In massive nod to success of West Coast industry and managers, Monterey Aquarium upgrades 21 species
Copyright © 2014 Seafoodnews.com - Posted with permission from SEAFOODNEWS.COMSEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton - Sept 3, 2014
In a massive nod to the success of US fishery managers, Monterey Bay Aquarium has upgraded its consumer guide on 21 west coast groundfish and rockfish species.
John Sackton, Editor And PublisherSeafoodNews.com 1-781-861-1441Email comments to jsackton@seafood.comCopyright © 2014 Seafoodnews.com
Pacific Ocean acidity dissolving shells of key species
Pacific Ocean acidity dissolving shells of key species: New research from NOAA sounding alarm bells about climate change
By Paul Rogers/San Jose Mercury News and Will Houston/The Times-Standard In a troubling new discovery, scientists studying ocean waters off California, Oregon and Washington have found the first evidence that increasing acidity in the ocean is dissolving the shells of a key species of tiny sea creature at the base of the food chain.The animals, a type of free-floating marine snail known as pteropods, are an important food source for salmon, herring, mackerel and other fish in the Pacific Ocean. Those fish are eaten not only by millions of people every year, but also by a wide variety of other sea creatures, from whales to dolphins to sea lions.Humboldt State University Oceanography Department Head Jeffrey Abell has conducted several studies on ocean acidification off the coast of Trinidad, most recently in 2010. Abell said that deeper ocean waters are usually more acidic due to bacteria digesting dead organism matter, called detritus, which floats to the ocean floors. This digestion releases carbon dioxide, which reacts with water and causes the ocean to increase in acidity. Abell said Humboldt County's shoreline is more prone to upwelling events in the late spring, which brings this deep, more acidic water to the surface."We don't see a consistent exposure to acidic waters," he said. "What we see is in the order of a few times to a dozen times a year during which the organisms, like pteropods, will be exposed to this corrosive water."Abell said Trinidad experienced about five of these events in 2007 -- lasting no longer than a few days -- but that number tripled to 15 episodes in 2010 that sometimes lasted over a week.If the trend continues, climate change scientists say, it will imperil the ocean environment."These are alarm bells," said Nina Bednarsek, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle who helped lead the research. "This study makes us understand that we have made an impact on the ocean environment to the extent where we can actually see the shells dissolving right now."Scientists from NOAA and Oregon State University found that in waters near the West Coast shoreline, 53 percent of the tiny floating snails had shells that were severely dissolving -- double the estimate from 200 years ago.Until now, the impact on marine species from increasing ocean acidity because of climate change has been something that was tested in tanks in labs, but which was not considered an immediate concern like forest fires and droughts.The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a scientific journal based in England, changes that."The pteropods are like the canary in the coal mine. If this is affecting them, it is affecting everything in the ocean at some level," said one of the nation's top marine biologists, Steve Palumbi, director of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.The vast majority of the world's scientists -- including those at NOAA, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Meteorological Organization -- say the Earth's temperature is rising because of humans burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. That burning pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and traps heat, similar to a greenhouse. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere have increased 25 percent since 1960 and are now at the highest levels in at least 800,000 years, according to measurements of air bubbles taken in ancient ice and other methods.Many of the impacts are already being felt. Since the 1880s, when modern temperature records were first taken, the 10 hottest years have all occurred since 1998. Polar ice has melted, forest fires are burning in the West with increasing frequency, and the ocean has risen 8 inches since 1900 at the Golden Gate Bridge.But what many people do not realize is that nearly a third of carbon dioxide emitted by humans is dissolved in the oceans. Some of that forms carbonic acid, which makes the ocean more corrosive.Over the past 200 years, the ocean's acidity has risen by roughly 30 percent. At the present rate, it is on track to rise by 70 percent by 2050 from preindustrial levels.More acidic water can harm oysters, clams, corals and other species that have calcium carbonate shells. Generally speaking, increasing the acidity by 50 percent from current levels is enough to kill some marine species, tests in labs have shown.Coastal Seafoods manager Greg Dale said Humboldt County's oyster industry has actually thrived over the last two years, but rising ocean acidity is "something we watch carefully.""If this keeps going, and it means shutting ocean productivity, that's when things get scary," Dale said. "The ocean changes every year, but if you change the (acidity), you will lose a great deal."Abell said the current ocean acidification levels are not enough to harm the shells of oysters or abalone, which are made of calcite, but are enough to dissolve the shells of pteropods, which are made of aragonite."Pteropods are the most sensitive of this process; they'll be kind of like an early warning system," Abell said. "The present school of thought is that 50 years from now is when we'll have to worry about the more sturdy shellfish, such as abalone."The new research on the marine snails does not show that increasingly acidic water is killing all of them, particularly older snails. But it is causing their shells to dissolve, which can make them more vulnerable to disease, slow their ability to evade predators and reduce their reproductive rates, the researchers said.Some of the corrosive water near the shore could be a result of other types of pollution, such as runoff from fertilizer and sewage, said Stanford's Palumbi, who was not involved in the NOAA research. But because the study found rates of the snails' shells dissolving in deep water, far from the shore, human-caused carbon dioxide is the prime suspect, he added.If people reduce emissions of fossil fuels, cutting carbon dioxide levels in the decades ahead, the damage to the oceans can still be limited, he said."But if we keep on the emissions profile we have now, by 2100 the oceans will be so harmed it's hard to imagine them coming back from that in anything less than thousands of years," Palumbi said."We are in a century of choice," he said. "We can choose the way we want it to go."
View original post here.
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 BasicsCollaborative 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 ParticipationWhile 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 GoalsCFR 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 ApproachCollaborative 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 UsesScientific UsesThe 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 UsesIn 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 Credibilityverification of data qualityThe 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 accessEvery 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 communicationsCommunicating 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 methodsCFR 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 SustainabilitySince 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 FutureCollaborative 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.
