INNOVATIVE LAB GAUGES ACIDIFICATION EFFECTS ON MARINE SNAILS

Michael Maher working at the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center Mukilteo field station with Mobile Ocean Acidification Treatment Systems (MOATS). Credit: NOAA NWFSC

Carbon dioxide scrubbers like those that clean the air in space stations.

Precision monitors and instruments.

Industrial parts used in wastewater treatment.

Michael Maher’s job was to assemble the pieces into one of the most sophisticated ocean acidification simulation systems yet developed. Ocean acidification is the decrease in ocean pH due to its absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – carbon dioxide forms an acid when it dissolves in water.

“You have tools available – they may not be designed for this purpose but you can try to make them all work together,” said Maher, a research biologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. “There wasn’t a blueprint or a kit you could order because nobody had really been trying to do this kind of thing before.”

The system that Maher and the ocean acidification research team built in the Science Center’s parking lot has provided new insight into the impacts of future ocean conditions on marine species. Researchers used it to examine what happens to small marine snails from Puget Sound when exposed to both current ocean conditions and the acidified conditions expected in the future. The research is described in a new paper in the online journal PLOS ONE reporting that current West Coast ocean waters are acidified enough to dissolve the shells of the snails, called pteropods.

The finding is not a surprise: Another NOAA-led team reported in April that shells of pteropods in near-shore habitat on the West Coast show signs of dissolution due to acidified waters. What is important about the new research is that it measured the extent of shell damage at escalating carbon dioxide concentrations, each translating to a different degree of acidification, in a controlled laboratory environment said Shallin Busch, a NOAA research ecologist.

The findings are a first step toward using the pteropod species examined in the study as a living barometer or indicator of ocean acidification along the West Coast.

“Our findings are a piece of the puzzle,” said Busch, the lead author of the new paper. “Now we know, yes, pteropods from the North Pacific are sensitive to ocean acidification. Now that we have confirmed their sensitivity, we need to look more closely at how pteropods are responding to current ocean conditions and what may happen in the future as carbon dioxide increases.”

Pteropods provide important nutrition for whales, seabirds and fish such as herring, salmon and mackerel, so changes in their populations could rattle through the marine food chain. Carbon emissions during the industrial era have lowered the average global ocean pH from 8.2 to 8.1, turning oceans slightly more acidic. West Coast waters are naturally acidified compared to other parts of the ocean so they may affect marine life such as pteropods sooner than acidifying waters elsewhere in the world.

The research also demonstrated the capacity of the NWFSC’s ocean acidification system to hold marine life at different carbon dioxide concentrations for extended periods. The system can control temperatures, oxygen levels and light for even more precise management of conditions during experiments.

“They are all dependent on each other – if you change the temperature, the pH will change,” Maher said. The system that carefully manages all the variables is “ a combination of machines and precisions instruments.”

The comprehensive controls allow researchers to isolate acidification as the cause of the shell damage, ruling out other factors that might otherwise be at play in a natural environment.

“There are not a lot of cases where we can definitively say, ‘This change is the result of acidification,’” said research ecologist Paul McElhany, Busch’s colleague at NWFSC. “It’s very hard to disentangle unless you know that’s the only thing changing. Experiments like this provide evidence about the effects of acidification alone.”

Busch said each member of the research team – Maher, McElhany and NOAA Hollings Scholar Patricia Thibodeau – brought individual skills to the research. The team has also developed a smaller and transportable version called a Mobile Ocean Acidification Treatment System, or MOATS that could be carried in the field or aboard research ships.

Thibodeau joined the research team for the summer of 2012 after her junior year at Bowdoin College in Maine. One of her initial tasks was to collect pteropods from Puget Sound by boat at night to stock the experimental system. Pteropods ascend in the water column at night to feed. The vertical movement naturally exposes them to varying carbon dioxide concentrations, which the ocean acidification system can simulate.

Later Thibodeau helped examine the shells of pteropods exposed to different concentrations of carbon dioxide. As with most science experiments where objectivity is paramount, she did not know which ones had been exposed to which concentrations when she rated the extent of damage to each shell.

