Fishing News

Sardines move north due to ocean warming

Original post: Phys.org

Sardines, anchovies and mackerels play a crucial role in marine ecosystems, as well as having a high commercial value. However, the warming of waters makes them vanish from their usual seas and migrate north, as confirmed by a pioneering study analysing 57,000 fish censuses from 40 years. The researchers warn that coastal towns dependent on these fishery resources must adapt their economies.

The continued increase in water temperature has altered the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems across the world. The effect has been greater in the North Atlantic, with increases of up to 1.3 ºC in the average temperature over the last 30 years.

This variation directly affects the frequency and biogeography of a group of pelagic fish, which includes the sardine (Sardina pilchardus), anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus), horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus) and mackerel (Scomber scombrus), among others, which feed off phytoplankton and zooplankton and that are the staple diet of large predators such as cetaceans, large fish and marine birds. These fish also represent a significant source of income for the majority of coastal countries in the world.

Until now, scientists had not managed to prove whether the changes observed in the physiology of the pelagic fish were the direct result of the water temperature or if they were due to changes in plankton communities, their main food source, which have also been affected by global warming and have changed their distribution and abundance.

The new study, published in Global Change Biology and that has developed statistical models for the North Sea area, confirms the great importance of sea temperatures. “Time series of zooplankton and sea surface temperature data have been included to determine the factor causing these patterns”, Ignasi Montero-Serra, lead author of the study and researcher in the department of Ecology at the University of Barcelona, explains to SINC.

Bioindicators of the health of the sea

To demonstrate the consequences of the warming of the seas, the research team analysed 57,000 fish censuses from commercial fishing performed independently along the European continental shelf between 1965 and 2012, extracted from data provided by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).

The study, the first to be carried out on such a large time scale and area, allows for the dynamics of this species to be understood in relation to the rapid warming of the oceans that has been happening since the eighties.

The results reveal that sardines and other fish (with fast life cycles, planktonic larval stage and low habitat dependence) are highly vulnerable to changes in ocean temperature, and therefore represent “an exceptional bioindicator to measure the direction and speed of climate change expected in the near future”, points out Montero-Serra.

Subtropicalization of North Sea species

Due to the accelerated increase in temperature of the continental seas, sardines and anchovies (with a typically subtropical distribution) have increased their presence in the North Sea “even venturing into the Baltic Sea”, confirms Montero-Serra, who adds that the species with a more northern distribution (like the herring and the sprat) have decreased their presence.

The analysis is therefore a clear sign that species in the North Sea and Baltic Sea are “becoming subtropical […] where sardines, anchovies, mackerel and horse mackerel, more related to higher temperatures, have increased their presence”, says the researcher.

This is due to the pelagic fish being highly dependent on environmental temperatures at different stages of their life cycle: from reproductive migrations and egg-laying, to development and survival of larvae.

According to researchers, the changes in such an important ecological group “will have an effect on the structure and functioning of the whole ecosystem”. The expert warns that coastal towns that are highly dependent on these fishery resources “must adapt to the new ecological contexts and the possible consequences of these changes”, although they still do not know the scale of the socio-economic and ecological repercussions.

Scientists: Warm waters, scarce prey likely cause of California sea lion strandings

The Press Democrat.com

California sea lions swim at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Tuesday, February 3, 2015. (Crista Jeremiason / The Press Democrat)

An intensifying spate of sea lion strandings on the California coast is likely caused by a shift in winds that has warmed coastal waters, making prey scarce for sea lion mothers and interfering with their ability to feed their pups, federal scientists said Wednesday.

The announcement marked the clearest answer yet to what might be affecting the sea lions, hundreds of which have come ashore malnourished and severely underweight in recent months.

With more than 940 animals, mostly pups, already admitted to rehabilitative care over the past several weeks, the state’s marine mammal centers are nearing capacity and running through resources, said Justin Viezbicke, California Stranding Network Coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

Many sea lions won’t be saved.

Yet NOAA scientists said the situation is less alarming than would appear and doesn’t look to be tied to a disease or new malady. Instead, it likely reflects the sea lion’s acute sensitivity to a change in ocean circulation patterns. The altered winds have bathed the coast in warm water — 2 to 5 degrees warmer than usual — and made foraging for redistributed fish species more of a challenge.

“It’s unlikely to have any really critical drop in the total population,” said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist with NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

There remain many unknowns, however, including how bad the situation will get before it starts getting better. Experts said they do not expect the situation to turn around for at least a few months.

Sea lions serve as an indicator species, Melin said, and are sometimes among the first and most visible marine creatures to reflect something amiss in the ocean environment. Their recent plight is one in a series of die-offs and stranding events beginning in 2009 on the heels of a rapid ocean warming. The population of their core prey has been somewhat diminished over the same time period, she said, so scientists will be looking for longer term implications.

January strandings were more than five times the historic average and more than twice the rate observed in 2013, when NOAA declared an Unusual Mortality Event, or UME. More than 1,100 sea lion strandings were recorded that year.

This year has not been declared a UME yet, though observations so far suggest it may be an even worse year, with data collected from sea lion rookeries in the Channel Islands during September and February showing that pups born last summer were already severely underweight, and in many cases, continued to lose weight over the winter, Melin said.

Most turning up on the coastline now are around 8 months old and should still be with their mothers, but appear to have weaned early, leaving the Southern California colonies in search of food, she said. Many are starving, too young to have developed the necessary skills to survive.

Scientists believe the root problem is the inability of their mothers to find sufficient food to nourish their young, most likely because the large area of warm water off the coast has driven fish and other marine life to other areas.

Yet satellite tags on some of the female sea lions who bore pups last year indicate they are staying within their usual foraging grounds, suggesting they may be having to dive deeper and work harder to feed, and thus are leaving their pups for longer periods, Melin said.

Pups left long enough will be so hungry they go off on their own to seek food, she said.

If so, this year’s event is similar to 2013, in which unavailability of prey was determined at least partly responsible. Though sea lions are opportunistic feeders, their core diet includes species rich in fatty acids like Pacific sardines, northern anchovies, rockfish, Pacific hake and market squid, some or all of which may be in short supply, Melin said.

Many pups coming ashore have secondary infections, like pneumonia, but testing on those that have not survived has not revealed evidence of an infectious disease outbreak or harmful algae blooms, which also are potential risks, scientists said.

Nate Mantua, a NOAA climatologist, said a period of strong southerly winds and weak northerly winds has spread warm water north and depressed the upwelling of cold water from deep ocean levels toward the surface.

He said the shift reflects the vagaries of weather — not more permanent climate change.

The warmer off-shore currents have coincided with a variety of shifting marine populations, causing some species to turn up in areas that are not part of their traditional habitats, Mantua said.

“There’s just a whole suite of different animals — some are really good swimmers and some are really weak swimmers — that have changed their distribution,” he said.

Sea lions, which are protected under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, generally have thrived in recent decades but had a rough time of it since 2009. It may be that the population has reached the carrying capacity of the coast, meaning that the current problems finding sufficient food are nature’s way of restoring balance, Melin said.

Most sea lions are born in June and are totally dependent on their mothers for the first six months of their lives, experts say. They generally remain with their mothers until about 11 months of age, when they are weaned.

Where some pup strandings occur every year, it’s usually around May and June, when pups are just beginning to forage on their own, with varying degrees of success, scientists said.

This year’s strandings began months earlier, in December and January, and have accelerated in recent weeks, resulting in reports like one out of San Francisco, where last week a pup strayed onto Skyline Boulevard, about 1,000 feet and up a hill from the water. Another report this week described an emaciated young sea lion wandering into a Marina del Rey apartment complex.

Though most of the strandings have occurred in Southern California and, to a lesser degree, on the Central Coast, the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, the world’s largest, has been at the forefront of providing care.

It is now responding to up to 15 ailing sea lions daily, and has more than 130 sea lions in rehab at its Marin Headlands facility, spokeswoman Sarah van Schagen said.

About 550 total are in the care of a half-dozen marine mammal centers up and down the coast.

Though the Sausalito center still has room, the growing number of strandings is making it harder and more time-consuming for rescue personnel to respond to reports. Mantua pleaded with the public to be patient with those doing their best to tend to the animals that can be saved.

Anyone who sees a stranded sea lion should report it by calling the Marine Mammal Center’s 24-hour rescue hotline at 415-289-SEAL (7325) and then leave the animal alone, avoiding human or pet contact that may contribute to its stress.

Mantua encouraged anyone interested in aiding the cause to donate time, supplies and money to facilities like the Marine Mammal Center.

View original article: The Press Democrat.com

California sea lion crisis: Warmer seas may be to blame

Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

Nearly 1,000 abandoned California sea lions have washed ashore this year in what rehabilitation centers say is a growing crisis for the animals.

Emaciated and dehydrated sea lions, mostly pups about 8 months old, have been admitted in record numbers to facilities up and down the California coast.

As of now, there are 550 sea lions at facilities statewide, according to NOAA Fisheries, which addressed the crisis Wednesday morning during a conference call with media.

It’s the third straight year for record numbers of sea lion strandings in the state.

Earlier this month, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory visited sea lion rookeries on the Channel Islands, where most of America’s sea lions breed.

They measured and weighed pups and found them to be considerably underweight. Their average growth rate also was alarmingly low.

