon on a farm in Norway in 1999. It has been reported in 417 fish farms in Norway and in some farms in the United Kingdom.

Read the complete story from All Headline News.

 

 

 

 

 

When it is time to reproduce, the male lobster acts more like the male bowerbird than a crustacean. First, he builds a special mating shelter out of rocks. Then, he places piles of clam shells, crab carcasses and other items outside to show off his hunting prowess.

If suitably impressed, the female lobster will check out the shelter with her claws before giving the male the sniff test.

"He needs to smell good," said Diane Cowan, a lobster scientist.

Discovering the mating rituals is just one aspect of lobster research that has kept Cowan busy for 27 years — many of them at a 6-acre lobster pound, the research lab for The Lobster Conservancy in Friendship.

Read the complete story from the Portland Press Herald.

 

 

 

 

 

Beginning July 8, Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) researchers will board industry vessels to conduct scallop surveys in 2 areas typically closed to fishing but scheduled to open for a limited time in spring 2011.

David Rudders and Dr. William DuPaul, Marine Scientists at VIMS, will be conducting these surveys aboard F/V Celtic (New Bedford, MA) and F/V Pursuit (Seaford, VA). The data gathered during these trips will help to set catch limits in these areas, which are only opened occasionally to prevent overfishing.

Managing scallops in such a way has enabled the fishery to attain recent stability and success. In 2008, scallops were the most valuable single-species fishery in the U.S. Coastwide, ex-vessel landings for 2008 were valued at roughly $370 million, not including the money generated on land by processors, shippers, and others. In Virginia, scallops are a major fisheries product and in 2008 accounted for $66 million ex-vessel, nearly 20 percent of the nation's scallop landings.

Read the complete story at William and Mary VIMS.

 

 

 

 

 

A group of independent scientists, frustrated and dumbfounded by the continued lack of the most basic data about the 77-day-old BP oil disaster, has put together a crash project intended to definitively measure how much oil has spilled and where and how it is spreading throughout the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

An all-star team of top oceanographers, chemists, engineers and other scientists could be ready to head out to the well site on two fully-equipped research vessels on about a week's notice. But they need to get the go-ahead — and about $8.4 million — from BP or the federal government or both. And that does not appear imminent.

The test is designed to provide responders to future deep-sea oil catastrophes with valuable information. But, to be blunt, it would also fill an enormous gap in the response to this one.

Read the complete story at The Huffington Post.

 

 

 

 

Scientists from the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology have launched a new initiative showing fishermen where not to catch fish, and the New Bedford fleet has lined up in droves to participate.

On Monday, an area of Georges Bank known as the Nantucket Lightship area, off limits since 2008, was reopened to scallop fishermen. Located some 40 miles south of Nantucket, the area is likely to yield an abundance of scallops for the 346 limited-access permit holders in the fleet. Boats holding full-time permits are allowed one trip inside the 20-by-25-mile area and are limited to 18,000 pound of scallops.

But there is one large caveat. Under fisheries regulations, a catch limit of 47 metric tons for the entire fishing year has been imposed for yellowtail flounder, a bottom-dweller that routinely comes aboard in scallop dredges. Fishermen are required to land all of the legal-sized yellowtail they catch. Once the annual limit is reached, all scalloping ceases immediately.

To help scallopers avoid large concentrations of yellowtail, SMAST has developed a system to update boats at sea with real-time data on yellowtail "hot spots."

"We're very excited about this because participation is voluntary, and the information we gather goes right back to the fishermen," said SMAST's Cate O'Keefe, who is managing the program. "I thought we'd get 30 boats but, once the word got out, we had 119 boats sign up for it."

Boats fishing in the closed area e-mail information daily to SMAST detailing their location, the number of tows they make and the amount of yellowtail they are catching. The cutoff time for submission is 8 a.m., and the information is then analyzed ashore and e-mailed back to the fleet by mid-morning, O'Keefe said. "Yellowtail move seasonally. There are a number of factors that affect that, like feeding, spawning and water temperature. But there was not a lot of good information up till now."

However, on Tuesday morning, the first day of reporting, that began to change. "We got 33 reports today," O'Keefe said Tuesday afternoon. "We were able to see where the yellowtail were being caught and where the boats were towing. We compiled that information and sent it right back out to the boats. We found one area that was a hot spot and, if we don't get any data from there tomorrow, it will be an indication that the advice is being heeded."

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today [subscription site]

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"There is an end in sight" for fish, a 2006 Science magazine paper proclaimed. The paper even put a date to the end time: the year 2048.

The paper was produced by a team of scientists headed by Boris Worm, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

Worm's idea that the world's supply of seafood would be exhausted within the lifetime of many alive today caused a sensation. The "2048" prediction gave it a news hook that made headlines around the world.

The idea that the world's fisheries were on the verge of collapse was not new. In 1998, in another Science magazine article, University of British Columbia professor Daniel Pauly predicted overfishing would consume every species until nothing was left but "jellyfish and plankton soup."

A decade later, the same theme was sounded by "Oceans of Abundance," the 2008 policy paper prepared for the incoming administration of Barack Obama by a team convened by the Environmental Defense Fund, the leading advocate of the current catch share system of fisheries management.

The team included marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, who last year was picked by President Obama to head the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration.

"Evidence is overwhelming," the policy paper said. "The global oceans are being emptied of seafood. … There is scientific consensus that fishing is fundamentally altering ocean ecosystems, which are increasingly likely to yield massive swarms of jellyfish rather than food fish."

That "scientific consensus" was the justification for the catch share system imposed on the New England fishery by Lubchenco as NOAA administrator.

In fact, the claim of a scientific consensus was as questionable as the claim that manmade global warming was "settled science."

Most New England fish stocks are healthy, stable and improving, according to NOAA's own figures, after more than a decade of management to rebuild the stocks (Please see related graphic).

"We've reduced fish mortality in most of the stocks," Steven Murawski, director of scientific programs and chief science adviser for NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, said in a recent interview. "We can't drain the pond and count, but the science is compelling."

Tom Nies, chief fishery analyst of the New England Fishery Management Council, said the rebuilding of imperiled stocks is on track or even ahead of schedule.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.