Fishing News

NOAA issues La Niña watch as tropical Pacific temperatures tank

La Niña is El Niño’s cooler counterpart. It seems likely to arrive this fall. (NOAA)

El Niño is quickly fading. Sea surface temperatures are coming down in the tropical Pacific, and winds in the region have weakened. History tells us, and forecast models predict, that La Niña conditions will be quick on its heels.

Seeing the writing on the wall, NOAA issued a La Niña watch on Thursday. “Nearly all models predict further weakening of El Niño, with a transition to ENSO-neutral likely during late spring or early summer 2016,” NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center wrote. “Nearly all models predict further weakening of El Niño, with a transition to ENSO-neutral likely during late spring or early summer 2016. Then, the chance of La Niña increases during the late summer or early fall.”

La Niña is El Niño’s cooler counterpart in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Whereas El Niño exhibits abnormally warm ocean temperatures and a strong atmospheric circulation across the equator, La Niña represents abnormally cold water. The cooler sea surface temperature pattern enhances the circulation in the tropics, called the Walker circulation.

The Walker circulation tends to dominate the weather across the equatorial Pacific. Air flows west toward Indonesia, where water is typically the warmest, and rises. This creates lots of thunderstorms and rain. During El Niño, this circulation is disrupted. The warmest water sloshes to the eastern side of the Pacific near South America. Air ends up rising closer to South America, and it sinks over Indonesia.

Air flow patterns during El Nino and La Nina. (climate.gov)

La Niña is the exact opposite. It sends the circulation into overdrive.

“During La Niña events … when waters in the western Pacific are even warmer than normal and waters in the eastern Pacific are even colder, it is like someone turned the normal Walker Circulation ‘up to 11,’” writes climate.gov’s Tom Di Liberto. “Warm, moist air rises even more over the Maritime Continent and South America leading to above-average rainfall. In the eastern Pacific, where colder than average waters exist, an enhanced downward branch of the Walker Circulation helps to further reduce the region’s already small rainfall totals.”

In its forecast, Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society has increased the likelihood of La Niña to 65 percent by early fall, and a 70 percent chance by next winter. This is up from 50 percent last month.

NOAA will “declare” a La Niña when temperatures across the eastern side of the Pacific have cooled to a temperature departure of 0.5 degrees Celsius below normal, and when the Walker circulation strengthens like we would expect it to during a true La Niña.

Read the original post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/

Professor Ray Hilborn wins 2016 International Fisheries Science Prize

April 11, 2016 — SAVING SEAFOOD — Professor Ray Hilborn, of the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, was recognized by the World Council of Fisheries Societies for his contributions to fishery management science.

“Professor Hilborn has had an extremely impressive career of highly diversified research and publication in support of global fisheries science and conservation. Throughout his 40-year career, Ray has been a model of dynamic and innovative science, and in the application of this work to the ever-changing problems of fisheries management and conservation in both marine and freshwater ecosystems. Professor Hilborn’s Prize will be awarded at the World Fisheries Congress in Busan, South Korea in late May.”

In recent years, Professor Hilborn has been one of the organizers of the Ram legacy Database at the University of Washington, which is the most complete global database on fish stocks, biomass surveys and catch history ever assembled.  The resulting analysis and modeling from this database have not only united many fisheries scientists around the world who had been portrayed by the media as opposing each other in terms of fisheries conservation issues, but the database has also served to highlight a road map for fisheries conservation efforts over the next twenty years.

As a result of these efforts, Hilborn has been instrumental in changing the perception that fish stocks were being fished to extinction and instead has shown that when fisheries management principles are properly applied, strong stock recoveries take place.

Frustrated by the public misperception about the actual state of major fisheries, Hilborn and other colleagues have created cfood a website scientists use to communicate with journalists and the general public about fisheries science issues.  The database, and website, have been particularly helpful in countering organizations who use distorted or outdated fisheries science to alarm regulators and the public.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Federal regulators: Don’t even think about fishing for these forage species

Fishing boats line the dock along Timms Way in San Pedro. West Coast fishery managers banned the take of any forage fish (pelagic squid, herring), in a decision ratified by federal officials with a final rule issued this week, in state waters. The species aren’t fished currently, and this is a move to protect them, in the event their numbers increase and become enough to sustain a productive fishery. (Chuck Bennett / Staff Photographer)

New NASA Study Shows Lessening El Nino Impacts This Spring

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

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

A new NASA study documents the current El Nino impact on the marine food chain, hoping to show where recovery may begin this spring.  The preliminary conclusions are that a recovery from El Nino is underway and that in Chile and Peru, impacts were less devastating than the 1998 super El Nino.