“It’s the lowest growth rate we’ve ever observed,” said Sharon Melin, NOAA Wildlife biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory.

The pups’ weight was similar to what was seen in 2013, the year of an “unusual mortality event” for sea lions, and during the 1998 El Niño, which was another difficult year for the mammal.

A UME is characterized by an unexpected number of strandings and significant die-off of a marine mammal population.

Although scientists are still awaiting data from research done on the islands, NOAA Fisheries says warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures along the California coast in fall 2014 may be a factor.

The warmer water could have affected the sea lions’ prey resources. Female sea lions may be having to expend more effort and time to get food, so pups are abandoned.

According to multiple California marine mammal centers, they are seeing a much larger number of sea lions in the first two months of 2015 than in 2013.

“The sea lion pups arriving at the Marine Mammal Center may look like barely more than skin and bones, but these are the lucky ones” because they receive treatment, said Shawn Johnson, director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif.

Read te original story: Los Angeles Times

Sen. Murkowski Defines Goal of Commercial Fishing Discharge Exemption Bill

SEAFOODNEWS.COM | Published by permission

Congress will consider a new effort during the current session to take vessel discharge regulations off the books for commercial, fishing and recreational vessels that are less than 79 feet in length.

That’s S.387, introduced Feb. 4 and sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

Co-sponsors are Senators Barbara Boxer, D-CA, Maria Cantwell, D-WA, and Dan Sullivan, R-AK.

“For those who need a little more graphic detail as to what we’re talking about, when you take a commercial fishing vessel out, your 45-foot commercial fishing vessel, and you have a good day fishing, you’ve got some salmon guts on the deck,” Murkowski said. “You’ve got a little bit of slime. You hose it off. That would be an incidental discharge that would be reportable to the EPA and if you fail to report, you could be subject to civil penalties. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

The senator said current Environmental Protection Agency regulations are so broadly written that they would penalize Alaska’s fishermen and more than 8,000 boats statewide simply for rinsing fish guts off their decks, or rainwater washing other materials off of their decks.

Alaska’s congressional delegation has been trying for several years to get a permanent exempt for these vessels through Congress. Last year Murkowski and former Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, introduced similar legislation.

Copyright SeafoodNews.com | Read original story here.

With West Coast Port Talks Gridlocked, U.S. Labor Secretary Intervenes to Press For a Deal

Copyright © 2015 Seafoodnews.com | Posted by permission

With idled cargo ships piling up along the coastline, President Obama ordered his labor secretary to California to try to head off a costly shutdown of 29 West Coast ports.

Obama dispatched Tom Perez on Saturday to jump-start stalled labor talks between shipping companies and the dockworkers’ union. The move ramps up pressure to resolve a dispute that stranded tens of thousands of containers on cargo ships over the holiday weekend.

The Los Angeles and Long Beach ports account for some 40% of the nation’s incoming container cargo, with $1 billion in goods moving through daily. A prolonged shutdown could hobble some Southland businesses and ripple across the U.S. economy.

On Saturday morning, 32 massive ships were anchored outside the ports, unable to unload thousands of cargo containers filled with auto parts, electronics and clothes destined for store shelves across the country.

“Any company that imports supplies, inventory or parts is going to feel it,” said Ian Winer, a managing director at Wedbush Securities. “There are very few companies who don’t have something coming through those ports.”

That has businesses across the world focused on a dispute between a network of terminal operators and one of the strongest unions left in American industry.

After nine months of talks, the two sides agree on key issues including healthcare but remain gridlocked over rules governing the removal of arbitrators, who settle disputes on the docks.

At stake is a new contract for roughly 20,000 dockworkers at 29 West Coast ports. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has been working without one since July amid negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Assn.

The association has accused union workers of slowdown tactics and has at times halted the unloading of ships, including this weekend. The local union denies the allegations. The unloading of ships is expected to resume Tuesday.

But the congestion has been building for months, because of the labor dispute and other factors. And the holiday weekend stoppage heightens fear of a longer-term disruption.

Some businesses have attempted expensive workarounds, rerouting goods via air or through Gulf and East Coast ports, analysts said. Items ordered by retailers for the spring probably won’t reach stores on time. Deliveries from Asian manufacturers could be delayed until after the Chinese New Year, which starts next week.

For now, retailers still have inventory left over from the holiday season, analysts said. But they will need shipments before the busy spring shopping season.

Communities close to the ports have been hit first and hardest. In Los Angeles, which has recovered slowly from the recession, truck drivers and warehouse workers are already seeing their hours cut.

Elsewhere in the state, the agriculture industry is in pain..

Ronald C. Leimgruber, namesake and owner of a farm in Holtville in southeastern California, said his small company normally exports two or three 20-ton loads of alfalfa hay and grasses a week . Now, he’s forced to stockpile it or sell it cheaper domestically.

“You do whatever you can to survive,” he said.

Customers have canceled orders, and Leimgruber fears they may never come back. His sister’s trucking company is also suffering. She usually sends 24 loads of goods to the ports each week, he said. It’s dropped to five. She’s laid off all but a few of her employees.

“All those wives won’t get a good Valentine’s Day, because their husbands aren’t working,” Leimgruber said.

Companies across the globe will also feel the effects. A shift toward “just in time” manufacturing means companies keep their inventories low, making them far more susceptible to supply chain interruptions.

Honda North America Inc. will slow production at factories in Ohio, Indiana and Canada because it can’t get crucial parts from Japan, said spokesman Mark Morrison.

The company has tried using air cargo and special truck shipments to obtain key supplies since January.

If labor disruptions continue, businesses may reconsider their reliance on shipping to the West Coast, said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo.

“The longer we have disruptions at the ports, the more and more people say this is a reason to do business elsewhere,” he said.

An extreme example of what could happen came Tuesday, when South Korea’s largest shipping company, Hanjin, announced it was pulling out of the Port of Portland.

The shipper accounted for 78% of business at the port, according to the Oregonian newspaper, importing apparel for companies such as Nike and exporting apples and other crops.

Just last weekend, a Hanjin ship sat for four days without being unloaded amid walkouts and lockouts.

Another looming threat is the widening of the Panama Canal, which will allow much larger cargo ships to head directly to the Gulf and East coasts, where ports are racing to expand. That business now mostly flows to L.A. and Long Beach.

With the canal project scheduled for completion next year, this is a bad time for the West Coast to give “themselves a bad name in terms of reliability,” said Jock O’Connell, an international trade economist.

For now, the unions have a strong hand.

While globalization has hurt unions in many U.S. industries, it’s had the opposite effect at West Coast ports. Surging trade with Asia has nearly tripled traffic at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach over the last 20 years and given dockworkers here ever more clout.

Today, the dockworkers are among the best-paid blue-collar workers in the country, earning between $26 and $41 an hour. And their union — tied not to the fate of any one company but to a whole network of international trade — has been able to play hardball.

“These 20,000 workers occupy one of the central choke points of the entire U.S. economy,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in labor unions. “That gives them enormous power.”

It will be up to Perez and a federal mediator to craft a deal that satisfies the dockworkers, the shipping companies and the many industries watching the talks.

If an agreement comes in the next week, the aftershocks will be “a blip,” said Winer, the Wedbush managing director. But if it drags longer, the situation could be dire, he said.

“Six months would be a horror show,” he said. “Even if this lasts more than a month, it’s going to be a significant issue.”

Ken Coons | SeafoodNews.com | Read original article here.

For Rockfish, A Tale Of Recovery, Hidden On Menus

Preface: The authorized, State approved market name for 13 species of rockfish in California is “Pacific red snapper”, or Pacific snapper.

Donna Schroeder/From ‘Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast’/Courtesy Milton Love

A school of vermilion rockfish. After being depleted decades ago by overfishing, rockfish — a genus of more than 100 tasty species — have made a remarkable comeback.

 
For West Coast commercial fishermen and seafood lovers, there is reason to cheer. Rockfish, a genus of more than 100 tasty species depleted decades ago by excessive fishing, have rebounded from extreme low numbers in the 1990s.

It’s a conservation and fishery management success story that chefs, distributors and sustainable seafood advocates want the world to hear.

The rub? It’s hard to communicate this success if purveyors continue to misidentify the fish, as many do.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a case of retailers and chefs being shady. A big problem, says chef Rick Moonen, owner of RM Seafood in Las Vegas, is that fish go by different names in different places. Take rockfish, for example.

“On the East Coast, they call striped bass ‘rockfish.’ You offer them a chilipepper,” Moonen says, citing the name of one rockfish species, “and call it a ‘rockfish’ and they’ll think they’re getting a striped bass.”

Moonen is well known as a sustainable-seafood advocate. And he’s eager to tell the story of rockfish’s comeback, a result of tightened fishing restrictions and a reduction in the number of commercial trawlers raking the ocean bottom in pursuit of the buggy-eyed, spiny-backed fish.

But he says many diners are only familiar with a handful of fish species, and rockfish can sound “like an animal from the Flintstones cartoon.”

If the goal is to get consumers to develop a taste for these fish, Moonen suggests, you’ve got to market it to them in an appealing way. So for now, on his menu, rockfish are still being sold as “Pacific bass.”

“That’s … the Trojan horse we use to get this fish into people’s mouths,” he says. That said, Moonen says he plans to transition to using real names for rockfish.

