Atlantic bluefin tuna Archives - Page 2 of 2

Tuna lab leaving Gloucester, Mass.

Lutcavage, colleagues to work out of UMass Boston

October 6, 2017 — For the first time in almost seven years, the highly-regarded Large Pelagics Research Center affiliated with the University of Massachusetts no longer has a Gloucester address.

The center, which has performed groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed research on the spawning habits and habitats of Atlantic bluefin tuna, closed up shop Thursday at its most recent home — the Americold-owned building at 159 E. Main St. in East Gloucester.

Americold has been actively shopping the site for months and recently informed the center it would have to vacate its office space by the end of October. Molly Lutcavage, the founder and executive director of the center, and Tim Lam, an assistant research professor, didn’t bother waiting until the end of the month.

“It’s sad to think that we won’t have a Gloucester presence anymore,” Lutcavage said. “For now, I guess we’ll be working out of our houses and garages.”

The center has been forced to navigate some rough seas in the past few years, changing its affiliation within the University of Massachusetts system and being forced out of its original facility at Hodgkins Cove, where it had been housed since 2011.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

UMaine to Receive More Than $220K From NOAA to Study Tuna

August 11, 2017 — ORONO, Maine — The University of Maine is slated to receive more than $220,000 from the federal government to support research of Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins and independent Sen. Angus King say the money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will help with UMaine’s research about the tuna’s age, growth and population in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.

UMaine researchers will work with dealers, fishermen and other stakeholders from Maine to North Carolina on the work.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the U.S. News & World Report

Regulators changing fishing rules to protect endangered tuna

January 4, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — The federal government is changing some of the rules about how fishermen harvest tuna in an attempt to protect one of the species of the fish.

The National Marine Fisheries Service says the rule change is designed to steer fishermen who catch yellowfin tuna and swordfish via longline away from bluefin tuna.

Atlantic bluefin tuna are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Fishing boats sometimes catch them incidentally while targeting other species.

The fisheries service says the rule change will modify the way it handles distribution of quota transfers in the longline tuna fishery. The service says that flexibility will improve fishing opportunities while limiting the number of bluefin tuna that are incidentally caught.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Tuna’s Declining Mercury Contamination Linked to U.S. Shift Away from Coal

November 23, 2016 — Levels of highly toxic mercury contamination in Atlantic bluefin tuna are rapidly declining, according to a new study. That trend does not affect recommended limits on consumption of canned tuna, which comes mainly from other tuna species. Nor does it reflect trends in other ocean basins. But it does represent a major break in the long-standing, scary connection between tuna and mercury, a source of public concern since 1970, when a chemistry professor in New York City found excess levels of mercury in a can of tuna and spurred a nationwide recall. Tuna consumption continues to be the source of about 40 percent of the mercury contamination in the American diet. And mercury exposure from all sources remains an important issue, because it causes cognitive impairment in an estimated 300,000 to 600,000 babies born in this country each year.

The new study, published online on November 10 by Environmental Science & Technology, links the decline directly to reduced mercury emissions in North America. Most of that reduction has occurred because of the marketplace shift by power plants and industry away from coal, the major source of mercury emissions. Pollution control requirements imposed by the federal government have also cut mercury emissions.

Progress on both counts could, however, reverse, with President-elect Donald Trump promising a comeback for the U.S. coal industry, in part by clearing away such regulations.

For the new study, a team of a half-dozen researchers analyzed tissue samples from nearly 1,300 Atlantic bluefin tuna taken by commercial fisheries, mostly in the Gulf of Maine, between 2004 and 2012. They found that levels of mercury concentration dropped by more than 2 percent per year, for a total decline of 19 percent over just nine years.

Read the full story at Scientific American

BP oil disaster might have hurt Bluefin tuna rebuilding, study says

October 3, 2016 — The release of 4 million barrels of oil in the 87 days following the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 occurred just as Atlantic bluefin tuna had returned to the Gulf of Mexico to spawn, and a small but significant percentage of the adult fish and their eggs and larvae were likely exposed to the toxic oil, according to a new study announced Friday (Sept. 30).

The study led by scientists with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Stanford University concludes that the oil cumulatively covered 3.1 million square miles where fish, eggs and larvae were present in the weeks immediately after the accident.

When combined with other stressors affecting this species of tuna — including overfishing and warming seas caused by climate change — the addition of the oil’s impact “may result in significant effects for a population that shows little evidence of rebuilding,” the study published in Nature: Scientific Reports concluded.