An El Nino, in which masses of warm tropical water slosh eastward to the coast of South America, has a huge impact on primary marine production, which NASA scientists are currently studying.

El Nino’s mass of warm water puts a lid on the normal currents of cold, deep water that typically rise to the surface along the equator and off the coast of Chile and Peru, said Stephanie Uz, ocean scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In a process called upwelling, those cold waters normally bring up the nutrients that feed the tiny organisms, which form the base of the food chain.

“An El Nino basically stops the normal upwelling,” Uz said. “There’s a lot of starvation that happens to the marine food web.” These tiny plants, called phytoplankton, are fish food — without them, fish populations drop, and the fishing industries that many coastal regions depend on can collapse.

NASA satellite data and ocean color software allow scientists to calculate the amount of green chlorophyll — and therefore the amount of phytoplankton present.

The ocean color maps, based on a month’s worth of satellite data, can show that El Nino impact on phytoplankton. In December 2015, at the peak of the current El Nino event, there was more blue — and less green chlorophyll — in the Pacific Ocean off of Peru and Chile, compared to the previous year. Uz and her colleagues are also watching as the El Nino weakens this spring, to see when and where the phytoplankton reappear as the upwelling cold water brings nutrients back to the region.

“They can pop back up pretty quickly, once they have a source of nutrients,” Uz said.

Researchers can also examine the differences in ocean color between two different El Nino events. During the large 1997-1998 El Nino event, the green chlorophyll virtually disappeared from the coast of Chile. This year’s event, while it caused a drop in chlorophyll primarily along the equator, was much less severe for the coastal phytoplankton population. The reason — the warmer-than-normal waters associated with the two El Nino events were centered in different geographical locations. In 1997-1998, the biggest ocean temperature abnormalities were in the eastern Pacific Ocean; this year the focus was in the central ocean. This difference impacts where the phytoplankton can feed on nutrients, and where the fish can feed on phytoplankton.

“When you have an East Pacific El Nino, like 1997-1998, it has a much bigger impact on the fisheries off of South America,” Uz said. But Central Pacific El Nino events, like this year’s, still have an impact on ocean ecosystems, just with a shift in location. Researchers are noting reduced food available along the food chain around the Galapagos Islands, for example. And there has been a drop in phytoplankton off the coast of South America, just not as dramatically as before.

Scientists have more tools on hand to study this El Nino, and can study more elements of the event, Uz said. They’re putting these tools to use to ask questions not just about ocean ecology, but about the carbon cycle as well.

“We know how important phytoplankton are for the marine food web, and we’re trying to understand their role as a carbon pump,” Uz said. The carbon pump refers to one of the ways the Earth system removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When phytoplankton die, their carbon-based bodies sink to the ocean floor, where they can remain for millions of years. El Nino is a naturally occurring disruption to the typical ocean currents, she said — so it’s important to understand the phenomenon to better attribute what occurs naturally, and what occurs due to human-caused disruptions to the system.

Other scientists at Goddard are investigating ways to forecast the ebbs and flows of nutrients using the center’s supercomputers, incorporating data like winds, sea surface temperatures, air pressures and more.

“It’s like weather forecasts, but for bionutrients and phytoplankton in the ocean,” said Cecile Rousseaux, an ocean modeler with Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. The forecasts could help fisheries managers estimate how good the catch could be in a particular year, she said, since fish populations depend on phytoplankton populations. The 1997-1998 El Nino led to a major collapse in the anchovy fishery off of Chile, which caused economic hardships for fishermen along the coast.

So far, Rousseaux said, the phytoplankton forecast models haven’t shown any collapses for the 2015-2016 El Nino, possibly because the warm water isn’t reaching as far east in the Pacific this time around. The forecast of phytoplankton populations effort is a relatively new effort, she said, so it’s too soon to make definite forecasts. But the data so far, from the modeling group and others, show conditions returning to a more normal state this spring.

The next step for the model, she said, is to try to determine which individual species of phytoplankton will bloom where, based on nutrient amounts, temperatures and other factors — using satellites and other tools to determine which kind of microscopic plant is where.

“We rely on satellite data, but this will go one step further and give us even more information,” Rousseaux said.

Subscribe to SeafoodNews.com 1-781-861-1441 | Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

Research Shows Global Warm Water “Blobs” Have Grown in Intensity Over Last Forty Years

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

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

In late 2013, a portion of the North Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska became unusually warm.  Parts of it five to six degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal.

This continent-sized patch quickly became known as “The Blob.”  Its ability to warm the air above is blamed for two record fire seasons in Washington state in 2014 and 2015, a drought, and record low snowpack in the winter of 2014/2015.

Nick Bond, Washington State’s climatologist, says while the blob has pretty much dissipated, we are still feeling some of the hangover effects, as the water along the West Coast is still one to two degrees above normal.

Turns out “The Blob” isn’t that rare. And unlike another ocean phenomenon known as El Nino, it’s not just found in the Pacific Ocean.

In a new research paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, University of Washington oceanographer and doctoral student Hillary Scannell looks back through 65 years of warming events in both the North Atlantic as well as the North Pacific oceans.

“They’re becoming more extreme,” said Scannell from her campus office.

Scannell is the lead author of “Frequency of marine heatwaves in the North Atlantic and North Pacific since 1950.”  At the University of Maine, she studied a 2012 blob or heatwave that, among other things, affected the lobster fishery.

The research finds that the number of longer term, deeper events started in the 1970s.  Before that, “they weren’t occurring at such a high-temperature average, so the range of variability was much smaller and lower than it is now,” said Scannell.

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com Subscribe to: Seafoodnews.com

North Coast crab boats finally head out to sea

BODEGA BAY — Long-idled fishermen settled Tuesday on an opening price for Dungeness crab, transforming Bodega Harbor into a beehive of activity as they streamed out to open waters to begin the commercial crabbing season at last.

Radiating relief and even cheer as they stocked up for the sleepless days and nights ahead, captains and deckhands wasted no time leaving the docks once stakeholders at the state’s major ports reached agreement on a price.

Crab should hit local markets by the weekend, lured by thousands of traps baited with chunks of squid and mackerel cut up while still frozen on the docks Tuesday.

“We’re just happy to go to work,” said Mark Gentry, a 30-year veteran of the fishery, who had only to finish pumping fuel into the tank of his boat, Rampage, before he and his crew could depart Spud Point Marina on Tuesday afternoon.

“Ready to go play,” said Sean Amoroso, captain of the Donna Mia. “Ready to play and get a paycheck.”

The state’s Dungeness crab catch is typically valued above $60 million, peaking in 2011-12 at $95.5 million. Crabbers make the vast majority of their income in the season’s first few weeks. The opening price agreed to Tuesday is $2.90 a pound, just under the $3 at which they started the 2014-15 season.

Many of the fisherman and, especially, their crews have been through desperate times in recent months as an unprecedented delay in the opening of the commercial season dragged on week after week, caused by an outbreak of harmful algae and a related neurotoxin called domoic acid.

The season normally opens Nov. 15 south of the Mendocino County line and Dec. 1 in waters north of there. The closure meant crabbers missed out on the lucrative Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s markets, with months still to go before the fishery would reopen — though they didn’t know it at the time.

When state regulators earlier this month finally notified commercial crabbers they could begin harvesting the succulent crustaceans last Saturday, the delay had cost them 4 1/2 months.

They waited at dock several days more while test crabs were fetched, cooked and measured to ensure they met the threshold of 25 percent meat. Crabs from different ports came in above the mark, North Coast Fisheries President Mike Lucas said Monday.

Fish processors and fishermen in Bodega Bay, Half Moon Bay and San Francisco all agreed by late Tuesday morning to start the season at $2.90 a pound, inciting a mad dash to acquire bait, fuel, groceries and other necessities no one wanted to buy until they could be sure of covering their costs.

By afternoon, dozens of boats had motored from the harbor out to open ocean as those remaining hustled to join them.

“This is what we love to do,” Annabelle deck hand Merlin Kolb, 45, said as he cut bait and loaded it into plastic containers.

His crew mate, Diego Quiroz, grinned. “We’re going to try to get some money,” Quiroz, 52, said. “Been working for $10 an hour just to make it.”

It’s unclear what can be salvaged of this year’s season before the crab shed their shells and fishing is no longer feasible without harming future generations. Many local crabbers said they hoped to eke at least several weeks out of the fishery, if not a month or two.

Read the original story: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/

CFOOD: Molly Lutcavage’s Atlantic Tuna Findings Should be Embraced, Not Discredited as Industry Spin

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

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

Dr. Molly Lutcavage wrote a piece last week on Medium titled, Environmental Bullies, how conservation ideologues attack scientists who don’t agree with them. Though a summary follows, we encourage you all to read the article.

Lutcavage discusses her paper published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has been making headlines in NPR, but also on smaller online platforms (like Medium).

The paper presents evidence for a new spawning ground for Western Atlantic bluefin tuna that may suggest the species matures earlier and may be more resilient to harvesting than previously thought. The authors suggest that earlier age at maturity and additional spawning grounds likely means the stock biomass and sustainable exploitation rate are both higher than previously thought. Carl Safina and others have painted this finding as “controversial.”

Dr. Lutcavage maintains this “news” should not have been considered controversial. As long ago as the early 1990’s Lutcavage and other scientists working with the New England Aquarium had counted up to one hundred thousand adult bluefin tuna from spotter planes, a total much higher than other estimates of the total stock size. Such findings contradicted Safina and his 1992 push to have Atlantic bluefin listed as Appendix I endangered because as he has said, bluefin is like, “the last buffalo, on the brink of extinction.”

Dr. Lutcavage felt Safina and other NGOs like Pew Oceans have maligned her and her peers for their research because it would, “get in the way of fund-raising campaigns, messages to the media, book sales, rich donors, and perhaps the most insidious – attempts to influence US fisheries and ocean policies.”

Comment by John Sibert, an emeritus professor at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii.

I, like many other scientists, practice my profession with the expectation that my work will be used to improve management policies. However, scientists who choose to work on subjects that intersect with management of natural resources sometimes become targets of special interest pressures. Pressure to change or “spin” research results occurs more often than it should. Pressure arrives in many forms— usually as phone calls from colleagues, superiors, or the media; the pressure seldom arrives in writing.

I have had a long career spanning several fields and institutions and have been pressured to change my views on restriction of industrial activities in intertidal zones in estuaries, on the necessity of international tuna fisheries management agencies, on the limited role of commercial fishing in the deterioration of marine turtle populations, on the lack of accuracy and reliability of electronic fish tags, and on the inefficacy of marine protected areas for tuna conservation.

My most recent experience with pressure came from a stringer who writes for Science magazine. Some colleagues and I had just published a paper that analyzed area-based fishery management policies for conservation of bigeye tuna. Although the paper was very pessimistic about the use of MPAs for tuna fishery management, this particular stringer contacted me about MPAs. We had an exchange of emails in which he repeatedly tried to spin some earlier results on median lifetime displacements of skipjack and yellowfin tuna into an argument supporting creation of MPAs. We then made an appointment to talk “face to face” via Skype. His approach was to play word games with my replies to his questions in order to make it seem that my research supported MPAs. I repeatedly explained to him that our research showed that closing high-seas pockets had no effect whatsoever on the viability of tuna populations and that empirical evidence showed that the closure of the western high seas pockets in 2008 had in fact increased tuna catches. We hung up at that point, and I have no idea what he wrote for Science.

When critics run out of fact, some resort to personal attack. During discussions about turtle conservation in the early 2000s, an attorney for an environmental group told a committee of scientists that we were in effect a bunch of fishing industry apologists with no knowledge of turtles or population dynamics. More recently, my friend and collaborator, Molly Lutcavage was recently subject of a personal attack by Carl Safina after she and her colleagues published an important discovery of a new spawning area for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. This discovery ought to push the International Commission of the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna to abandon its simplistic two stock approach to management of ABFT. (Whether ICCAT will actually change its approach is another question.) Safina made the outrageously false assertion that the authors’ “… main concern is not recovery, not conservation, but how their findings can allow additional exploitation.” Instead of attacking the messenger and implying that Lutcavage and her colleagues are industry tools, Safina should have embraced the science, supported tuna conservation, and applied pressure in ICCAT to change its antiquated management. By attempting to smear Lutcavage and her NOAA colleagues, he demeans science in general and those of us who try to apply scientific approaches to resource management in particular.

