Saving Seafood Special Report: U.S. Seafood: Ratings and Realities

As the National Park Service implements seafood guidelines for its vendors Saving Seafood examines the value, limitations, and pitfalls of third party ratings and certifications.

(Saving Seafood) August 1, 2013 — When the National Park Service (NPS) announced it would utilize third party seafood ratings and certification programs to set guidelines for vendors offering seafood options within U.S. National Parks, the agency revived a debate surrounding the eco-certification of U.S. seafood. Tomorrow, NPS is meeting with NOAA in an attempt to reconcile concerns and ensure that its new sustainable seafood guidelines aren’t detrimental to fishermen, processors, and consumers alike.

In June, the National Park Service (NPS) announced a new initiative to provide healthier and more sustainable food options in national parks across the United States. As part of the program, NPS created guidelines for “sustainable seafood,” stating that parks will “provide only [seafood options] that are ‘Best Choices’ or ‘Good Alternatives’ on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch list, certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), or identified by an equivalent program that has been approved by the NPS.”

In response, John Connelly, President of the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), wrote a letter to NPS, in which he asked that the Agency reconsider their guidelines. He stated that “any fish caught in U.S. waters is already ‘certified sustainable,’ based on rigorous NOAA oversight and does not need additional certifications.” His point speaks to the strict conservation standards in the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which are enforced by NOAA.

The Seafood Coalition, an ad hoc group representing members of the seafood industry across the U.S., followed up with their own letter. In it they asked: “Why would the NPS limit its vendors to those whose products are deemed sustainable by outside interests while ignoring [NOAA’s] FishWatch, an existing and proven program?”

Read the full story here.

Voyage to study effects of ocean acidification off U.S. West Coast

Scientists aboard the survey ship Fairweather will travel along the U.S. West Coast to study ocean acidification. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / July 25, 2013)

A team of scientists is setting out on a research expedition along the U.S. West Coast to study ocean acidification, the greenhouse gas-driven change in the chemistry of seawater that has been called climate change’s “evil twin.”

Chemists and biologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will board the survey ship Fairweather next week, sailing from Canada to Mexico to collect samples of water, algae and plankton, officials said Thursday. The goal of the monthlong voyage is to better understand how marine ecosystems are responding to water that is becoming more acidic as a result of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“We will for the first time not only study the chemistry of acidification but also study at the same time the biological impacts,” Richard Feely, an oceanographer with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Research Laboratory, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Oceans have absorbed about 25% of the greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, buffering some of the effects of climate change, Feely said. But that comes at a great cost to marine life because when carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it lowers itsthe water’s. The gradual change in chemistry poses a particular threat to shellfish such as oysters and clams that require alkaline water to build their protective shells.

The research expedition could shed light on whether acidification is harming pteropods, marine snails that are especially sensitive to changing acidity and are a key food source for fish, birds and whales. Scientists also want to know whether acidification is making harmful algae blooms more toxic to marine life. Increased toxicity has been shown in laboratory experiments but not observed the field.

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Agency says Pacific great white shark not in danger of extinction

A great white shark plies waters at Guadalupe Island in 2007. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times / November 15, 2007)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday that the northeastern Pacific Ocean population of great white sharks is not in danger of extinction and does not warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act.

NOAA had been researching the health of the great white population since last year, when the environmental groups Oceana, Shark Stewards and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition calling for endangered species protection.

The petitioners were reacting to the first census of great whites ever attempted. Conducted by UC Davis and Stanford University researchers, and published in the journal Biology Letters in 2011, the census estimated that only

219 adult and sub-adult great whites lived off the Central California coast, and perhaps double that many were in the entire northeastern Pacific Ocean, including Southern California.

Read the full story here.

Warming, Rising Acidity and Pollution: Top Threats to the Ocean

Ocean plants produce some 50% of the planet’s oxygen. Seawater absorbs a quarter of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere. Ocean currents distribute heat around the globe, regulating weather patterns and climate. And, for those who take pleasure in life’s simple rewards, a seaweed extract keeps your peanut butter and ice cream at the right consistency!

Nonetheless, those of us who can’t see the ocean from our window still feel a disconnect—because the ocean feels far away, it’s easy to forget the critical role the ocean plays in human life and to think that problems concerning the ocean will only harm those people that fish or make their living directly from the sea. But this isn’t true: the sea is far more important than that.

Every year, scientists learn more about the top threats to the ocean and what we can do to counter them. So for tomorrow’s World Oceans Day, here’s a run-down of what we’ve learned just in the past 12 months.

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Ruddy turnstones sit on an abandoned pier on the coast of Hawaii. Photo by LCDR Eric T. Johnson, NOAA Corps

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Sperm as superfood? It’s a healthy snack for squid and other critters

Certain females consume male ejaculate and sperm as if they were food, using the nutrients to fuel their own bodies as well as their eggs, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, adds yet another dimension to the battle between the sexes.

“If males have their sperm consumed, rather than used for egg fertilization, they will lose that reproductive opportunity. Therefore, it is in the male’s best interests to try to ensure at least some of his sperm reaches the female’s eggs,” lead author Benjamin Wegener, a researcher at Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences, explained to Discovery News.

