Letters, Nov. 12, 2015: Anchovy population has not collapsed

Anchovy population has not collapsed

I’ve been fishing in Monterey and along the West Coast for more than 30 years and I’m one of only about eight fishermen who fish anchovy in Monterey Bay. I’m shocked at the recent outcry in the media that claims the anchovy population has collapsed!

Environmentalists who are calling for the immediate closure of our local anchovy fishery are basing their claims on a flawed study that deliberately omits data from recent years showing a huge upswing in the anchovy population.

Our sonars mark schools that are hundreds of feet thick, but our nets just skim the surface of these schools. Fishermen up and down the coast are seeing the same thing: anchovies are everywhere.

It’s time to stop pointing fingers at fishermen and get out and see what’s really going on in the ocean.

— Tom Noto, Salinas

Published: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com

NOAA Finds Arctic Ocean, Northern Pacific and Antarctic Waters Acidifying Fastest

— Posted with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM. Please do not republish without their permission. —

Copyright © 2015 Seafoodnews.com

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Alaska Dispatch] By Yereth Rosen – November 13, 2015 –

The Arctic Ocean and the northern Pacific Ocean, along with Antarctic waters, are acidifying faster than the rest of the world’s marine waters, a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-led study finds.

The study, which analyzed measurements from thousands of monitoring stations across the globe, found these bodies acidified faster as carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere combines with natural sources of carbon swept into them by marine currents and held fast by low temperatures.

Ocean acidification is the chemical transformation seawater undergoes as it absorbs and stores more carbon. The increasingly acidic water more easily dissolves the calcium carbonate from which many marine species make their shells — affecting not only commercially important shellfish, such as oysters and clams, but also smaller creatures, such as tiny pteropods, upon which marine food webs depend. That could upend entire ecosystems, harming other important species, including salmon.

The new study, published online in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, uses data from 11,431 sampling stations to evaluate aragonite saturation levels in oceans worldwide — the degree to which aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate that sea creatures use to build shells, is held in the water.

When water is saturated, it holds the maximum amount of dissolved aragonite. When it is supersaturated, it holds excess suspended aragonite. All the world’s oceans, measured down to a depth of 50 meters, are supersaturated with aragonite, according to measurements from the Global Ocean Data Analysis Project used in the study.

Still, those measurements and other large-scale programs monitoring ocean conditions, show that aragonite saturation levels have slipped globally, a troubling sign, the study’s lead author said.

“A decline in the saturation state of carbonate minerals, especially aragonite, is a good indicator of a rise in ocean acidification,” Li-Qing Jiang, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites at the University of Maryland, said in a statement issued by the agency.

The study found that at depths shallower than 100 meters, aragonite saturation levels declined by an average rate of 0.4 percent a year from the decade spanning 1989 to 1998 to the decade after then, spanning the years 1998 to 2010.

Low levels of aragonite saturation were pronounced in the North Pacific Ocean at latitudes above 50 degrees north, according to the study. At depths of 200 meters and below, all the sections measured in that part of the Pacific showed undersaturated states for aragonite, the study said. Aragonite undersaturation, a condition normally found in the very deep parts of the world’s oceans, can be a troubling sign when it occurs in shallower waters, scientists say.

The Arctic Ocean also showed lowered aragonite saturation states, though not as low as those at corresponding depths of the North Pacific. Less data was available from the Arctic Ocean, researchers noted.

In contrast, the Atlantic Ocean was found to have aragonite-supersaturated waters down to much deeper levels, thanks to a lower level of lingering carbon from decaying organisms, according to the study.

“The deepest saturation horizon and youngest water are found in the North Atlantic. The shallowest saturation horizon and oldest deep waters are found in the North Pacific. This is because older water has had more time for CO2 accumulation from organic matter remineralization,” the study said.

In the polar regions, even the surface waters — though supersaturated with aragonite — held far less of the mineral than did waters in more temperate latitudes, the study found.

The Arctic, Antarctic and North Pacific are vulnerable to acidification in part because of their cold waters, which hold in carbon dioxide, the study said. Those regions, along with some other marine areas in the world, such as a region off the coast of Africa, are more vulnerable because the pattern of ever-moving ocean currents brings in carbon-dioxide-rich waters from elsewhere in the world and causes that older water to rise up to shallower levels closer to the surface, the study said.

That’s especially the case in the fish-rich North Pacific, site of major Alaska-based commercial seafood catches, which has the distinction of being at the very end of the Global Thermohaline Circulation, the pattern sometimes called the “ocean conveyor belt,” Jiang said in an email.

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Sea Lion Surge Prompts High Tech Tracking, Hazing & Killings

On the last day of the spring salmon season on the Columbia River, sport anglers spotted competition for the fish they want to catch.

Half a dozen sea lions poked up their heads just beyond the reach of fishing lines.

Fisherman David Hylton from Redmond said, “I think we need to get them out of this system because this is not their natural habitat. They don’t live here.”

