Focusing In: Collaborative Fisheries Research West

Collaborative Fisheries Research West is a program that supports and facilitates research involving fishermen, managers and scientists. Unlike other cases we have examined, this is a program dedicated to supporting one very particular kind of citizen science. In this summary we describe the approach that CFR West has taken to supporting collaborative fisheries research — the principles and practices that they instill through their program — using the same framework that we have applied to citizen science programs in previous blog posts.

The Basics
Collaborative Fisheries Research West is a not-for-profit organization that develops partnerships between fishermen, managers, and scientists for the purpose of contributing to fisheries science and management, for example: bycatch reduction, gear recovery, population structure, or seafood markets. CFR West may fund projects directly, provide project management and oversight or contribute scientific expertise to these efforts. Projects must abide by a set of ten principles (link is external), the first of which is that projects must be relevant to fisheries management. The last round of funding, supported by the California Ocean Protection Council, committed over $1.1 million to 15 projects.

Program Participation
While all of the CFR West projects involve collaborators from the fishing community, participation varies amongst individual projects. Some are instigated by fishermen: for example, conducting aerial sardine surveys to complement acoustic-trawl surveys conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Another project collects life history information on night smelt by beach fishermen in northern California. Others are driven by management needs x for example, an experiment to test the effect of trap hole diameters on the size distribution of hagfish was led by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. All, however, are required to maintain close cooperation and communication amongst all three partner types, from identifying the research questions and determining best methods through data collection to data interpretation. This is one of the highest forms of collaboration and is recognized by scholars of participation to be an effective means to integrate different worldviews towards a common goal.

Fishermen get involved with the program often because they do not see the best available science used to inform management decisions – possibly because there xs not much available science. In these cases, fishermen lend their expertise to help steward the resource in the future. Managers are motivated to work together to improve the data available for developing regulations and policy. Scientists share a similar motivation – a desire to better understand fisheries ecology in order to support the livelihoods, economy, and ecosystems that depend on fisheries, and, of course, an interest in learning how populations and ecosystems respond to recreational and commercial fishing pressure.

Meeting the Mission by Balancing Goals
CFR West has the following mission statement:
CFR West engages commercial and recreational fishermen, resource managers, tribes, nongovernmental organizations, and scientists by facilitating and supporting applied research focused on fisheries and fisheries resources and their human dimensions. Through open and collaborative partnerships, CFR West contributes to the management of sustainable marine resources, and fosters the stewardship of those resources.
Data from CFR West are used for both scientific and management applications, which helps connect science and policy. This connection bolsters the sometimes flagging trust between fishermen and managers, who can have a conversation about the data and how they are interpreted. For the fishermen, participation fosters a sense of stewardship for the resource and participants report that taking on these responsibilities can be rewarding.
The stewardship aspect of this mission, aside from producing management-relevant science, brings together a diverse group of stakeholders in research and fosters a stewardship ethic among these communities. The manner in which CFR West implements its multi-faceted mission is affected heavily by the uncertainty and nature of its funding. As a result, most projects are, by necessity, short term and the means for maintaining continued support for long term monitoring, a requirement for good fishery management, are limited at best.

Data Types Good for a Citizen Science Approach
Collaborative fisheries research is designed to utilize expertise in the fishing industry gained largely through daily experience on the water or practical experience gained on the job. There are many avenues for such integration of expertise, as demonstrated by the wide diversity of projects under the CFR West umbrella. They are mostly unified by research that includes a large amount of fieldwork, as time on the water is the best place to share and demonstrate the experiential knowledge of fishermen.

Data Uses

Scientific Uses
The scientific partners in each of these projects generally make sure that the data contributes to the appropriate body of scientific literature. A number of the projects also enroll graduate students in the work, who use the data as part of their thesis work.

Management Uses

In addition to the data from the research projects, lessons learned from the research process itself can inform management. CFR West projects must be completed or transferred to an agency within three years, and some projects serve as pilots for potentially long-term programs within management agencies.

