California Wetfish Producers Association Recognizes Ocean Week With Video on the Latest in Sardine, Anchovy Science

BUELLTON, Ca. — June 6, 2019 — This week, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) is convening Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington, D.C. Additionally, President Trump has declared the month of June “National Ocean Month” in recognition of the importance of the ocean to the economy, national security, and environment of the United States.

For the duration of Ocean Week, Saving Seafood will share materials related to the sustainable and economically vital U.S. commercial fishing and seafood industries, including information tied directly to events being organized as part of the NMSF conference.

The following was released by the California Wetfish Producers Association:

In recent years, fisheries managers have made devastating cuts to California’s sardine and anchovy fisheries based on reports that populations of the two species have sharply declined. However, the California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA) is marking Ocean Week 2019 with a video documenting new research that shows increasing populations of both species in nearshore waters.

The CWPA has been working in cooperation with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Southwest Fisheries Science Center to develop sampling methods to assess sardine and anchovy in nearshore waters missed by NOAA’s acoustic trawl surveys. This research shows that both species are abundant in nearshore waters not surveyed by NOAA – in fact, approximately 70 percent of California coastal pelagic species landings are harvested in waters not surveyed in federal stock assessments.

More accurate biomass estimates and stock assessments for coastal pelagic species will benefit sustainable harvest policies, the fishermen and seafood processors who produce these species, and fishing communities and seafood consumers who rely on them.

“We’re doing [this research] partly to improve the science in cooperation both with federal and state fishery biologists,” says Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of CWPA, in the video. “And we’re doing it to save our lives.”

Watch the video here

About the California Wetfish Producers Association
The non-profit California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA) was established in 2004 to promote sustainable fisheries and foster cooperative research. Voluntary membership includes the majority of wetfish harvesters and processors operating in California.

How much U.S. Seafood is Imported?

According to the latest science, 35-38% of seafood consumed in the U.S. is produced domestically, meaning 62-65% is imported.

The commonly quoted statistic that “90% of seafood consumed in the United States is imported” is out of date and should stop being cited. In this post, I explain the origins of the 90% myth, the scientific paper that produced the updated numbers, and the implications for U.S. trade and seafood markets.

Where did the 90% statistic come from and why is the new estimate more accurate?

A lot of seafood farmed or caught in the United States is sent overseas for processing, then sent back. Due to varying trade codes that get lost in the shuffle of globalization, these processed seafood products are often mistakenly recorded as ‘imported,’ despite being of U.S. origin.

For example, pollock, the fish used in McDonald’s Filet-o-fish sandwich, is caught throughout U.S. waters near Alaska. Once onboard, a significant portion is sent to China (the U.S.’s largest seafood trade partner) to be cleaned, gutted, and processed into filets. After processing in China, the fish is sent back to the U.S. and sold in restaurants and grocery stores. Pollock is not a Chinese fish, but the trade codes used when sending them back from China signify them as Chinese-origin and they are recorded as imported or foreign seafood.

Recording fish caught in the U.S. but processed in China has led to a significant overestimation of Americans’ so-called ‘seafood deficit’, or the ratio of foreign to domestic seafood consumption in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the misleading 90% deficit statistic has become commonplace, mostly due to coverage of Oceana’s seafood fraud campaign that stoked consumer anxiety about imported seafood. Distorted import data had been taken at face value for several years because no one had pieced together the conversion factors that account for processing and return export/import—until three scientists, Jessica Gephart, Halley Froehlich, and Trevor Branch, published their work in PNAS in May 2019.

Knowing the conversion factor for seafood products caught or farmed in the U.S. is the key to accurately estimating the amount of domestic seafood processed abroad. Froehlich describes a conversion factor as a number that can be used to back-calculate a processed seafood item to its pre-processed weight. Basically, when pollock are sent back to the U.S. after being processed in China, a conversion factor can be applied to estimate how much fish was originally sent and domestic seafood statistics can be corrected. When U.S. seafood is processed abroad but consumed in the U.S., it should be counted as domestic seafood consumed domestically.

Scientists compiled live weight conversion factor data from NOAA, FAO, and CEPII; then, along with estimates for the amount of seafood processed abroad and imported again, an accurate percentage of domestic seafood consumed domestically was derived. The updated number (35-38%) is over three times higher than commonly reported.