Historically, sea lions did not come up the Columbia. Lewis & Clark spotted harbor seals. Archaeologists confirm finding remains of seals but not sea lions as high up the river as Celilo Falls.

However, a growing number of sea lions have made the Columbia a frequent stopping point since the 1980s.

In 2015, sea lions set records. More than 2500 covered the docks in Astoria and surveys estimated nearly 5,000 in the lower Columbia River.

West coast populations have risen from about 180,000 in the late 1990s to nearly 300,000 in 2015.

Biologists, anglers and tribes all believe the sea lions are killing too many endangered salmon.

Government observers spend months watching the sea lions.

The official estimates predict sea lions eat from 3,00 to 5,000 salmon, though in 2015 that jumped to more than 8,000.

Doug Hatch, biologist with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission concedes they really don’t know how many salmon are eaten by sea lions.

“We know there’s a lot of sea lions in the river,” says Hatch, “but we don’t know what their predation rate is on salmon.”

Tribal biologists are experimenting with a high tech means to find out.

They have captured a handful of sea lions, glued a tracking device to their head and released them back to the river.

Hatch compares the tag to a fitness tracker people wear on their wrists. The sea lion tags measure the unique motions of a sea lion’s head, particularly when they eat.

Sea lions often thrash about, throwing their food.

It’s not play. They’re breaking the salmon up into pieces easier for them to eat.

“When they do that it’s a very unique, distinctive movement of shaking,” says Hatch. “We think we’ll be able to capture that on the accelerometer tag.”

Perhaps those tracking tags will show how many fish each sea lion eats when observers are not around to watch.

Learning how many salmon sea lions eat is more than an academic question. It directly affects how many more sea lions may be put to death in future years.

“It’s been quite controversial,” says Robin Brown, the marine mammal program leader for the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife.

Brown says if the Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to modify Bonneville Dam in a way that would kill an additional 5,000 salmon each year, “It would never be permitted. The same is true from our perspective for the California sea lion predation on threatened and endangered salmon.”

Biologists received federal permission to take more extreme measures.

CRITFC helps with the first stage. They haze the animals by firing non-lethal noise-making shells from shotguns at sea lions near Bonneville Dam. The hazing lasts several months a year.

ODFW has regularly branded thousands of sea lions for the last several decades. The brands are large enough to be read by observers.

If an individual sea lion has been exposed to non-lethal hazing and has been identified repeatedly eating salmon near the dam, that sea lion can be killed.

That infuriates Ninette Jones, an activist with the Sea Lion Defense Brigade.

Day after day, she arrives before dawn to watch and shoot video of the government’s sea lion trapping operation from the opposite side of the river.

Jones believes sea lions are scapegoats when the impact of dams kills far more fish.

“We still had a million Chinook cross this dam. With our sea lions, with all the people, I think that’s pretty amazing,” says Jones. “For land mammals (humans) to allocate all the aquatic animals food source for themselves, I find that rather greedy.”

In eight years, the government has killed 85 sea lions and transferred another 15 to zoos.

Hatch, the CRITFC biologist, says he hopes their tracking tags will improve data showing whether sea lions are responsible for a substantial impact on salmon runs.

“It’s circumstantial,” says Hatch. “You have a large population of sea lions and you have this loss of fish.  But we need a predation rate.  We need a way to link those together before we could say, without a doubt that it’s a sea lion problem.”

Recent salmon runs in the millions have set records.

But tribal and government biologists believe allowing several thousand fish each year to disappear to predators still poses too great a risk to the salmon.

“None of us like the idea of having to kill animals, remove predators,” says Brown.

ODFW says it has no plans to remove large numbers of sea lions; it will target only those individuals identified as repeatedly eating salmon near the dam.

Read the original post: http://www.opb.org/

THE ANCHOVY “COLLAPSE”: ANOTHER MANUFACTURED CRISIS

Recent sensational media accounts trumpet the collapse of the central anchovy population. Environmental extremists are now calling for emergency closure of the anchovy fishery that takes place primarily in Monterey Bay. This hysteria is based on a study, funded by these same environmentalists, that claims the population has collapsed in southern California, has declined by 99 percent and now is at extremely low levels, with virtually all the fish concentrated nearshore in Monterey Bay.

The scientific paper detailing study findings – still in peer review – is now being criticized for failing to consider the last 5 years of data, which document a big increase in recruitment for anchovy and sardine both in southern California and coast-wide. But that doesn’t stop the extremists from accusing fishermen of, in essence, taking “the last fish.”

We are responding to the outcry in the media with facts and images to illustrate the fallacy of extremist claims of anchovy “collapse.”

Fishermen are the vanguard of ocean observations. Here’s their side of the story:

Corbin Hanson fishes for coastal pelagic species (CPS), mainly in southern CA:

“I saw a large volume of anchovy show up on the southern CA coast beginning around 2011. I’ve seen lots of pinhead [small] anchovy in the Santa Barbara channel, and in 2014 Catalina Island was loaded with small anchovy. The largest volume of anchovy I’ve ever seen was running up coast from Point Conception to Monterey this summer – miles of anchovies from 30 fathoms depth to the beach. We couldn’t escape them; it was hard to see the bottom on the fathometer at times. We drove through hundreds of thousands of tons in one night this summer. Other fishermen saw the same thing I did – whales, birds, seals all gorging on anchovy.”