“Sometimes biology can be so unpredictable, but this had such a clear outcome and relationship, it was very interesting to be a part of,” said Thibodeau, who just began work on her PhD at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “There is definitely a human component to the issue because so many of us eat oysters and clams and other species affected by ocean acidification. So what we know and what we do really makes a difference.”

NOAA Hollings Scholar, Patricia Thibodeau collects seawater from Puget Sound for chemistry measurement. Credit: NOAA NWFSC

Read original post at: http://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/WhatsNew.aspx

Monterey Bay – Squid Fishing – Thank You

Source: Monterey Harbor Update September 2014 –

The 2014 squid catch was an event of a life time! This years squid catch challenged the memory of local fisherman elders. They had a difficult time remembering a better year for the squid fishery going back to the 1960’s. This year more than 1500 jobs were created for local companies during this season. This years catch and subsequent use of the pumping and landing facilities along with the associated track trailers challenged the users of the commercial wharf with parking, transportation, and access. The businesses, fisherman, boaters, and the public worked within a defined amount of space. The limitations of commercial wharf II was challenged to try and be all things to all users on wharf II this year. We wanted to let you know how much we appreciate the wharf II users being patient throughout this busy 2014 season.

Thank you.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=O_F4KiMMpik

Pacific Ocean acidity dissolving shells of key species

Pacific Ocean acidity dissolving shells of key species: New research from NOAA sounding alarm bells about climate change

By Paul Rogers/San Jose Mercury News and Will Houston/The Times-Standard

In a troubling new discovery, scientists studying ocean waters off California, Oregon and Washington have found the first evidence that increasing acidity in the ocean is dissolving the shells of a key species of tiny sea creature at the base of the food chain.

The animals, a type of free-floating marine snail known as pteropods, are an important food source for salmon, herring, mackerel and other fish in the Pacific Ocean. Those fish are eaten not only by millions of people every year, but also by a wide variety of other sea creatures, from whales to dolphins to sea lions.

Humboldt State University Oceanography Department Head Jeffrey Abell has conducted several studies on ocean acidification off the coast of Trinidad, most recently in 2010. Abell said that deeper ocean waters are usually more acidic due to bacteria digesting dead organism matter, called detritus, which floats to the ocean floors. This digestion releases carbon dioxide, which reacts with water and causes the ocean to increase in acidity. Abell said Humboldt County’s shoreline is more prone to upwelling events in the late spring, which brings this deep, more acidic water to the surface.

“We don’t see a consistent exposure to acidic waters,” he said. “What we see is in the order of a few times to a dozen times a year during which the organisms, like pteropods, will be exposed to this corrosive water.”

Abell said Trinidad experienced about five of these events in 2007 — lasting no longer than a few days — but that number tripled to 15 episodes in 2010 that sometimes lasted over a week.

If the trend continues, climate change scientists say, it will imperil the ocean environment.

“These are alarm bells,” said Nina Bednarsek, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle who helped lead the research. “This study makes us understand that we have made an impact on the ocean environment to the extent where we can actually see the shells dissolving right now.”

Scientists from NOAA and Oregon State University found that in waters near the West Coast shoreline, 53 percent of the tiny floating snails had shells that were severely dissolving — double the estimate from 200 years ago.

Until now, the impact on marine species from increasing ocean acidity because of climate change has been something that was tested in tanks in labs, but which was not considered an immediate concern like forest fires and droughts.

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a scientific journal based in England, changes that.

“The pteropods are like the canary in the coal mine. If this is affecting them, it is affecting everything in the ocean at some level,” said one of the nation’s top marine biologists, Steve Palumbi, director of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.

The vast majority of the world’s scientists — including those at NOAA, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Meteorological Organization — say the Earth’s temperature is rising because of humans burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. That burning pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and traps heat, similar to a greenhouse. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere have increased 25 percent since 1960 and are now at the highest levels in at least 800,000 years, according to measurements of air bubbles taken in ancient ice and other methods.

Many of the impacts are already being felt. Since the 1880s, when modern temperature records were first taken, the 10 hottest years have all occurred since 1998. Polar ice has melted, forest fires are burning in the West with increasing frequency, and the ocean has risen 8 inches since 1900 at the Golden Gate Bridge.