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com Subscribe to Seafoodnews.com

Ocean acidification takes a toll on California’s tide pools at nighttime

A new study, based on the most extensive set of measurements ever made in tide pools, suggests that ocean acidification will increasingly put many marine organisms at risk by exacerbating normal changes in ocean chemistry that occur overnight. Conducted along California’s rocky coastline, the study shows that the most vulnerable organisms are likely to be those with calcium carbonate shells or skeletons.

Ocean acidification is occurring as the oceans absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide concentrations are steadily rising due to emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Absorption of carbon dioxide changes seawater chemistry, pushing it toward the lower, acidic end of the pH scale, although it remains slightly alkaline. A small decrease in pH affects the chemical equilibrium of ocean water, reducing the availability of carbonate ions needed by a wide range of organisms to build and maintain structures of calcium carbonate, such as the shells of mussels and oysters.

Kristy Kroeker, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, is a coauthor of the new study, published March 18 in Scientific Reports. “There is a lot of concern about how ocean acidification is going to affect marine species in the future, but most of our understanding comes from laboratory studies where a single organism is exposed to acidified seawater under very controlled conditions for a short period of time,” Kroeker explained. “In reality, every organism is embedded in a complex community that experiences dynamic environmental conditions that will gradually change over time.”

Calcifying organisms

In the new study, researchers closely monitored conditions in tide pools along California’s rocky coast, which are isolated from the open ocean during low tides. During the daytime, photosynthesis—the mechanism by which plants use the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar, giving off oxygen in the process—takes up carbon dioxide from the seawater and acts to reverse ocean acidification’s effects. At night, however, photosynthesis stops, while the respiration of plants and animals takes up oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. This adds carbon dioxide to the seawater and exacerbates the effects of ocean acidification, increasing the risk to calcifying organisms.

“Tide pools are home to lots of different species that regularly experience daily swings in chemistry,” Kroeker said. “Tide pools can experience particularly corrosive seawater during nighttime low tides, when all of the animals are ‘exhaling’ carbon dioxide into the water that has been cut off from the ocean.”

The research team, led by scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Science, used these natural nighttime spikes in corrosive conditions to examine how entire communities of marine species respond to natural acidification. Observing a variety of California’s natural rocky tide pools near the Bodega Marine Laboratory, they found that the rate of shell and skeletal growth was not greatly affected by seawater chemistry in the daytime. However, during low tide at night, water in the tide pools became corrosive to calcium carbonate shells and skeletons. The study found evidence that the rate at which these shells and skeletons dissolved during these nighttime periods was greatly affected by seawater chemistry.

“Unless carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly curtailed, we expect ocean acidification to continue to lower the pH of seawater,” said lead author Lester Kwiatkowski of the Carnegie Institution of Science. “This work highlights that even in today’s temperate coastal oceans, calcifying species, such as mussels and coralline algae, can dissolve during the night due to the more acidic conditions caused by community respiration.”

These results highlight the vulnerability of marine species in even the most dynamic conditions to the global process of ocean acidification, Kroeker said.

According to coauther Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, “If what we see happening along California’s coast today is indicative of what will continue in the coming decades, by the year 2050 there will likely be twice as much nighttime dissolution as there is today. Nobody really knows how our coastal ecosystems will respond to these corrosive waters, but it certainly won’t be well.”

The study was a collaborative effort by the Carnegie Institution for Science, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz. This work was funded by the Carnegie Institution for Science, UC Multi-campus Research Initiatives and Programs, and the National Science Foundation.

Read the original post: http://news.ucsc.edu/

Dungeness Crab Fishery

Recreational Dungeness Crab Fishery Open South of Sonoma/Mendocino County Line, Commercial Fishery to Open in Seven Days

Closure of the recreational Dungeness crab fishery south of the Mendocino/Sonoma county line has been lifted, and opening of the commercial Dungeness crab fishery – delayed since November – is set for March 26 in the same region.

Recent test results show that domoic acid levels in crabs off the California coast south of the Mendocino/Sonoma county line no longer pose a significant human health risk, according to notice given today to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the Fish and Game Commission (Commission) by the director of the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), after consultation with the Director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).

As a result, the director of OEHHA recommends opening the Dungeness crab fishery in this area. Under emergency closure regulations, CDFW will provide commercial Dungeness crab fishermen at least seven days’ notice before the re-opening of the commercial fishery south of the Mendocino/Sonoma county line. The fishery will open at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, March 26. The presoak period, during which commercial fishermen may begin setting gear in place, starts at 6:01 a.m. Friday, March 25.

