A Bird’s Eye View: Aerial Surveys of Nearshore Waters Provide Important Information for Managing Coastal Pelagic Fishes

An unretouched aerial photo of a sardine school off Southern California

 

Since August 2012, CDFW’s Coastal Pelagic Species (CPS) Project and the California Wetfish Producers Association have been working together to develop a nearshore aerial survey program for southern California waters. The valuable data collected by the program may be used to set sustainable harvest limits and prevent overfishing of CPS, including Pacific sardine, Pacific mackerel, and northern anchovy.

A primary focus of the program is developing scientifically rigorous aerial survey methods. Over the first four field seasons, Pacific sardine schools were mostly observed close to shore along either mainland or island coasts. Boat-based groundtruthing confirmed the accuracy of aerial fish identification, and provided critical biological and environmental data.

Starting in summer 2013, other CPS were quantified including northern anchovy and Pacific mackerel. Both aerial and boat survey methods have been refined to improve data collection efficiency and accuracy, and staff have begun integrating all CPS observations into the program. Information from the aerial surveys will help to increase our understanding of the abundance and distribution of CPS in southern California.

CDFW coordinates with NOAA Fisheries and other West Coast agencies through the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) to manage Pacific sardine and other CPS fisheries included in the federal CPS Fishery Management Plan. PFMC uses stock assessments to set sustainable harvest limits that prevent overfishing of CPS populations. Once enough data are collected, CDFW will request that the PFMC include the California aerial survey data in future stock assessments of Pacific sardine and, potentially, other CPS. California aerial surveys would complement other types of surveys currently included in stock assessments, such as the ship-based acoustic surveys and fish egg surveys conducted farther off shore.

For more information about Pacific sardine research and management, please visit CDFW’s Pacific sardine webpage.

 

 

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Unusual North Pacific warmth jostles marine food chain

September 2014 | Contributed by Michael Milstein

 

Scientists across NOAA Fisheries are watching a persistent expanse of exceptionally warm water spanning the Gulf of Alaska that could send reverberations through the marine food web. The warm expanse appeared about a year ago and the longer it lingers, the greater potential it has to affect ocean life from jellyfish to salmon, researchers say.

“Right now it’s super warm all the way across the Pacific to Japan,” said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Newport, Ore., who has linked certain ocean indicators to salmon returns. “For a scientist it’s a very interesting time because when you see something like this that’s totally new you have opportunities to learn things you were never expecting.”

Not since records began has the region of the North Pacific Ocean been so warm for so long. The warm expanse has been characterized by sea surface temperatures as much as three degrees C (about 5.4 degrees F) higher than average, lasting for months, and appears on large- scale temperature maps as a red-orange mass of warm water many hundreds of miles across. Nick Bond of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington earlier this summer nicknamed it “the blob.”

Indeed, there are three warm zones, said Nate Mantua, leader of the landscape ecology team at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center: The big blob dominating the Gulf of Alaska, a more recent expanse of exceptionally warm water in the Bering Sea and one that emerged off Southern California earlier this year. One exception to the warmth is a narrow strip of cold water along the Pacific Northwest Coast fed by upwelling from the deep ocean.

The situation does not match recognized patterns in ocean conditions such as El Niño Southern Oscillation or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which are known to affect marine food webs. “It’s a strange and mixed bag out there,” Mantua said.

One possibility is that the PDO, a long-lived El Niño-like pattern, is shifting from an extended cold period dating to the late 1990s to a warm phase, said Toby Garfield, director of the Environmental Research Division at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Mantua said the PDO may have tipped into a warm state as early as January of this year.

But both scientists noted that the observed warm temperatures are higher and cover more of the northern Pacific than the PDO typically affects. For all but the Gulf of Alaska, the warm waters appear to lie in a relatively shallow layer near the surface. The cold near-shore conditions in the Pacific Northwest also don’t match the typical PDO pattern.

Warm ocean temperatures favor some species but not others. For instance, sardines and albacore tuna often thrive in warmer conditions. Pacific Coast salmon and steelhead rely on cold-water nutrients, which they may have found recently in the narrow margin of cold water along the Northwest coast. But if the warmth continues or expands Pacific Northwest salmon and steelhead could suffer in coming years.

“If the warming persists for the whole summer and fall, some of the critters that do well in a colder, more productive ocean could suffer reduced growth, poor reproductive success and population declines,” Mantua said. “This has happened to marine mammals, sea birds and Pacific salmon in the past. At the same time, species that do well in warmer conditions may experience increased growth, survival and abundance.”