Read the original post here.
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.
View the original post here: http://www.theatlantic.com
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.
Read the original story here.
Climate data from air, land, sea and ice in 2013 reflect trends of a warming planet
Increases in temperature, sea level and CO2 observed; Southern Hemisphere warmth and Super Typhoon Haiyan among year’s most notable events
July 17, 2014
State of the Climate report.
In 2013, the vast majority of worldwide climate indicators—greenhouse gases, sea levels, global temperatures, etc.—continued to reflect trends of a warmer planet, according to the indicators assessed in the State of the Climate in 2013 report, released online today by the American Meteorological Society.Scientists from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., served as the lead editors of the report, which was compiled by 425 scientists from 57 countries around the world (highlights, visuals, full report). It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments on air, land, sea, and ice.“These findings reinforce what scientists for decades have observed: that our planet is becoming a warmer place,” said NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D. “This report provides the foundational information we need to develop tools and services for communities, business, and nations to prepare for, and build resilience to, the impacts of climate change.”The report uses dozens of climate indicators to track patterns, changes, and trends of the global climate system, including greenhouse gases; temperatures throughout the atmosphere, ocean, and land; cloud cover; sea level; ocean salinity; sea ice extent; and snow cover. These indicators often reflect many thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets. The report also details cases of unusual and extreme regional events, such as Super Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated portions of Southeast Asia in November 2013.Highlights:
- Greenhouse gases continued to climb: Major greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide, continued to rise during 2013, once again reaching historic high values. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by 2.8 ppm in 2013, reaching a global average of 395.3 ppm for the year. At the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the daily concentration of CO2 exceeded 400 ppm on May 9 for the first time since measurements began at the site in 1958. This milestone follows observational sites in the Arctic that observed this CO2 threshold of 400 ppm in spring 2012.
- Warm temperature trends continued near the Earth’s surface: Four major independent datasets show 2013 was among the warmest years on record, ranking between second and sixth depending upon the dataset used. In the Southern Hemisphere, Australia observed its warmest year on record, while Argentina had its second warmest and New Zealand its third warmest.
- Sea surface temperatures increased: Four independent datasets indicate that the globally averaged sea surface temperature for 2013 was among the 10 warmest on record. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-neutral conditions in the eastern central Pacific Ocean and a negative Pacific decadal oscillation pattern in the North Pacific had the largest impacts on the global sea surface temperature during the year. The North Pacific was record warm for 2013.
- Sea level continued to rise: Global mean sea level continued to rise during 2013, on pace with a trend of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year over the past two decades.
- The Arctic continued to warm; sea ice extent remained low: The Arctic observed its seventh warmest year since records began in the early 20th century. Record high temperatures were measured at 20-meter depth at permafrost stations in Alaska. Arctic sea ice extent was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979. All seven lowest sea ice extents on record have occurred in the past seven years.
- Antarctic sea ice extent reached record high for second year in a row; South Pole station set record high temperature: The Antarctic maximum sea ice extent reached a record high of 7.56 million square miles on October 1. This is 0.7 percent higher than the previous record high extent of 7.51 million square miles that occurred in 2012 and 8.6 percent higher than the record low maximum sea ice extent of 6.96 million square miles that occurred in 1986. Near the end of the year, the South Pole had its highest annual temperature since records began in 1957.
- Tropical cyclones near average overall / Historic Super Typhoon: The number of tropical cyclones during 2013 was slightly above average, with a total of 94 storms, in comparison to the 1981-2010 average of 89. The North Atlantic Basin had its quietest season since 1994. However, in the Western North Pacific Basin, Super Typhoon Haiyan – the deadliest cyclone of 2013 – had the highest wind speed ever assigned to a tropical cyclone, with one-minute sustained winds estimated to be 196 miles per hour.
State of the Climate in 2013 is the 24th edition in a peer-reviewed series published annually as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The journal makes the full report openly available online."State of the Climate is vital to documenting the world's climate," said Dr. Keith Seitter, AMS Executive Director. "AMS members in all parts of the world contribute to this NOAA-led effort to give the public a detailed scientific snapshot of what's happening in our world and builds on prior reports we've published."NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our other social media channels.
Squid skin protein could improve biomedical technologies, UCI study shows
Conductivity could charge up futuristic disease treatments
Read the original post at: heathcanal.com
Regional Fishery Management Councils call on Oceana to retract bycatch report; Cite "substantial errors, omissions"
WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) -- June 18, 2014 -- The Regional Fishery Management Council Coordination Committee, representing all eight U.S. regional Fishery Management Councils, has recommended that environmental group Oceana retract its March 2014 report on fisheries bycatch, "Wasted Catch," that was widely reported in the press without independent verification of its allegations.
The Councils contend that "misinformation in reports like Wasted Catch undermines those productive relationships between industry, management, and NGOs that have been effective in reducing bycatch." They are especially critical of the fact that Oceana relied heavily on only one document, the National Marine Fishery Service's "National Bycatch Report," and in doing so has left the report "unlikely to result in a full representation of the best available science."
The Councils recommended that for future reports, Oceana should adopt "a standardized peer review process to ensure that reports like this accurately and objectively represent the best available science."
The analysis by the Councils lists general issues with and critiques of the report, followed by a region-by-region analysis of errors and omissions identified by Council staffs.
The Councils conclude by acknowledging, "there are no laws requiring Oceana reports to accurately represent the best available scientific information or to undergo peer review." But they urge that "to do so would be in the best interest of all involved parties."
Read the full letter from the Regional Fishery Management Council Coordination Committee here