Richie Ashley also fishes for both live bait anchovy and other CPS in S.CA

“There has been major tonnage of anchovy in the Los Angeles / Long Beach harbor for more than a year. Almost all of it has been very small “pinhead” size. Another volume of slightly larger anchovy were in front of Newport Beach for several months. In June, Catalina was loaded with small pinhead anchovies – many thousands of tons. At the same time, we saw anchovy in the Santa Barbara channel in daytime as well, a lot of it!

Whoever said there are no anchovies in southern CA has no clue!”

Tom Noto has fished for 30 years, and fishes for anchovy in Monterey.

“Fishermen catch anchovy on the edge of Monterey Canyon. These fish like to dive deep. We see schools of anchovy that color our fathometers red from bottom to near top. Our sonars mark schools that are hundreds of feet thick, but our nets just skim the surface of these schools. Fishermen up and down the coast are seeing the same thing: anchovies are everywhere, but we only fish them in Monterey Bay.

The study is wrong and I feel our fishery is being assassinated without cause.”

Neil Guglielmo has been fishing for 57 years up and down the West Coast, and is one of about eight fishermen who fish anchovy in Monterey.

“ I’m on the water nearly every day and I’ve seen a big surge in the anchovy population in recent years. Anchovies now stretch from the “pinheads” fishermen see in Southern California all the way up the coast past Half Moon Bay, where a large group of whales was recently spotted feeding on anchovies.

Our fishery simply skims the surface of anchovy schools that often run hundreds of feet deep. The allowed anchovy harvest is limited at 25,000 tons, leaving 75 percent of the biomass in the ocean as forage. Bottom line: there are plenty of anchovies in the sea. “

To illustrate, Neil photographed his sonar during one night fishing anchovy in Monterey:

The sonar shows a school of anchovy in front of the boat – one school representing hundreds of tons of fish. Schools this dense are plentiful in Monterey Bay and along the coast from Pt. Conception to Monterey and beyond.

The fathometer on Neil Guglielmo’s fishing vessel Trionfo marked dense schools of anchovy on the bottom of the ocean across the entire mouth of San Francisco Bay, under the Golden Gate Bridge — thousands and thousands of tons of anchovy.

The Trionfo fishes for anchovy in Monterey Bay at night when the fish are near the surface. The boat is surrounded by birds, sea lions and other marine life, all eager to help themselves to the catch.

Climate change a likely culprit for declines in ocean fish

A school of fish swim near the Sujak wreck off Catalina Island. Photo by Wade McDonald

Fish populations off California’s coast have plummeted more than 70 percent in the last four decades, and scientists’ best guess is that climate change is to blame.

The precipitous decline has occurred ecosystemwide in the California current, a stretch of the Pacific that runs from the Pacific Northwest to Baja California, according to a recently published study. The decline can’t be pegged on a lone cause, such as overfishing or chemical pollutants.

There is one correlation: ever increasing ocean temperatures.

“The decline has been going on for four decades, and it hasn’t ever reversed, so it seems to us that it might be related to global climate warming,” said Tony Koslow, the lead author on the study and a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Natural variability might see fish populations fluctuate over a decade. But the decline this time around has been steady for half a century, leaving few options other than climate change.

Even as scientists examine evidence of decadeslong trends of declining fish populations, short-term threats have wracked marine ecosystems off California’s coast.

Last week, California officials warned people against eating Dungeness crabs because of a natural acid toxin that has contaminated them. An algae that produces the acid has grown exponentially because of warm ocean temperatures. The algae has made its way up the food chain and into the crabs.

Populations of certain commercially fished species also have suffered in recent years. The sardine fishery, for instance, was closed this year because estimated fish levels were below a certain threshold.

And for the past two years, increasing numbers of emaciated sea lions have been stranded on California’s shores. With warmer water, certain fish populations are lower and sea lions are seeing their food sources dwindle. Instead of sardines and anchovies, whose numbers are down, the sea lions are eating low-quality squid and rock fish.

“The food quality that’s available to the mothers, and they come back and then feed their pups, is now lower-quality food,” said Sam McClatchie, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist.

These changes largely have been attributed to a patch of warm ocean water lingering off California, called “the blob.”

But the new study, published last month in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, addressed trends that take decades to unfold, not months. And it revealed a decline that has more do with global climate change than any one particularly warm patch of ocean water.

The study combined two sets of data that hadn’t been analyzed before.

One was taken from cooling water intakes at coastal power plants that also suck in and kill some fish.

The other data came from one of the most extensive collections of fish larvae and ocean conditions in the country, compiled by the state’s California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations program. For more than 60 years, scientists have measured ocean conditions off the Central and Southern California coast.

Four times a year, boats travel 500 kilometers offshore, taking measurements of temperature, nitrate levels, dissolved oxygen and other variables, from just below the surface to 210 meters deep.

The boats also collect water samples. Those are sent to the lab, where researchers count fish larvae under a microscope and sort them by species.

Counting fish larvae is a good stand-in for counting adult fish populations: if there are lots of larvae, scientists are confident there were a lot of adult fish reproducing to create those larvae. And sampling larvae in the top 200 meters captures most larvae-producing species, since that’s where they reproduce.

That fish numbers are declining isn’t surprising. What the new study shows is how evenly numbers are dropping for fish species across the spectrum, for the whole marine ecosystem, and not only for a handful of commercially fished species.

In the recent study, larvae populations in the open ocean had declined 72 percent since 1970, while fish levels at power plant intakes dropped 78 percent.

Such consistent declines call into question many of the usual suspects for fish decline, such as overfishing, chemical pollutants and power plant water intakes, according to the researchers.

“We’re seeing this consistent pattern across species,” said Eric Miller, an author on the paper and scientist at MBC Applied Environmental Sciences, an environmental consulting firm. “It’s beyond fishing, it’s beyond pollution, it’s beyond power plant ocean intakes. It’s something in the environment itself.

“You can’t look locally to try to understand all the problems and concerns we have in the ocean. It’s something that’s going on in a much bigger, regional scale,” he added.

Only ocean temperatures correlated with fish declines. The scientists found that cold-water fish are declining the fastest, Miller said. And while warm-water fish are replacing them, they’re doing so at a slower rate than the cold water fish are disappearing.

While chemical pollution isn’t benign, it couldn’t have done such widespread damage to the ecosystem, Miller added.

Chemicals like DDT have killed many marine and other creatures. For instance, the pesticide became famous and then was subsequently banned in the U.S. because it thinned bald eagles’ egg shells, causing that bird’s population to crash in the 1960s. But the current declines in fish population can’t be explained by one chemical – nor by the power plant water intakes, which would have a very local effect on the fish population.

Population declines have been observed far from the coast, where chemicals enter the water and fish get sucked into cooling systems.

“You can’t look at any single thing and say, ‘That’s the problem.’ There’s something much more pervasive,” he said.

While heavy fishing directly reduces numbers of certain fish species in the open ocean such as sardines and anchovies it probably isn’t causing the ecosystemwide declines.

Fish that live at middle depths have suffered – and they don’t wind up in fishermen’s nets either on purpose or accidentally.

Relying on fish counts from commercial fishermen’s nets can mask population declines for fish that form large schools, according to another study Miller published several years ago.

Such fishery data calculates population based on a formula that compares the number of fish caught to how much effort is expended catching those fish.

Even as fish populations decline, fishermen are skilled enough to find them easily and still catch large numbers of them. The large catches suggest the population is robust, even as fish numbers dwindle.

For that reason, Miller and his colleagues relied on fishery-independent data in the new study.

They included open-ocean data collected by the state’s California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations program, which was created in the early 1950s to figure out why the sardine stocks collapsed.

The collapse of the sardine fishery, a major business in the 1930s, was documented in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel “Cannery Row.”

Today, the oceanic data collection program is considered the gold standard for data collection and has been used for about 600 scientific studies examining fisheries.

It was instrumental in uncovering how El Niño increases the heat content of the ocean, lowers nutrient production and wrecks certain fisheries, such as squid.

Those decades of data reveal the Pacific Ocean isn’t the same place it was half a century ago, said John McGowan, a study author and researcher at Scripps.

“The California current is changing,” he said.

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Read the original post: http://www.ocregister.com/

California’s first offshore wind farm proposed near Hearst Castle

A speedboat passes by offshore windmills in the North Sea near the village of Blavandshuk near Esbjerg, Denmark, in this Oct. 30, 2002, file photo. (Heribert Proeppe/AP)

MORRO BAY — This sleepy coastal town of 10,000 people along California’s Central Coast is known for its fishing fleet, nearby Hearst Castle and Morro Rock, a craggy 581-foot-tall monolith that dominates the views to the ocean.

But a few years from now, Morro Bay may be known for something else: a huge offshore wind farm.

In a venture that could pit the state’s commitment to green energy against its famed coastal environmental movement, a Seattle company is proposing to build the first ocean wind farm off California’s coast.

Trident Winds has filed early paperwork with Morro Bay city officials for a plan to install 100 floating turbines — each up to 636 feet tall — about 15 miles off the San Luis Obispo County shoreline. The project would generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 300,000 homes.

“It’s not oil. It’s not fossil fuel. It doesn’t spill,” said Alla Weinstein, CEO of Trident Winds. “It’s energy from the jet stream, as pure as it comes.”

California is already a national leader in wind energy on land, drawing 8 percent of its electricity from wind turbines. The state now has 1,883 wind turbines, mostly in the Tehachapi Pass area in Kern County, at Altamont Pass in Alameda County, San Gorgonio Pass in Riverside County, and in Solano County. Texas is the only state that generates more electricity from wind.

Weinstein, a native of Russia and a former Honeywell engineer, said California will increasingly need to look to the ocean, with its vast spaces where wind speeds are stronger than on land, to meet its ambitious climate change and clean-energy goals.

Last month, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law requiring the state’s utilities to provide 50 percent of their electricity from solar, wind and other renewable sources by 2030 — a key piece of the state’s strategy to reduce greenhouse gases and smog. Currently, California generates about 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, double where it was a decade ago.

To reach the landmark 50 percent goal, the state will need dozens of massive new solar arrays, wind farms and other projects.

Weinstein harbors no illusions that building huge metal towers in the ocean south of Big Sur will be easy. It will take at least six or seven years to secure permits from the federal government, the Coastal Commission and other agencies, she said. And the politics are likely to be passionate.

Some environmentalists are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

“California just set a very high goal for renewable energy, so we are going to have to see projects like this,” said Andrew Christie, director of the Sierra Club’s Santa Lucia chapter. “But whenever we do, just like with real estate, it will always be about location, location, location.”

Christie said he will be watching closely.

The Morro Bay Power Plant, photographed in Morro Bay, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 2, 2015, closed down in 2014. In a test that could pit California’s commitment to green energy against its slow-growth coastal politics, a company is proposing to build the first ocean wind farm off California’s coastline. Trident Winds has filed early paperwork with the city of Morro Bay for a plan to install 100 floating turbines — each up to 636 feet tall — about 15 miles offshore. The project would take the hulking Morro Bay Power Plant, which closed last year, and route electricity through large cables from the wind turbines into the plant, and up on the power grid. (Patrick Tehan)

“All we know right now is that it is really big, and it is going to float,” he said. “It won’t be ramming concrete pylons into the ocean floor, which is good. We’re concerned about migrating whales, night lighting and birds in general. Are the blades going to be slow enough to prevent them from becoming bird fricassee?”

Other environmentalists — whose very identities were shaped from decades of battling the oil industry over offshore drilling proposals — are already girding for a fight.

“It sounds really, really horrible. This is a fairly massive project,” said Susan Jordan, director of the California Coastal Protection Network in Santa Barbara. “California places a great deal of value on the Pacific coastline and what it looks like when you travel there. People don’t want to look out and see a floating industrial facility.”

Alla Weinstein, founder of Trident Winds, talks about her company’s plans in Morro Bay, Calif., Monday, Nov. 2, 2015. In a test that could pit California’s commitment to green energy against its slow-growth coastal politics, a company is proposing to build the first ocean wind farm off California’s coastline. Trident Winds has filed early paperwork with the city of Morro Bay for a plan to install 100 floating turbines — each up to 636 feet tall — about 15 miles offshore. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

Fishermen also are wary.

“They want an area where a lot of guys fish,” said Tom Hafer, president of the Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization. “We’re willing to work with her on it, but we have some problems with it. We have a lot of areas already taken away. I don’t know how much more we can lose. We’re worried.”

Weinstein already has begun meeting with fishermen, university officials at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and local political leaders. Her company plans a public forum in December.

In her meetings, she explains how the turbines float. One way is to mount them on triangular bases that can be chained to anchors dug into the ocean floor.

Weinstein is the former CEO of Principle Power, a Berkeley-based company that developed that floating technology and built a prototype turbine off Portugal in 2011. It continues to produce electricity and has survived 45-foot stormy seas.

Floating wind technology is still new. There are three floating turbines off the coast of Japan and one off Norway. But in a major breakthrough last week, Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company, won approval from the Scottish government to build a $236 million floating wind farm 15 miles off Peterhead in northeastern Scotland. It will have five large turbines, each 584 feet high, that are expected to begin producing electricity in 2017 for 20,000 homes.

One common question Morro Bay residents have asked: Just how big will it look?

Because of the distance and the curvature of the Earth, the farther offshore wind farms are, the smaller they appear.

“It all depends where you are,” Weinstein said. “From the beach, you won’t see it. If you are up in the hills at Hearst Castle, you’ll see it.”

The 100 turbines would be spaced about half a mile apart, covering 40,000 acres of ocean and linked together with underwater power cables. The electricity would be shipped through one power line buried in the ocean floor back to the Morro Bay Power Plant, a former PG&E facility that was shuttered in 2013 but is still connected to existing transmission lines.

Most offshore wind turbines around the world are fixed to the ocean bottom, usually with foundations held down by steel pilings to withstand huge waves and gale-force winds. Floating turbines are easier to install and less intrusive, supporters say.

In many ways, California is a world leader in clean energy. But when it comes to offshore wind production, the state and the U.S. in general are far behind other countries.

The world’s first offshore wind farm went up off Denmark’s coast in 1991. Today, an ocean wind boom is under way in Europe as countries race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

There are now 3,072 massive offshore wind turbines — many with giant rotating blades the size of a Boeing 747’s wingspan — generating clean, pollution-free electricity in 82 locations off Scotland, England, Denmark, Germany and other European countries, producing enough power for 7 million people.

“When I drove along the coast of England, I’d see these things, and I thought they were kind of cool,” said Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

“It’s almost like seeing an electric car. It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re doing something right.’ They look like the windmills you see in the Midwest.”

A recent study by the U.S. Department of Energy found that offshore wind in the United States could supply 4,150 gigawatts of electricity — four times the electricity now produced by all U.S. power plants combined.

Griggs said he understands that the Morro Bay project will be controversial. But, he said, every energy source has some impact.

“I think of myself as being very environmentally conscious,” he said. “But at some point we can’t keep burning oil and coal. Let’s build solar and wind — and minimize the impacts.”

Voluminous environmental studies will have to be done for the Morro Bay project to move forward.

Weinstein said ocean turbines have less impact on birds than land-based ones because there are fewer birds far offshore. Whales, she said, swim around them, the way they swim around large rocks. She concedes that fishing boats cannot drag nets near them, but says she’s willing to compromise on the location.

Another challenge is money. The project will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So Weinstein’s company, which was formed in July, will need major investors.

The Obama administration has been a big supporter of offshore wind turbines.

In recent years, the Department of the Interior has given $4 million grants each to seven proposed U.S. projects and identified three others — including one off Coos Bay, Oregon, that Weinstein’s former company is planning — as potential recipients of $47 million federal grants.

The Coos Bay project has run into problems, however. Its power, projected at 24 cents a kilowatt hour, cost more than the utilities in Oregon want to pay. A bill in the state Legislature to force them to buy it failed this year, slowing the plan.

Weinstein and other offshore wind industry officials note that solar power was considerably more expensive 10 years ago, but as the technology improved and more projects were built, the costs dropped significantly. They say they also expect the cost of offshore wind energy to come down in the decade ahead.

America’s first offshore wind project is under construction on the East Coast. Although critics have all but killed the famous Cape Wind project, off Cape Cod, workers this summer began installing turbines 18 miles off the coast of Rhode Island. The project, funded by the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and several banks, features five turbines 600 feet high — twice the height of the Statue of Liberty — and is expected to open in 2017.

It won accolades from environmental groups.

“I am going to remember this day and tell my kids and grandkids that I was there when the first U.S. offshore wind farm was built,” Emily Norton, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club, said at the groundbreaking in April.

“When we had a choice between bequeathing them a future powered by polluting fossil fuels that lead to extreme storms, heat waves and drought, we chose to power their future from the wind, and the sun, and smart technologies.”

Weinstein says her next step will come in 2016, when she plans to apply to the federal government for an offshore lease. She hopes to open the wind farm in 2025 and set an example for other West Coast ocean wind projects.

“Nothing is simple,” she said. “But this has great potential.”

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Read the original post: http://www.mercurynews.com/

Big Trouble Looms For California Salmon — And For Fishermen

The West Coast’s historic drought has strained many Californians — from farmers who’ve watched their lands dry up, to rural residents forced to drink and cook with bottled water. Now, thanks to a blazing hot summer and unusually warm water, things are looking pretty bad for salmon, too – and for the fishermen whose livelihoods depend on them.

Preliminary counts of juvenile winter-run Chinook are at extreme low levels. These are salmon that are born during the summer in California’s Sacramento River and begin to swim downstream in the fall.

Unusually warm water in recent months has caused high mortality for the young salmon, which are very temperature sensitive in their early life stages. Most years, about 25 percent of the eggs laid and fertilized by spawning winter-run fish survive. This summer and fall, the survival rate may be as low as 5 percent, according to Jim Smith, project leader with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Bluff office.

“That’s not good,” Smith tells The Salt.

Worse, it’s the second year in a row this has happened. Most Chinook salmon live on a three-year life cycle, which means one more year like the last two could essentially wipe out the winter run. To protect them, fishing for Chinook in the ocean may be restricted in the years ahead, when winter-run fish born in 2014 and 2015 have become big enough to bite a baited hook. The hope is that the few young fish that survived the recent warm-water die-offs will make it through adulthood and eventually return to the river to spawn.

Sacramento River winter-run Chinook are already protected by law from anglers. It’s mostly the Chinook salmon of the relatively abundant fall run — a genetically distinct strain — that wind up in the fish boxes and coolers of California’s commercial and recreational fishermen. The state’s salmon fishery has been estimated to be worth $1.4 billion, with the fish finding their way into markets and restaurants.

Chinook salmon swim in the Stanislaus River, a tributary of the San Joaquin River, in California.

Courtesy of John Hannon/USBR

 

The trouble is, winter-run and fall-run Chinook — when mingled together in the ocean — are all but impossible to tell apart by eye. In fact, many of the protected fish are almost certainly caught and killed every year.

So, when estimated numbers of winter-run fish drop too low, fishing restrictions for all ocean Chinook in certain regions along the California coast may be imposed to protect them. Peter Dygert, a biologist with the sustainable fisheries division of the National Marine Fisheries Service, says fishing regulations for 2016, including size limits and season duration, will be determined at meetings in March and April — and the recent spawning failures of winter-run Chinook will factor into the decision-making.