But what many people do not realize is that nearly a third of carbon dioxide emitted by humans is dissolved in the oceans. Some of that forms carbonic acid, which makes the ocean more corrosive.

Over the past 200 years, the ocean’s acidity has risen by roughly 30 percent. At the present rate, it is on track to rise by 70 percent by 2050 from preindustrial levels.

More acidic water can harm oysters, clams, corals and other species that have calcium carbonate shells. Generally speaking, increasing the acidity by 50 percent from current levels is enough to kill some marine species, tests in labs have shown.

Coastal Seafoods manager Greg Dale said Humboldt County’s oyster industry has actually thrived over the last two years, but rising ocean acidity is “something we watch carefully.”

“If this keeps going, and it means shutting ocean productivity, that’s when things get scary,” Dale said. “The ocean changes every year, but if you change the (acidity), you will lose a great deal.”

Abell said the current ocean acidification levels are not enough to harm the shells of oysters or abalone, which are made of calcite, but are enough to dissolve the shells of pteropods, which are made of aragonite.

“Pteropods are the most sensitive of this process; they’ll be kind of like an early warning system,” Abell said. “The present school of thought is that 50 years from now is when we’ll have to worry about the more sturdy shellfish, such as abalone.”

The new research on the marine snails does not show that increasingly acidic water is killing all of them, particularly older snails. But it is causing their shells to dissolve, which can make them more vulnerable to disease, slow their ability to evade predators and reduce their reproductive rates, the researchers said.

Some of the corrosive water near the shore could be a result of other types of pollution, such as runoff from fertilizer and sewage, said Stanford’s Palumbi, who was not involved in the NOAA research. But because the study found rates of the snails’ shells dissolving in deep water, far from the shore, human-caused carbon dioxide is the prime suspect, he added.

If people reduce emissions of fossil fuels, cutting carbon dioxide levels in the decades ahead, the damage to the oceans can still be limited, he said.

“But if we keep on the emissions profile we have now, by 2100 the oceans will be so harmed it’s hard to imagine them coming back from that in anything less than thousands of years,” Palumbi said.

“We are in a century of choice,” he said. “We can choose the way we want it to go.”

View original post here.

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.

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D.B. Pleschner: California’s ports, fishermen rely on healthy wetfish fisheries

Despite gloomy predictions of El Niño and the broader impact of climate change on the ocean and planet, California’s historic wetfish fisheries carry on — still the foundation of California’s fishing economy.

More than 150 years ago, Chinese fishermen rowed Monterey Bay at night in sampans, with baskets of burning fat pine on the bow used as torches to attract market squid, which fishermen harvested with round-haul nets.

This was the modest beginning of California’s “wetfish” industry. The immigrant Asian, Italian, Slavic and other nationalities of fishermen who came to America introduced new fishing methods. Around the turn of the 20th century, Sicilian immigrants to Monterey brought their lampara nets, another type of round-haul net, and launched what would become the largest fishery in the western hemisphere — California’s famed sardine industry, popularized in our collective conscience by John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.”

It was the plentiful schools of fish — especially sardines that stretch from the Gulf of California to Alaska — that provided opportunity for generations of enterprising fishing families to prosper. The complex of fisheries that makes up California’s wetfish industry, including mackerel and anchovy as well as squid and sardines, helped to build the ports of Monterey and San Pedro, as well as San Diego and San Francisco. Wetfish, now called coastal pelagic species (CPS), have contributed the lion’s share of California’s commercial catch since before the turn of the 20th century.

Even back then fishermen recognized that a sustainable fishery was good for both fisherman and fish. That’s why over the decades fishing interests have supported marine protections based on sound science and have contributed significantly to cooperative research. That tradition continues today.

In fact, today coastal pelagic fisheries in California like squid and sardines are managed with strict quotas as well as numerous time and area closures, including a statewide network of no-take marine reserves. Fishermen are allowed to harvest only a small percentage of the overall fish population. Current regulations require that at least 75 percent of CPS finfish must stay in the ocean to ensure a resilient core biomass, and the sardine protection rate is even higher at about 90 percent.

In addition, squid fishing is closed on weekends (squid live less than a year and die after spawning). And about 30 percent of squid spawning grounds are also closed in reserves.

