" Next year and Maine and ambitious effort will begin to restore salmon and other sea…"
Starting next year, dams will start being removed from Maine’s largest river in an ambitious effort to restore salmon and other sea-run fish to the waterway. It’s called the "Penobscot River Restoration."
Climate change is happening faster than was expected, and it is happening all over the world – in rich as well as poor countries.
That was the message from the third World Climate Conference, held in Geneva last week, according to Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The conference, focusing on global warming science and climate prediction, was hosted by the World Meteorological Organisation.
Talking to the Financial Times after the event, Dr Lubchenco said: “Every single country in the world is being affected by climate change.”
Studying fish once seemed so simple: find out where they were biting and keep it under your hat. Now the study of fish has evolved into Ph.D.-level programs that can make fish bigger, tastier and a larger part of the nation’s economy.
The University of Arkansas’ board of trustees on Friday approved a doctoral program for the Aquaculture-Fisheries Center of Excellence at its Pine Bluff campus. It’s the first Ph.D. program for the 3,000-student campus at the edge of the Arkansas Delta.
"I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stronger and more positive review" of a program proposal, UA system vice president for university relations Dan Ferritor told the UA system board at a meeting Friday in Little Rock.
The basic makeup of the ocean waters off the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic region has fundamentally changed in the past 40 years because of climate change, commercial fishing pressures and growing coastal populations, according to a new report.
The 2009 Ecosystem Status Report says fish populations in U.S. waters from North Carolina to Maine have moved from their traditional home grounds because of a changing environment and human activities.
The report is the broadest study that researchers have undertaken for U.S. waters in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, Michael Fogarty, who headed the study, said Tuesday. The findings show how interconnected the ecosystem is, he said.
The Future of Fisheries Science in America, edited by Richard Beamish and Brian Rothschild, which was published in April (Springer-Verlag, 736pp) is now available from Barnes and Noble.
Fisheries science in North America is changing in response to a changing climate, new technologies, to ecosystem approach to management and new thinking about the processes affecting stock and recruitment.
Authors of the 34 chapters review the science in their particular fields and use their experience to develop informed opinions about the future. Everyone associated with fish, fisheries and fisheries management will find material that will stimulate their thinking about the future. Readers will be impressed with the potential for new discoveries, but disturbed by how much needs to be done in fisheries science if we are to sustain North American fisheries in our changing climate. Officials that manage or fund fisheries science will appreciate the urgency for the new information needed for the stewardship of fish populations and their ecosystems. Research organizations may want to keep some extra copies for a future look back into the thoughts of a wide range of fisheries professionals. Fisheries science has been full of surprises with some of the surprises having major economic impacts. It is important to minimize these impacts as the demand for seafood increases and the complexities of fisheries management increase.
So, three years after a supposedly landmark "scientific" study — one that warned that "overfishing" was so severe it would essentially leave the oceans to jellyfish by 2048 — we find that the conclusion wasn’t to be taken "literally."
That, at least, is the theory now being advanced by acting CEO Jim Simon of the high-profile environmental group Oceana. And it’s one that is — and should be — raising entire fields of red flags within not only the fishing industry, but among state and federal lawmakers whose communities may well have been duped into thinking that the science used to implement new regulatory changes actually had some credibility.
Alas, we probably all should have known better. Indeed, the 2006 study by marine biologist Boris Worm and his colleagues, titled "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services," had already drawn significant credibility questions from fellow marine scientists such as recognized fisheries expert Ray Hilborn, and even some of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s own science advisors.
Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.
The projected doomsday date for the collapse of world fisheries, outlined in a peer-reviewed, Science magazine research article that took on life of its own in countless alarmist stories about overfishing the oceans, "was not meant to be taken literally," the environmental group Oceana has claimed.
But if Boris Worm, the lead scientist of the 2006 study did not intend the 2048 date to be taken literally, he has indicated that he had an ulterior and non-scientific purpose for it — to gin up interest in the study.
In an e-mail he did not intend for the press, Worm admitted the use of the end-game date for functioning fisheries was as a "news hook." Even Oceana, whose chief e-mailed the press and last week about the figurative use of the 2048 time frame, used it as if the researchers had data documenting what they wrote.
Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.
University of New England marine biologist James Sulikowski, Ph.D., has placed himself in the middle of a contentious debate between conservationists and the commericial fishing industry over the health of the spiny dogfish stock.
Sulikowski, assistant professor, Department of Marine Sciences, has been awarded a $237,000 grant from the NOAA Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program to use satellite tags to examine the behavior of spiny dogfish in the Northwest Atlantic. The research will try to determine the habitat, depth and movement patterns of the spiny dogfish to better understand the inconsistencies in data collected by federal agencies and the commercial fishing industry.
The status of the spiny dogfish, Squalus acanthias, stock in the northwest Atlantic Ocean has become a volatile issue. Distributed from Labrador to Florida, this species was once considered to be the most abundant shark throughout this geographic range.
Researchers at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, one of nine outcroppings in the windswept Isles of Shoals six miles off the coast of New Hampshire, are looking at the commercial potential of invertebrate hagfish to make a high-performance material.
University of Guelph researcher Doug Fudge and collaborators at the University of British Columbia have been granted a patent for the commercial use of hagfish nanofilaments. The researchers are seeking a means to concentrate proteins in hagfish slime in solution and are attempting to use electrospinning to assemble it into threads.
Hagfish, an ancient quasi-invertebrate fish and relative to the sea lamprey, produces a clogging slime as a defense against suction feeding teleost fishes. Tiny cytoskeleton filaments in this gelatinous slime could be used to make a high-performance material, the researchers say. The slime is made from protein filaments that have the same ultra-strong properties of spider webs, said Fudge. He and Guelph post-doc student Atsuko Negishi positioned hagfish microfilaments as an alternative to spider silk because the proteins that build the slime are much easier to amplify in a vector. “It sort of got us excited because it’s similar to spider silk,” Fudge said.
A survey of the sea scallop population off the Eastern seaboard released on Tuesday, August 17 shows an increase in the number of young scallops on Georges Bank, which could be a good sign for several years to come.
The survey, conducted from May to June by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass., a division of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, says the numbers of juvenile scallops found on Georges Bank were the highest since 2000. Georges Bank stretches from the waters off Cape Cod to Nova Scotia.
The sea scallop fishery often surpasses lobster as the most valuable fishery in the country, bringing in $368 million in 2007, according to the New England Fishery Management Council.