Indeed, rebranding fish species with more appealing market names is a common and accepted practice in the seafood industry. Tooth fish are sold as Chilean sea bass, sablefish as black cod and slime head as orange roughy.

In these cases, it’s not quite fraud, because consumers understand what each market name means. As Derek Figueroa, chief operating officer with Seattle Fish, a distributor in Denver, observes, “It’s like asking for a Kleenex and getting some other tissue. It might not be what you asked for, but it’s what you had in mind.”

Not always, says Kim Warner, a senior scientist with the environmental group Oceana. She notes that rockfish is sometimes sold as snapper — but “snapper” is the name of another group of fish, which live in warm waters and are exceptionally tasty.

“What if someone who is familiar with real snapper comes to California?” asks Warner. “They’ll think they’re getting snapper. This absolutely confuses people.”

The debate over what to call rockfish comes as American consumers are increasingly demanding accurate information about their food and where it came from. And even if they don’t, correctly identifying fish on menus and in markets is the first step toward creating traceability in the often deceptive and murky fishing industry, says Sheila Bowman of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program.

“The only way to recognize and appreciate these fish is to start calling them by their proper names,” says Bowman.

Bowman says telling the story of West Coast rockfish is important, because it could inspire fishery managers elsewhere to use similar strategies to rebuild other depleted fisheries — such as the beleaguered Atlantic cod.

Oceana’s Warner notes that some instances of seafood mislabeling — such as calling farmed fish “wild,” or serving up a fish containing high mercury levels under an ambiguous label — are deceitful attempts to hide traits that might be seen as undesirable.

But the case of the West Coast rockfish fishery offers much to be proud of, she says — so chefs and vendors who pass rockfish off as something else are shooting themselves in the foot.

“If they’re celebrating that rockfish are doing well, why call them snapper?” Warner says. “You lose the story you’re trying to tell.”

Bowman says that on regular strolls through the seafood markets of Cannery Row, in downtown Monterey, Calif., she sees rockfish of all colors labeled as “snapper” and “rock cod.” Sometimes, chefs and vendors avoid the fishes’ real names because they are a mouthful for diners — like vermillion rockfish, bocaccio rockfish, chilipepper rockfish and shortbelly rockfish. But Figueroa at Seattle Fish says he’s excited to start using these exotic — and accurate — names.

And a little tableside education could quickly help consumers get over the unfamiliarity factor, adds John Rorapaugh, owner of a seafood wholesaler and distributor in Washington, D.C., called ProFish.

“I think it’s more interesting to use the real names,” Rorapaugh says. “If you have thornyhead rockfish on the menu, it will start a conversation.”

And if consumers start asking for these mild, white fish species by name, says Bowman, it could help boost demand — and prices — for rockfish. She says that could be good for both fish and fishermen.

“If rockfish fishermen are happy and making money, other fishermen will see that [the recovery efforts used for West Coast rockfish] could work in other places,” Bowman says. “But if fishermen are just getting a couple of bucks a pound for these fish, then the effort we made to bring this fishery back won’t be worth it.”

View original article here.

Elephant Seals Battle for Love With Mating Songs and Bravado

Lauren Sommer, KQED Science

Editor’s Note: This story won a national Edward R. Murrow Award last year for Use of Sound. We bring it back to you as our Valentine from KQED Science. 

A male northern elephant seal calling at Año Nuevo State Reserve. (A. Friendlaender)

Love is in the air on California beaches this time of year, when northern elephant seals arrive by the thousands for breeding season. Males make plenty of noise at Año Nuevo State Reserve, north of Santa Cruz, but it sounds more like a chorus of motorcycles than the sultry sounds of Annie Lennox.

Now, researchers at UC Santa Cruz are decoding this complex communication system and learning how males use it to boost their reputation.

Elephant seals spend most of the year alone in the Pacific Ocean, so there’s plenty of action packed into the two months they’re on land every winter. “That’s mating behavior,” says naturalist Lisa Wolfklain, pointing at two elephant seals in a sea of hundreds of males, females and pups.

Male elephant seals are the size of an SUV — fifteen feet long and 4,000 pounds. They’re known for their proboscis, the huge, fleshy nose that hangs over their mouth. There are plenty of available females this time of year, but most males will strike out. The dating scene is controlled by alpha males.

“The alpha strategy is to be dominant over a group of females, the harem,” says Wolfklain. “And they want to have the first right to mate.”

You can spot the alpha males right in the middle of their groups of 10 to 100 females. The other males, known as betas, are on the outskirts, just watching, waiting for their chance.

“So this guy’s coming in,” says Wolfklain, pointing at one beta male moving quickly toward a female. The alpha male perks up and snorts a warning with customary bravado. Sometimes the fight ends there, but not this one.