The study, funded by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the BP spill required under the federal Oil Pollution Act, made use of computer modeling based on information gathered from 16 years of electronic tagging of 66 tuna that kept track of individual fish locations, temperatures and oscillating diving patterns. The information was compared with satellite observations of the breadth of oil from the spill on the surface of the Gulf to estimate the potential impacts.

Barbara Block, a Stanford professor of marine scientists and expert on Atlantic bluefin tuna, said in a Friday interview that the tagging program took advantage of earlier tagging information that indicated many of the Gulf-spawning tuna migrate back and forth from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Researchers captured adult tuna in Canada and installed the tags. When the fish returned to Canada a year later, the tags dropped off and were collected, and their data was added to a long-term database on fish movements.

The information collected from the tags helped the scientists confirm their theories about the spawning habits of the huge fish, which can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds at maturity, and begin reproducing about 10 years after birth.

Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune

Tagging Ahi Tuna in the Western Pacific

July 5, 2016 — A respected research professor, scientist and part-time resident has been on Kauai for several weeks coordinating the latest phase of a tuna tagging project launched on Kauai and the Big Island three years ago.

Dr. Molly Lutcavage is a research professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s School for the Environment. She is also director of the Large Pelagic Research Center and is renowned for her extensive work with the Atlantic bluefin tuna fishing community.

The Ahi Satellite Tagging Project of the Pacific Island Fisheries Group is a joint venture that uses state-of-the art technology and partners fisheries organizations, policy makers and local fishermen in the effort to gather much-needed baseline data on ahi and other pelagic fish that live and migrate in waters surrounding the main Hawaiian islands and beyond.

“There’s very little information on these patterns for ahi in this region,” Lutcavage said.

“Most of PSAT or data logging tags on ahi were deployed in the eastern and western Pacific, so the Hawaiian islands remain a ‘data poor’ area as far as high-tech tag results,” she added.

Last week, six large yellowfin tuna (ahi) were tagged with pop-up satellite tags and released in waters off Kauai. If all goes well, the tags will collect data that will help identify their migration routes and behavior for one year, Lutcavage said.

Read the full story at the Garden Island

Environmental Bullies – Conservationists or Agenda-pushers?

March 22, 2016 (Saving Seafood) – Dr. John Sibert, an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii, has come to the defense of scientists whose research conflicts with the agendas of conservation ideologues. Dr. Sibert specifically targets Carl Safina and others who have painted recent research by Dr. Molly Lutcavage as “controversial.” Dr. Lutcavage’s research, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was featured in NPR, presented evidence that Western Atlantic Bluefin tuna may be more resilient to harvesting than previously thought.

In an article for CFOOD, a University of Washington project chaired by Dr. Ray Hilborn that corrects erroneous stories about fisheries sustainability, Dr. Sibert criticizes environmentalists who resort to personal attacks on researchers whose findings they oppose. Saving Seafood partners with CFOOD to help deliver these facts to the public.

“Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular,” Dr. Sibert wrote.

Last week, Dr. Lutcavage wrote a piece about her own struggles with environmental bullies.

Dr. Sibert’s full comments are below:

I, like many other scientists, practice my profession with the expectation that my work will be used to improve management policies. However, scientists who choose to work on subjects that intersect with management of natural resources sometimes become targets of special interest pressures. Pressure to change or “spin” research results occurs more often than it should. Pressure arrives in many forms— usually as phone calls from colleagues, superiors, or the media; the pressure seldom arrives in writing.

I have had a long career spanning several fields and institutions and have been pressured to change my views on restriction of industrial activities in intertidal zones in estuaries, on the necessity of international tuna fisheries management agencies, on the limited role of commercial fishing in the deterioration of marine turtle populations, on the lack of accuracy and reliability of electronic fish tags, and on the inefficacy of marine protected areas for tuna conservation.

My most recent experience with pressure came from a stringer who writes for Science magazine. Some colleagues and I had just published a paper that analyzed area-based fishery management policies for conservation of bigeye tuna. Although the paper was very pessimistic about the use of MPAs for tuna fishery management, this particular stringer contacted me about MPAs. We had an exchange of emails in which he repeatedly tried to spin some earlier results on median lifetime displacements of skipjack and yellowfin tuna into an argument supporting creation of MPAs. We then made an appointment to talk “face to face” via Skype. His approach was to play word games with my replies to his questions in order to make it seem that my research supported MPAs. I repeatedly explained to him that our research showed that closing high-seas pockets had no effect whatsoever on the viability of tuna populations and that empirical evidence showed that the closure of the western high seas pockets in 2008 had in fact increased tuna catches. We hung up at that point, and I have no idea what he wrote for Science.