The water supply issues in Lake Shasta haven’t only affected the winter run. Adult fall-run Chinook are currently returning to the Sacramento River to spawn at very low levels, according to Smith. And in 2013 and 2014, meager river flows caused high juvenile mortality of this commercially important fish.

Bay Area commercial salmon fisherman Mike Hudson says the situation is unfair. “We’re all aware that fishermen haven’t caused this problem,” he says. “The way they manage water in the Central Valley has killed thousands of fish, and we might get shut down to save a few hundred.”

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is required by federal law to make sure enough cold water is available throughout the year at the bottom of Lake Shasta, a large reservoir at the north end of the Sacramento Valley. This cold water is critical for successful salmon spawning in the river below. For fertilized Chinook eggs, water temperatures in the high 50s and up can be lethal. Temperatures in the low- to mid-50s are more ideal.

However, in 2014 and 2015, the bureau failed to meet basic temperature requirements for salmon. Louis Moore, public affairs specialist with the Bureau of Reclamation, says a faulty temperature gauge deep in the lake is to blame. Inaccurate readings, he says, threw off calculations in 2015.

That resulted in too much water released from the reservoir early in the season and not enough cold water left later for the benefit of fish.

Many in the environmental community are not sold on this story.

“All of that is either negligence or incompetence,” says Jon Rosenfield, a conservation biologist with the The Bay Institute, an environmental group in San Francisco. “Why did they only have one temperature gauge? Saying the thermometer broke is like saying, ‘The dog ate my homework.’ ”

Rosenfield says the bureau chose to favor farmers over environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

Of course, many farmers have been hit hard by the drought. Growers in parts of the San Joaquin Valley have been receiving none of their usual irrigation allotments and have had to resort to heavy use of groundwater — reserves that are becoming seriously stressed.

But in parts of the Central Valley, farmers have what are called senior water rights. This means they are last in line to get cut off when shortages occur. Rosenfield says these farmers, including rice growers near where the endangered salmon spawn, experienced only minimal cutbacks in 2015.

Even though these farmers have senior rights, favoring them over endangered fish is illegal, according to Kate Poole, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water program. She tells The Salt that protecting endangered species is supposed to be prioritized over diverting flows to farmland.

John Hannon, a Bureau of Reclamation fisheries biologist, agrees that a miscalculation was made earlier in the year, leading to unfavorable conditions in the cold water supply. However, he says the problems now affecting winter-run salmon have been caused mostly by Mother Nature.

“It just didn’t rain enough,” Hannon says.

If the drought persists through this winter, Rosenfield believes fish must be provided with generous flows while California farmers, who sold a record $54 billion in crops in 2014, must take one for the team.

“Because extinction is forever, and though economic losses for farmers are painful, they aren’t forever,” Rosenfield says.

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Read the original post: http://www.npr.org/

Commercial Dungeness Crab Season Opener Delayed and Commercial Rock Crab Season Closed

November 6, 2015

The Director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) today enacted an emergency rulemaking to delay the opener of the commercial Dungeness crab season, which was scheduled to open on Nov. 15, and close the commercial rock crab fishery, which is open year round. The closure could take effect as early as today.

“Crab is an important part of California’s culture and economy, and I did not make this decision lightly,” said CDFW Director Charlton H. Bonham. “But doing everything we can to limit the risk to public health has to take precedence.”

The emergency rule prohibits commercial take and possession of Dungeness crab and all rock crab from ocean waters, including bays and estuaries, north of the Ventura/Santa Barbara county line. Closure of the fisheries will remain in effect until the Director of the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), in consultation with the Director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), determines that domoic acid levels no longer pose a significant risk to public health and recommends the fisheries be open, and the Director of CDFW provides notification to the commercial fisheries.

This decision follows a health advisory issued by CDPH on Tuesday. OEHHA followed that with a recommendation for fishery opener delays and closures. In a similar action, on Thursday, Nov. 5, the Fish and Game Commission voted to delay the recreational Dungeness crab opener and close the recreational rock crab fishery. The recreational Dungeness crab season was scheduled to start Saturday, Nov. 7.

CDFW will continue to coordinate with CDPH and OEHHA to test domoic acid levels in crab along the coast to determine when the fisheries can safely be opened. Once levels drop and the crab are safe, CDFW will coordinate with the Commission so that the season openers for Dungeness crab ensure an orderly fishery balancing recreational and commercial participation.

CDPH, in conjunction with CDFW, has been actively testing crabs since early September and results from the most recent tests showed that the health risk to humans is significant. Domoic acid is a potent neurotoxin that can accumulate in shellfish, other invertebrates and sometimes fish. It causes illness and sometimes death in a variety of birds and marine mammals that consume affected organisms. At low levels, domoic acid exposure can cause nausea, diarrhea and dizziness in humans. At higher levels, it can cause persistent short-term memory loss, seizures and can in some cases be fatal.