“Ooh, now they’re hitting with their heads,” the commentary continues, as the two lunge at each others’ chests. A few strikes seem to be enough for the beta male and he retreats.

These fights can be bloody and all the while, other males are taking advantage and sneaking in. It adds up to a very stressful time for male elephant seals.

It’s All About Reputation

“It’s not advantageous for males to fight all the time,” says Caroline Casey, a researcher at UC Santa Cruz. She says fights can be risky. “Sometimes they can result in death and we’ve seen that,” she says.

Elephant seals also don’t eat while on land, so they need to conserve energy. Casey says, as with humans, one way to avoid fighting is communication. But until now, no one was really sure what the males were saying to each other. So, she and her colleagues have been studying a patch of beach with about 50 males.

“We have come up with this ranking system where we assign each male a score,” she says. It’s similar to systems used in professional sports, where the males win or lose points with every fight. Casey and her team also recorded the males’ calls and found remarkable differences.

One beta male, X579, has a call that ends in a flourish. “His call, to me, is my favorite,” she says. “He always has this really lovely note at the end of it.”

X579 was a beta male with a lot of competition. “He tends to vocalize and challenge everybody right when he gets there,” Casey says. He challenged GL, an alpha male with a very short, staccato call.

“That is what’s so incredible,” Casey says. “All of the animals sound completely different from one another.” What’s more, Casey’s team found that each male seems to use the same call year after year, whether he has a harem or not. It’s their signature call – and they flaunt it.

“A larger, more dominant animal will come up to a smaller animal, maybe beat him up a little bit,” says Casey, “call at him before and after, like, ‘Hey, this is me. I’m Bob. Don’t mess with me.’”

It’s all about spreading your reputation around. “That’s called associative learning and that’s very unique among marine mammals,” Casey explains. “That means that every male has the potential to be learning every other male based on their acoustic signature at that site.”

These complex communication systems have been studied in songbirds and other animals, but Casey says less is known about marine species. “I think it’s just a piece of larger puzzle in understanding how these animals breed and how they’re going to survive.”

A century ago, elephant seals were hunted to near extinction for their blubber. Fewer than 100 lingered off the coast of Mexico. With protective laws in place, today there are more than 150,000 northern elephant seals — and growing.

That’s good news for Casey’s loner elephant seal X579. This year, he’s an alpha male for the first time. As for the others, there’s always next year.

Read the original post here.

Alaska senators hope to toss overbroad fishing-discharge regs overboard

Chris Klint, Senior Digital Producer, cklint@ktuu.com

ANCHORAGE –

Three U.S. senators, including both of Alaska’s, are pushing to gut the application of an Environmental Protection Agency discharge regulation to small fishing boats they say could punish cleaning up fish guts.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Alaska Republicans, joined Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) Thursday in sponsoring legislation which would remove the expiration date on a three-year moratorium for commercial fishing vessels, as well as commercial vessels under 79 feet long. The incidental discharge regulation was part of the Coast Guard Reauthorization Bill, which was passed by Congress and signed into law in December.

“The flawed regulation is written so broadly that it would penalize Alaska’s fisherman and more than 8,000 boats statewide simply for rinsing fish guts off their deck, or rainwater washing other materials off their decks,” Murkowski’s office wrote in a statement on the 2014 bill Thursday.

In a December Senate speech on the proposed moratorium, Murkowski offered her colleagues a fisherman’s perspective on what the regulations meant.

“For those who need a little more graphic detail as to what we’re talking about, when you take a commercial fishing vessel out, your 45-foot commercial fishing vessel, and you have a good day fishing, you’ve got some salmon guts on the deck,” Murkowski said. “You’ve got a little bit of slime. You hose it off.  That would be an incidental discharge that would be reportable to the EPA, and if you fail to report, you could be subject to civil penalties. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

Murkowski Speaks on Senate Floor on Vessel Discharge Agreement — video

Murkowski spokesman Matthew Felling said Thursday that the sweep of the EPA regulations seemed to be a product of being overbroad, rather than an intentional effect.

“I think this was designed for big, huge fishing boats, and they just forgot to make the reasonable exception,” Felling said.

The Peninsula Clarion reported last year that leaders of Alaska commercial fishing groups had questioned the sensibility of applying the regulations to small fishing boats, noting that they would bar pumping rainwater overboard or returning parts of halibut removed from the sea to the sea.

With bipartisan support from Boxer, Felling said Murkowski is optimistic that a permanent version of the moratorium “is going to happen.”

“Sen. Boxer had announced that she’s not running again, and this has been a real priority for her,” Felling said. “We want to make sure this gets done this Congress, to give certainty and security and right a wrong that may not have been intended in the first place.”

Copyright © 2015, KTUU-TV

Read the original story here.

Chemical clues in fossil shells may help us understand today’s ocean acidification

By: Brendan Bane

As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, so too do those in the sea, leading to ocean acidification that outpaces that of any other time in tens of millions of years. Some effects of ocean acidification are imminent, like the fact that calcified organisms such as corals and shellfish will have access to less and less of the chemical components they need to build their shells and skeletons. Other outcomes are less clear, and scientists wanting to predict what may come of our quickly acidifying waters are looking to past climatic events that were similar to our own.

One such event, the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 56 million years ago, is likely our closest analog to modern ocean acidification. Researchers who refer to the PETM as a case study have long suspected that ancient waters acidified then, but until recently, they never had physical evidence of it actually happening. Then just this past year, researchers uncovered the PETM’s chemical chronology encrypted in the shells of fossilized plankton, called foraminifera, and learned that the two timelines aren’t entirely similar; today’s surface ocean is acidifying ten times faster than it did during the PETM. Their findings were published in Paleoceanography in June, 2014.

Penman (the lead author) offered this image of himself (center), Richard Norris (Scripps) and Pincelli Hull (Yale) inspecting sediment cores from the PETM while aboard a scientific drilling vessel.
Penman (the lead author) offered this image of himself (center), Richard Norris (Scripps) and Pincelli Hull (Yale) inspecting sediment cores from the PETM while aboard a scientific drilling vessel. Photo credit Donald Penman.
“While foraminifera are alive, they incorporate the chemistry of the water into their shells,” said Bärbel Hönisch, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University and coauthor of the study. “When they die, they take that information with them into the sediment.”

Hönisch and several other scientists analyzed the chemical composition of fossilized foraminifera embedded in “nannofossil ooze,” a section of rock particularly rich with tiny fossilized organisms, which they drilled out of sub-ocean sediment near Japan.

Foraminifera, like coral and shellfish, pull carbonate ions from the surrounding seawater to build their shells. In a way, the chemical composition of these shells acts as a snapshot of the chemical composition of the water the foraminifer lived in. When water grows increasingly acidic, foraminifera replace whole carbonate molecules with borate molecules. When the scientists of this study inspected the boron composition of shells from plankton that died during the PETM, they learned not only how acidic the ocean was at the time, but also how quickly its chemistry shifted and how long it stayed that way.

“Acidification during the PETM was relatively rapid,” said oceanographer Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, another coauthor of the study, “but it was also sustained. The whole event took a very long time.” A massive surge in atmospheric carbon, its cause still unknown, warmed the globe by four to eight degrees and dropped the ocean’s pH by about 100 percent. Conditions remained that way for approximately 70,000 years. These environmental changes triggered many biological ones. Seafloor-dwelling foraminifera suffered mass extinction while another type of tiny aquatic organism, dinoflagellates, thrived and expanded.

Foraminifera like the one pictured above record their environment’s chemistry in calcium carbonate shells, essentially leaving a trail of chemical breadcrumbs for future investigators. Photo by Howard Spero.
Foraminifera like the one pictured above record their environment’s chemistry in calcium carbonate shells, essentially leaving a trail of chemical breadcrumbs for future investigators. Photo by Howard Spero.
Although the PETM ocean did acidify quickly, it happened ten times slower than what’s happening today. Our ocean’s pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 in the last 150 years, an amount that took a few thousand years in the PETM. Scientists predict the drop will only continue, with the seas reaching a pH of 7.8 to 7.9 by 2100. That change was and continues to be fueled by manmade carbon being pumped into the atmosphere and subsequently absorbed by the ocean.

In understanding how to compare the two events and what outcomes will emerge from modern acidification, rate is key.

“In any aspect of environmental change, particularly global change, rate matters” said lead author Donald Penman of the University of California Santa Cruz. Natural buffers like deep seawater mixing likely mitigated acidification during the PETM. But those same buffers will surely be outpaced by today’s heightened rate. “If you put carbon dioxide into the ocean faster than its natural processes can deal with it,” Penman said, “then they don’t do you any good.”

Marine animals will also be challenged by the speed at which their environment is changing. “We know that organisms and ecosystems can adapt and evolve to slow changes as they have throughout earth’s history,” Penman said. “However, when you invoke the same change over a shorter time, then you can outstrip organisms’ ability to evolve with that change. Species go extinct, and marine ecosystems change dramatically, perhaps irrecoverably.”

The researchers noticed that extinctions occurred during the PETM even at a pH change rate of 0.1 per thousands of years – which may not bode well for today’s foraminifera.

“The fact that some organisms went extinct during the PETM puts our current activities in perspective,” said Hönisch. “If the organisms died then, it is even more likely that some organisms will die now.”