Read the full story here.

The southern bottletail squid occupies the waters off the coast of Australia.

Ocean temperatures highest in 150 years last year

The average temperature in that area hit a record high of 57.2 degrees last year.

 Sea-surface temperatures from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to the Gulf of Maine were the highest measured in 150 years in 2012, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The average temperature in that area hit a record high of 57.2 degrees last year. The previous record was set in 1951, according to NOAA.

The average sea surface temperature has usually been below 54.3 degrees in the last 30 years, NOAA reports.

The temperature is influencing fish and shellfish on the Northeast Shelf, according to NOAA.

Four southern species – black sea bass, summer flounder, longfin squid and butterfish – have moved to the northeast, according to NOAA. American lobster has headed northeast but at a slower pace. Atlantic cod and haddock have moved in the opposite direction.

Story from USA Today

El Niños Are Highly Unpredictable

El Niño events are not as predictable as scientists thought. The frequency and strength of the ocean-warming climate phenomenon

It’s in there. Corals collected on islands in the central Pacific reveal that the strength and frequency of the climate phenomenon commonly known as El Niño is highly unpredictable.
Credit: Gary Meek/Georgia Tech

were more variable during the 20th century than, on average, during the preceding 7000 years, according to new analyses of climate records locked within ancient corals. The finding largely discounts the idea that certain long-term variations in Earth’s orbit strongly influence the climate-maker, scientists say.

“This will be a shock for many paleoclimatologists,” says Axel Timmermann, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in Honolulu who wasn’t involved in the new research. “[These findings] are a stark contrast to their ideas.”

El Niños are marked by substantially warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperatures along the equatorial Pacific. These events—along with their alter egos La Niñas, which are defined by cooler-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the same region—steer weather patterns across large swaths of the globe, baking some areas while drowning others. Together, these phenomena are called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In modern times, El Niños occur once every 2 to 7 years; sometimes they’re strong and long-lasting, and other times they’re brief and mild.

Read the full article here.

National ocean policy sparks partisan fight

The wrangling threatens to overshadow a fundamental issue — the country’s patchwork approach to managing offshore waters. Twenty-seven federal agencies, representing interests as diverse as farmers and shippers, have some role in governing the oceans. Obama’s July 2010 executive order set up a National Ocean Council, based at the White House, that is designed to reconcile the competing interests of different agencies and ocean users.

Is Fish Poop Critical To The Ocean?

Professor Deborah Steinberg of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) has dedicated her professional life to investigating crustaceans and their role in the “biological pump,” which is the process by which marine life transports carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ocean’s surface to the deep sea. This cycle removes the carbon to a depth where it contributes nothing to global warming.

In a new study published in Tuesday’s issue of Scientific Reports, professor Steinberg partnered with Dr. Grace Saba of Rutgers
University and retrained her focus from crustaceans to small forage fish in order to gain an understanding of their role in this carbon removal process.

The research pair collected their data off the coast of southern California on an exploratory expedition aboard the research vessel Point Sur. Building on Steinberg’s knowledge of copepods and other small, drifting marine animals, gleaned from two decades of research, the team wanted to explore whether forage fish like crustaceans played a discernible role in the biological pump through their consumption of photosynthetic surface algae and subsequent release “fecal pellets”.
Read full story here.

Fishery Management: An Analysis of Fish Stock Assessments

Center for American Progress

Counting Fish 101

An Analysis of Fish Stock Assessments

George Lapointe, Linda Mercer, and Michael Conathan   

Science is integral to fishing operations. Without the ability to estimate how many fish exist in the ocean there’s no way to determine how many of them we can catch while allowing the remaining fish populations to stay viable. But fish live in a mostly invisible world beneath the ocean surface, they move around constantly, and they eat each other.

This creates a dynamic population structure that’s incredibly difficult to track, making fish virtually impossible to count. Thus, fisheries scientists—like political pollsters or other statisticians—must rely on imperfect data to make their predictions about the status and health of fish populations.

They take these data—some of which they collect, some of which come from fishermen—and plug them into scientific models which, in turn, create estimates of population health. Because the entire population of a given species is frequently divided into subpopulations known as “stocks,” these estimates are called “stock assessments,” and they form the backbone of modern fishery management in the United States.

These assessments provide an estimate of the current state of a fish population and, in some cases, forecast future trends. This tells us whether fishery management goals are
being met and indicates the type of conditions to which the fishery will have to adapt in the near future. In an ideal world, scientists would have the resources to provide managers with updated stock assessments for each species every year, but their expense and complexity mean they can only be updated periodically.

Regardless of how frequently they can be updated, strong, science-based stock assessments are the key to future sustainability, not just of the fish but also of the fishing industry. Fishing is an inherently unstable business, yet strong, accurate science can give fishermen a better understanding of whether their resource will remain healthy, and if it does, how many fish they will be allowed to catch. This in turn allows fishermen to make informed business decisions and stabilizes coastal economies.

Read the full report here.