When critics run out of fact, some resort to personal attack. During discussions about turtle conservation in the early 2000s, an attorney for an environmental group told a committee of scientists that we were in effect a bunch of fishing industry apologists with no knowledge of turtles or population dynamics. More recently, my friend and collaborator, Molly Lutcavage was recently subject of a personal attack by Carl Safina after she and her colleagues published an important discovery of a new spawning area for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. This discovery ought to push the International Commission of the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna to abandon its simplistic two stock approach to management of ABFT. (Whether ICCAT will actually change its approach is another question.) Safina made the outrageously false assertion that the authors’ “… main concern is not recovery, not conservation, but how their findings can allow additional exploitation.” Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular.

Read the commentary at CFOOD

Environmental Bullies: How Conservation Ideologues Attack Scientists Who Don’t Agree With Them

March 11, 2016 — The following is an excerpt from a commentary from Dr. Molly Lutcavage, the head of the Large Pelagics Research Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was originally published on Medium :

Back in the 90s, bluefin fishermen said that spotter pilots could see, in a single day, as many adult bluefin that were supposed to exist in the entire western Atlantic in just a few surface schools in the Gulf of Maine alone. No federal fisheries scientists would fly to validate the fishermen’s observations, so Dr. Scott Kraus, director of the right whale research group and whale aerial surveys, stepped in to find out. And he hired me to run the surveys after an inquiry about his sea turtle data. I’d completed an oceanography PhD, two postdocs, and recently left a job in the Dept. of Interior as an endangered species scientist to get back to research, which I loved. I had been studying leatherbacks, a warm bodied turtle, and bluefin tuna were a warm bodied fish. And incredibly interesting. My UBC postdoc supervisor, Dr. David R. Jones, was an expert on their blood. And there were huge gaps in biological understanding – in other words, a scientific frontier to explore!

In his clumsy communication to discredit our survey work, Carl Safina made no attempt to confirm the scientific credentials of the scientist running the study (me), nor her highly respected collaborator, Dr. Scott Kraus. In fact, by doing our job as scientists, using aerial survey methods to investigate real-time, surface abundance of bluefin schools, we were disrupting the ocean conservation group’s efforts, especially that of Safina, to list Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species. Apparently, by whatever means necessary. The published spotter survey results eventually provided independent observations that rebutted Safina’s portrayal of western Atlantic bluefin as an endangered species down to a few thousand individuals. The study established the local assemblage as larger than one hundred thousand giant bluefin, at the surface alone.

Since our first research projects over 25 years ago, my lab and our collaborators and students have built a diverse body of peer reviewed science covering extensive aspects of the biology, life history, physiological ecology, reproduction, diet, oceanographic associations, and fisheries dynamics of Atlantic bluefin tuna. We published over 75 research studies on western bluefin. Most of it was new, or challenged the status quo of bluefin biology used in stock assessment. We documented a lower age at maturity, extensive, Atlantic-wide mixing, complex annual migration patterns, and effects of prey dynamics and ocean conditions on their movements. This holistic body of research showed the western Atlantic bluefin population to be far more resilient and larger than that being represented by some NGO’s. Yet this substantial scientific body of evidence, most of it noted by historic studies by Frank Mather and Peter C. Wilson, has been conveniently ignored by those with ideological agendas, even today.

Enviro Bullies rarely confront their targets face to face. Since the 1990’s, they’ve made pretty impressive attempts to mislead about bluefin science. And to influence US fisheries managers, politicians and the direction of research funding, all the way up to the White House. We stuck to our research goals, but when Congressional earmarks funding the Large Pelagics Research Center (LPRC), and its role model, the Pacific Fisheries Research Program, went away, we faced vastly downsized research budgets. Actually, just when the Centers had amassed a substantial body of credible, cutting edge fisheries science, and established their true worth, both pelagic fisheries science Centers went off the cliff, into real extinction. Meanwhile, major funding began streaming in to some ocean-focused NGO’s, and their spokesperson scientists.

In 2013, former students, collaborators and I witnessed the Pew Oceans Campaign and partners mislead, in their press releases and statements to US and Canadian fisheries managers, experts’ consensus regarding the status of the Atlantic bluefin population in Pews Fact Sheet representation of Best Available Science. And more specifically, that LPRC’s peer reviewed research that challenged their take away message, that the Atlantic bluefin population trajectory was downward, and that they were in danger. They labelled our work as well as consensus science from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), as “unsubstantiated hypotheses”. Amanda Nickson, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Bluefin Campaign, phoned from Vancouver to berate my colleagues and I for responding to the Pew Fact Sheet, which dramatically misrepresented science. We had corrected it with our own fact sheet, and they were not happy to be called out by credentialed bluefin experts.