With a clearer picture of the PETM painted, researchers can begin to draw more detailed analogies between the two events, and hopefully catch any drastic environmental changes before they surprise us.

“Now that we have [ocean acidification during PETM] quantified,” Penman said, “we can begin to make calculations of how much and how quickly carbon was emitted during the PETM. This will help us disentangle what sources of carbon and feedbacks were in operation during the PETM, and whether or not they are something we need to worry about in the future.”

Penman (the lead author) offered this image of himself (center), Richard Norris (Scripps) and Pincelli Hull (Yale) inspecting sediment cores from the PETM while aboard a scientific drilling vessel. Photo credit Donald Penman.

Foraminifera like the one pictured above record their environment’s chemistry in calcium carbonate shells, essentially leaving a trail of chemical breadcrumbs for future investigators. Photo by Howard Spero.

Citations:
Penman, D. E., Hönisch, B., Zeebe, R. E., Thomas, E., & Zachos, J. C. (2014). Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene‐Eocene Thermal Maximum. Paleoceanography.
Hönisch, B., Ridgwell, A., Schmidt, D. N., Thomas, E., Gibbs, S. J., Sluijs, A., … & Williams, B. (2012). The geological record of ocean acidification. science, 335(6072), 1058-1063.

Read the original post Mongabay.com.

Mike Hale, The Grub Hunter: Don’t slam the sardine

Smaller fish such as sardines and herring are less vulnerable to pollutants. (Bob Fila — Chicago Tribune file)

By Mike Hale, Monterey Herald

I live for Sardine Tuesdays, those rare occasions when Local Catch Monterey Bay offends some of its members by highlighting those small, oily “trash” fish that belong on the end of a hook — not in a fry pan fouling the air within two square blocks.

The sign-out sheet at my pickup location always includes more than a few persuasive scribbles from disappointed members urging someone — anyone — to take their share.

I always oblige. Then I tote home my double dose of sardines — meeting the cold glare of my fish-phobe wife and the delirious purr of our rotund Sopa, who creates a happy tangle of orange fur around my ankles.

Sardines and other small fish at the bottom of the food chain (herring, mackerel, smelt, anchovies) often end up in pet food, but in the right hands they are a tasty, healthful addition to the human diet (a fact ridiculously obvious anywhere outside our Fast Food Nation).

When Local Catch offers the smaller-sized sardines as it did last week, I prepare my home for a massive fish fry by opening my kitchen windows. It’s a simple process: I liberally season the cleaned, headless sardines before dredging them in flour and frying them in vegetable oil. After a spritzing of lemon juice, I hold these crispy beauties by the tail and eat them whole (the tiny bones practically dissolve upon cooking).

If that seems like a lot of trouble, order them out. Oddly enough, the former Sardine Capital of the World has traditionally boasted very few restaurants that serve these undervalued and underutilized fish (and believe it or not, the Sardine Factory has never served sardines).

But the tide is turning. Heading to Fisherman’s Wharf provides options: Domenico’s offers a fried anchovy appetizer and olive-oil marinated, grilled local sardines served with a Sicilian salsa; Abalonetti Bar & Grill grills its local sardines, topped with a spicy marinara. Off the pier: Crystal Fish in Monterey serves a fine sardine sushi; Lokal in Carmel Valley often adds to its menu tasty sardine sandwiches called bocadillos, slathering the bread with a pungent mojito aioli; jeninni kitchen + wine bar in Pacific Grove rolls out bruschetta with anchovies; and Mundaka in Carmel right now offers Spanish mackerel escabeche, a method where the fish is cooked before pickled.

Boats are pulling Spanish mackerel out of the bay now, and Mundaka chef Brandon Miller seasons them with fennel, black pepper and cumin before roasting. He then sautés vegetables, adding water and vinegar to create a pickling liquid he pours over the fish.

When smelt are running in San Francisco Bay, Miller will source them from his hometown and serve what he calls “fries with eyes.” He dredges the whole smelt in flour and deep-fries until crispy, serving them with a side of squid ink aioli.

“You can’t just eat all the big fish, because there is only so many of them in the ocean,” he said. “I like to target these little fish. They are delicious and really good for you.”

Cardiologists light up at the subject. Sardines and their brethren are full of heart-healthy omega-3s, and not full of toxins (such as mercury) that can build up in large fish such as tuna. They are also chock-full of fat-fighting compounds that help stabilize blood sugar, and rich in coenzyme Q10, vitamin B12, selenium, calcium, phosphorus and vitamin D.

Without a doubt, sardines are stinky, slimy, slippery and seemingly indigestible. But look closer, climb down the food chain and give them a try anyway. Open the windows, put on a pot of boiling vinegar and cause a stink.

Read the original post MontereyHerald.com.