Closures remain in place north of the Mendocino/Sonoma county line for the Dungeness crab commercial and recreational fisheries. The commercial and recreational rock crab fisheries are closed north of Piedras Blancas Light Station near San Simeon, and in state waters around San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz islands.

The unusually high domoic acid levels off the coast this fall and winter wrecked a Dungeness crab fishery worth as much as $90 million a year to California’s economy. Domoic acid is a potent neurotoxin that can accumulate in shellfish, other invertebrates and sometimes fish. At low levels, domoic acid exposure can cause nausea, diarrhea and dizziness in humans. At higher levels, it can cause persistent short-term memory loss, seizures and may even be fatal.

“This has been a very difficult season for hardworking Californians who have suffered significant financial hardship due to this natural disaster,” said Charlton H. Bonham, Director of CDFW. “We thank the affected communities for their patience and fortitude as we have worked with our partners at CDPH and OEHHA to open a portion of the commercial fishery along a traditional management boundary as recommended by the industry.”

Both the commercial and recreational Dungeness crab seasons are scheduled to end June 30 in the newly opened area, although the CDFW director has authority to extend the commercial season.

In February, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker seeking federal declarations of a fishery disaster and a commercial fishery failure in response to the continued presence of unsafe levels of domoic acid and the corresponding closures of rock crab and Dungeness crab fisheries across California. Should a federal determination be made to declare a disaster and failure, the state and federal agencies will work together to determine the full economic impact of the disaster and, upon appropriation of funds from Congress, provide economic relief to affected crabbers and related businesses.

Despite several weeks of test results that showed crab body meat samples below alert levels, one sample of viscera was slightly above the alert level. Because of this, CDPH and OEHHA strongly recommend that anglers and consumers not eat the viscera (internal organs, also known as “butter” or “guts”) of crabs. CDPH and OEHHA are also recommending that water or broth used to cook whole crabs be discarded and not used to prepare dishes such as sauces, broths, soups or stews. The viscera usually contain much higher levels of domoic acid than crab body meat. When whole crabs are cooked in liquid, domoic acid may leach from the viscera into the cooking liquid. This is being recommended to avoid harm in the event that some crabs taken from an open fishery have elevated levels of domoic acid.

With the upcoming partial opening of the commercial fishery in the state, CDFW recommends that all people fishing for crab refer to the Best Practices Guide, a resource providing tips on how to use crab trap gear in a manner that reduces incidences of whale entanglements. This guide was produced collaboratively by commercial crabbers, agency staff and staff from non-profit organizations during two meetings of the Dungeness Crab Fishing Gear Working Group that took place late last year.

Pursuant to the emergency regulations adopted by the Commission and CDFW on November 5 and 6, 2015, respectively, the current open and closed areas are as follows:

Areas open to crab fishing include:

• Recreational Dungeness crab fishery along mainland coast south of Sonoma/Mendocino county line – 38° 46.1′ N latitude, near Gualala, Mendocino County

• On March 26, 2016 commercial Dungeness crab fishery along mainland coast south of Sonoma/Mendocino county line – 38° 46.1′ N latitude, near Gualala, Mendocino County

• Commercial and recreational rock crab fishery along the mainland coast south of 35° 40′ N latitude (Piedras Blancas Light Station, San Luis Obispo County)

Areas closed to crab fishing include:

• Recreational Dungeness crab fishery north of Sonoma/Mendocino county line – 38° 46.1′ N latitude, near Gualala, Mendocino County

• Commercial Dungeness crab fishery north of Sonoma/Mendocino county line – 38° 46.1′ N latitude, near Gualala, Mendocino County

• Commercial and recreational rock crab fisheries north of 35° 40′ N latitude (Piedras Blancas Light Station)

• Commercial and recreational rock crab fisheries in state waters around San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands.

CDFW will continue to closely coordinate with CDPH, OEHHA and fisheries representatives to extensively monitor domoic acid levels in Dungeness and rock crabs to determine when the fisheries can safely be opened throughout the state.

# # #

Ghostly Octopod Highlights How Little We Know About Life on Earth

This ghostlike octopod is almost certainly an undescribed species and may not belong to any described genus. Image courtesy of NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.

