NE Fish Council Votes For Oversight of Large Trawlers Scooping Up River Herring

The fate of the river herring in Maine and along the Atlantic coast was solidly in the hands of the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC), who gathered in Portland this week.

By midday Wednesday, they had voted to send a recommendation to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to require strict oversight on large mid-water trawlers working three miles off the coast and up to 200 miles out to sea.

More decisions affecting river herring were expected by late in the day. NMFS is likely to act on the NEFMC recommendations before the end of the summer.Recreational and commercial fishermen, among others, have pointed to the need for strict oversight of the large mid-water trawlers that target Atlantic sea herring inshore but also scoop up marine mammals, haddock, and river herring as unintended bycatch.

Alewives and blueback herring, collectively known as river herring, spend most of their lives at sea and have been on the decline for decades, in spite of efforts to improve habitat and build fish ladders so spawning fish can make their way from the sea to freshwater in the spring.

Fishing for river herring is illegal in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and North Carolina. The fish are currently under review for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act, with a recommendation for or against listing expected this summer.

Like their sea-dwelling cousins, river herring are an important food species in the marine food web, providing food for groundfish, stripers, tuna and others. At sea, river herring often school with Atlantic herring.

Atlantic mid-water trawlers, with a fleet numbering around 40 boats, are among the largest boats fishing in federal U.S. waters today. Mid-water trawlers, such as those operated by O'Hara Corporation in Rockland, tow submerged cone-shaped nets through the midsection of the water column that funnel schooling fish towards the small end of the net, known as the cod end. Working in pairs, with one larger net being pulled behind two boats, trawlers can work an area in a grid pattern, catching up to 1,000,000 pounds of fish in one haul, with the potential to clear out a local river herring population in a day.

There have been no bycatch limits on how many river herring can be caught. Catch caps may be set late Wednesday.

On Wednesday, NEFMC voted to require all mid-water trawlers to carry a scientific observer on board to keep track of bycatch numbers, with industry and the federal government sharing the cost. If NMFS approves this requirement, it is likely to be implemented in spring of 2013.

Source: New England Fishery Management Council

U.S. Fisheries Continue to Improve

The latest numbers on the status of fisheries in the United States, released on Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), show continued progress toward ending overfishing.

Credit: Pew Environment Group, Data by NOAA

Six stocks that were previously overfished have been declared rebuilt—having reached a healthy population size—the biggest improvement since NOAA began issuing the reports in 1997. That raises the total number of rebuilt stocks to 27. "This is evidence that we are moving in the right direction and that sacrifices that fishermen have made are paying off," says Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group.

All told, 86% of the 258 major stocks reviewed by NOAA are in good shape.

But more remains to be done. Forty-five stocks remain overfished (the population is below the target) and 36 others are still "subject to overfishing," or, in other words, being caught at too high a rate. Both of these metrics, however, improved slightly from the previous year.

In a teleconference, Galen Tromble of NOAA's Office of Sustainable Fisheries credited the gains to the annual catch limits required by federal law and the rebuilding plans implemented by regional fisheries councils.

The six stocks now ready:

• Northeast: Gulf of Maine Haddock
• Mid-Atlantic: Summer Flounder
• Northwest: Widow Rockfish, Chinook Salmon, Coho Salmon
• Alaska: Bering Sea Snow Crab

Source:  National Oceanic and Atmosperic Administration  (NOAA)

Dwarf Seahorse Needs Protection

The one-inch long dwarf seahorse may be threatened with extinction by lingering pollution from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, loss of habitat and overzealous collectors, according to findings by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The USFWS is now beginning a 12-month status review to determine if listing the species under the Endangered Species Act is warranted.

The Center for Biological Diversity's listing petition claims that 90 percent of the seagrass habitat off the coast of Florida has been lost since 1950.

 It is also cited that massive die-offs of seagrass and seahorses across the Gulf Coast due to ocean acidification from global warming and the damage caused by boat propellers and shrimp trawlers to be mitigating factors.

The public has until July 3 to comment on the USFWS 90-day finding on the petition. The USFWS will announce a public comment period for the species review at a later date. I will keep you updated.

Thank You

Thanks to all my readers for hanging in there as I change my blogs location and format. Your patience is really appreciated!

