Council Votes to Close 2015-2016 Pacific Sardine Fishery
Regarding Council action yesterday to close what’s left of the 2014-15 sardine fishery, the Council recommended that NMFS close the directed fishery in the fastest way possible, using current rule making authority. This action stopped short of declaring an emergency, which would require justification and new rule making which could take more than a month. The Council explanation was that this closure was recommended as an added layer of precaution, considering the recent sharp decline observed in the sardine biomass due to lack of recruitment in the past few years. Given the recent uptick in directed landings in both OR and CA, it is expected that the closure could be implemented in about a week.
Can squid help make soldiers invisible?
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Atlanta (CNN) — One of the world's oldest organism groups, cephalopods, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish, have survived in Earth's oceans for millions of years.They key to their survival: mastering the art of camouflage.Now, scientists say, these ancient invertebrates may hold the key to developing a combat technology that will allow soldiers to avoid infrared detection.Researchers at the University of California, Irvine say they have discovered a way to use proteins in the cells of pencil squid to develop "invisibility stickers" that can be worn by ground troops."Soldiers wear uniforms with the familiar green and brown camouflage patterns to blend into foliage during the day, but under low light and at night, they're still vulnerable to infrared detection," said Alon Gorodetsky, assistant professor of chemical engineering and material sciences."You can draw inspiration from natural systems that have been perfected over millions of years, giving us ideas we might never have been able to come up with otherwise," he said.Gorodetsky and his team have focused on specialized squid cells known as iridocytes, which contain a unique light-reflecting protein called reflectin. They were able to engineer E. coli bacteria to synthesize reflectin and coat the protein onto a packing tape-like surface to create the "invisibility stickers."Researchers say these reflectin-coated stickers can be changed into virtually any color with a chemical or mechanical stimulus."There is a lot of flexibility in how one can deploy this material, essentially, by taking the stickers and putting them all over yourself, you could look one way under optical visualization and another way under active infrared visualization," Gorodetsky said.The lab technology is not ready to be used in combat zones as researchers work to develop an adaptive camouflage system, in which multiple stickers are able to work in sync and respond to varying infrared wavelengths."We've developed stickers for use as a thin, flexible layer of camo with the potential to take on a pattern that will better match the soldiers' infrared reflectance to their background and hide them from active infrared visualization," Gorodetsky said.The researchers' work was recently presented at the 2015 American Chemical Society national meeting.
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Status of Stocks 2014 Report to Congress: Overfishing and Overfished Stocks Hit All-Time Lows
Today, NOAA Fisheries is pleased to announce the release of the 2014 Status of U.S. Fisheries report to Congress and the regional fisheries management councils. The number of stocks on the overfishing and overfished lists dropped to an all-time low, and we continued to rebuild stocks.In 2014, six stocks cam off the overfishing lists and 2 stocks are no longer listed as overfished. Additionally, stock assessments show three stocks have rebuildt--bringing the total number of stocks rebuilt since 2000 to 37. This progress demonstrates that our science-based approach to determining stock status and managing for sustainability is working. We continue to look for ways to strengthen the fishery management process and address the role of complex ecosystems and climate implacts on U.S. fisheries. We look forward to working with you to build on our efforts and identify opportunities to further strengthen the long-term biological and economic sustainability of our nation's fisheries.
Visit the NOAA Fisheries website for more details and the report. Additional supporting data is available online through the Office of Sustainable Fisheries.Warm Regards,Laurel BryantChief, External AffairsNOAA Fisheries CommunicationsLaurel.Bryant@noaa.govwww.nmfs.noaa.gov
Scat may contain clues to marine mammals' Southern California deaths
Biologist Mark Lowry collects sea lion and elephant seal scat.(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
By Louis Sahagun
Mark Lowry has collected sea lion and elephant seal scat from San Nicolas and San Clemente islands for more than three decades to track the long-term health of marine mammal life off the California coast.But the federal biologist's work has new meaning — and urgency — this year. Analyses of the specimens could solve the mystery of why so many young sea lions have been found dead and dying on Southern California beaches.Keeping a wary eye on a herd of elephant seals lolling on rocks perched over the pounding surf here on a recent weekday, Lowry put on rubber gloves and used a dinner spoon to scoop up piles of seal scat and plop them into plastic specimen bags.Lowry, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist, hoped the pungent material contained answers to why at least 2,250 dehydrated and underweight sea lions started showing up on local beaches in January — around the time he detected evidence of an unprecedented shift in the species' eating habits.Specifically, Lowry found what he described as "mystery stuff — gooey bits of substance you'd expect from a diet of jellyfish or tube worms."Sea lions are opportunistic predators that typically feed on mackerel, sardines, rockfish and market squid. But amid El Niño-like conditions and a dearth of fish and squid to prey on, they may be trying to sustain themselves on novel food sources, he said."These findings are preliminary," Lowry said. "But it could mean sea lions are starving and eating what little they can find to fill their stomachs up."There were 350 ailing sea lion pups stranded on local beaches in January, 850 in February and 1,050 in March, according to the latest numbers released by the National Marine Fisheries Service.The overall health of the California sea lion population, however, remains robust."The sea lion population is increasing at a rate of about 5.1% per year," said Lowry, who also conducts annual aerial surveys of California's pinniped populations. "In 1964, the sea lion population was about 30,000. Today, it is a tad over 300,000."Most of those sea lions breed on the wind-raked beaches of 3-mile-by-9-mile San Nicolas Island, the outermost of the eight Channel Islands and pinniped capital of the United States.
San Nicolas is populated by about 200 military and civilian residents. But for several months beginning in December and continuing into spring, it is breeding grounds for tens of thousands of California sea lions, elephant seals and harbor seals.Lugging his collecting gear and buckets down a sandstone bluff toward raucous herds of sea lions and elephant seals weighing as much as 3,000 pounds, Lowry, 64, said with a laugh, "This is field biology at its finest."Moments later, he was in his element, on his knees and harvesting seal scat on this desert isle used by the Navy to test the latest missile defense systems."If flies are interested in it, I'm interested," he said. "No joke."He aimed to collect 15 pounds of the stuff for analysis later in his La Jolla laboratory. That process involves soaking the samples in buckets of fragrant soapy water, then pouring them through wire-mesh seines to separate out bony particles that can determine the species, size and age of the fish and squid eaten."The value of Mark's data is enormous," said Doug Demaster, science and research director of NOAA's Alaska region fisheries. "Shifts in the diets of sea lions are among the earliest signals we get of impending El Niño events, which mean wholesale shifts of wind and storm patterns, and changes in the marine ecology."Beyond that, we all want to know why the number of dying sea lion pups on California's beaches has jumped from a few dozen a year to thousands in the past three months alone."Seals have altered their feeding habits several times over the last three decades, Lowry said. In the 1980s, for example, they were eating mostly anchovies and sardines. In the 1990s, they started going after squid. During El Niño events, they chase rockfish."The mystery stuff I'm finding now is altogether new," he said. "I intend to figure out exactly what it is."Lugging a 5-gallon bucket full of scat samples back to his pickup after a productive day of prospecting, Lowry smiled and said, "I have no plans to retire, and my bosses are very happy about that."
Seal scatBrian van der Brug / Los Angeles TimesBiologist Mark Lowry uses a large tablespoon to scoop up sea lion and elephant seal scat to track the long-term health of marine mammal life on San Nicolas Island.
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Feds lower boom: no sardine fishery next year
By Jason Hoppin, Monterey County Herald
Rohnert Park >> For the first time in 30 years, boats operating along the West Coast will be banned from pursuing the fish that helped build Cannery Row: sardines.Meeting Sunday in Rohnert Park, federal fishery regulators canceled the 2015-16 sardine fishery, which was set to begin July 1. For the first time since 1986 — when the sardine fishery was nurtured back to life following an 18-year fishing ban that stretched back to the collapse of Monterey Bay’s fishing industry — fishermen will have to make their livelihoods elsewhere.“We know boats will be tied up, but the goal here is to return this to a productive fishery,” said David Crabbe, a Carmel fisherman and member of the Pacific Fishery Management Council who voted in favor of the ban.On Wednesday, regulators will also vote on an emergency closure of the remaining sardine season through June 30, a vote that would largely impact Oregon fishermen.The moves are a sign the West Coast sardine population, which rises and falls with natural cycles, has reached a nadir. Fishery regulators estimate there are less than 97,000 metric tons of sardines off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, far below the minimum of 150,000 tons needed to sustain even a modest fishery.Sardines have become a flashpoint in an ongoing debate between environmentalists, regulators and commercial interests in how to best manage the ocean’s resources. Since they are prey for larger fish, such as salmon and tuna, not to mention birds and marine mammals, they have taken on a much greater role in debates about the ocean’s ecosystem than their lowly status would seem to warrant.Sunday’s vote was a victory for environmental groups, which have been adamant for years that more needs to be done to manage a fish that is critical to the ocean’s food chain.“It turns out the sky was falling,” said Geoff Shester, California program director for Monterey-based Oceana.Fishing interests weren’t happy about the vote, which had been expected after initial sardine assessments showed the numbers are very low. But they supported it.“This is a harvest control rule that we support,” said Dianne Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association. “It is doing exactly what it’s intended to do.”Area fishermen hauled in more than 820 tons of sardines in 2013, according to state figures. It is Monterey Bay’s second-largest fishery, far behind market squid.Despite closing the fishery, the council will allow 7,000 tons of sardines to be fished by native tribes, taken for recreational bait or taken by boats seeking other species, such as anchovies or mackerel.Paul Shivley, Portland, Oregon-based project manager for The Pew Charitable Trusts, said he was pleased overall with the council’s action but disappointed it allowed so much “incidental” fish to be caught.“What they’ve created is a situation where the rebound will inevitably be slower because how much they left for incidental fisheries,” Shivley said.That catch allows fishermen to continue fishing other fish, with nets often scooping up a number of species at once. If the 7,000-ton limit is reached, other fisheries could be shut down as well to protect sardines.“The council, thankfully, is allowing a small incidental catch so that we can at least do our other fisheries,” Pleshner-Steele said, later adding: “It’s going to be a hard year for the fleet. There’s no doubt about it.”Pew is also urging the council to take a closer look at anchovies, which can also be abundant in Monterey Bay. He is concerned sardine boats would turn their attention to that fishery, which is monitored by regulators but not capped.“What we’re asking the council to do is update their stocks assessment and get a better handle on anchovies before it becomes a free-for-all,” Shivley said.Oceana maintains that sardines have been overfished for years, citing a council recalculation that lowered the maximum amount of sardines that could be sustainably fished.“It’s a step in the right direction,” Shester said of the fishery closure. “But irreversible ecosystem damage has already occurred that will persist for decades.”Pleshner-Steele strongly rejected the overfishing allegation, saying sardines rise and fall naturally.“Fishing has a minimal impact. It does have some. In the long term, this fishery is managed excruciatingly precautionary,” she said.Fishermen maintain there are more sardines in the sea than federal assessments show, an argument Shester rejects.“The reality is, neither scientists nor fishermen nor all those starving sea lion mothers can go find them,” Shester said. “Show us the fish, if that‘s the explanation.”For months, starving sea lion pups have washed up on California beaches, with no signs of slowing. Federal scientists blame changes in ocean conditions, and Pleschner-Steele said El Niño and overpopulation is to blame, not fishing.“Sure, there’s (no fish) in the water for those young pups to eat. But that doesn’t mean the fishermen took them,” she said.
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Broccoli, sardines, blueberries good for your eyes, says study
Found in blueberries, the pigment anthocyanin can help maintain cornea health. – AFP Relaxnews pic, April 2, 2015.
Anyone concerned with maintaining healthy eye function may want to add more broccoli, sardines and blueberries to their diet, according to the recommendations from an expert at Loyola University Chicago.