What’s more, to preserve the quality of the catch, fishermen typically fish day trips near the ports. This makes California’s CPS fisheries among the most efficient and “greenest” fisheries on the planet with one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world. For example, wetfish fisheries can produce 2,000 pounds of protein for only six gallons of diesel fuel. This highlights the importance of California wetfish to California.

Beyond history, culture and sustainability, California’s CPS fisheries contribute essential revenue into local port communities. Wetfish fisheries are an important part of California’s fishing economy and squid is California’s most valuable fishery. Statewide, these fisheries represent more than 80 percent of all landings and close to 40 percent of dockside value of all fisheries in the Golden State!

download/view PDF infographic

[www.californiawetfish.org/CPS_infographic.pdf]

D.B. Pleschner is executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit created to promote sustainable wetfish resources.

Read the original post: MontereyHerald.com

Lucrative crab industry in danger

Lucrative crab industry in danger | Sea Change: Ocean acidification | The Seattle Times

DUTCH HARBOR, Alaska — For decades, the crab piled up in fishing boats like gold coins hauled from a rich and fertile sea.

But the very ocean that nursed these creatures may prove to be this industry’s undoing.

New research earlier this year shows that Bristol Bay red king crab — the supersized monster that has come to symbolize the fortunes of Alaska’s crab fleet — could fall victim to the changing chemistry of the oceans.

Barring a hasty reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions — or evidence that the creatures could acclimate to changing sea conditions — a team of scientists fears Alaska’s $100 million red king crab fishery could crash in decades to come.

That grim possibility also raises alarm about the crab fleet’s other major moneymaker, snow crab.

“With red king crab, it’s all doom and gloom,” said Robert Foy, who oversaw the crab research for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Kodiak, Alaska. “With snow crab, there’s so little known we just can’t say. But we don’t see anything from our experience that’s good for any of these crab. Some is just not as bad as others.”

Said Mark Gleason, director of the Seattle-based industry trade group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, “From my perspective, the chemistry is pretty clear-cut.”

For decades, these storied crustaceans have drawn men and women from Seattle to the far reaches of the North Pacific. There, adventurers wrestled 800-pound steel cages amid raging seas and aprons of pack ice, hoping to strike it rich on a bounty of flaky meat and accordion legs.

The emerging issues with Alaska’s crab underscore a predicament that stretches beyond the North Pacific. It gets to the difficulty of trying to comprehend the depth of fallout from ocean acidification.

For reasons scientists don’t always understand, similar species, even those living side by side, often respond to changing water chemistry in remarkably different ways.

“The real issue here is unpredictability,” said Richard Aronson, a Florida-based marine scientist who has tracked king crab in Antarctica. “There are all these unanticipated collateral impacts. The problem is, most of them are nasty surprises.”

‘We’re scared to death’

Certainly the threat to king crab was unexpected.

As humans pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a quarter of it gets absorbed by the seas. That lowers the water’s pH and alters the availability of carbonate ions, which crab rely on to build their exoskeletons.

Many crab species appear hardy in the face of souring seas, or at least not so frail. Exceedingly corrosive waters actually pump up Maryland blue crab to three times their size and turn them into voracious predators. Sour waters kill Dungeness crab, but far less often than Alaska red king crab.

When Foy and his colleagues exposed baby red king crab to CO₂ levels expected by midcentury, the young died more than twice as often as crab raised in normal water. When researchers boosted CO₂ to levels expected decades later, red king crab died in far larger numbers.

“The overall survival at the larval and juvenile stage is extremely low,” Foy said. “It decreases to a point that is likely to affect the population of the crab.”

Such a loss would exact quite a toll.

“You say king crab, and most people associate that with Alaska,” said longtime crab-boat captain Kale Garcia, who lives outside Kent. “So, for it to go away, that’s a huge part of the identity for Alaska. I think it’d be devastating. I know it’d be devastating for me.”

Red king crab is the showboat of the Northwest’s billion-dollar fishing industry. It is a television sensation and a marketer’s dream, its image emblazoned on bumper stickers, mugs, caps and T-shirts throughout the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

It is even a tourist attraction: Cruise-ship passengers stopping in Ketchikan pay $159 for a half-day ride to watch crews haul marine life aboard a 107-foot crab boat that appeared on Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch.”