Scientific Credibility

verification of data quality

The collaborative aspect of CFR West xs approach promotes trust-building among participants in the program, and a degree of data verification happens through reputation-building of the investigators as trustworthy brokers of information. Otherwise, the data is reviewed the same way as most other fisheries research – by undergoing review as part of the process of making management decisions through the Pacific Marine Fishery Council, the Department of Fish and Wildlife or the National Marine Fisheries Service, as well as the peer-review process of publishing in academic journals and presenting at scientific conferences. CFR West also makes an effort to disseminate project results widely to include fishing communities and the interested public in a manner that is generally accessible to the non-scientist. For example, the results of the hagfish trap experiment were presented at meetings held in key port communities from Morro Bay to Eureka. This too functions as a kind of peer review, whereby those not involved in the research process have an opportunity to consider the projects and their results and provide input to CFR West and project collaborators.

raw data transparency and access

Every project must make the data publicly available unless there xs a specific sensitivity, but the logistics of this access can be tricky. Results published in scientific journals (a common product of these projects) often reside behind paywalls, so the fishing partners often do not have access, plus raw data is not always included. In addition, fisherman participants worry about sharing spatially explicit data, which might give away lucrative fishing spots or invite legal battles with DFW enforcement.

clarity of communications

Communicating about the scientific process comes primarily in the form of participation – fishermen, scientists, and managers are all invited to spend time designing the research, collection data, or otherwise observing the research process firsthand. Similarly, post-project community presentations and outreach materials offers everyone an opportunity to learn. One of the major challenges, however, is to design these in such a way that they are accessible to all.

willingness and capability to adapt methods

CFR West is currently beginning a process of evaluating itself. The evaluation will form the basis of plans for future collaborative research as well fundraising strategies. Some of the projects will live on, as they include plans to develop a strategy for future activity. The crab gear recovery project, for example, has developed a long-range plan to convert the effort to a largely industry-funded one, including work with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to address legal issues that would otherwise interfere with the process.

Program Sustainability

Since the CFR West program focuses heavily on creating trusting relationships between fishermen, managers and scientists, it depends especially heavily on equal participation – xtrue collaboration x – through all the intellectual and economic aspects of the project. One of the challenges CFR West faces is that the funding is structured around short-term projects, while maintaining these relationships requires some standing level of base funding. Another challenge is that the nature of a traditional request for proposals, so familiar to scientists, is foreign to fishermen; ways of encouraging these fishermen to come forward with their own ideas that would benefit from collaboration should be developed.
Just like any research, collaborative fisheries research has some resource needs that are critical to success of the program. Many of these needs are specific to the research question at hand – for example, equipment and data analysis software. But there are a couple of additional resources peculiar to collaborative fisheries arrangements:

• coordinator, especially to connect potential partners.
• payment for fishing partner xs time (managers and scientists are generally salaried employees; if they are not fishing, fishermen are not earning a living)
• data management and regulating data access

Looking Toward the Future

Collaborative fisheries research is a subset of the broader citizen science community. It is one that celebrates and values the experiential expertise of fishermen. Yet, to date on the Central Coast, there are no models that blend collaborative fisheries research (with commercial fishermen) and more typical citizen science, which often focuses on long-term monitoring. Such a program might look something like fishermen recording observations while out on the water daily. Collaborative fisheries research is an evolving model, and for the long term, one that needs to collect quality data without huge injections of grant money. This can be done, but the model that demonstrates this goal does not appear to be out there yet.

For existing projects, the future holds a program evaluation. The CFR West director, Peter Nelson, says he is interested in participants x sense of what collaborative research is and if their feelings on the process changed over the course of their project. In addition, CFR West might shift its attention a bit – to be less of a grant-making institution and more of a boundary organization that helps cement relationships between the many partners in the fishing industry, management, and academic science.

Aerial sardine surveys. Photo by Kirk Lynn, CDFW

Tag and release study of Paralabrax spp. Photo by Lyall Bellquist.

Read the original post here.

This Is Your Brain on Fish

Thicker, stronger, and more resilient. Once a week is all it takes, new research says.
James Hamblin | Aug 7 2014

Alex Trautwig/Getty

Have you ever considered undergoing brain-thickening surgery, only to find that such a thing does not exist? And that the guy in the van was probably not actually a surgeon? Well, consider fish.

Dr. Cyrus Raji, a resident radiologist at UCLA, appreciates value beyond the cosmetics of a thick cerebral cortex. He’s the lead researcher in a new study in the current American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found that people who regularly eat fish have more voluminous brains than those who do not—in such a way that stands to protect them from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Understanding the effects of fish consumption on brain structure is critical for the determination of modifiable factors that can decrease the risk of cognitive deficits and dementia,” Raji and colleagues write. The team has previously shown gainful effects of physical activity and obesity on brain structure.

This study found that eating fish—baked or broiled, never fried—is associated with larger gray matter volumes in brain areas responsible for memory and cognition in healthy elderly people.

“There wasn’t one type of fish that was the best,” Raji told me by phone, probably while eating fish. “All that mattered was the method of preparation.” Fried fish had a unique dearth of benefits to the brain.

People who eat fish at least once a week have larger gray matter volumes in the red/yellow areas.

“If you eat fish just once a week, your hippocampus—the big memory and learning center—is 14 percent larger than in  people who don’t eat fish that frequently. 14 percent. That has implications for reducing Alzheimer’s risk,” Raji said. “If you have a stronger hippocampus, your risk of Alzheimer’s is going to go down.”

“In the orbital frontal cortex, which controls executive function, it’s a solid 4 percent,” Raji said. “I don’t know of any drug or supplement that’s been shown to do that.”

Speaking of supplements, the researchers initially looked to omega-3 fatty acids as the driver of these benefits. But when they looked at the levels of omega-3s in people’s blood, they didn’t correlate with better brain volumes.

“These findings suggest additional evidence that it is lifestyle factors—in this case, dietary intake of fish,” the researchers write, “and not necessarily the presumed biological factors that can affect the structural integrity of the brain.”

Omega-3 fatty acids have previously been shown to slow cognitive decline. In one study, higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in people’s blood were associated with lower rates of brain atrophy observable over just a four-year period. We also know that when rats are fed diets low in omega-3 fatty acids, they have increased signs of dementia, possibly mediated by insulin and related buildup of amyloid plaques in their tiny brains.

Eating more omega-3 fatty acids, a lot of fruit, and not much meat, has previously been associated with increased volume throughout the brain’s gray matter. Recent research in the journal Neurology found that elderly people with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had better cognitive function than those with lower levels. MRIs of their brains showed larger volumes, too. (The associations also held for vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D, and E, and folate.)

Drs. Deborah Barnes and Kristine Yaffe at UCSF recently calculated in Lancet Neurology that up to half of cases of Alzheimer’s disease “are potentially attributable” to seven modifiable risk factors: diabetes, midlife high blood pressure, midlife obesity, smoking, depression, cognitive inactivity or low educational attainment, and physical inactivity. Minimal inroads in those areas, they say, could result in millions fewer cases of Alzheimer’s.
People who ate fish once per week were just as well off as those who ate it more frequently.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine corroborate, “Our research has consistently shown that it is the interactions among these risk factors with the patho-biological cascade of Alzheimer’s disease that determine the likelihood of a clinical expression as dementia or mild cognitive impairment.”

Specific suspects in the fish-brain benefit paradigm are omega-3s docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which seem to increase the size of the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus, and possibly overall brain volume. DHA and EPA can also affect the way neural synapses fire.

“Something about fish consumption, whatever it is, is strengthening to the brain,” Raji said. “It’s also possible that we’re capturing a general lifestyle effect—that there’s something else out there we’re not measuring that’s accounting for this.”

For example, people who ate fish might also eat more tartar sauce, and it might actually be that tartar sauce was responsible here. Though that’s unlikely. The researchers did control for obesity, physical activity, education, age, gender, race, and every other variable they could think of, and fish-eating itself remained a strong predictor of gray matter volume.

Even if it is just that people of good birth and cognitive fortune are those eating fish, the number of people with dementia is projected to double every 20 years. Or, as Raji put it to me, “By the time you and I are in our 60s and we start worrying about Alzheimer’s, 80 million people in the United States are going to have it.”

As that tide approaches, it can be nice to adopt a few hard grains of habit that confer a sense of command in sealing it out. Raji and other dementia researchers note that the challenge is to implement prevention strategies in the decades prior to ages when dementia manifests, before there are any signs of brain structural or functional abnormalities. In the case of fish, this doesn’t have to be a foundational life overhaul or even a substantive acquiescence. People who ate fish once per week were just as neurologically fortified as those who ate it daily.

“Nobody wants to eat food like they’re taking medicine,” Raji said. Unless, of course, they do.

View the original post here: http://www.theatlantic.com

Farming The Bluefin Tuna, Tiger Of The Ocean, Is Not Without A Price

Dan Charles  |  July 30, 2014

Yonathan Zohar, Jorge Gomezjurado and Odi Zmora check on bluefin tuna larvae in tanks at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. (Courtesy of Yonathan Zohar)

In a windowless laboratory in downtown Baltimore, some tiny, translucent fish larvae are swimming about in glass-walled tanks.

They are infant bluefin tuna. Scientists in this laboratory are trying to grasp what they call the holy grail of aquaculture: raising this powerful fish, so prized by sushi lovers, entirely in captivity. But the effort is fraught with challenges.

When I visited, I couldn’t see the larvae at first. They look incredibly fragile and helpless, just drifting in the tanks’ water currents. But they’re already gobbling up microscopic marine animals, which in turn are living on algae.

“It’s amazing. We cannot stop looking at them! We are here around the clock and we are looking at them, because it is so beautiful,” says Yonathan Zohar, the scientist in charge of this project.

It’s beautiful to Zohar because it’s so rare. Scientists are trying to raise bluefin tuna completely in captivity in only a few places around the world. Laboratories in Japan have led the effort. This experiment, at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, is the first successful attempt in North America.

Scientists still have a long way to go to succeed. Most of the larvae have died, but hundreds have now survived for 10 days, “and we are counting every day,” says Zohar. “We want to be at 25 to 30 days. This is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the first three to four weeks.”

If they make it that far, they’ll be juvenile fish and much more sturdy. Then, they’ll mainly need lots to eat.

Fully grown, the bluefin tuna is a tiger of the ocean: powerful and voracious, its flesh in high demand for sushi all around the world.

Journalist Paul Greenberg wrote about bluefin tuna in his book Four Fish. If you’re an angler, he says, catching one is an experience you don’t forget.

“When they come onboard, it’s like raw energy coming onto the boat. Their tail will [beat] like an outboard motor, just blazing with power and energy,” he says.

The fish can grow to 1,000 pounds. They can swim up to 45 miles per hour and cross entire oceans.

They’re also valuable. Demand for tuna has grown, especially in Japan, where people sometimes pay fantastic prices for the fish.

That demand has led to overfishing, and wild populations of tuna now are declining.

That’s why scientists like Zohar are trying to invent a new way to supply the world’s demand. They’re trying to invent bluefin tuna farming.

“The vision is to have huge tanks, land-based, in a facility like what you see here, having bluefin tuna that are spawning year-round, on demand, producing millions of eggs,” he says.

Those eggs would hatch and grow into a plentiful supply of tuna.

That brings us back to these precious larvae. Before there can be aquaculture, large quantities of these larvae have to survive. Here in the laboratory, the scientists are tinkering with lots of things — the lights above the tanks, the concentration of algae and water currents — to keep the fragile larvae from sinking toward the bottom of the tank.

“They tend to go down,” explains Zohar. “They have a heavy head. They go head down and tail up. If they hit their head on the bottom they are gone. They are not going to survive.”

Enough are surviving, at the moment, that Zohar thinks they’re getting close to overcoming this obstacle, too.

But that still leaves a final hurdle. The scientists will need to figure out how to satisfy the tuna’s amazing appetite without causing even more damage to the environment.

A tuna’s natural diet consists of other fish. Lots of other fish. Right now, there are tuna “ranches” that capture young tuna in the ocean and then fatten them up in big net-pens. According to Greenberg, those ranches feed their tuna about 15 pounds of fish such as sardines or mackerel for each additional pound of tuna that can be sold to consumers. That kind of tuna production is environmentally costly.

Zohar thinks that it will be possible to reduce this ratio or even create tuna feed that doesn’t rely heavily on other fish as an ingredient.

But Greenberg says the basic fact that they eat so much makes him wonder whether tuna farming is really the right way to go. It increases the population of a predator species that demands lots of food itself.

“Why would you domesticate a tiger when you could domesticate a cow,” he asks — or, even better, a chicken, which converts just 2 pounds of vegetarian feed into a pound of meat.

If farmed tuna really can reduce the demand for tuna caught in the wild, it would be worth doing. But it might do more good, he says, to eat a little lower on the marine food chain. We could eat more mussels or sardines. It would let more tuna roam free.

Read the original story here.