Peterson recently advised the Northwest Power and Conservation Council that juvenile salmon and steelhead migrating from the Columbia River to the ocean this year and next may experience poor survival.

“The signs for salmon aren’t good based on our experience in the past,” Peterson said, “but we won’t really see the signal from this until those fish return in a few years.” The warm expanse in the Gulf of Alaska is a kind of climatic “hangover” from the same persistent atmospheric ridge of high pressure believed to have contributed to California’s extreme drought, Bond and Mantua said. The ridge suppressed storms and winds that commonly stir and cool the sea surface.

Other factors created the patch of warm water hugging the Central California Coast south to Baja California. A low-pressure trough between California and Hawaii weakened the winds that typically drive upwelling of deep, cold water along the California Coast. Without those winds waters off Southern California’s beaches have stayed unusually warm.

NOAA surveys off California in July found jellyfish called “sea nettles” and ocean sunfish, which the warmer waters likely carried closer to shore, Mantua said. Anglers have reported excellent fishing for warm water species including yellowfin tuna, yellowtail and dorado, also known as mahi-mahi.

Research surveys in the Gulf of Alaska this summer came across species such as pomfret, ocean sunfish, blue shark and thresher shark often associated with warmer water, said Joe Orsi of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center Auke Bay Laboratories in Juneau. He said temperatures in the upper 20 meters of water up to 65 kilometers offshore were 0.8 degrees C (about 1.4 degrees F) above normal in both June and July.

The potential arrival of El Niño later this year would likely reinforce the warming and its effects on marine ecosystems, Bond said. NOAA’s National Weather Service estimates a 65 percent chance El Niño will emerge in fall or early winter.

Mantua noted that fall in California generally brings even weaker winds and weaker upwelling, making it likely that the warm waters off Central California will persist and even expand northward regardless of a tropical El Niño.

Unusually warm temperatures dominate three areas of the North Pacific: the Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska and an area off Southern California. The darker the red, the further above average the sea surface temperature. NOAA researchers are tracking the temperatures and their implications for marine life.

NOAA research surveys in the Gulf of Alaska this summer turned up ocean sunfish, also known as mola, which are often associated with warmer waters.

Thresher sharks were among the species associated with warmer waters that turned up in research surveys in the Gulf of Alaska this summer.

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El Niño forecast is up in the air for Southern California

With the summer winding down, weather officials say the winter forecast is wide open.

While a mild-to-moderate El Niño weather pattern is widely expected to develop in the fall, forecast models have “projected many different outcomes,” said Eric Boldt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“The odds of drier than normal winter are just as high as a wetter than normal winter,” he said in a video released Tuesday.

Last month, climatologists downgraded the chance of El Niño forming this fall from 80% to 65%. But the latest three-month outlook for January to March shows a potential for above-normal precipitation in Southwest California, Boldt said.

Forecasters are in El Niño watch mode, noting that sea temperatures along the equatorial Pacific have warmed, a possible signal that the storm-producing weather system is strengthening, Boldt said.

In the last four weeks, sea surface temperatures were also above average along the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

El Niño winters in Southwest California have been historically wet, which would be a welcome reprieve for a region parched by a prolonged drought.

Nearly 60% of the state is experiencing “exceptional” drought conditions, the harshest on a five-level scale as measured by U.S. Drought Monitor.

For breaking news in Los Angeles and throughout California, follow @VeronicaRochaLA. She can be reached at veronica.rocha@latimes.com.

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

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CHUCK DELLA SALA, JOE PENNISI, AND SHEMS JUD: Sustainability Certification Reflects Sea Change in West Coast Fisheries

September 4, 2014 — In essence, what the trawlers of the West Coast have done under this new system is renew the social contract that they have with the public, by providing assurance that they are harvesting a public resource in a sustainable manner.

The following op-ed was submitted to Saving Seafood by Chuck Della Sala, the Mayor of the City of Monterey, California; Joe Pennisi, the owner and skipper of the F/V Pioneer; and Shems Jud, of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Oceans Program:

Most California seafood lovers are familiar with the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Consumer Guides – the booklets that recommend which fish to eat and which should be avoided.

Seafood Watch just dramatically increased its list of recommended seafood options from the West Coast. They now rank nearly all bottom trawl-caught groundfish as “good” and “best” alternatives. Those species include lingcod, chilipepper rockfish, Dover sole, and dozens more.

Readers accustomed to grim news about marine resources will find this news a pleasant surprise; but for those who closely follow commercial fisheries of the West Coast it may seem more like a miracle.

Fourteen years ago the West Coast groundfish fishery was declared a disaster by the federal government. Years of overharvesting and science and management failures had resulted in rapidly dwindling stocks as too many boats chased too few fish in a classic example of the “tragedy of the commons.” Eight species were declared overfished, and the Pacific Fishery Management Council (Council) and the National Marine Fisheries Services were scrambling – along with fishermen – to figure out some way to save a major American fishery, and one of great importance to Monterey and the region.

There’s nothing like disaster to bring unlikely partners together. In the years following the declaration it has been our privilege – fishermen, fishing communities, and conservationists, to sit together at the same table with the Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service to help develop an entirely new approach to managing one of the most complex multispecies fisheries on earth.

The quota-based management system that was eventually implemented in 2011 became known as the West Coast Groundfish Trawl Catch Share Program. It combined practical conservation incentives with a system of full accountability by putting federal observers on fishing vessels.   The program gives fishermen the flexibility to fish when the weather is right and to work with their markets to time landings to meet demand. Fishermen are also able to actively manage their portfolio of species, which has dramatically reduced both bycatch and discards.

Today, fishing businesses are slowly becoming more stable, and several of those overfished species are rebuilding at a surprisingly rapid rate.

In essence, what the trawlers of the West Coast have done under this new system is renew the social contract that they have with the public, by providing assurance that they are harvesting a public resource in a sustainable manner. The recent assessment from the Seafood Watch Program, and the June certification of thirteen species of West Coast groundfish as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council, verifies that.

This is an unfolding success story; West Coast fishermen still face stiff challenges. They have to pay for those observers and bear much of the cost of administering their catch share program. But the announcement by Seafood Watch signifies a remarkable course change in this fishery, a change that California seafood lovers – and that’s everybody reading this, right? – can be proud of.

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INNOVATIVE LAB GAUGES ACIDIFICATION EFFECTS ON MARINE SNAILS

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

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

Precision monitors and instruments.

Industrial parts used in wastewater treatment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focusing In: Collaborative Fisheries Research West

Collaborative Fisheries Research West is a program that supports and facilitates research involving fishermen, managers and scientists. Unlike other cases we have examined, this is a program dedicated to supporting one very particular kind of citizen science. In this summary we describe the approach that CFR West has taken to supporting collaborative fisheries research — the principles and practices that they instill through their program — using the same framework that we have applied to citizen science programs in previous blog posts.

The Basics
Collaborative Fisheries Research West is a not-for-profit organization that develops partnerships between fishermen, managers, and scientists for the purpose of contributing to fisheries science and management, for example: bycatch reduction, gear recovery, population structure, or seafood markets. CFR West may fund projects directly, provide project management and oversight or contribute scientific expertise to these efforts. Projects must abide by a set of ten principles (link is external), the first of which is that projects must be relevant to fisheries management. The last round of funding, supported by the California Ocean Protection Council, committed over $1.1 million to 15 projects.

Program Participation
While all of the CFR West projects involve collaborators from the fishing community, participation varies amongst individual projects. Some are instigated by fishermen: for example, conducting aerial sardine surveys to complement acoustic-trawl surveys conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Another project collects life history information on night smelt by beach fishermen in northern California. Others are driven by management needs x for example, an experiment to test the effect of trap hole diameters on the size distribution of hagfish was led by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. All, however, are required to maintain close cooperation and communication amongst all three partner types, from identifying the research questions and determining best methods through data collection to data interpretation. This is one of the highest forms of collaboration and is recognized by scholars of participation to be an effective means to integrate different worldviews towards a common goal.

Fishermen get involved with the program often because they do not see the best available science used to inform management decisions – possibly because there xs not much available science. In these cases, fishermen lend their expertise to help steward the resource in the future. Managers are motivated to work together to improve the data available for developing regulations and policy. Scientists share a similar motivation – a desire to better understand fisheries ecology in order to support the livelihoods, economy, and ecosystems that depend on fisheries, and, of course, an interest in learning how populations and ecosystems respond to recreational and commercial fishing pressure.

Meeting the Mission by Balancing Goals
CFR West has the following mission statement:
CFR West engages commercial and recreational fishermen, resource managers, tribes, nongovernmental organizations, and scientists by facilitating and supporting applied research focused on fisheries and fisheries resources and their human dimensions. Through open and collaborative partnerships, CFR West contributes to the management of sustainable marine resources, and fosters the stewardship of those resources.
Data from CFR West are used for both scientific and management applications, which helps connect science and policy. This connection bolsters the sometimes flagging trust between fishermen and managers, who can have a conversation about the data and how they are interpreted. For the fishermen, participation fosters a sense of stewardship for the resource and participants report that taking on these responsibilities can be rewarding.
The stewardship aspect of this mission, aside from producing management-relevant science, brings together a diverse group of stakeholders in research and fosters a stewardship ethic among these communities. The manner in which CFR West implements its multi-faceted mission is affected heavily by the uncertainty and nature of its funding. As a result, most projects are, by necessity, short term and the means for maintaining continued support for long term monitoring, a requirement for good fishery management, are limited at best.

Data Types Good for a Citizen Science Approach
Collaborative fisheries research is designed to utilize expertise in the fishing industry gained largely through daily experience on the water or practical experience gained on the job. There are many avenues for such integration of expertise, as demonstrated by the wide diversity of projects under the CFR West umbrella. They are mostly unified by research that includes a large amount of fieldwork, as time on the water is the best place to share and demonstrate the experiential knowledge of fishermen.

Data Uses

Scientific Uses
The scientific partners in each of these projects generally make sure that the data contributes to the appropriate body of scientific literature. A number of the projects also enroll graduate students in the work, who use the data as part of their thesis work.

Management Uses

In addition to the data from the research projects, lessons learned from the research process itself can inform management. CFR West projects must be completed or transferred to an agency within three years, and some projects serve as pilots for potentially long-term programs within management agencies.

Scientific Credibility

verification of data quality

The collaborative aspect of CFR West xs approach promotes trust-building among participants in the program, and a degree of data verification happens through reputation-building of the investigators as trustworthy brokers of information. Otherwise, the data is reviewed the same way as most other fisheries research – by undergoing review as part of the process of making management decisions through the Pacific Marine Fishery Council, the Department of Fish and Wildlife or the National Marine Fisheries Service, as well as the peer-review process of publishing in academic journals and presenting at scientific conferences. CFR West also makes an effort to disseminate project results widely to include fishing communities and the interested public in a manner that is generally accessible to the non-scientist. For example, the results of the hagfish trap experiment were presented at meetings held in key port communities from Morro Bay to Eureka. This too functions as a kind of peer review, whereby those not involved in the research process have an opportunity to consider the projects and their results and provide input to CFR West and project collaborators.

raw data transparency and access

Every project must make the data publicly available unless there xs a specific sensitivity, but the logistics of this access can be tricky. Results published in scientific journals (a common product of these projects) often reside behind paywalls, so the fishing partners often do not have access, plus raw data is not always included. In addition, fisherman participants worry about sharing spatially explicit data, which might give away lucrative fishing spots or invite legal battles with DFW enforcement.

clarity of communications

Communicating about the scientific process comes primarily in the form of participation – fishermen, scientists, and managers are all invited to spend time designing the research, collection data, or otherwise observing the research process firsthand. Similarly, post-project community presentations and outreach materials offers everyone an opportunity to learn. One of the major challenges, however, is to design these in such a way that they are accessible to all.

willingness and capability to adapt methods

CFR West is currently beginning a process of evaluating itself. The evaluation will form the basis of plans for future collaborative research as well fundraising strategies. Some of the projects will live on, as they include plans to develop a strategy for future activity. The crab gear recovery project, for example, has developed a long-range plan to convert the effort to a largely industry-funded one, including work with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to address legal issues that would otherwise interfere with the process.

Program Sustainability

Since the CFR West program focuses heavily on creating trusting relationships between fishermen, managers and scientists, it depends especially heavily on equal participation – xtrue collaboration x – through all the intellectual and economic aspects of the project. One of the challenges CFR West faces is that the funding is structured around short-term projects, while maintaining these relationships requires some standing level of base funding. Another challenge is that the nature of a traditional request for proposals, so familiar to scientists, is foreign to fishermen; ways of encouraging these fishermen to come forward with their own ideas that would benefit from collaboration should be developed.
Just like any research, collaborative fisheries research has some resource needs that are critical to success of the program. Many of these needs are specific to the research question at hand – for example, equipment and data analysis software. But there are a couple of additional resources peculiar to collaborative fisheries arrangements:

• coordinator, especially to connect potential partners.
• payment for fishing partner xs time (managers and scientists are generally salaried employees; if they are not fishing, fishermen are not earning a living)
• data management and regulating data access

Looking Toward the Future

Collaborative fisheries research is a subset of the broader citizen science community. It is one that celebrates and values the experiential expertise of fishermen. Yet, to date on the Central Coast, there are no models that blend collaborative fisheries research (with commercial fishermen) and more typical citizen science, which often focuses on long-term monitoring. Such a program might look something like fishermen recording observations while out on the water daily. Collaborative fisheries research is an evolving model, and for the long term, one that needs to collect quality data without huge injections of grant money. This can be done, but the model that demonstrates this goal does not appear to be out there yet.

For existing projects, the future holds a program evaluation. The CFR West director, Peter Nelson, says he is interested in participants x sense of what collaborative research is and if their feelings on the process changed over the course of their project. In addition, CFR West might shift its attention a bit – to be less of a grant-making institution and more of a boundary organization that helps cement relationships between the many partners in the fishing industry, management, and academic science.

Aerial sardine surveys. Photo by Kirk Lynn, CDFW

Tag and release study of Paralabrax spp. Photo by Lyall Bellquist.

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Lucrative crab industry in danger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We’re scared to death’

Certainly the threat to king crab was unexpected.

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

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

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

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

Such a loss would exact quite a toll.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adaptation possible, but uncertain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No two crab species react same way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatchery may be part of future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This Is Your Brain on Fish

Thicker, stronger, and more resilient. Once a week is all it takes, new research says.
James Hamblin | Aug 7 2014

Alex Trautwig/Getty

Have you ever considered undergoing brain-thickening surgery, only to find that such a thing does not exist? And that the guy in the van was probably not actually a surgeon? Well, consider fish.

Dr. Cyrus Raji, a resident radiologist at UCLA, appreciates value beyond the cosmetics of a thick cerebral cortex. He’s the lead researcher in a new study in the current American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found that people who regularly eat fish have more voluminous brains than those who do not—in such a way that stands to protect them from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Understanding the effects of fish consumption on brain structure is critical for the determination of modifiable factors that can decrease the risk of cognitive deficits and dementia,” Raji and colleagues write. The team has previously shown gainful effects of physical activity and obesity on brain structure.

This study found that eating fish—baked or broiled, never fried—is associated with larger gray matter volumes in brain areas responsible for memory and cognition in healthy elderly people.

“There wasn’t one type of fish that was the best,” Raji told me by phone, probably while eating fish. “All that mattered was the method of preparation.” Fried fish had a unique dearth of benefits to the brain.

People who eat fish at least once a week have larger gray matter volumes in the red/yellow areas.

“If you eat fish just once a week, your hippocampus—the big memory and learning center—is 14 percent larger than in  people who don’t eat fish that frequently. 14 percent. That has implications for reducing Alzheimer’s risk,” Raji said. “If you have a stronger hippocampus, your risk of Alzheimer’s is going to go down.”

“In the orbital frontal cortex, which controls executive function, it’s a solid 4 percent,” Raji said. “I don’t know of any drug or supplement that’s been shown to do that.”

Speaking of supplements, the researchers initially looked to omega-3 fatty acids as the driver of these benefits. But when they looked at the levels of omega-3s in people’s blood, they didn’t correlate with better brain volumes.

“These findings suggest additional evidence that it is lifestyle factors—in this case, dietary intake of fish,” the researchers write, “and not necessarily the presumed biological factors that can affect the structural integrity of the brain.”

Omega-3 fatty acids have previously been shown to slow cognitive decline. In one study, higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in people’s blood were associated with lower rates of brain atrophy observable over just a four-year period. We also know that when rats are fed diets low in omega-3 fatty acids, they have increased signs of dementia, possibly mediated by insulin and related buildup of amyloid plaques in their tiny brains.

Eating more omega-3 fatty acids, a lot of fruit, and not much meat, has previously been associated with increased volume throughout the brain’s gray matter. Recent research in the journal Neurology found that elderly people with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had better cognitive function than those with lower levels. MRIs of their brains showed larger volumes, too. (The associations also held for vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D, and E, and folate.)

Drs. Deborah Barnes and Kristine Yaffe at UCSF recently calculated in Lancet Neurology that up to half of cases of Alzheimer’s disease “are potentially attributable” to seven modifiable risk factors: diabetes, midlife high blood pressure, midlife obesity, smoking, depression, cognitive inactivity or low educational attainment, and physical inactivity. Minimal inroads in those areas, they say, could result in millions fewer cases of Alzheimer’s.
People who ate fish once per week were just as well off as those who ate it more frequently.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine corroborate, “Our research has consistently shown that it is the interactions among these risk factors with the patho-biological cascade of Alzheimer’s disease that determine the likelihood of a clinical expression as dementia or mild cognitive impairment.”

Specific suspects in the fish-brain benefit paradigm are omega-3s docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which seem to increase the size of the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus, and possibly overall brain volume. DHA and EPA can also affect the way neural synapses fire.

“Something about fish consumption, whatever it is, is strengthening to the brain,” Raji said. “It’s also possible that we’re capturing a general lifestyle effect—that there’s something else out there we’re not measuring that’s accounting for this.”

For example, people who ate fish might also eat more tartar sauce, and it might actually be that tartar sauce was responsible here. Though that’s unlikely. The researchers did control for obesity, physical activity, education, age, gender, race, and every other variable they could think of, and fish-eating itself remained a strong predictor of gray matter volume.

Even if it is just that people of good birth and cognitive fortune are those eating fish, the number of people with dementia is projected to double every 20 years. Or, as Raji put it to me, “By the time you and I are in our 60s and we start worrying about Alzheimer’s, 80 million people in the United States are going to have it.”

As that tide approaches, it can be nice to adopt a few hard grains of habit that confer a sense of command in sealing it out. Raji and other dementia researchers note that the challenge is to implement prevention strategies in the decades prior to ages when dementia manifests, before there are any signs of brain structural or functional abnormalities. In the case of fish, this doesn’t have to be a foundational life overhaul or even a substantive acquiescence. People who ate fish once per week were just as neurologically fortified as those who ate it daily.

“Nobody wants to eat food like they’re taking medicine,” Raji said. Unless, of course, they do.

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Farming The Bluefin Tuna, Tiger Of The Ocean, Is Not Without A Price

Dan Charles  |  July 30, 2014

Yonathan Zohar, Jorge Gomezjurado and Odi Zmora check on bluefin tuna larvae in tanks at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. (Courtesy of Yonathan Zohar)

 

In a windowless laboratory in downtown Baltimore, some tiny, translucent fish larvae are swimming about in glass-walled tanks.

They are infant bluefin tuna. Scientists in this laboratory are trying to grasp what they call the holy grail of aquaculture: raising this powerful fish, so prized by sushi lovers, entirely in captivity. But the effort is fraught with challenges.

When I visited, I couldn’t see the larvae at first. They look incredibly fragile and helpless, just drifting in the tanks’ water currents. But they’re already gobbling up microscopic marine animals, which in turn are living on algae.

“It’s amazing. We cannot stop looking at them! We are here around the clock and we are looking at them, because it is so beautiful,” says Yonathan Zohar, the scientist in charge of this project.

It’s beautiful to Zohar because it’s so rare. Scientists are trying to raise bluefin tuna completely in captivity in only a few places around the world. Laboratories in Japan have led the effort. This experiment, at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, is the first successful attempt in North America.

Scientists still have a long way to go to succeed. Most of the larvae have died, but hundreds have now survived for 10 days, “and we are counting every day,” says Zohar. “We want to be at 25 to 30 days. This is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the first three to four weeks.”

If they make it that far, they’ll be juvenile fish and much more sturdy. Then, they’ll mainly need lots to eat.

Fully grown, the bluefin tuna is a tiger of the ocean: powerful and voracious, its flesh in high demand for sushi all around the world.

Journalist Paul Greenberg wrote about bluefin tuna in his book Four Fish. If you’re an angler, he says, catching one is an experience you don’t forget.

“When they come onboard, it’s like raw energy coming onto the boat. Their tail will [beat] like an outboard motor, just blazing with power and energy,” he says.

The fish can grow to 1,000 pounds. They can swim up to 45 miles per hour and cross entire oceans.

They’re also valuable. Demand for tuna has grown, especially in Japan, where people sometimes pay fantastic prices for the fish.

That demand has led to overfishing, and wild populations of tuna now are declining.

That’s why scientists like Zohar are trying to invent a new way to supply the world’s demand. They’re trying to invent bluefin tuna farming.

“The vision is to have huge tanks, land-based, in a facility like what you see here, having bluefin tuna that are spawning year-round, on demand, producing millions of eggs,” he says.

Those eggs would hatch and grow into a plentiful supply of tuna.

That brings us back to these precious larvae. Before there can be aquaculture, large quantities of these larvae have to survive. Here in the laboratory, the scientists are tinkering with lots of things — the lights above the tanks, the concentration of algae and water currents — to keep the fragile larvae from sinking toward the bottom of the tank.

“They tend to go down,” explains Zohar. “They have a heavy head. They go head down and tail up. If they hit their head on the bottom they are gone. They are not going to survive.”

Enough are surviving, at the moment, that Zohar thinks they’re getting close to overcoming this obstacle, too.

But that still leaves a final hurdle. The scientists will need to figure out how to satisfy the tuna’s amazing appetite without causing even more damage to the environment.

A tuna’s natural diet consists of other fish. Lots of other fish. Right now, there are tuna “ranches” that capture young tuna in the ocean and then fatten them up in big net-pens. According to Greenberg, those ranches feed their tuna about 15 pounds of fish such as sardines or mackerel for each additional pound of tuna that can be sold to consumers. That kind of tuna production is environmentally costly.

Zohar thinks that it will be possible to reduce this ratio or even create tuna feed that doesn’t rely heavily on other fish as an ingredient.

But Greenberg says the basic fact that they eat so much makes him wonder whether tuna farming is really the right way to go. It increases the population of a predator species that demands lots of food itself.

“Why would you domesticate a tiger when you could domesticate a cow,” he asks — or, even better, a chicken, which converts just 2 pounds of vegetarian feed into a pound of meat.

If farmed tuna really can reduce the demand for tuna caught in the wild, it would be worth doing. But it might do more good, he says, to eat a little lower on the marine food chain. We could eat more mussels or sardines. It would let more tuna roam free.

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NOAA vessel to conduct research with Scripps, UCSD

Jun 06, 2014 | SDNEWS.COM

Fisheries survey vessel Reuben Lasker, the newest member of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research fleet, was commissioned May 2 in San Diego, tasked with conducting research cruises in the California Current, the ocean region where Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, and NOAA operate the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations program.

“NOAA will once again be prominent in San Diego Bay,” said U.S. 53rd District Rep. Susan Davis, who helped secure American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for the construction of the $75-million Lasker. “The ship brings an important legacy to our research mission and to the blue economy.”

The vessel, which will dock at the 10th Avenue Terminal, will be the first NOAA ship home-ported in San Diego since David Starr Jordan was retired in 2009 after having logged 1.5 million miles in its 44-year tenure.

The Lasker’s duties will routinely conduct research cruises in the California Current for the state fisheries investigations program with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Since 1949, the fisheries program has conducted regular cruises with the goal of managing living resources in an ocean region that supports a $250 million fishery.

The 208-foot vessel is named for the late Reuben Lasker, NOAA coastal fisheries division director, who served as an adjunct professor at Scripps. Lasker is noted in fisheries management for his advances in understanding the transition period of commercially important fish species from juveniles to adults.

San Diego Port Commissioner Bob Nelson noted that the ship brings 24 jobs and an estimated $27 million to the local economy.

The ship’s first cruise will center on a July cetacean and ecosystem survey. It will employ perhaps its most distinctive feature, an ability to operate so quietly that the vessel will be able to make close-range observations of marine life without disturbing animal behavior or compromising extremely sensitive acoustic equipment.

In related news:

As the probability of an El Niño winter increases, Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers are following the climate phenomenon as it develops off Southern California and finding that local readings closely hew to El Niño monitoring taking place at the equator.

El Niño is a phenomenon characterized by warmer sea surface water in the equatorial Eastern Pacific Ocean. It is often associated with greater rainfall on much of the U.S. West Coast and frequently enhances the encroachment of storm surges by raising regional sea levels for several months at a time. An El Niño is defined by a seasonal sea surface temperature anomaly in the eastern-central equatorial Pacific greater than 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than historical average temperature. The opposite phenomenon, La Niña, is defined as a seasonal sea surface temperature colder than the historical average.

The researchers’ data are distributed by the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS), a region of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System. SCCOOS uses the data to make model forecasts in support of U.S. national security.

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