Several nutrients are essential to eye health, and some may even help to improve eyesight and prevent problems such as cataracts and macular degeneration.Dr James McDonnell, a paediatric ophthalmologist at the Loyola University Health System, has compiled a list of these nutrients and the foods that contain them.Omega-3: Protection from macular generation is yet another benefit of this remarkable fatty acid, which by now is well known to nutrition-savvy consumers. Good sources include oily fish (sardines, mackerel, etc.), flaxseed and canola oil.Astaxanthin: This pigment is a powerful antioxidant with the power to stave off cataracts and even blindness. Seaweed and wild salmon (not farmed) are among the top sources.Anthocyanins: These pigments, which range in colour from bright red to blue, can help maintain the health of the cornea and of the blood vessels throughout the eye. Blueberries and blackcurrants are rich in these colourful nutrients.Zeaxanthin: Found in dark leafy green vegetables such as broccoli, kale, collard greens and spinach, this nutrient may help reduce the risk of age-related macular degeneration.Vitamin D: Moderate sun exposure is one way to ensure an adequate supply of Vitamin D, and consuming fish oils, liver and egg yolks can provide an additional boost. Supplementing with Vitamin D3 has been shown to reduce retinal inflammation and even improve vision.Bioflavonoids: These antioxidants belong to the polyphenols family and may reduce the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration. They are found in citrus fruits, cherries, tea and even red wine.Beta-carotene: Found in carrots, sweet potatoes and butternut squash, this provitamin helps to improve night vision and to prevent dry eyes.Lutein: Supplementing with this carotenoid, which is found in organic eggs from pastured hens, may help prevent macular degeneration. – AFP Relaxnews, April 2, 2015.
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D.B. Pleschner: Sardines are not being overfished
In recent weeks, sardines have been a hot news topic again. Environmental groups like Oceana complain that the sardine population is collapsing just like it did in the mid-1940s. They blame “overfishing” as the reason and maintain that the fishery should be shut down completely.Today, in truth, Pacific sardines are perhaps the best-managed fishery in the world — the poster fish for effective ecosystem-based management. The current harvest control rule — established in 2000 and updated last year with more accurate science — sets a strict harvest guideline that considers ocean conditions and automatically reduces the catch limit as the biomass declines.If the temperature is cold — which hampers sardine recruitment — the harvest rate is low. And if the population size decreases, both the harvest rate and the allowable catch automatically decrease.Current management sets aside a 150,000 metric ton reserve off the top of the stock assessment and automatically closes the directed fishery when the biomass estimate falls below that level, which it did in the latest stock assessment, after four years of abnormally cold La Niña ocean conditions.In fact, the truth is much more complicated than environmentalists would lead you to believe. It’s inaccurate and disingenuous to compare today’s fishery management with the historic sardine fishery collapse that devastated Monterey’s Cannery Row.In the 1940s and ‘50s, the fishery harvest averaged more than 43 percent of the standing sardine stock. Plus, there was little regulatory oversight and no limit on the annual catch.Today, based on the latest stock assessment, the U.S. exploitation rate has averaged about 11 percent, ranging as low as 6 percent, since the return of federal management in 2000.Here’s where complications begin because scientists recognize two stocks on the West Coast: the northern or “cold” stock ranges from northern Baja California to Canada during warm-water oceanic cycles and retracts during cold-water cycles.A southern or “temperate” stock ranges from southern Baja to San Pedro, in Southern California. The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council manages only the northern stock.Doing the math, our current fishery harvest is less than one-quarter of the rate observed during the historical sardine collapse.In fact, the current sardine harvest rule is actually more precautionary than the original rule it replaced. It does this by producing an average long-term population size at 75 percent of the unfished size, leaving even more fish in the water, vs. 67 percent in the original rule. The original harvest rule reduced the minimum harvest rate to 5 percent during cold periods. The present has a minimum rate of 0 percent during cold periods.The so-called “sardine crash due to overfishing” mantra now peddled by Oceana isn’t anything of the sort. It’s simply natural fluctuations in biomass that follow the changing conditions of the ocean, reflected in part by sea temperature.In April, the council will discuss the most recent sardine assessment report and decide on future management measures. It is important to understand that the sardine stock assessment is a conservative estimate based on acoustic surveys that miss sardines in the upper 10 meters of the water column, above the down-looking acoustic transducer, and in shallow near-shore waters where survey vessels cannot go. It’s really a question of scale, fishermen say. While they acknowledge sardines’ downward trend, fishermen question the accuracy of the total number of sardines that the stock assessment estimates.California’s wetfish industry relies on a complex of coastal pelagic species including mackerels, anchovy and market squid as well as sardines. Sardines typically school with all these species, so a small allowance of sardine caught incidentally in these other fisheries will be necessary to keep wetfish boats fishing and processors’ doors open.Sardines are critically important to California’s historic wetfish industry as well as the Golden State. This industry produces on average 80 percent of total fishery landings, and close to 40 percent of dockside value. A total prohibition on sardine landings could curtail the wetfish industry and seriously harm California’s fishing economy.D.B. Pleschner is executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit dedicated to research and to promote sustainable wetfish resources.
Posted in http://www.montereyherald.com 04/04/15
Oceans might take 1,000 years to recover from climate change, study suggests
Sea urchins disappeared for thousands of years during ancient warming periods that could be a model of future climate change, a new study shows. Here, the shells of modern sea urchins lie in a tide pool in Corona del Mar. (Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)
Naturally occurring climate change lowered oxygen levels in the deep ocean, decimating a broad spectrum of seafloor life that took some 1,000 years to recover, according to a study that offers a potential window into the effects of modern warming.Earth's recovery from the last glacial period, in fact, was slower and more brutal than previously thought, according to the study, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Researchers deciphered that plotline from a 30-foot core of sea sediments drilled from the Santa Barbara Basin containing more than 5,000 fossils spanning nearly 13,000 years."The recovery does not happen on a century scale; it's a commitment to a millennial-scale recovery," said Sarah Moffitt, a marine ecologist at UC Davis' Bodega Marine Laboratory and lead author of the study. "If we see dramatic oxygen loss in the deep sea in my lifetime, we will not see a recovery of that for many hundreds of years, if not thousands or more."Studies already have chronicled declines in dissolved oxygen in some areas of Earth's oceans. Such hypoxic conditions can expand when ocean temperatures rise and cycles that carry oxygen to deeper areas are interrupted.As North American glaciers retreated during a warming period 14,700 years ago, an oxygen-sensitive community of seafloor invertebrates that included sea stars, urchins, clams and snails nearly vanished from the fossil record within about 130 years, the researchers found."We found incredible sensitivity across all of these taxonomic groups, across organisms that you would recognize, that you could hold in your hand, organisms that build and create ecosystems that are really fundamental to the way ecosystems function," Moffitt said. "They were just dramatically wiped out by the abrupt loss of oxygen.”That highly diverse community soon was replaced with a relatively narrow suite of bizarre and extreme organisms similar to those found near deep-ocean vents and methane seeps in modern oceans, Moffitt said.Evidence of that transition was confined to such a narrow band of sediments that the turnover could have been "nearly instantaneous," the study concluded.Then, beginning around 13,500 years ago, the seafloor community began a slow recovery with the rise of grazers that fed on bacterial mats. Recovery eventually was driven by a fluctuation back toward glaciation during the Younger Dryas period, a cooling sometimes called the Big Freeze."The biological community takes 1,000 years to truly recover to the same ecological level of functioning," Moffitt said. "And the community progresses through really interesting and bizarre states before it recovers the kind of biodiversity that was seen prior to the warming.”That relatively brief freeze also ended abruptly around 11,700 years ago, virtually wiping out all the seafloor metazoans, the study found. They were gone within 170 years and did not appear again for more than 4,000 years, according to the study.The climate changes chronicled in the study arose from natural cycles involving Earth's orbit of the sun, and the oxygen declines that ensued were more extreme than those that have occurred in modern times, the study noted.Still, the abrupt fluctuations offer a glimpse at the duration of the effects of climate change driven by human activity pumping more planet-warming gases into Earth's atmosphere, Moffitt said."What this shows us is that there are major biomes on this planet that are on the table, that are on the chopping block for a future of abrupt climate warming and unchecked greenhouse gas emissions," Moffitt said. "We as a society and civilization have to come to terms with the things that we are going to sacrifice if we do not reduce our greenhouse gas footprint."
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