Climate data from air, land, sea and ice in 2013 reflect trends of a warming planet

Increases in temperature, sea level and CO₂ observed; Southern Hemisphere warmth and Super Typhoon Haiyan among year’s most notable events

July 17, 2014

In 2013, the vast majority of worldwide climate indicators—greenhouse gases, sea levels, global temperatures, etc.—continued to reflect trends of a warmer planet, according to the indicators assessed in the State of the Climate in 2013 report, released online today by the American Meteorological Society.

Scientists from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., served as the lead editors of the report, which was compiled by 425 scientists from 57 countries around the world (highlights, visuals, full report). It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments on air, land, sea, and ice.

“These findings reinforce what scientists for decades have observed: that our planet is becoming a warmer place,” said NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D. “This report provides the foundational information we need to develop tools and services for communities, business, and nations to prepare for, and build resilience to, the impacts of climate change.”

The report uses dozens of climate indicators to track patterns, changes, and trends of the global climate system, including greenhouse gases; temperatures throughout the atmosphere, ocean, and land; cloud cover; sea level; ocean salinity; sea ice extent; and snow cover. These indicators often reflect many thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets. The report also details cases of unusual and extreme regional events, such as Super Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated portions of Southeast Asia in November 2013.

Highlights:

• Greenhouse gases continued to climb: Major greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane and nitrous oxide, continued to rise during 2013, once again reaching historic high values. Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations increased by 2.8 ppm in 2013, reaching a global average of 395.3 ppm for the year. At the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the daily concentration of CO₂ exceeded 400 ppm on May 9 for the first time since measurements began at the site in 1958. This milestone follows observational sites in the Arctic that observed this CO₂ threshold of 400 ppm in spring 2012.
• Warm temperature trends continued near the Earth’s surface: Four major independent datasets show 2013 was among the warmest years on record, ranking between second and sixth depending upon the dataset used. In the Southern Hemisphere, Australia observed its warmest year on record, while Argentina had its second warmest and New Zealand its third warmest.
• Sea surface temperatures increased: Four independent datasets indicate that the globally averaged sea surface temperature for 2013 was among the 10 warmest on record. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-neutral conditions in the eastern central Pacific Ocean and a negative Pacific decadal oscillation pattern in the North Pacific had the largest impacts on the global sea surface temperature during the year. The North Pacific was record warm for 2013.
• Sea level continued to rise: Global mean sea level continued to rise during 2013, on pace with a trend of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year over the past two decades.
• The Arctic continued to warm; sea ice extent remained low: The Arctic observed its seventh warmest year since records began in the early 20th century. Record high temperatures were measured at 20-meter depth at permafrost stations in Alaska. Arctic sea ice extent was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979. All seven lowest sea ice extents on record have occurred in the past seven years.
• Antarctic sea ice extent reached record high for second year in a row; South Pole station set record high temperature: The Antarctic maximum sea ice extent reached a record high of 7.56 million square miles on October 1. This is 0.7 percent higher than the previous record high extent of 7.51 million square miles that occurred in 2012 and 8.6 percent higher than the record low maximum sea ice extent of 6.96 million square miles that occurred in 1986. Near the end of the year, the South Pole had its highest annual temperature since records began in 1957.
• Tropical cyclones near average overall / Historic Super Typhoon: The number of tropical cyclones during 2013 was slightly above average, with a total of 94 storms, in comparison to the 1981-2010 average of 89. The North Atlantic Basin had its quietest season since 1994. However, in the Western North Pacific Basin, Super Typhoon Haiyan – the deadliest cyclone of 2013 – had the highest wind speed ever assigned to a tropical cyclone, with one-minute sustained winds estimated to be 196 miles per hour.

State of the Climate in 2013 is the 24th edition in a peer-reviewed series published annually as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The journal makes the full report openly available online.

“State of the Climate is vital to documenting the world’s climate,” said Dr. Keith Seitter, AMS Executive Director. “AMS members in all parts of the world contribute to this NOAA-led effort to give the public a detailed scientific snapshot of what’s happening in our world and builds on prior reports we’ve published.”

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our other social media channels.

Squid skin protein could improve biomedical technologies, UCI study shows

Conductivity could charge up futuristic disease treatments

Regional Fishery Management Councils call on Oceana to retract bycatch report; Cite “substantial errors, omissions”

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — June 18, 2014  — The Regional Fishery Management Council Coordination Committee, representing all eight U.S. regional Fishery Management Councils, has recommended that environmental group Oceana retract its March 2014 report on fisheries bycatch, “Wasted Catch,” that was widely reported in the press without independent verification of its allegations.

