James Watson Archives - Saving Seafood

OREGON: Crab fishery adapts following climate shock event

March 10, 2021 — An unprecedented marine heat wave that led to a massive harmful algal bloom and a lengthy closure of the West Coast Dungeness crab fishery significantly altered the use of ocean resources across seven California crab-fishing communities.

The delayed opening of the 2015-16 crab-fishing season followed the 2014-16 North Pacific marine heat wave and subsequent algal bloom. The bloom produced high levels of the biotoxin domoic acid, which can accumulate in crabs and render them hazardous for human consumption.

That event, which is considered a “climate shock” because of its severity and impact, tested the resilience of California’s fishing communities, researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Washington, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center found.

The study is the first to examine impacts from such delays across fisheries, providing insight into the response by the affected fishing communities, said James Watson, one of the study’s co-authors and an assistant professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

Read the full story at the Newport News Times

Gloucester Times: So, be nice to your oceans

August 1, 2018 — This is why we can’t have nice things. Because we’re human and we tend, over time, to spoil most of the wondrous things we touch. You need only look at big league baseball, which, despite the historic season unfolding for the local nine, has become a soulless slog through the barren desert of analytics, home runs, strikeouts and pitching changes.

And then there are the oceans. We’ve really left our smudgy fingerprints all over them.

According to a new study that offers the most exhaustive mapping of the Earth’s ocean wilds, there is virtually no corner of the planet’s oceans that has not suffered human disruptions or the ill effects of human-created climate change.

“Nowhere is safe,” James Watson, an author on the study published in the journal, Current Biology, told The Washington Post via a video abstract of the study.

Perhaps more alarming, the study calculates that only 13 percent of the planet’s oceans could still be classified as “wilderness” because of the unceasing onslaught of humans trekking around the planet.

Read the full editorial at the Gloucester Times

Study finds tuna fishermen who fish along ocean fronts can significantly boost revenue

February 21, 2018 — CORVALLIS, Ore. – Savvy Northwest anglers have long known that when patches of warm Pacific Ocean water drift closer to shore each summer, it’s time to chase after the feisty and tasty albacore tuna.

Now a new study confirms that tuna are more likely to be found in regions of the California Current System with certain oceanographic conditions – and that commercial fishermen who work those areas more frequently bring in up to three times the revenue of other tuna anglers.

Results of the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and led by Oregon State University, were published today in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

These oceanographic conditions are more complex than simply being warmer temperatures, said James Watson, an OSU marine ecologist and lead author on the study. Their technical name is Lagrangian Coherent Structures, though scientists often refer to them as “the skeletons of the sea.”

“Essentially they are physical ocean fronts where surface waters converge,” Watson said. “If you toss two tennis balls in the water and they converge quickly, it is considered a Lagrangian Coherent Structure, or LCS.”

“What we’ve found is that the stronger the convergence, the more likely it is to attract certain things, beginning with the aggregation of phytoplankton, which in turn attracts larger organisms like tuna – and, ultimately, tuna fishermen.”

The researchers sought to discover whether anglers were utilizing these LCSs and if so, whether it had an economic impact. They compiled data from a vessel monitoring system on the location of more than 1,000 fishing vessels every hour in the U.S. California Current Large Marine Ecosystem for a four-year period – a total of more than 340,000 trips. They then collected fisheries catch and price data.

Read the full story at KVAL