Domoic acid is produced from some species of the marine diatom Pseudo-nitzschia. Currently, a massive toxic bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia has developed, significantly impacting marine life along California’s coast. State scientists tested crab from nine ports from Santa Barbara to Crescent City, and determined that domoic acid levels are exceeding the state’s action level.

Algal blooms are common, but this one is particularly large and persistent. Warmer ocean water temperatures due to the El Niño event California is experiencing are likely the cause of the size and persistence of this bloom.

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Commission Delays Opener of Recreational Dungeness Crab Season and Closes Northern Part of Recreational Rock Crab Fishery

The California Fish and Game Commission today voted 3-0 in favor of an emergency rulemaking to prohibit recreational take and possession of Dungeness crab and all rock crab from ocean waters, including bays and estuaries, north of the Ventura/Santa Barbara county line. Closure of the fisheries will remain in effect until the Director of the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), in consultation with the Director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), determines that domoic acid levels no longer pose a significant risk to public health and no longer recommends the fisheries be closed.

The Commission also directed the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to maintain a list of closed ocean waters of the state and update that list on Wednesday of each week by 1 p.m. It is the responsibility of any person, prior to taking Dungeness crab, to call CDFW’s hotline at (831) 649-2883 or visit the CDFW website to obtain the current status of any ocean water.

The recreational Dungeness crab season was scheduled to start Saturday, Nov. 7.

CDPH, in conjunction with CDFW, has been actively testing crabs since early September and results from the most recent tests showed that the health risk to humans is significant. CDHP issued a health advisory on Tuesday. OEHHA followed that with a recommendation for delays and closures of the crab fisheries.CDFW will continue to coordinate with CDPH and OEHHA to test domoic acid levels in crab along the coast to determine when the fisheries can safely be opened.

Domoic acid is a potent neurotoxin that can accumulate in shellfish, other invertebrates and sometimes fish. It causes illness and sometimes death in a variety of birds and marine mammals that consume affected organisms. At low levels, domoic acid exposure can cause nausea, diarrhea and dizziness in humans. At higher levels, it can cause persistent short-term memory loss, epilepsy, and can in some cases be fatal.

Domoic acid is produced from some species of the marine diatom Pseudo-nitzschia. Currently, a massive toxic bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia has developed, significantly impacting marine life along California’s coast. Biologists tested crab from eight ports from Morro Bay to Crescent City, and determined that domoic acid levels are exceeding the State’s action level.

Algal blooms are common, but this one is particularly large and persistent. Warmer ocean water temperatures, due to the El Niño event California is experiencing, are likely behind the large size and persistence of this bloom.

Commercial fisheries are also affected by domoic acid levels. CDFW has the authority to delay or otherwise restrict commercial fisheries, and is developing an emergency rulemaking under that authority. The commercial Dungeness crab season is currently scheduled to open Nov. 15.

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Toxic Algae Confirmed in Dead Wildlife, Officials Warn Against Eating Crabs

Tests on dead or dying marine wildlife show the animals were exposed to a vast bloom of toxic algae that flourished off the West Coast this summer, federal biologists said on Tuesday.

Scientists detected domoic acid — a neurotoxin produced by marine algae and harmful to people, fish and marine life — in more than three dozen animals from Washington to California, including whales, dolphins, seabirds and seals. Several were found to have dangerous levels of the toxin, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

Meanwhile, high levels of domoic acid continue to be found in shellfish.

On Tuesday, California health officials advised people not to eat Dungeness or Rock crabs caught between the Oregon border and the southern Santa Barbara County line because tests showed dangerous levels of domoic acid.

Oregon state officials also issued an advisory Tuesday for all recreationally caught crab along the southern Oregon coast, from south of Coos Bay to California. Officials warned people to remove the viscera, or guts, before eating the crab meat.

Last month, Washington shellfish managers postponed the fall start of razor clam digging on ocean beaches and all razor clamming remains closed along the entire Oregon coast because of high level of domoic acid.

The toxic algae bloom emerged last spring and flourished during the summer amid unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures. It was the largest and most widespread ever recorded on the West Coast and shut down lucrative fisheries, according to NOAA.

Sea lions in California commonly experienced seizures, a common sign of domoic acid poisoning, during harmful algae blooms along that state’s coast.

But this was the first year that such harmful effects were documented as far north as Washington state, said Kathi Lefebvre, a research biologist with the NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

“My biggest concern is — what does the future hold?” she asked.

Domoic acid accumulates in anchovies, sardines and other small fish as well as shellfish that eat the algae. Marine mammals and fish-eating birds in turn can get sick from eating the contaminated fish. In people, it can trigger amnesic shellfish poisoning, which can cause permanent loss of short-term memory in severe cases.

Health officials stress that seafood bought in stores is still safe to eat because it is regularly tested.

Researchers said the number of animals found exposed to domoic acid may be a small fraction of those affected since many others don’t wash ashore or aren’t found.

Read the original post: http://ww2.kqed.org/