Science

Salmon genetically engineered to grow twice the normal rate could end up on dinner plates if U.S. regulators give the go-ahead, The New York Times reported.

The salmon would become the first genetically engineered animal approved for human consumption, capping a decade-long effort by the fast-growing fish's developer, the Times said.

AquaBounty Technologies, based in Waltham, Mass., developed the salmon, which would be raised on fish farms. The genetically altered Atlantic salmon has a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon and a genetic "on-switch" from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon.

Read the complete story from UPI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

New scientific information showing improvement in Northeast skate stock health has allowed NOAA to adjust catch limits and avoid severe catch reductions in the skate fishery in 2010.

New management measures were also adopted to establish annual catch limits for all skate species and accountability measures if catches are exceeded as well as to establish a rebuilding program for smooth skates.

In March, new scientific information indicated that the overall condition of the skate stock complex, which includes winter, barndoor, thorny, smooth, little, clearnose and rosette skates, had improved. As a result, NOAA delayed implementation of the new skate management measures scheduled to go into effect on May 1, in order to use the best available science to define catch levels for the 2010 and 2011 fishing years.

”We made a commitment to be as responsive as possible when new science is made available that impacts our management decisions,” said Patricia Kurkul, northeast regional administrator, NOAA Fisheries Service. “Because of this information, we did not have to reduce catch levels by as much as we initially thought necessary to avoid overfishing this stock, thus we were able to minimize impacts on fishermen and local communities.”

The annual catch limit for the fishery will only be cut by 1 percent over last year’s total catch in state and federal waters combined. However, the amount of the catch that can be landed from federal waters will be significantly reduced from previous years.

Read the complete story from NOAA.

 

 

 

 

 

A new review of the Atlantic menhaden stock confirms that the population continues to exist at a low level and-for the first time-suggests that overfishing has taken place in a number of recent years.

ut the assessment stops short of blaming the commercial fishery for the ongoing low abundance of fish, especially juveniles, noting that there has been little correlation between the amount of menhaden harvested and reproduction.

Nonetheless, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the multistate agency responsible for managing the species along the East Coast, directed its technical advisers to begin exploring new management options, with an eye toward recommending changes by the end of this year.

It's the latest development in the heated controversy over the small oily fish, which pits the Bay's largest commercial fishery against recreational fishermen and environmentalists.

Read the complete story at The Chesapeake Bay Journal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Due to a combination of climate change creating warmer water conditions and continued pressure from fishing, lobster stocks in southern New England have been badly depleted, and a five-year moratorium is needed for recovery.

This is the recommendation of a technical panel for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in a report discussed last week.

“Overwhelming environmental and biological changes coupled with continued fishing greatly reduce the likelihood of southern New England stock rebuilding,” the report said.

Robert Glenn, senior fisheries biologist for the state Division of Marine Fisheries and a state expert on lobsters, spoke at an informational meeting at the University of Massachusetts at South Dartmouth last Thursday. More than 60 lobstermen attended. If it is approved, the moratorium would take effect in July of 2011 from the southern New England coast to Virginia, for both commercial and recreational lobster fishing.

Read the complete story at The Vineyard Gazette Online.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEW YORK – The ocean covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface, but on this World Oceans Day (June 8, 2010) scientists say they still know shockingly little about the mysterious deep blue sea.

With 95 percent of the ocean unmapped, more is known about the moon's surface than the ocean depths, said aquatic filmmaker Fabien Cousteau, grandson of ocean diving pioneer Jacque Cousteau. In fact,12 men have stepped foot on the moon, but only two have been to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean at roughly 7 miles (11 kilometers) deep.

The few forays to the bottom of the ocean have revealed that "we were wrong about life on Earth," said David Guggenheim of the Ocean Foundation, speaking Friday at the World Science Festival here. As these deep-sea expeditions have revealed, life on Earth can even exist miles below the ocean's surface and under the most extreme conditions. Scientists hope that in the coming years new technologies that are under development may allow man to dive deeper and probe further into the ocean abyss — solving some major mysteries about our own planet.

Read the complete story at Live Science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

New England fishermen have mixed feelings about a programme designed to allow overfished species to recover. Mark Schrope reports on how catch shares have scientists fishing for answers. Many researchers, conservationists and even some fishermen have grown increasingly enamoured of catch shares and hail an emerging policy at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) encouraging their widespread use as part of the solution for ailing oceans. These supporters are not insensitive to the social and economic costs associated with major management shifts, but they say the long-term benefits will be worth it. Still, some fishermen, legislators and scientists question whether the policy will work to replenish stocks and whether it is fair to fishermen.

Other scientists, however, find fault with the targets. Brian Rothschild, who oversaw implementation of the original Magnuson–Stevens act for NOAA is now a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. He says that the restoration targets for some troubled species are too high and that the ecosystem isn't equipped to handle maximum levels of all species all the time. "The carrying capacities of ecosystems don't really work that way," he says. Another question is whether catch shares are the best way to achieve mandated population restorations and increased biodiversity. A study published in 2008 analysed a database of more than 11,000 fisheries, 121 of which were managed using some form of catch shares. The study focused mainly on landings data, and looked for drops in catch as a sign of fishery collapse. The authors concluded that those under catch shares were less prone to collapse and that catch shares can halt or even reverse collapse.

Other studies, using different methods, have suggested a more complicated picture. Timothy Essington, a fisheries ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, for instance, looked in more detail at 15 catch-share programmes in North America, analysing their effect on fish numbers, the use of habitat-damaging gear and commercial landings. He found that results varied widely between systems, with continued population declines for some fisheries even under catch share management. "It totally depends on the baseline you're looking at," says Essington.

Read the full story in the journal Nature

 

 

NOAA has released the following press advisory:

May 6, 2010 – A NOAA-sponsored ocean mission, set to explore for deep sea corals, has been redirected to collect seafloor and water column data from areas near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill source.

Researchers from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST) on a university research ship to obtain core sediment samples from the seafloor and water samples from the water column in areas near the Deepwater Horizon spill source. The samples are expected to provide important information about the abundance of marine organisms and the presence of chemicals in ocean water and sediments–information for a baseline against which to measure change if those areas are affected by sinking oil.

The university fleet research vessel Pelican, operated by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, departed Cocodrie, La., late Tuesday and arrived at the spill source on Wednesday. They will return on Sunday for more supplies, and go back to the site later that week.

The ship had been outfitted and ready to support a different NOAA-funded mission, but it was scrubbed in favor of gathering timely and much-needed data close to the oil spill source.

 “This sampling mission is one of many NOAA responses to the oil spill,” acting NOAA assistant administrator for NOAA Research Craig McLean said. “It fills an important gap in researching the interaction of spilled oil and the ocean environment. The samples will help us better understand affected ocean resources.”

“We plan to sample as close to the well head as is safe, reasonable and allowable,” said Ray Highsmith, executive director for NIUST and principal investigator for both the original and revised mission. “We then plan to travel northwestward toward our long-term study site.”

That study site is about nine miles from the oil spill source and the home of the Gulf of Mexico Consortium’s Methane Hydrate Seafloor Observatory. In the seven years of the observatory’s development, scientists have collected a wealth of geologic, physical, chemical, and biological data describing the area—data that could be important in measuring changes there that stem from the oil spill.

With NOAA’s agreement to change missions, scientists and technicians on the ship and ashore worked quickly to adjust staffing and resources.

The research team brought aboard a large box corer used to take seafloor sediment samples and installed a large reel of cable to allow the corer to operate at depths equal to the spill source at 5,000 feet. An instrument called a CTD (Conductivity-Temperature- Depth) will measure the water’s conductivity, temperature, density and oxygen concentration at various water column depths, while bottles on the CTD obtain water samples.

Before the ship departed, Chief Scientist Arne Diercks and scientists and crewmembers received Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response training as required by OSHA for those involved in the clean-up of hazardous substances. Oil is considered a hazardous substance.

Based at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and the University of Southern Mississippi at the Stennis Space Center, NIUST is a partnership of the University of Mississippi, University of Southern Mississippi and NOAA, funded by NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. Samples from the mission will be studied by NOAA and by labs at the universities of Georgia and North Carolina and others that are members of the Gulf of Mexico Hydrates Research Consortium.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. Visit us at http://www.noaa.gov or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/noaa.lubchenco.                          

 

 

 

 

 

 

Federal biologists plan to put anglers' assertions that red snapper are plentiful to the test.

Biologists with National Marine Fisheries Service vowed Monday to conduct a new stock assessment of red snapper this summer.

Fishermen hope the findings echo what they've been saying for years and ultimately lead to lifting a ban on fishing for red snapper.

But the study won't be done until December, little comfort for fishermen struggling to stay afloat without their prime target fish.

Read the complete story at Florida Today.

 

 

 

 

 

While the record floods that struck Rhode Island in late March and early April caused significant damage and disruption, there may be one positive effect. The flood runoff into Narragansett Bay may improve the health of the Bay’s fisheries.

 Scientists at the Narragansett Laboratory of NOAA’s Fisheries Service have been assessing the changing conditions of Narragansett Bay on a monthly basis for the past 12 years in collaboration with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and the University of Rhode Island.

Using a towed sampling system called the Mariner Shuttle, the monthly surveys record biological, chemical, and physical characteristics of the Bay’s ecosystem from surface to bottom.  Researchers have used the survey data to construct a baseline of normal conditions over the course of a year. The conditions found on the April 8 survey, days after the torrential rains, were far from normal.

“The flood runoff produced the lowest salinity surface water and the highest April concentrations of phytoplankton ever measured during the 12 years of the study,” said Mark Berman, an oceanographer in the Laboratory’s marine ecosystems group.  “A week after the flooding, the low salinity surface plume was evident all the way to the mouth of Narragansett Bay.”

Read the complete story from NOAA.

 

 

 

 

 

John Chisholm likes sharks. A lot. That's evident with just a quick gander at the shark paraphernalia floating all over his desk. Inside his New Bedford office, the computer screen flashes photos of dor sal fins, sharp teeth and, yes, even Chief Brody from "Jaws," as Chisholm sits down to talk about his passion for the fearsome fish, which has been on the protected species list since 1997.

The son of a commercial lobsterman, Chisholm grew up on the waters of Plymouth. He started working for the Division of Marine Fisheries two decades ago, while he was still in college (at what is now UMass Dartmouth), and joined the division's Massachusetts Shark Research Program in 2004. Last fall, Chisholm observed 12 great white sharks off the coast of Cape Cod, and tagged five. He said it was his career highlight.

Chisholm spoke last week at the Old Methodist Meeting House in Wareham about the world's greatest predator.

Read the article and the interview from The South Coast Today.

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