The Councils contend that “misinformation in reports like Wasted Catch undermines those productive relationships between industry, management, and NGOs that have been effective in reducing bycatch.” They are especially critical of the fact that Oceana relied heavily on only one document, the National Marine Fishery Service’s “National Bycatch Report,” and in doing so has left the report “unlikely to result in a full representation of the best available science.”

The Councils recommended that for future reports, Oceana should adopt “a standardized peer review process to ensure that reports like this accurately and objectively represent the best available science.”

The analysis by the Councils lists general issues with and critiques of the report, followed by a region-by-region analysis of errors and omissions identified by Council staffs.

The Councils conclude by acknowledging, “there are no laws requiring Oceana reports to accurately represent the best available scientific information or to undergo peer review.” But they urge that “to do so would be in the best interest of all involved parties.”

Read the full letter from the Regional Fishery Management Council Coordination Committee here

Unusual Fish Catches Off San Diego Signal Large-Scale El Niño, Researcher Says

Wednesday, June 11, 2014 | By Susan Murphy | Aired 6/11/14 on KPBS News.

Wikimedia Commons

El Niño currents and warming water are drawing semi-tropical fish, such as yellowfin, to San Diego’s coast several months earlier than usual.

One telltale sign that this year’s coming El Niño could be a big one is what’s been reeled in off San Diego’s coast.

Above-average sea surface temperatures are developing in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The weather phenomenon, called El Niño, changes the heating pattern of the atmosphere and pulls the Pacific jet stream farther south. It has the potential to play havoc on weather systems across the globe, causing heavy rain and mudslides in some areas, drought in others, and disrupting the marine food chain.

Previous strong El Niños caused above-average rainfall and coastal erosion in San Diego. In 1997-1998, the event was credited with dumping 17 inches of rain at Lindbergh Field.

“This looks really a lot like the ’97-’98 El Niño event, which was one of the biggest ones ever recorded,” said Tim Barnett, marine research physicist emeritus with Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“We’ll just have to wait and see how things develop in the summer,” he added.

Barnett said the ’97-’98 event caused a northward shift of the whole fishery population, drawing an abundance of albacore and Bluefin tuna to San Diego’s unusually warm waters.

“We’ve already started to see very unusual fish catches here,” Barnett said. “The first yellowfin tuna was caught in May — that has never happened before to anybody’s recollection.”

“And the other thing too is the first dorado Mahi Mahi — first of June,” Barnett added, “that has never happened before. They really like the warm water and you normally don’t see them here until September.”

Barnett said both catches could be signatures of a coming large-scale El Niño. He said the tropical fish get caught up in currents caused by El Niño trade winds.

“They get entrapped in the current and they just swim along happily North,” Barnett said. “Unfortunately, it’s a one-way trip for most of them, it appears.”

In 1997-98, there were a lot of strange biological goings-on, Barnett added, like yellowtail being caught off Kodiak Island in Alaska. The tropical fish usually stops much farther south at Point Conception near Santa Barbara, California.

“And nobody could identify them, it’s really funny, they had never seen a yellowtail in Kodiak Island, and they had to send the fish out to be identified.”

Barnett said it’s still too early to project this year’s El Niño strength, but the unusual fish sightings are a good early indication.

SUSAN MURPHY, Reporter

FDA and EPA Issue Updated Draft Advice for Fish Consumption

Advice encourages pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers to eat more fish that are lower in mercury

• Draft advice on fish consumption, and supplemental questions and answers about the draft advice:  Fish: What Pregnant Women and Parents Should Know

• Federal Register Notice of Availability: Advice About Eating Fish; Draft Update

• 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans

• FDA Consumer Update: New Advice: Some Women and Children Should Eat More Fish

• EPA information on wild-caught fish

• FDA Audio Clips

• EPA Audio Clips

• Read the draft advice.

• Starting Wednesday, June 11, 2014, submit comments through the Federal Register docket at FederalRegister.gov.

NOAA vessel to conduct research with Scripps, UCSD

Jun 06, 2014 | SDNEWS.COM

Fisheries survey vessel Reuben Lasker, the newest member of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research fleet, was commissioned May 2 in San Diego, tasked with conducting research cruises in the California Current, the ocean region where Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, and NOAA operate the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations program.