Maybe it’s because National Geographic’s Wicked Tuna reality show, on roll out, put me up against Safina’s video blurb about the overfished, endangered bluefin on the show’s website. What can you do when a lauded environmental writer, one with a PhD in seabird ecology, that receives accolades and is often the go to authority on Atlantic bluefin for the New York Times, National Public Radio, high media profile journals Science and Nature (even though he’s not exactly running a research lab, is he?), lacks the ethics most of us practice when we conduct science. To claim to be an expert where you are not, to mislead the public, to falsely disparage those that don’t support your ideology, to repeatedly and falsely allude to a woman scientist being bought by fishermen, “in their pockets”, whatever works, when his ideology or views expressed in books or blogs or lectures are shown to be false. Is this what conservation leadership has become? Incidentally, another blatant attempt to disparage and mislead was accomplished by Pew and their scientists in Quicksilver, by Kenneth Brower, published in National Geographic Magazine March 2014 story on Atlantic bluefin tuna.

The quotes looks pretty familiar:

Tuna science, always politicized, has recently become much more so. As it is no longer possible for ICCAT to simply ignore scientific advice, there is now an effort to massage the science. “There are inherent uncertainties about these stock assessments,” Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, told me. “We’re seeing a mining of the areas of uncertainty to justify increases in quota.”

Industry-funded biologists propose that there might be undiscovered spawning grounds for Atlantic bluefin. It is possible, of course, but there is no real evidence for the proposition. The idea seems awfully convenient for an agenda favoring business as usual.

Wow, “awfully convenient for an agenda”, in this Nat Geo story repeating Pew’s positions and only their scientists that support it, Drs. Barbara Block and Safina. So now we have even more evidence that their representations are wrong. Jee, National Geographic Society Research and Exploration had actually funded two of my research projects. Let’s see if they print a correction.

Here we are again, Carl Safina. Yes, you’re certainly not the only enviro bully out there, not the only one wrong again, but this time, I’m calling you out. Let the ocean conservation community represented by Pew tuna campaigns and their chosen scientists see the latest, peer reviewed science finding on Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning areas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, early edition on 7 March 2016 “Discovery of a new spawning ground reveals diverse migration strategies in Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus)” by Richardson and coauthors.

Read the full opinion piece at Medium

How In Trouble Are Bluefin Tuna, Really? Controversial Study Makes Waves

March 9, 2016 — Bluefin tuna have been severely depleted by fishermen, and the fish have become a globally recognized poster child for the impacts of overfishing. Many chefs refuse to serve its rich, buttery flesh; many retailers no longer carry it; and consumers have become increasingly aware of the environmental costs associated with the bluefin fishery.

But a group of scientists is now making the case that Atlantic bluefin may be more resilient to fishing than commonly thought — and perhaps better able to rebound from the species’ depleted state. In a paper published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers suggest that fishery managers reassess the western Atlantic bluefin’s population, which could ultimately allow more of the fish to be caught.

The 10 co-authors, most of whom are scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, say they’ve all but confirmed that bluefin tuna spawn in an area of the Atlantic Ocean previously suspected but not known to be a breeding ground. Not only that; the tuna spawning in this area off the Atlantic Coast are much younger and smaller than the age and size at which it was previously believed the fish become sexually mature, according to the scientists.

This, their paper claims, would make the western Atlantic bluefin tuna “less vulnerable to overexploitation and extinction than is currently estimated.”

But the study is controversial. Several tuna researchers we spoke with warned that the results are preliminary, and it’s much too soon to use them to guide how fisheries are managed

Read the full story from NPR

Scientists Find Possible New Spawning Area for Western Atlantic Bluefin

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SeafoodNews] By Peggy Parker — March 8, 2016 — Scientists from NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries) and the University of Massachusetts Boston have found evidence of Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning activity off the northeastern United States in an area of open ocean south of New England and east of the Mid-Atlantic states called the Slope Sea.

The findings suggest that the current life-history model for western Atlantic bluefin may overestimate age-at-maturity. If so, the authors conclude that western Atlantic bluefin may be less vulnerable to fishing and other stressors than previously thought.

Prior to this research, the only known spawning grounds for Atlantic bluefin tuna were in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean Sea. The evidence for a new western Atlantic spawning ground came from a pair of Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) research cruises in the Slope Sea during the summer of 2013.