Last week, NOAA scientists discovered an unknown species in the deep sea. Not far from the Hawaiian Islands, at almost 4,300 meters depth—that’s more than 2-1/2 miles underwater—the unmanned submersible Deep Discoverer, operating from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, captured video of a ghostly octopod.

Mike Vecchione is a zoologist with the NOAA Fisheries National Systematics Lab who specializes in deep-water cephalopods (a group that includes octopods, squids, and cuttlefishes). Although he wasn’t physically on the cruise, Vecchione was participating remotely that evening via live video feed. In this interview, Vecchione describes this mysterious species and what its discovery says about our understanding of life on Earth.

Dr. Mike Vecchione was Chief Scientist on a 2014 expedition aboard NOAA Ship Pisces to sample deep-sea biodiversity.

What was the first thing you thought when you saw this thing? 

Mike Vecchione: I thought, Wow! I’ve never seen one that looks like that before.

OK. What was the second thing you thought?

That this animal doesn’t have fins. The cirrate octopods—those that do have fins on the sides of their bodies—are known to live in the deep sea. But this one is an incirrate octopod. It doesn’t have fins, and until last week we didn’t know that they existed this deep.

The lack of chromatophores, or pigment cells, also stands out—that’s why it’s totally white. Another obvious feature is its diaphanous consistency—it’s sort of jelly-like. That’s common for deep-sea animals because they live in a very food-limited environment, and it takes a lot of food to maintain muscle.

The picture of this animal is sort of misleading because it’s lit—it looks like it could have been taken at some beach near my house. But it wasn’t. Describe the world this creature lives in.

The deep sea is an environment that’s completely alien to us. It’s almost totally dark. It’s extremely cold. And it’s under immense pressure. People want to know, How come the octopod doesn’t get crushed? And, If you brought it up to the surface, would it pop? The answer to both of those questions is no. That’s because there are no gas spaces in the animal to expand or compress, and fluids don’t compress much. The importance of pressure for animals in the deep sea has more to do with the functioning of their enzymes because pressure can change the folding of proteins.

What is this creature’s ecological niche?

All octopods are predators, so it probably feeds on benthic animals of some sort. But other than that, anything I told you would be speculation. We also have no idea how long it lives or how fast it grows.

I keep hearing this creature described as an octopod. Why not octopus?

I use the word octopus for things that are of the genus Octopus, which this isn’t. Octopod is a more general term, and it includes the dumbos, the deep-sea octopods, and the shallow-water true octopuses.

Does this octopod have a name yet?

No. And it won’t, not until we get a specimen of it. Some species have been described based on photo records. But it’s much better to have a specimen so you can see the internal anatomy and get DNA sequences.

Octopods are famous for their dynamic coloration. What’s that coloration used for in most octopods, and what does its absence say about this one?

Octopods use dynamic displays for camouflage. Also if they want to look scary they can puff up and make a dynamic pattern on their bodies. And presumably they use it to communicate with other members of their species. There’s been recent evidence that some shallow-water octopuses will flash different colors before they fight with one another, presumably as a display of dominance. This one doesn’t look like it would be capable of dynamic patterning, and that probably wouldn’t be very useful anyway because it lives in near-total darkness. But we could be wrong about that. We’ve been wrong about many things in the past.

If it’s so dark in the deep sea, why does this octopod have eyes?
This octopod does indeed have eyes and they appear to be functional. But the deep sea isn’t completely dark. Many animals produce bioluminescence, so not everything down there is blind.

This animal probably doesn’t bioluminesce, but that’s just speculation. We used to say that no octopods bioluminesce, but we were wrong about that. Turns out a few of them do.

Why is this discovery important?

The headlines are all emphasizing that this is possibly a new species. To me that’s not the important thing. We know so little about life in the deep sea that new species there are a dime a dozen. But this discovery highlights just how little we know about the deep sea.

I know exploring the deep sea satisfies a very deep human instinct and curiosity, but is there also a more practical reason for going there?

We can’t protect our planet if we don’t know what lives on it and how life functions. We used to think that the deep sea was so remote that we couldn’t affect it. But that’s not true. We impact the deep sea in many ways, from pollution to warming to acidification to expansion of oxygen minimum zones, and we don’t even know what’s down there that we’re affecting. Of all the space on Earth that contains multicellular life, over 95 percent of that is in the deep sea. And we know almost nothing about it.

Read the original post: http://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/