Allison Horst (University of California, Santa Barbara, CA)

The vexing 90% statistic + Twitter = paper

The story of how this paper came to be is different than most other scientific collaborations. Both Gephart and Froehlich had tried to reconcile the 90% statistic in the past, but “neither of us completely followed the breadcrumbs because it was never a primary focus of our typically global research,” according to Froehlich.

“I first heard this statistic while working on my PhD and studying global seafood trade. The data I was looking at did not agree with this statistic, but I assumed I must be missing something and pushed it off,” said Gephart.

Years later, a discussion on twitter reignited their curiosity and got the researchers in touch. Froehlich explains, “It started with an article posted on Twitter around US imports and what should seemingly be a quite simple question from Trevor about the percent of exports. After all three of us engaged on Twitter (along with several other scientists in the mix), it was clear none of us seafood scientists in fisheries or aquaculture could really, fully trace the numbers completely.”

After connecting on Twitter, Gephart reached out to Froehlich and Branch and the three of them began working together to find the correct seafood consumption numbers. Twitter, for all its faults, is still valuable as a connector of people. You can still read through the original discussion from last year that led to the collaboration. Academic conversations that lead to published papers usually happen in hallways, closed meetings, and private conferences; ‘Science Twitter,’ a community of scientists sharing and conversing online, functions like a multidisciplinary scientific conference that everyone can attend. Twitter can stoke collaboration among scientists, but it also makes science more accessible to the public—an important feature when the science has significant political implications.

United States Seafood Trade

Misleading statistics in fisheries and marine conservation usually circulate with the ebb and flow of the news cycle, but the ‘90% imported seafood’ statistic has unique political implications. Gephart, Froehlich, and Branch noted in their paper:

In recent years, the former US Secretary of State, current US Secretary of Commerce, and members of Congress have all cited the number to call for new policy measures addressing seafood sustainability and dependence on foreign seafood

“I kept hearing this number [90%] repeated and it started to bother me that I couldn’t figure out where the number came from. Then, under the current administration, reducing the seafood trade deficit became a priority and this statistic was being used to support a range of policy changes. If this number was going to be used as support for proposed policies, it felt important to know where the number came from, whether it was right, and whether it is even a good indicator for sustainable fisheries policy,” Gephart told me.

Essentially, the misleading 90% statistic has been used to justify recent nationalist/protectionist shifts in U.S. foreign policy: President Trump has lamented the U.S.’s trade deficit with China since he began running for president in 2014. Now in power, he has escalated a trade war that has hit the seafood industry especially hard. For example, Maine lobster (a popular seafood item in China) is now at a 45% price disadvantage compared to Canadian lobster due to the U.S. and China raising tariffs on each other’s imports. Many in the Maine lobster fishery have been laid off as a result.

The most mind-numbing implications are the tariffs on “foreign” seafood from China. Remember the pollock example above? It is now potentially tariffed twice, “once going to China and another when it enters back into the states as a processed good,” explained Froehlich. “It’s a bit of cutting off the nose to spite the face for the U.S., which is not helping fishers, farmers, or consumers.”

Although it has received less attention and relief efforts than agriculture, US seafood is front and center in the trade war.

NOAA has said the U.S. will not tax domestic seafood on the way back from China, but there is currently no way it can differentiate it from other seafood. China has exempted seafood for processing and export, but a retaliatory tariff is a card they still hold.

We haven’t seen a misleading fishery statistic taken quite so far politically, but with correct statistics available now, hopefully the Trump administration will flout their history and work towards a policy that benefits working class people like those in the U.S. seafood industry.

Original post: https://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/fact-check/how-much-seafood-is-imported/

Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

There are costs to each mouthful. By the time you swallow it, that mouthful has racked up a huge amount of unseen costs: production of greenhouse gases, pollution of air and waterways, soil erosion, use of freshwater, use of antibiotics, and impacts on terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity.

However, it doesn’t have to be that costly. Ocean fisheries don’t cause soil erosion, don’t blow away the topsoil, don’t use any significant freshwater, don’t use antibiotics and don’t have anything to do with nutrient releases, that devastating form of pollution that causes algal blooms in freshwater and dead zones in the ocean. After extensive studies, it turns out that some fish have the lowest green house gas footprint per unit of protein. Better even than plants. Sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies and farmed shellfish all have a lower GHG footprint than plants, and many other fisheries come close.