Alaska’s commercial crabbers also catch small loads of golden king crab and Tanner crab, but the real cash comes from just two species — red king crab and snow crab. The 54 million pounds of snow crab caught in 2011 brought the fleet $115 million dockside. But a mere 14.8 million pounds of red king crab brought nearly as much — $92.5 million. And it can fetch $39.99 a pound at Pike Place Market.

Crabbing attracts tough adrenaline junkies who disappear for weeks into the storm-buffeted frontier of the Bering Sea. They lounge in cramped quarters watching bad movies and wait for crab to fill their cages. Then workers scramble day or night on icy decks through stomach-churning swells, amped on coffee and nicotine.

“A lot of people that are involved in the industry, it’s something they’ve been in forever,” Garcia said. “People like that don’t plan an exit strategy out of the fishery. There is no exit strategy. They’re like ‘This is what we do. We fish.’ ”

NOAA researchers are using Bob Foy’s research to develop models and a timeline that charts the potential collapse of king crab. But things are changing quickly.

“Bob reared those crabs under conditions that we thought were some time off in the future,” said Jeremy Mathis, a NOAA oceanographer who specializes in Alaska and the Arctic. “And what we actually found is that in certain times of the year, the conditions near the bottom in the Bering Sea were actually worse than the conditions that Bob was raising his crabs under.”

There’s no evidence that souring seas have yet altered wild populations — the most corrosive seas now occur at times when red king crab aren’t as susceptible. But Alaska’s crab industry has followed the science closely.

“All of us in the fishing industry are looking at each other and going ‘This sucks,’ ” said Ed Poulsen, former science adviser to the crab industry group. “I can tell you right now I’m doing all I can to get into other fisheries. I’m diversifying. With these changes in the environment, I think things are probably not going to get better.”

Still, Jim Stone, of Lakewood, Pierce County, co-owner of the Bering Sea crab boat Arctic Hunter, is trying to remain optimistic.

“We’re scared to death,” Stone said. “But we’ve heard a lot of horror stories before.”

Adaptation possible, but uncertain

The research comes with plenty of caveats. No laboratory setting can ever properly approximate what happens in nature. Scientists are still conducting genetic tests to see if king crab might have the ability to adapt.

“It’s not unreasonable to assume, for example, that they might move, that some form of rapid evolution will occur, that they may become somewhat more robust,” said Andre Punt, a University of Washington professor who worked on the research and assesses crab for fishing regulators.

But the situation also might be worse than first thought. Souring seas could hit crab at several additional stages of development or attack their food.

“They could be impacted in other parts of the water column,” Punt said. “The prey that they’re eating could be impacted.”

Ocean acidification is also not the only marine-world change under way. Warming seas, also caused by carbon emissions, could compound crab’s troubles.

“Anytime you’re working with an organism at the edge of its threshold and you add another stressor, that’s going to be an issue,” Foy said. “When you’re working in the subarctic environment like we are in the Bering Sea, these animals are always living at the edge of their tolerance in one season or another.”

And while king crab’s future has everyone scrambling, the future for snow crab, which brings in more money, could be equally disconcerting.

No two crab species react same way

No two Alaskan crab species have responded to CO₂ exactly the same way. They seem to react differently depending on where they live at certain stages of their lives.

Golden king crab, for example, live extremely deep, below 1,000 feet, where waters already are naturally rich in CO₂. That appeared to make them highly tolerant of sea-chemistry changes.

Meanwhile, baby Tanner crab exposed to high CO₂ died at a higher rate than normal — but nowhere near as often as king crab. Foy suspects that’s because young Tanner crab live in water that already experiences vast swings in pH, depending on tides, time of day and photosynthesis.

Tanner crab probably are used to more variations than king crab, which remain on the outer continental shelf.

While snow crab are genetically similar to Tanner crab, their young spend more time at moderate depths.

But with snow crab, scientists have struggled to perform extensive tests. The animals are just too hard to keep alive in the lab.

It’s also hard to know how Foy’s results will translate to other species in other waters.