“NOAA will once again be prominent in San Diego Bay,” said U.S. 53rd District Rep. Susan Davis, who helped secure American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for the construction of the $75-million Lasker. “The ship brings an important legacy to our research mission and to the blue economy.”

The vessel, which will dock at the 10th Avenue Terminal, will be the first NOAA ship home-ported in San Diego since David Starr Jordan was retired in 2009 after having logged 1.5 million miles in its 44-year tenure.

The Lasker’s duties will routinely conduct research cruises in the California Current for the state fisheries investigations program with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Since 1949, the fisheries program has conducted regular cruises with the goal of managing living resources in an ocean region that supports a $250 million fishery.

The 208-foot vessel is named for the late Reuben Lasker, NOAA coastal fisheries division director, who served as an adjunct professor at Scripps. Lasker is noted in fisheries management for his advances in understanding the transition period of commercially important fish species from juveniles to adults.

San Diego Port Commissioner Bob Nelson noted that the ship brings 24 jobs and an estimated $27 million to the local economy.

The ship’s first cruise will center on a July cetacean and ecosystem survey. It will employ perhaps its most distinctive feature, an ability to operate so quietly that the vessel will be able to make close-range observations of marine life without disturbing animal behavior or compromising extremely sensitive acoustic equipment.

In related news:

As the probability of an El Niño winter increases, Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers are following the climate phenomenon as it develops off Southern California and finding that local readings closely hew to El Niño monitoring taking place at the equator.

El Niño is a phenomenon characterized by warmer sea surface water in the equatorial Eastern Pacific Ocean. It is often associated with greater rainfall on much of the U.S. West Coast and frequently enhances the encroachment of storm surges by raising regional sea levels for several months at a time. An El Niño is defined by a seasonal sea surface temperature anomaly in the eastern-central equatorial Pacific greater than 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than historical average temperature. The opposite phenomenon, La Niña, is defined as a seasonal sea surface temperature colder than the historical average.

The researchers’ data are distributed by the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS), a region of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System. SCCOOS uses the data to make model forecasts in support of U.S. national security.

View the original post: http://sdnews.com/bookmark/25253275

Intense El Nino seen likely to be developing this fall

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SCOM] – May 15, 2014 –

New NASA satellite images seem to show that El Niño conditions seem to be developing in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, data from satellites and ocean sensors indicate.  The ocean temperature profile in May 2014 appears very similar to that of 1997, when an intense El Nino cycle formed.

A natural climate cycle that brings abnormally toasty temperatures to the Pacific Ocean, El Niño occurs when winds pile up warm water in the eastern part of the equatorial Pacific, triggering changes in atmospheric circulation that affects rainfall and storm patterns around the world.

Sea-surface height can reveal if such heat is being stored in particular regions of the ocean, since water expands as it warms. Above-normal sea-surface height in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, in turn, can suggest an El Niño is developing, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

That’s what is showing up right now, as satellite images taken from the Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason 2 satellite reveal sea-surface height, averaged over a 10-day period centered on May 3, is above normal. A similar anomaly showed up during May 1997 — which coincided with one of the strongest El Niños ever experienced. That year North America saw one of its warmest and wettest winters on record; Central and South America saw immense rainstorms and flooding; and Indonesia along with parts of Asia endured severe droughts, the Earth Observatory noted.

“What we are now seeing in the tropical Pacific Ocean looks similar to conditions in early 1997,” said Eric Lindstrom, oceanography program manager at NASA headquarters, in an Earth Observatory statement. “If this continues, we could be looking at a major El Niño this fall. But there are no guarantees.”

A network of sensors in the Pacific Ocean reveals a deep pool of warm water shifting eastward, supporting the satellite data, according to the Earth Observatory.
Model predictions issued on May 8 by the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecast that the chances of an El Niño developing during the summer are more than 65 percent. “These atmospheric and oceanic conditions collectively indicate a continued evolution toward El Niño,” the alert read.

This event may be just the beginning of more intense El Niños to come, according to research detailed Jan. 19 in the journal Nature Climate Change. That study suggested the most powerful El Niño events may occur every 10 years rather than every 20 years, due to rising sea-surface temperatures overall in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Republished with permission of SeafoodNews.com

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