A ringing endorsement of fish over meat came in 2013, when Andy Sharpless, the CEO of the conservation group Oceana, pointed out that you can sustainably produce food from the sea at low environmental cost. In his book, The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans, Sharpless says, “What if there was a healthy, animal sourced protein, that both the fats and the thins could enjoy without draining the life from the soil, without drying up our rivers, without polluting the air and the water, without causing our planet to warm even more, without plaguing our communities with diabetes, heart disease and cancer?” His answer was to eat fish.

There has been plenty of criticism of commercial fisheries, mostly focused on the impacts on marine ecosystems – fishing certainly reduces the abundance of fish in the ocean, and also non-target species like marine birds, mammals and turtles. But consider the alternative.

Suspend, for a minute, your image of food from the land as it appears to most of us in grocery stores or farmers’ markets – beautifully arranged vegetables, tasty bread, pretty cuts of meat as well as pre-cooked, pre-packaged, eternally preserved fast food. Then cast your minds to how and from where it comes, the raw material from a field. The land as it once was has been totally transformed by farming, replacing original habitat by clearcutting every type of existing flora and replacing it with exotic species, that would be grains, vegetables and fruit trees. Farming, be it agrobusiness or subsistence, essentially eliminates the habitat for indigenous species, and thousands of them have gone extinct because of food production, whereas no marine fish is known to have gone extinct from fishing. The ocean will remain the ocean, though of course we have to manage fish stocks well. We should press our governments to manage fisheries sustainably and minimize the environmental impacts of fishing.

Let’s give a final thought to the reality of boycotting fish and commercial fishing. The need for protein in this world is huge, and we certainly must not waste it. Fishing fleets are guided by quotas set by management and what Earle and Monbiot might boycott, will be shipped and gratefully eaten elsewhere.

Featured image: “Pile of Fish” by Oziel Gómez. Free for use via Pexels.

Ray Hilborn is a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, specializing in natural resource management and conservation. He has co-authored several books and has published over 300 peer reviewed articles. His latest book, co-authored with Ulrike Hilborn, is Ocean Recovery: A sustainable future for global fisheries?

Original post: https://blog.oup.com/2019/05/keep-eating-fish-best-way-feed-world/

Squid Research Update 2018-19

Methodological Overview

The California Wetfish Producer’s Association (CPWA) in collaboration with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has been conducting a long-term data collection program targeting California Market Squid paralarvae in Southern California since 2011, and in Monterey since 2014. Sampling sites occur at fixed and known squid spawning and aggregation sites and were selected through a collaborative process involving the squid fishing community, government managers, and independent scientists. These sites are in shallow waters, generally between 40-100 meters, over sandy substrate and often within one km from shore. Sampling effort targets the winter hatching season in southern California, sampling occurs in December, January, and February. Summer surveys are also conducted in SC and Monterey. Depending on funding availability, additional surveys are conducted in spring and autumn. To date, over 1,000 net tows have been collected during 42 survey efforts spanning nine years. Sampling is done on chartered fishing vessels and paralarvae are captured via bongo nets with a 505-micron mesh. Zooplankton volume and preservation, paralarval sorting and identification and other lab work are conducted at the SWFSC. Paralarval ageing is conducted with SWFSC personnel in an on-going project. Paralarval condition is measured by obtaining an average weight for paralarvae at a given station location, as well as measuring lengths of all individuals at a station location, or from 10 randomized individuals if >10 individuals occur at a station.

Overview – Early Winter 2018

Market squid paralarval abundance in Southern California (SC) during the winter of 2018 remained very low compared to the long-term mean, and especially compared to paralarval densities found during previous La Niña time periods (prior to 2015), indicating lingering effects from the historic 2015-16 El Niño. The 3-month mean SC paralarval density index (PDI) for the December 2018, and January and February, 2019 winter paralarval hatching season was 3.17 paralarvae per 1,000 m3 of filtered sea-water (± 19 SD). This is down from 7.43 (± 46.9) the previous hatching season (2017-18). The long-term SC winter mean PDI is 51.3 (± 342). Measurements of productivity, both zooplankton displacement volume (ZPDV) and surface chlorophyll (SCHL) declined from the previous year. ZPDV has steadily declined since the onset of the strong El Niño in 2014. Surface chlorophyll concentrations have recovered slightly from the El Niño, but are lower than last year, and still much lower than the previous period of high productivity (Fig. 1). Local sea surface temperature (SST) and the Ocean Niño Index (ONI) both saw cooling periods in 2017, but have warmed slightly during 2018 and 2019.

Late Winter Hatching Season, 2019

Paralarval abundance, temperature, and ocean productivity began the 2018-19 winter hatching season similarly to previous years, marked by very low abundance, warmer ocean temperatures, and reduced productivity. However, February, 2019, marked a dramatic change. A series of strong winter storms drove coastal upwelling, which cooled surface waters, increased ocean mixing, nutrient availability, zooplankton abundance, and yielded a significant increase in paralarval abundance (Table 1, Fig. 2). Zooplankton biomass and availability seems to be particularly important for market squid, likely due to the high energetic demands required by squids (O’Dor 1982). General Additive Models were used (also see Van Noord & Dorval 2017) to evaluate the importance of oceanographic variables on determining variability in paralarval density for the 2018-19 season. Sea surface temperature, ZPDV, SCHL, and four geographic variables (separating the coast from the Channel Islands and north from south at Santa Monica Bay) explained 48% of the variability in paralarval abundance. Sea surface temperature and ZPDV were particularly important in the model (Fig. 3). Greater paralarval density was associated with lower SST and moderate to high ZPDV.

Monterey Bay Area and Summer Sampling

The Monterey Bay Area was sampled in June, 2018 (n=15) and the paralarvae density index was 10.5 (± 7.18). This was the highest paralarvae abundance measured during the 2018-19 season. Southern California was sampled in June, 2018 and the PDI measured 0.45 (± 0.04). This was the second consecutive year that Monterey PDI values were the highest recorded in a given fishing year, indicating the population’s center of distribution may still be north following the anomalous warm water event during 2015-16, indicating that squid are seeking cooler ocean waters and greater food availability.

The Keeling Curve Hits 415 PPM

Watch the new video released by Scripps Oceanography

Scripps scientists measured a record level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 415 parts per million, on Sunday, May 12, 2019. This daily record, the Keeling Curve, is considered the foundation of modern climate change research. Geochemist Charles David Keeling joined Scripps in 1956 and built a manometer and other equipment to isolate the carbon dioxide in air samples. In 1958, the average carbon dioxide concentration of the first measurement was 316.16 parts per million. In 2013, the CO2 concentration surpassed 400 ppm for the first time in human history.

What is the Real Cost of Protein?

With headlines published in the media like “Two-Thirds of the World’s Seafood is Over-fished” and “Science Study Predicts the Collapse of All Seafood Fisheries by 2050,” what is really the state of the ecosystems in the Earth’s oceans?

Will we deplete the ocean’s resources in the near future? or do we have time to make adaptions to ensure the vitality of fisheries?

At the Foodable.io event in Seattle, Foodable Host Yareli Quintana sat down with Dr. Ray Hilborn, professor of Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington who has been researching the topic of conservation and quantitative population dynamics of seafood for the last eight years.

Hilborn starts out by pointing out that there a two environmental challenges when it comes to seafood supply.

First, it’s the substantial fuel used to catch the fish, which generates carbon foot and then, the impact on biodiversity. As specific fish populations continue to be caught, this is changing the ecosystem of the ocean.

The seafood conservation expert also clears up a common misconception that our ocean is being depleted.

“Within the last 20 years the abundance of stock has really turned around in many places, there are certainly exceptions where that’s not true though,” says Hilborn.

But that doesn’t mean that chefs shouldn’t be concerned about what fish product that they are serving.

Each type of seafood makes a different impact on the environment. For example, Maine lobster generates a lot of energy to catch, while sardines, oysters, and mussels, on the other hand, make a really low impact.

Oyster and mussels feed themselves and most of the environmental cost comes from feed production.

Then there’s the problem of food waste, which is a challenge for restaurants, but more so, for consumers eating at home.

“One of the big issues of fish and food, in general, is waste. Globally, about 30 percent of food is wasted. In rich countries like the U.S., that’s mostly at home…So it’s important to be more careful about making sure you buy what you need and use it,” says Hilborn.

Watch the Seafood Talk Session above to learn more about the sustainability, research and management practices that are being worked on and adjusted every day in order to do right by nature and to feed the masses.

Original post: https://www.foodabletv.com/blog/what-is-the-real-cost-of-protein

San Pedro Fishermen Help Add to Sardine Stock As­sess­ments

Video: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/news/2019/04/08/

SAN PEDRO, CA –

Based out of San Pedro harbor, Nick Juril got his first fishing boat in 1982 and has been making a living ever since with a variety of catches including squid, mackerel, and sardines.

“I grew up with the fishery,” said Juril on the deck of his current boat, Eileen. “[It] goes back to my dad’s childhood. There’s still a handful of us left and we’re still, you know, hanging on. It would be a shame to see it go away.”

Sardine stock assessments are based primarily on acoustic trawl surveys conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to the administration, the sardine biomass has fallen short of the 150,000 metric ton threshold needed for commercial fishing to commence. Therefore, the Fisheries Management Council has prohibited a directed sardine fishery since 2015 to allow for stocks to bounce back.

“In 2014/2015 we weren’t seeing a lot. But since the water kind of changed, the water warmed up a little bit, there’s a lot of sardines around right now,” explained Juril. “So, we’re hanging on, but not having the sardines has been really, really tough.”

Joe Ferrigno, one of Juril’s neighboring fishermen, says the loss of the sardine catch has taken as much as half of his business away.

“There was some years we fish sardines all year long,” said Ferrigno. “Now, we go farther, and we work a lot harder to try to catch a little bit of squid to make up for it.”

Besides human consumption, sardines also feed the pet food market and act as live bait in the multi-billion-dollar recreational fishing industry. They are also a food source for larger marine life, like sea lions which can be seen coming into harbor looking for fish.

Juril says the acoustic trawl surveys are flawed because they do not take near shore measurements, which is where he says fishermen are seeing stocks of sardines.

“These fisheries are managed on best available science,” said Juril, “and when the science is bad, it’s not doing anybody any good.”

Juril has been working in conjunction with the Department of Fish and Wildlife to do near shore aerial surveys. A spotter plane will take images once a school is spotted and radio back to the boat with location. The school is then scooped up with the boat’s purse nets and the yield will be measured and correlated to the images so that future estimates can be made more accurately.

“Most, or almost all almost all, of [the sardines] are always fished from 25 meters into surf line,” explained Juril.

Another neighbor, Jamie Ashley, is a bait hauler, also participating in the aerial surveys. The Pacific Fishery Management Council does allow for a few thousand tons of sardines to be harvested as live bait, but Ashley is worried that too could be shut down.

“If we can’t get sardines, we’re out of business,” Ashley said. “There’s nothing else to catch. There’s nothing else to use for bait so we’re done.”

“The corns ripe, ready to pick,” said Juril. “There’s corn all over the place and some scientists are saying, ‘No corn this year. Can’t pick it. Sorry.’ So we’re trying to do what we can do to add to the science so that they do have better information and we can get a better assessment of abundance.”

Juril will haul other catches like squid and continue the near shore surveys hoping to add to stock assessment data and end the moratorium on sardines, but scientists aren’t optimistic and worry sardine stocks will take years to recover.

Original post/video: https://spectrumnews1.com/

Pacific sardines likely to face another shuttered season

For the past four years, fishermen who are on the ocean on a near daily basis have been reporting an increasing biomass of sardines – in a range of sizes — in nearshore waters of California. In October 2018, our collaborative CDFW/CWPA aerial survey documented more than 13,000 tons of sardine in nearshore waters along a 70-mile stretch of coast near Big Sur.

Yet the 2018 AT survey ran the length of the West Coast from Canada to Mexico and estimated only 27,547 mt in July 2019; 94 percent of the estimate was located in the Pacific Northwest, and very few sardines in California.

In light of multiple lines of evidence of recruitment and abundance excluded from this update stock assessment, we ask the Council to employ some “best available common sense,” suspend this assessment until the problems can be resolved in a new STAR panel review, and simply extend last year’s fishery management measures in the interim.

Pacific Sardines. NOAA photo.

 

Sardine fishermen on the West Coast are preparing for another year of severe restrictions after a new draft assessment from NMFS shows the the population is continuing its collapse.The new report, released on March 26, indicates a sardine population of 27,547 metric tons. Any tonnage below 50,000 metric tons is considered “overfished” by NMFS.

These numbers indicate a 98.5 percent collapse since 2006, when the population reached an estimated 1.77 million metric tons, according to NMFS data.

The assessment still must undergo review and adoption by the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee before any rules are passed to restrict this year’s season, which begins on July 1.

Last year the council voted to allow up to 7,000 metric tons of sardines to be caught by West Coast fishermen as incidental take, or bycatch.

The cause of the sardine population collapse is still being debated.

The California Wetfish Producers Association has repeatedly taken issue with NMFS’ assessment strategy. Executive Director Diane Pleschner-Steele has called Oceana-driven claims of overfishing to be “fake news.”

The organization claims that NMFS is not collecting data close enough to shore where fishermen are reporting seeing more sardines, not fewer. NMFS has acknowledged that its research vessels are unable to take stock data close to shore but have said the number of missed fish is unlikely to have a significant effect on their general findings.

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Original story: https://www.nationalfisherman.com/

Environmental Impact Displacement in Fisheries & Food

Methane bubbling up from ocean floor provides a surprising food source for crabs, Oregon State University research shows

Oregon State University researchers have documented tanner crabs feeding at a methane seep site off British Columbia. Tanner crabs are also known as ‘snow crabs’ and sold as food. It is the first time a commercially harvested species has been known to feed at methane sites.The methane shouldn’t cause any health concerns and, in fact, it may provide an alternative energy source for seafloor-dwelling marine species. [Oregon State University]

Climate change will result in less ocean-borne food falling into the deep sea, scientists say. But that likely won’t be a problem for tanner crabs, according to a recent discovery by Oregon State University researchers.

The long-legged orange crabs — one of three species that crabbers harvest and sell as snow crabs — vigorously feed at methane seeps, where the gas bubbles up from the ocean floor.

“The thinking used to be that the marine food web relied almost solely on phytoplankton dropping down through the water column and fertilizing the depths,” OSU Marine Ecologist Andrew Thurber said in a statement. “Now we know that this viewpoint isn’t complete and there may be many more facets to it.”

Thurber co-authored a study that the journal Frontiers in Marine Science just published. The study details how scientists found tanner crabs in eating frenzies around a methane seep in the floor of the Pacific Ocean off British Columbia. It is one the first times that a commercially harvested seafood has been found to rely on methane seeps.

Methane seeps appear to be serving up food to seafloor-dwelling species, such as tanner crabs. This would be a hedge against climate change because nearly all models predict less food will drop into the deep sea in coming years.

“Tanner crabs likely are not the only species to get energy from methane seeps, which really haven’t been studied all that much,” Thurber said. “We used to think there were, maybe, five of them off the Pacific Northwest coast and now research is showing that there are at least 1,500 seep sites — and probably a lot more. … They are all over the world, so the idea that they may provide an energy source is quite intriguing.”

Researchers first noticed tanner crabs bunching up around methane seeps in 2012 off the British Columbia coast. The crabs sifted through sediment at the bubbling seeps. Mats of bacteria form around the seeps and the crabs munch on those.

Underwater video shows methane building up below tanner crabs hanging out at seeps and eventually flipping them. The entertaining video drew researchers to wonder why the crabs were gathered around the seeps in the first place.

OSU teamed up with scientists from the University of Victoria in Canada. The National Science Foundation in the U.S. provided support for the study.

Off the Oregon Coast, Pacific sole and black cod have been seen near methane seeps. Like the crabs, the fish are harvested.

But seafood lovers need not worry about what their food is eating. Researchers say methane seeps create nontoxic environments.

Sarah Seabook, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate at OSU, said scientists examined the guts and tissues of tanner crabs to confirm they were feeding around methane seeps.

″… We can apply these new techniques to other species and find out if the use of methane seeps as a food source is more widespread than just tanner crabs,” she said in a statement.

Original post: https://www.registerguard.com/news/20190225/methane-bubbling-up-from-ocean-floor-provides-surprising-food-source-for-crabs-oregon-state-university-research-shows