A related king crab species has recently been seen by the millions in Antarctica, where it is devouring shellfish and starfish. Scientists are debating whether or not the crab is native.

Will more acidic conditions kill these creatures or drive them out? Since they often occupy far deeper water, does that mean they instead might thrive?

“There’s a lot of ifs, ifs, ifs,” said Aronson, who documented Antarctica’s crabs during a cruise in 2010. “I’ve found that the number of times the surprise with carbon-dioxide emissions has been undesirable far outweighs the times it’s been desirable.”

The weird purgatory for these signature creatures unnerved Brett Robinson, who captains Stone’s Arctic Hunter.

“It’s scary as hell, if something doesn’t get figured out,” Robinson said. “I don’t know.”

“I guess you won’t have to fish for them” in the future, he added. “They’ll figure out how to grow these things in an aquarium or something.”

Hatchery may be part of future

Scientists in Seward, a thousand miles from the fishing grounds, are working toward just that.

For years, a shellfish hatchery has been learning how to raise baby king crab from scratch. The program started as an experiment to see if baby crab could be transplanted near Kodiak Island, where massive crab populations crashed in the 1970s and 1980s. But the rising threat from acidification has insiders closely watching their work.

Crab are most susceptible to corroding seas as babies, when a mere fraction of young survive even in perfect conditions. At the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery, survival can be 500 times higher.

Still, no one expects this operation could ever replace wild king crab. The orders of magnitude required to get enough crab to populate the Bering Sea would be ridiculous.

But perfecting the science could provide options, such as the ability to repopulate a few previously devastated areas.

“We’re hoping that it never gets to the point that they rely on the hatchery for that kind of work,” hatchery manager Jeff Hetrick said. “If we get to that point I think we’re in trouble. But it is a possibility.”

The idea that crab might be partially grown in a lab instead of the ocean frustrated Mizrain Rodriguez, another Arctic Hunter crewman. But it also saddened him to think that humans could be doing such damage to the sea.

“Every single animal on this planet lives in balance with its surroundings except us,” Rodriguez said. “We see it. We understand it. But we don’t want to do anything about it. It seems like we are on this destructive path.”

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Fishing Fleets Search for Squid Off Santa Barbara Shores

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A brightly lit commercial fishing vessel hunting for squid sits just offshore from Santa Barbara on a recent night. (Mike Eliason/Noozhawk photo)

Market squid are spawning in more places than normal, including in local waters

Bright lights seen off the shores of Santa Barbara signify the return of squid-fishing fleets locally, a common occurrence in recent years but still a bit unusual, experts say.

Santa Barbara isn’t typically a popular squid-spawning locale. But cooler surface temperatures in nutrient-rich Pacific Ocean waters the past four years have caused smaller California market squid to spawn like crazy everywhere, according to Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of California Wetfish Producers Association.

A market squid usually grows to eight inches long with its eight legs and two feeding tentacles— sometimes up to a foot — and lives about nine months, she said.

The animals are one of the smallest of all 300-plus species of squid, and die after laying eggs in sandy, shallow water, which is where fishermen come in.

Most squid are caught with help from light boats, which shine bright lights at the water to attract the animals to the surface. When they do, fishing boats catch the squid in nets and share about 20 percent of profits with their helpers, Pleschner-Steele said.

She said squid-fishing season lasts nearly year-round, from April 1 through March 1, but closes whenever fishermen reach the statewide cap of 118,000 tons — a rarity.

Boats usually follow squid from one spawning ground to the next, starting in Monterey and then heading south, sometimes netting near the northern Channel Islands and Ventura.

Pleschner-Steele, who lives in Buellton, said La Niña effects have spurred squid to spawn near Santa Barbara and Carpinteria for unknown reasons, and fishermen hit the state’s tonnage quota in 2010.

Most squid are caught with help from light boats, which shine bright lights at the water to attract the animals to the surface. (Mike Eliason / Noozhawk photo)

“Squids are a fascinating animal,” Pleschner-Steele said. “We are learning more about them, and we’re learning how much we don’t know about them.”

The California Wetfish Producers Association was founded in 2004 to promote sustainable fishing and to foster collaborative research with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The nonprofit also governs other so-called “wetfish,” such as sardines, mackerel, anchovies and coastal tuna.

Although the squid fishery is the state’s largest in terms of volume and revenue, Pleschner-Steele said fishermen haven’t seen such solid production since the last La Niña effects in the late 1990s.

The boom is likely nearing its end, however, she said.

“We’ve just had four banner squid seasons,” she said. “The conditions were so ripe in so many places. These are small little animals but they are sure tasty.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.

Squid Fishermen Find Massive Schools Near Santa Barbara Shores

Paul Greenberg misses the boat in his push for local California squid; fails to understand market

More Big Whales in Ocean Could Mean More Fish, Scientists Find

New study reveals how scientists and fisheries managers underestimated the massive mammals.

The return of large whales—such as sperm (pictured), blue, right, and gray—could help ocean fish populations recover.

Photograph by Stephen Frink, Corbis

Brian Clark Howard
National Geographic
Published July 10, 2014

Scientists and fisheries managers have long underestimated the valuable role large whales play in healthy ocean ecosystems, a new study suggests. And, scientists add, those commercial fishermen who complain that whales steal fish from their nets have it wrong.

An increase in the number of large whales—like blue, sperm, right, and gray—around the world could lead to a healthier ocean and more fish, a team of scientists report in a review study published this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The underestimation occurred because “when oceanographic studies were started, large whales were largely absent from the ecosystem—because we had killed most of them,” says the study’s lead author, Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

Large whales were heavily hunted until the 1970s. At that point an estimated 66 to 90 percent of the animals had been removed from ocean waters.

But since then, great whales have been slowly recovering. There are now more than a million sperm whales, and tens of thousands of gray whales.

Yet blue whales—the largest animal ever known to have lived on the planet—have been slower to rebound. In fact, they remain at about one percent of their historic range in the Southern Hemisphere. Roman says scientists think their absence may have altered the ecosystem in a way that made it harder for all life to survive there.

In recent years, as whale numbers have increased and technology has advanced—especially the ability to tag and track seafaring animals—we’ve begun to gain a better understanding of how important cetaceans are, says Roman.

“Whale Pumps and Conveyor Belts”

The scientists report that when whales feed, often at great depths, and then return to the surface to breathe, they mix up the water column. That spreads nutrients and microorganisms through different marine zones, which can lead to feeding bonanzas for other creatures. And the materials in whale urine and excrement, especially iron and nitrogen, serve as effective fertilizers for plankton.

Many great whales migrate long distances to mate, during which time they bring those nutrients with them. When they breed in far latitudes, they make important nutrient contributions to waters that are often poor in resources. Even their placentas can be rich sources of feedstocks for other organisms, says Roman, who calls whale migration a “conveyor belt” of nutrients around the ocean.

Whale deaths can be helpful too. When one of the massive mammals dies, its body sinks to the sea bottom, where it nourishes unique ecosystems of scavengers, from hagfishes to crabs to worms. Dozens of those scavenger species are found nowhere else, says Roman.

“Because [humans] took out so many whales, there were probably extinctions in the deep sea before we knew those [scavenger] species existed,” says Roman, who adds that he’s working on a new study to estimate how many of those scavenger species were lost.

Maddalena Bearzi, a marine biologist and president of the California-based Ocean Conservation Society who was not affiliated with the study, calls the paper “a great and interesting piece” that could help us better understand the role marine mammals play in the ocean ecosystem.

Fishers vs. Whales

For decades some commercial fishermen have complained that whales eat the fish that they’re trying to catch. Japan’s government has been particularly vocal, going as far as to say that whaling is necessary because “whales are threatening our fisheries.” (See “Japan’s Commercial Whaling Efforts Should Resume, Says Prime Minister.”)

Masayuki Komatsu, one of Japan’s international whaling negotiators, famously told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2001 that “there are too many” minke whales, calling them “the cockroach of the ocean.”

Roman disagrees.

“It’s far more complicated than that,” he says, referring to the whale pump and the conveyor belt. “Our new review points to several studies that show you have more fish in an ecosystem by having these large predators there.”

The next step, he says, is to conduct more field studies on those processes. That could help scientists better understand exactly how plankton and other organisms respond to the presence of whales.

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