“We collected 67 larval bluefin tuna during these two cruises, and the catch rates were comparable to the number collected during the annual bluefin tuna larval survey in the Gulf of Mexico,” said David Richardson of NEFSC, lead author of this study. “Most of these larvae were small, less than 5 millimeters, and were estimated to be less than one week old. Drifting buoy data confirmed that these small larvae could not possibly have been transported into this area from the Gulf of Mexico spawning ground.”

Larvae collected during the cruises were identified as bluefin tuna through visual examination and genetic sequencing. To confirm the identification, larvae were sent to the Alaska Fisheries Science Center laboratory in Juneau, where DNA sequences verified that the larvae were Atlantic bluefin tuna.

A single bluefin tuna can spawn millions of eggs, each of which is just over a millimeter in diameter, or the size of a poppy seed. Within a couple of days these eggs hatch into larvae that are poorly developed and bear little resemblance to the adults. Larval bluefin tuna can be collected in plankton nets and identified based on their shape, pigment patterns and body structures.

High-value Atlantic bluefin tuna has a unique physiology that allows it to range from the tropics to the sub-arctic. As a highly migratory species, Atlantic bluefin tuna is assessed by the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS) of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) as distinct eastern and western stocks separated by the 45 degree west meridian (or 45 w longitude). The U.S. fishery harvest from the western Atlantic stock is managed through NOAA Fisheries’ Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan.

For many years, global overfishing on this species was prevalent, resulting in substantial population declines. Recent international cooperation in managing catches has contributed to increasing trends in the abundance of both the eastern and western management stocks. The western stock, targeted by U.S. fishermen, is harvested at levels within the range of the SCRS’ scientific advice.

This research may change the long-held assumption that bluefin tuna start spawning at age 4 in the Mediterranean Sea and age 9 in the Gulf of Mexico. Electronic tagging studies begun in the late 1990s showed that many bluefin tunad, did not visit either spawning ground during the spawning season, despite being large enough to be of spawning age. This led some to say that these larger fish were not yet spawning, and that the age-at-maturity for western Atlantic bluefin tuna was 12-16 years, rather than 9 years, as was assumed in the stock assessment.

A consistent supporter of an alternate hypothesis was Molly Lutcavage at the Large Pelagics Research Center of the University of Massachusetts Boston. She believed tuna that did not visit the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean Sea were spawning elsewhere. Her research team used electronic tagging data from the Lutcavage lab to present an alternate model of western Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning migrations.

Only the largest bluefin tuna, those over about 500 pounds, migrate to the Gulf of Mexico spawning area. After these fish exit the Gulf of Mexico, they swim through the Slope Sea rapidly, on their way to northern feeding grounds. On the other hand, smaller bluefin tuna, ranging in size from 80 to 500 pounds, generally spend more than 20 days in the Slope Sea during the spawning season, a duration consistent with spawning. Lutcavage is a co-author on the study.

“Last year, we demonstrated using endocrine measurements that bluefin tuna in the western Atlantic mature at around 5 years of age. That study, and ones before it, predicted that these smaller fish would spawn in a more northerly area closer to the summertime foraging grounds in the Gulf of Maine and Canadian waters,” Lutcavage said. “The evidence of spawning in the Slope Sea, and the analysis of the tagging data, suggests that western Atlantic bluefin tuna are partitioning spawning areas by size, and that a younger age at maturity should be used in the stock assessment.”

Researchers also found that individual tuna occupy both the Slope Sea and Mediterranean Sea in separate years, contrary to the prevailing view that individuals exhibit complete fidelity to a spawning site. Reproductive mixing between the eastern and western stocks may occur in the Slope Sea and the authors contend that population structure of bluefin tuna may be more complex than is currently thought.

“Past analyses of Atlantic bluefin tuna population structure and mixing between the western and eastern Atlantic stocks may need to be revisited because they do not account for the full spatial extent of western Atlantic spawning,” Richardson said. “So much of the science and sampling for Atlantic bluefin tuna has been built around the assumption that the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean Sea are the only spawning grounds. This new research underscores the complexity of stock structure for this species and identifies important areas for future research.”

The authors expect these findings could potentially lead to a lower estimated age-at-maturity, a critical component of the stock assessment, and could reopen consideration of the nature and level of mixing between the western and eastern Atlantic populations. This new information will be considered along with other pertinent research as part of the regular ICCAT SCRS stock assessment process.

The findings were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientific team for this study comprises researchers from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) and Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC), the Large Pelagics Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the School of Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and NOAA’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office (GARFO). The sampling for this study was supported by NOAA, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and the US Navy through interagency agreements for the Atlantic Marine Assessment Program for Protected Species (AMAPPS).

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission