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Dr. Charles Littnan Appointed New Science and Research Director for the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center

June 13, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Today, NOAA announced the appointment of Dr. Charles Littnan as the new Science and Research Director for NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. He succeeds Dr. Mike Seki who retired from the agency in December 2022. Dr. Littnan will assume his new role on June 18, 2023.

Dr. Littnan is a marine biologist with 20 years’ experience in marine mammal and sea turtle science and research. He is known for leading innovative biological research and conservation management of large, complex, research programs related to marine mammals and sea turtles. He also has experience in staff supervision and development, program planning and implementation, and budget development and execution.

“We look forward to the opportunities ahead as Charles takes on the leadership of the Pacific Islands Science Center and its mission to conduct the research and monitoring programs that support the domestic and international conservation and management of living marine resources across the Pacific Islands,” said Dr. Cisco Werner, Chief Science Advisor for NOAA Fisheries.

Bounded by the Hawaiian Archipelago in the north, American Samoa and U.S. Pacific Remote Island Areas in the south, and the Mariana Archipelago in the west, the Pacific Islands region encompasses the largest geographical area within NOAA Fisheries’ jurisdiction. The U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone within the region includes more than 1.7 million square nautical miles of ocean, roughly equal to the total EEZ of the continental United States and Alaska.

The Center’s work is focused in the waters surrounding American Samoa, Guam, Hawaiʻi, the Northern Mariana Islands, and other U.S. Pacific Islands. The Center also conducts research on living marine resources in the high-seas areas of the central and western Pacific. These islands have a rich diversity of marine life that is vital to the culture and economic stability of the islands.

With regard to fisheries research and monitoring, the Center will conduct the research and analysis to maintain healthy stocks, eliminate overfishing, and rebuild overfished stocks important to commercial, recreational, and subsistence fisheries.

In addition to fisheries research, Hawaiian monk seals, green sea turtles, spinner dolphins, false killer whales, and humpback whales, and Pacific corals are some of the protected species in the center’s research portfolio.

“I am incredibly excited to lead and work alongside everyone at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center to support NOAA’s mission in the Pacific Islands region.  Our commitment to excellence in science and service will be our foundation as we address the complex challenges facing our oceans, our fisheries and the communities that depend on them,” said Dr. Littnan.

Dr. Littnan will work closely to ensure sustainable fisheries and protecting marine life is a joint effort between NOAA Fisheries Pacific Islands Regional Office and the Science Center. The center will continue to offer cutting-edge science to help inform management decisions to the region in an ever-changing environment. They work together to conserve and manage domestic and international marine resources in a vast geographical area.

Dr. Littnan holds a PhD in environmental science from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marine Ecology from Texas A&M University.

He lives in Honolulu where he enjoys spending as much time as possible with his wife and two children, especially at the beach.  Any remaining time is spent with friends, seeking rare whiskies, and enduring years of heartache as a Minnesota Vikings fan.

Coastal biomedical labs are bleeding more horseshoe crabs with little accountability

June 13, 2023 — Horseshoe crabs used to be everywhere. Millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the planet, each spring, the hard-shelled creatures gathered to mate in massive mounds along the beaches of the Atlantic coast. Later, migratory shorebirds like the robin-size red knot learned to fly up from South America to join them for a feast. The crabs’ eggs gave the birds the energy they needed to keep flying north to breed in the Arctic.

But humans began to want something from the crabs, too — their blood. In the 1960s, scientists discovered that the sky blue blood inside horseshoe crabs would clot when it detected bacterial toxins. Vaccines, drugs and medical devices have to be sterile before they’re put inside people. A better toxin-detection system meant less contamination risk for patients, so fishermen soon started collecting and selling the prehistoric animals to be bled.

A synthetic alternative was later invented and has since been approved in Europe as an equivalent to the ingredient that requires horseshoe crabs. But in the U.S., the blood harvest isn’t shrinking. It’s growing. Five companies along the East Coast — with operations in South Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Maryland — drained over 700,000 crabs in 2021. That’s more than any other year since officials started keeping track in 2004. Since then, the number of crabs bled by the industry has more than doubled. At least 80 million tests are performed each year around the world using the blood-derived ingredient.

Read the full article at NPR

Long-term study hopes to unlock secrets of Gulf of Alaska ecosystem

June 9, 2023 — The University of Alaska Fairbanks is using underwater autonomous vehicles in order to learn more about the ecosystem in the Gulf of Alaska.

After more than a month apart, Gretel and Shackleton began their reunion with a slow dance.

The autonomous underwater vehicles circled each other in the Gulf of Alaska in April, gathering data about ocean conditions: temperature, light, salinity, chlorophyll, fluorescence, and even acoustically determined densities of fish and zooplankton.

The torpedo-shaped vehicles, known informally as gliders, met after taking separate journeys to the middle of the continental shelf south of Seward, about 70 miles offshore. Seth Danielson, a University of Alaska Fairbanks oceanographer, expects it to become a spring ritual.

Read the full article at KINY

University of Hawai’i study finds social media found to be effective research tool for fisheries monitoring

June 9, 2023 — Social media is an effective data-collection tool when studying the activities of recreational fisheries, reducing the limitations of cost and timeliness associated with traditional research methods, according to a new study.

University of Hawai’i at Hilo Adjunct Associate Professor and Hawai’i Cooperative Fishery Research Unit Leader Tim Grabowski was the lead author of the paper, which was published in March 2023 in Aquatic Biology.

Read the full at SeafoodSource

2023-2024 Monkfish Research Set-Aside Project Recommendations

June 7, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The selected projects will investigate monkfish research priorities developed by the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils. NOAA Fisheries expects the awards to generate approximately $300,000 to fund the research projects.

In the Monkfish RSA program, researchers compete for funding through a federal grant competition managed by NOAA Fisheries. No federal funds support the research. Instead, the program awards RSA days at sea that are “set-aside” annually for use in compensation fishing to fund the program.

For more information about these awards and the Monkfish RSA Program, please contact Ryan Silva.

Both projects responded to one of the Councils’ highest monkfish RSA research priorities: Research to develop a standardized catch per unit effort (CPUE) index for the commercial directed monkish gillnet fishery to be used for stock assessment purposes.

Due to the common goal for the projects, and intended application of the research results, NOAA Fisheries and the grant recipients will coordinate closely to help ensure efforts are complementary, and likely to support monkfish stock assessments.

Institution: Cornell Cooperative Extension Association of Suffolk County

Principal Investigators and Collaborators: Emerson Hasbrouck and Scott Curatolo-Wagemann, CCE; Patrick J. Sullivan, Ph.D., Cornell University; Suresh A. Sethi, Ph.D., Alaska Pacific University; Bonnie Brady, Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.

Title: Addressing Monkfish Management Needs by Developing a Standardized Catch per Unit Effort (CPUE) Time Series.

Project summary: This project will collect and analyze fishery dependent and independent data to inform the development and utilization of an integrated statistical estimation procedure that will determine a standardized CPUE time series. This can be used to estimate the relative abundance of the stock for improved monkfish stock assessment and management purposes.

Institution: Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, Inc.

Principal Investigators and Collaborators: Melissa Sanderson and Aubrey Church, CCFA; Steven Cadrin, Ph.D., UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science & Technology.

Title: Incorporating Fishermen’s Knowledge into a Standardized Catch Per Unit Effort Index for the Commercial Monkfish Gillnet Fishery.

Project summary: This project seeks to develop standardized CPUE indices for the commercial directed monkfish gillnet fishery for use in stock assessments. Investigators will work collaboratively with the commercial monkfish fishing industry throughout the region to elicit expertise on monkfish CPUE, obtain fishery dependent data, and develop CPUE standardization for contribution to upcoming monkfish stock assessments.

Tracking Climate-Driven Shifts in Fish Populations Across International Boundaries

June 6, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

As the ocean warms, marine fish are on the move—beyond their traditional habitats and across international boundaries. Understanding these patterns of movement is essential to predicting change and managing climate-resilient fisheries.

A new collaborative NOAA Fisheries study looks at patterns of movement by multiple fish species across the entire Bering Sea shelf over decades. Alaska Fisheries Science Center scientists collaborated with Russian scientists to combine data from the eastern, western, and northern Bering Sea shelf. An innovative analysis distilled dominant patterns of fish movement over time from these data. The research advances our understanding of how the ecosystem is responding to climate change.

“International collaboration is likely going to become increasingly important for sustainable management of Bering Sea fisheries,“ said study lead Lukas DeFilippo, NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “As fish move into new habitats, we need to take a broader scale approach to monitoring to support sustainable fisheries management .”

Study: Overfishing caused cod to evolve rapidly

June 5, 2023 — New genetic evidence suggests the overfishing of cod in the 1900s led the fish to rapidly evolve over decades, according to a study led by Rutgers University.

The study, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, shows that the collapse of cod stocks in the Atlantic due to overfishing may have spurred genetic changes that were previously thought to take place over millions of years.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Study finds creation of marine protected area in Mexico did not reduce commercial catches

May 31, 2023 — A study recently published in Science Advances providing before and after assessment of the impacts of Mexico’s Revillagigedo National Park claims there have been no negative consequences for the fishing industry.

The study, performed by a team of U.S. and Mexican researchers, found evidence that Mexico’s industrial fishing sector had no economic losses five years after the creation of the national park. Revillagigedo National Park was created in 2017 and protects 148,087 square kilometers of ocean south of the Baja California peninsula in the Pacific Ocean.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Scientists detected 5,000 sea creatures nobody knew existed. It’s a warning.

May 26, 2023 — There are bright, gummy creatures that look like partially peeled bananas. Glassy, translucent sponges that cling to the seabed like chandeliers flipped upside down. Phantasmic octopuses named, appropriately, after Casper the Friendly Ghost.

And that’s just what’s been discovered so far in the ocean’s biggest hot spot for future deep-sea mining.

To manufacture electric vehicles, batteries and other key pieces of a low-carbon economy, we need a lot of metal. Countries and companies are increasingly looking to mine that copper, cobalt and other critical minerals from the seafloor.

A new analysis of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast mineral-rich area in the Pacific Ocean, estimates there are some 5,000 sea animals completely new to science there. The research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology is the latest sign that underwater extraction may come at a cost to a diverse array of life we are only beginning to understand.

Read the full article at Washington Post

Dr. Kevin Stokesbury Appointed Dean at UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science & Technology

May 24, 2023 — Dr. Kevin Stokesbury has been appointed Dean of the School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. As Dean, he will ensure that SMAST continues to play a leading role in both research and educating students in the marine sciences.

Kevin began at UMass Dartmouth in 1998 as an associate fellow in the then-named Center for Marine Science and Technology and currently holds the rank of commonwealth professor. He served as founding chair of the Department of Fisheries Oceanography for twelve years.

Kevin’s extensive research portfolio, and roughly $40 million in grants during the past two decades, examines the impacts on marine ecosystems from fishing and energy development efforts. His research focuses on sea scallop and groundfish resources, including stock assessments, fishery management strategies, and growth and mortality estimates. Kevin’s dedication to collaborating with the fishing industry earned him the David H. Wallace Award from the National Shellfish Association in 2013, and he was named the Standard-Times “SouthCoast Man of the Year” in 2018.

Kevin is involved in several professional organizations, including serving as chair of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea’s Scallop Assessment Working Group from 2013 to 2018, upcoming chair of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Committee on Offshore Science and Assessment, and president-elect of the National Shellfisheries Association.

Kevin was recently awarded over $1.4 million in grants for sea scallop research from NOAA’s Scallop Research Set-Aside Program.