How Much Is Too Much?

At the Offshore Technology Conference that opened Monday in Houston, a presentation focused on a plan to drill the deepest offshore well ever — a scientific project set for 2017 that will break into the seafloor under more than two miles of water.

While the well, which is aimed at retrieving a core of the Earth's mantle, will not produce oil, it will break the record for offshore drilling with a riser — a pipe used in oil drilling that reaches from the rig to the seafloor.

If successful, the accompanying innovations in drilling also could bring energy companies into contact with life and ecosystems even more obscure and less understood than the frontiers they already explore.

So when is it too much?

Pushing deeper underwater could endanger little-understood creatures such as the deep-water corals that were damaged after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill two years ago.

How sad would it be that these oil companies are going to be the first ones maybe to get anywhere near new species of corals and as of yet undiscovered marine life. Ultimately if they're not careful, they may also be the last.

For years the offshore industry's pursuit of oil has pushed drillers farther into the deep, bringing heavy machinery and remote-operated vehicles into some of the most alien reaches of the globe.

Already, oil companies have been scientific observers during deep-water operations. During Shell's development of its Perdido project 200 miles south of Freeport, a camera on an unmanned submarine captured the first images of an obscure creature in its natural habitat: a big-fin squid at a depth of about 6,399 feet below the surface. The Perdido project, which contains the world's deepest producing well at 9,267 feet, was also where workers operating another unmanned submarine spotted a Greenland sleeper shark 8,530 feet under water. The shark previously was thought to stay within 2,000 feet of the surface.

Source: mysanantonio.com/

Marine biologist turned game designer ‘World of Warcraft’

Life as a marine biologist was not quite the splash Greg Street thought it would be. In the late 1990s, he spent years going through school only to find that studying the environment at times meant spending little of it in nature. Bored by the administrative side of his career, Street looked to video games instead.

“I ultimately [decided] if I was going to spend so much of my time in front of a computer, I may as well be playing computer games instead of writing grant proposals.”

Street managed to arrange an interview with Ensemble Studios, which was planning to release the real-time strategy game “Age of Empires.” Although a gamer at heart, Street had little knowledge of the intricacies of design.

“They wanted a sample of my work and I had never made anything, so I stayed up all night making levels for the game they were working on and they really liked it,” Street says.

On Monday, Street will speak at McDaniel College as part of its SmartTALK series, which brings accomplished alumni back to campus for a public chat with president Roger Casey. Street will discuss how his liberal arts education served him.

Street graduated from the school in 1991 with degrees in biology and philosophy, and then earned his doctorate at the University of Texas. McDaniel became Street’s number one pick on a lark. His original pick was Columbia, but Street’s grandfather was a McDaniel alumnus, who asked him to apply. Street did apply and the more he learned about the school, the more he was enticed by the notion of attending.

“I just got this sense that they really wanted me and they would be excited about my being there and, ultimately, that was where I wanted to be,” Street says.

He says the school prepared him not only for graduate school, but also how to approach and interact with his professors without apprehension.

“I feel like there’s a real quality of learning that could occur in that environment that you just couldn’t get in a larger state school. And I feel like interactions like that gave me a lot of self-confidence that when I went to graduate school [I could] try to talk to professors ... as people,” Street says.

After working at Ensemble for a decade, Street joined Blizzard Entertainment in 2008. In addition to “World of Warcraft,” the company is known for its massive franchises “StarCraft” and “Diablo.” Street says a business toss-up at Ensemble and the studio’s impending closing prompted his decision to leave.

“I worked at Ensemble for almost 10 years. About halfway through that, the studio was acquired outright by Microsoft, which was super exciting at the time,” Street says. “But it seemed to me that over the years Microsoft was placing less emphasis on PC gaming.”

Once Street joined Blizzard, he became lead systems designer for the massive multiplayer online role-playing game hit “World of Warcraft.” As Street says he tells new employees, he enjoys working at the company.

“This would be a fantastic place to work even if we made light bulbs or batteries,” Street says. “The fact that we make games is icing on the cake.”

At Blizzard, Street says he emphasizes more overlap between developers and designers.
“Blizzard tries to avoid what we call ‘the grand reveal," Street says. That’s where a designer sits and works on something and says, ‘A-ha, there it is.

Science itself also plays a role in Street’s work. He says he regularly interacts with fans on forums or at conventions for feedback. They also test complaints, create statistics and rely on numbers as much as possible.

For Street, science and video games share some of the same philosophies, a lesson he began to appreciate while studying at McDaniel College.

“Scientists learn early on how to fail,” Street says. “You make a ton of mistakes. You set up an experiment and the experiment fails or you have a theory and you’re totally wrong.”

Source: gazzette.net

Mysterious Life Forms in the Extreme Deep Sea

Dropcam' and other deep-sea instruments reveal strange creatures of the dark deep during expedition to Mariana Trench.

A summer research expedition organized by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has led to the identification of gigantic amoebas at one of the deepest locations on Earth.

During a July 2011 voyage to the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, the deepest region on the planet, Scripps researchers and National Geographic engineers deployed untethered free-falling/ascending landers equipped with digital video and lights to search the largely unexplored region. The team documented the deepest known existence of xenophyophores, single-celled animals exclusively found in deep-sea environments. Xenophyophores are noteworthy for their size, with individual cells often exceeding 10 centimeters (4 inches), their extreme abundance on the seafloor and their role as hosts for a variety of organisms.

The researchers spotted the life forms at depths up to 10,641 meters (6.6 miles) within the Sirena Deep of the Mariana Trench. The previous depth record for xenophyophores was approximately 7,500 meters (4.7 miles) in the New Hebrides Trench, although sightings in the deepest portion of the Mariana Trench have been reported. Scientists say xenophyophores are the largest individual cells in existence. Recent studies indicate that by trapping particles from the water, xenophyophores can concentrate high levels of lead, uranium and mercury and are thus likely highly resistant to large doses of heavy metals. They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea.

"The research of Scripps Professor Lisa Levin (deep-sea biologist) has demonstrated that these organisms play host to diverse multicellular organisms," said Doug Bartlett, the Scripps marine microbiologist who organized the Mariana Trench expedition. "Thus the identification of these gigantic cells in one of the deepest marine environments on the planet opens up a whole new habitat for further study of biodiversity, biotechnological potential and extreme environment adaptation."
The xenophyophores are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to considerations of the nature and diversity of life at extreme depths. For example, according to Dhugal Lindsay (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC), the Dropcam movie also depicts the deepest jellyfish observed to date.

The instruments used to spot the mysterious animals were "Dropcams" developed and used by National Geographic Society Remote Imaging engineers Eric Berkenpas and Graham Wilhelm, participants in the July voyage.

"The 'Dropcams' are versatile autonomous underwater cameras containing an HD camera and lighting inside of a glass bubble," said Berkenpas. "They were created by National Geographic engineers to allow scientists and filmmakers to capture high-quality footage from any depth in the ocean. The devices were baited and used 'camera-traps' to capture imagery of approaching marine life."

Dropcams utilize a thick-wall glass sphere capable of withstanding more than eight tons per-square-inch pressure at extreme depth.
"Seafloor animals are lured to the camera with bait, a technique first developed by Scripps Professor John Isaacs in the 1960s," said Kevin Hardy, a Scripps ocean engineer and cruise participant. Hardy advanced the ultra-deep glass sphere design used on 'Dropcams' more than a decade ago. "Scripps researchers hope to one day capture and return novel living animals to the laboratory for study in high pressure aquariums that replicate the trench environment."

Also during the expedition, Scripps researchers successfully tested an advanced seafloor Deep Ocean Vehicle (DOV) design, using similar spheres to recover microbes and test other advanced system components.

The xenophyophore sightings were positively identified by Scripps' Levin, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, and confirmed by Andrew Gooday of the UK National Oceanography Center.

"As one of very few taxa found exclusively in the deep sea, the xenophyophores are emblematic of what the deep sea offers. They are fascinating giants that are highly adapted to extreme conditions but at the same time are very fragile and poorly studied," said Levin. "These and many other structurally important organisms in the deep sea need our stewardship as human activities move to deeper waters."

This project was funded by NASA, the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council, Joanie Nasher, Patty and Rick Elkus.

Photo credit: Lisa Levin (all except upper right, credit David Checkley)


Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego