October 10 – WHOI scientist Sarah Cooley studies the impacts of ocean acidification – Talking Fish interviews Sarah Cooley, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist, on the processes behind ocean acidification, its effects on fisheries and other industries, and the future of our oceans.

October 11 – All About Aquaculture: What is aquaculture, anyway? – This post, the second in a series that focuses on aquaculture, discusses the various methods and practices used by fish and shellfish farmers in raising their products.

October 12 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, October 12 – In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, some fishermen continue to oppose 10-year rebuilding requirements for overfished stocks; a new initiative will help Maine fishermen seeking to enter the groundfish fleet; a dead finback whale creates a challenge in Boston Harbor, John Bullard supports limits on catch share accumulation, cod brings large trawlers to inshore waters; a new article discusses the history and restoration of alewife populations.

The beauty, health, and wealth provided by the productivity of New England’s ocean is illustrated in the diversity of ocean and coastal habitat found in the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, southern New England waters, and the far edge of the Outer Continental Shelf. New England’s ocean habitats provide a huge economic service, but only if the underlying ecological foundation is healthy and sustained. Pushing our ocean waters to produce more fish and seafood than is sustainable can lead to a severe decline in goods and services – as we are seeing with the most recent groundfish depletion crisis – or even to an unrecoverable collapse as has happened in eastern Canada.

There are really two major components to a healthy ocean: don’t take out too much in the way of fish and other living resources and don’t put in too much in the way of runoff, nutrients, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants. In New England’s celebrated cod and groundfish fishery we have clearly been taking out too much through decades of overfishing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at the request of the New England Fishery Management Council, has for years taken the riskiest possible approach to managing fish stocks. NOAA and the Fishery Management Council have set catch limits at the highest levels allowed by law and then shown great surprise when fish stocks fail to recover.

We need NOAA to show proactive leadership by ensuring a more precautionary approach to setting annual catch limits and to rebuilding fish populations. Decades of unsustainable catch levels should not continue to plague New England’s fisheries or our ocean’s health.

The other problem of overfishing is that the methods used to catch fish have gotten more destructive. Since the development of more powerful engines and sonar during World War II, fishing vessels can go farther out to sea, fish in deeper water, and drag heavier bottom trawls. These inventions not only catch a lot more fish, but also cause more damage to ocean bottom habitat – the kelp beds, boulders and rocky fields, tube worms, anemones, sponges, corals, and mussel beds which serve as nurseries and spawning areas. Over decades we are left with cumulative impacts to large areas of New England’s ocean habitat.

This makes the remaining special areas such as Cashes Ledge even more important as a place where small fish can grow and become large enough to reproduce.

In New England, NOAA is headed in reverse on its legal responsibility and the ecological necessity to further protect juvenile groundfish in their nursery grounds. The commercial fishing industry, led by big trawlers, has argued for opening these nursery grounds. Areas of sea bottom that provide essential fish habitat must be protected from destructive fishing practices like trawling and dredging.  For nearly a decade regional fishery managers have failed to take serious action to protect essential fish habitat.  It’s time to make habitat conservation a priority.

The Conservation Law Foundation, our conservation partners, marine scientists, fishermen, and ocean users agree that permanent habitat protection is needed for Cashes Ledge and other special places.

Join our statement to NOAA asking for their leadership. Click here to urge NOAA to protect our ocean beauty, health, and wealth.

October 2 – All About Aquaculture: from 2000 BC in China to Today in the U.S. - This piece is the first in a series that will focus on aquaculture, both world-wide and in New England. Over the next few weeks, the series will explore topics such as the various methods of aquaculture, its environmental and sustainability implications, current aquaculture research and production in New England, and national regulations and sustainability certifications. This first post focuses on aquaculture’s history and its current status as a seafood provider in the United States.

October 3 – The Bottom Line: Historic Moment for Menhaden - By Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group. Menhaden numbers have plunged nearly 90 percent over the past 25 years, and the regulators responsible for their management will soon make a critical decision. In December, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission(ASMFC) could finally help the depleted population recover by setting a coastwide, science- based annual catch limit.

October 5 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, October 5 - In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, fish stocks lacking scientific assessments are severely depleted; community-supported fisheries provide economic opportunity for fishermen; a sustainable seafood festival in Boston; Seacoast Online explores the tension between fishermen and scientists over stock assessments; sharks hurt Cape beach revenues; the History Channel puts the spotlight on New England fishermen; fish are likely to reach smaller sizes due to warming water; ocean acidification threatens ecosystems and fisheries.

September 25 – Globe, Times Miss Boat on Real Issues – The Northeast’s two leading newspapers both editorialized recently on the fragile status of groundfish populations, especially cod, on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, both the Boston Globe and New York Times missed an opportunity to emphasize conservation measures and explain the great risk for fish and fishermen if we weaken those protections.

September 26 – Opening the Closed Areas – A bet we can’t afford to take? – On Thursday, the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) will meet for the first time since the Secretary of Commerce declared the New England groundfish fishery, which includes species such as cod, haddock, and flounder, a disaster. One of the ideas currently being discussed is opening groundfish closed areas that have been closed to fishing for the past 15 years; a proposition that could be the final straw causing the collapse of the fisheries in the Gulf of Maine.

September 28 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, September 28 – In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, NEFMC moves to open closed areas; John Bullard reverses his decision on a seasonal gillnetting closure; NOAA proposes exempting scallopers from accountability measures on yellowtail bycatch; a report highlights the culture of distrust between fishermen and regulators; the Center for American Progress explains stock assessments; NOAA finds deep water coral hotspots on Georges Bank; the Boston Globe exposes problems with underweight seafood sold to New England consumers.

September 17 – Booming New England Seal Population Creates a Management Challenge – Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) in 1972, forty years ago. Intended to slow the precipitous decline of marine mammal populations due to human activities, the act prohibited the killing, harassment, or excessive disturbance of marine mammals in United States waters. For seals in New England—mainly harbor seals and gray seals—the MMPA’s protections effected a massive boom in population.

September 21 – Illegal and Wrong – Wednesday’s New England Fishery Management Council’s Groundfish Committee meeting was … depressing. As the expression goes, just when I think I am seeing light at the end of the tunnel I realize that it is the headlights of the on-coming bus. Once again, current events—bad as they are—seem about to be exploited to produce an even more dismal future. The topic was throwing open the decades-long fishery closed areas to exploitation again.

September 21 - Fish Talk in the News – Friday, September 21 – In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, the NEFMC Groundfish Committee proposes opening closed areas; blanket shark fin bans may hurt the sustainable dogfish industry; Gloucester fishing personalities comment on warm waters this summer; a NOAA report ranks New Bedford first in the country in fishing revenues; cod stocks move north in response to record-setting warm water temperatures; the scallop quota could take a heavy cut over the next two years due to poor recruitment.

Brian Skerry and Luis Lamare get ready to photograph Cashes Ledge on their recent dive. Photograph by Christian Conroy.

What’s so special about Cashes Ledge? In this second of a planned series of dives on this New England biodiversity hotspot, Brian Skerry was joined by marine ecologist, Jon Witman, an expert on Cashes Ledge.  Jon has been studying Cashes Ledge for 35 years, and has been watching how the diversity and abundance of sea life has been changing there, and how it has responded to its current limited-protection status. We talked to him and found out more about why Cashes Ledge is so important to the Gulf of Maine, and what we can do to keep it thriving.

Robin:

Why have you spent so much time on Cashes Ledge?

Jon:

Cashes Ledge is a fascinating and wild offshore place that helps us understand how marine ecosystems tick. It is also a unique storehouse of Atlantic marine biodiversity. Cashes Ledge provides an opportunity to understand why biodiversity matters in an ecological sense. Unfortunately, we are losing marine biodiversity in the world’s oceans faster than we can study it.

Currently, I’m trying to figure out how the whole benthic ecosystem out on Cashes Ledge – from the fish, to the kelp forests and the diverse invertebrates communities have changed over the past decades. I’m particularly interested in how resilient the system is to human disturbance and to climate-related changes in the oceanography.

When we studied Cashes Ledge intensively in the 1980’s, it was like a time machine providing a fleeting glimpse of what New England marine coastal communities might have been like hundreds of years ago, when lots of large predatory fish – especially cod,  were commonplace close to shore. We videotaped over 100 cod an hour going by an area of bottom about the size of a large picnic table on Cashes Ledge, compared to no cod seen at the same depth at coastal sites in the Gulf of Maine.

I actually saw a whale cod as long as a diver and schools of Atlantic bluefin tuna while diving on Cashes Ledge then. There have been substantial reductions of predatory fish since then, which is something I’m studying, but Cashes Ledge is still a vitally rich ecosystem compared to coastal ones that have been more heavily impacted by humans.

Robin:

What other kinds of interesting animals have you seen on Cashes Ledge?

Jon:

There are layers of marine life on Cashes Ledge, including minke, right, humpback and pilot whales, blue sharks, basking sharks, atlantic white sided dolphins, big schools of bluefin tuna chasing herring, whale cod, red cod, pollock, wolffish, torpedo rays, squid, strange feather stars called crinoids, and unusual sponges and sea squirts typical of sub arctic areas of Scandinavia.

Robin:

Can you talk about the internal waves and why they are important?

Jon:

The top of the ridge on Cashes Ledge is an incredibly dynamic place – layers of plankton in warmer overlying waters are driven right down to the bottom as much as 20 times a day by these phenomena known as internal waves. This is a big deal because the downwelling plankton layers are pulses of concentrated food that sustain bottom dwelling organisms and, in effect, fuel the food web.

We stumbled across this phenomenon in the course of our scuba dives to the top of the ridge at 30 m. One dive team would go down and report that the water on the bottom was cold and beautifully clear but the next team an hour later found pea soup visibility in greenish warm water. This, of course, turned out to be the plankton layer pushed down onto the bottom like a yo-yo by internal waves.

The temperature increase was so large that we could feel the warm water through our drysuits. At that time, the prevailing view of the subtidal zone was that it was a stable place with nearly constant environmental conditions, compared to the rocky intertidal zone. But out on Cashes we were documenting as much as 5 degree centigrade temperature increases in 10 minutes right on the rocky sea floor at 30 m depth.

Internal waves are like a sine wave travelling along the boundary between the warm surface waters and the colder layer below. They can be huge – spanning 50 m vertically in some parts of the world and 30 m high on Cashes.  I’ve seen these downwelling green water waves approaching the ridge on Cashes Ledge while scuba diving and sitting off the ridge in the Johnson Sea Link submersible – it’s one of the most spectacular things I’ve seen underwater.

Robin:

What makes Cashes Ledge so unique?

Jon:

There are at least three things make Cashes Ledge so unique. First of all, it is the largest continuous kelp forest in offshore waters on the entire east coast of the US. The kelp grow unusually deep there, beyond  30 m depth. The forest and the ledge itself provide many valuable goods and services to keep the offshore Gulf of Maine ecosystem healthy, vibrant, and productive. For example, it’s a nursery habitat for commercially valuable groundfish. It’s also an energy rich food source for marine life living in habitats both on the ledge and far away from it – in the form of detritus as the kelp breaks down.

Secondly, the Cashes Ledge ecosystem contains a wide range of different bottom types – it isn’t just all rocky ledge. Just like on a mountain slope in the Green or White Mountains in New England, there are cobble and boulder fields on the lower sides of rocky slopes on Cashes Ledge. Deeper down, the sea floor is covered in sand and gravel that grades into soft bottom areas of silt and mud in the basins. So what you have in the Cashes Ledge underwater landscape is a representative collection of most of the major types of bottom habitats found in the Gulf of Maine, but in an incredibly compact area, as ecosystems go.

Each of those different habitat types has its own community of species that do especially well in that particular habitat. For example, there are pink northern shrimp, clams, and tube worms living in the muddy basins at the edge of a boulder field, then communities of soccer ball-sized yellow sponges, bright red sea anemones, and little upright calcified candelabras called bryozoans that look like miniature coral reefs, attached to the boulder tops. Different habitats enhance biodiversity overall. If you sum up all the different species living in each of these different types of habitats from kelp forests to the muddy basins, you have some of the highest biodiversity levels in the Gulf of Maine right on Cashes Ledge.

Finally, as an abrupt topographic high in relatively clear, shallow, sunlit waters, Cashes Ledge is an especially productive offshore ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine. I mentioned the role of the kelp detritus exporting food to adjacent ecosystems, but the dynamic oceanography of the ledge itself also contributes to the productivity of the bottom community in the way that internal waves push concentrated layers of plankton to the top of the ridge.

I think both mechanisms help make Cashes Ledge such a productive area for many species – including groundfish and marine mammals. We’ve seen minke whales feeding in the slicks of internal waves on Cashes Ledge, presumably due to high concentrations of food there.

Robin:

What kind of protection does Cashes Ledge need and why?

Jon:

As special as it is, Cashes Ledge is a very vulnerable marine ecosystem. Right now Cashes Ledge has a small amount of protection from certain types of fishing activity as an Essential Fish Habitat and as a Habitat Area of Special Concern. This is laudable and a real achievement by fisheries managers in New England. However, this protection is only temporary and it could be eliminated at any moment.  It could be opened to fishing practices that further deplete stocks of groundfish, damage biodiverse communities, and decrease the sustainability of the kelp forests.

Because it is such a unique, valuable, and diverse New England marine ecosystem, the rocky ridge, adjacent bottom habitats, and the overlying water column on Cashes Ledge need permanent protection from human impacts. It has been shown many times that marine protected areas help exploited stocks recover and can ensure the sustainability of biodiversity and other goods and services that keep our oceans healthy. We also know that really small protected areas don’t do these jobs very well, so it pays in the long run to preserve larger areas containing different types of habitats.

Globally, we aren’t doing a very good job of protecting the oceans as less than 2% of the worlds oceans are fully protected, despite all the scientific findings showing that marine ecosystems are under ever increasing levels of stress from all sorts of human impacts.

September 10 – New Study Shows Overfishing Costs Southeast and Gulf Regions Millions Per Year – By Lee Crockett of the Pew Environment Group. There’s an old saying that a penny saved is a penny earned. This sound financial advice is equally true for management of U.S. ocean fish resources. As I’ve said before, conserving our ocean fish populations is a prudent economic investment. The converse is also true: Overfishing is bad economic policy.

September 14 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, September 14 – This week in Fish Talk in the News: A disaster declaration for the New England groundfish fishery; fishermen oppose an increase in the minimum landing size for conch; an increase in seafood-borne illness in Maine; a new study of the importance of forage fish; NMFS denies a request to alter the gillnetting closure intended to protect porpoises; Shaw’s expands its sustainable seafood choices; a study suggests seal culling wouldn’t help fish; John Bullard continues his public listening sessions; and the US Court of Appeals upholds catch shares for West Coast groundfish.

Trash on a New England beach

Walking the sandy beaches of the Cape and Islands, kayaking the marshes and salt ponds, or scrambling around the rocky shores of Maine will almost always provide three things: a great outdoor experience, a chance to explore and learn about nature and the amazing diversity of life, and a full review of the waste, refuse, garbage, and pollutants that we cast onto our rivers, shores, and oceans.

While being blessed with the chance to take a recent early morning hike around my favorite little Massachusetts island, I calculated an assortment of the following: the smashed remnants of dozens of lobster traps, several plastic and metal buckets, beer cans, more beer cans, an unopened plastic bottle of cranberry juice (I didn’t try to drink it), a refrigerator door which was probably 30 years old, plastic food wrappers, auto oil filters, boat oil filters, one pretty large piece of fiberglass part from someone’s unfortunately lost vessel, dozens of miles of discarded fishing line, nets and other assorted fishing gear, flip-flops, sandals and shoes, 50 gallon drums, an unused emergency smoke bomb, about two dozen assorted rubber gloves (mostly lefts), about one dozen assorted rubber boots (mostly rights), a vast amount of the highly predictable but still depressing plastic bottles, a few glass bottles, an oddly-placed large chunk of asphalt, a metal chair, some random pieces of wood pallets and tree stumps, two umbrellas, pesticide spray bottles, one display of typical latex birthday party balloons, and two separate displays of very fancy Mylar celebratory balloons.

While shocking in its abundance, it was still a fairly standard composition of junk. Policy makers refer to this aspect of ocean management as “marine debris.” Honestly, I think we can just call it “ocean garbage.” Ocean garbage is a longtime and ever increasing problem. The type of materials we put into waterways and on our beaches in the modern era tend to be more toxic and long-lived than the flotsam and jetsam of past centuries. The debris floating across the Pacific from the terrible tsunami that devastated the coast of Japan last year has brought some attention to the problem, as has the media report so the massive garbage patches. Believe it or not, even the thousands of tons of stuff from a single event such as the tsunami is dwarfed by the annual build-up of daily deposits.

There are some good folks, however, who are not going to take this problem lying down. One tremendous collaborative effort is the annual International Coastal Cleanup which is organized each year by our good friends at the Ocean Conservancy. The 2012 ICC, as it is known, happens this Saturday, Sept. 15. Thousands of people around this country and others will volunteer for a day to gather up the coastal and ocean garbage and responsibly deposit it in landfills. You can help out too!

A challenge this broad really does require broad coordination and collaboration. The National Ocean Policy provides the forum for state officials, federal agencies, municipalities and other ocean user groups to help tackle the threat of marine debris. Regional ocean planning is certainly a great tool for coordination in New England.

September 6 – Courts Can’t Fix What’s Broken With Groundfish – On Wednesday, a panel of three Federal Circuit Court judges heard arguments from various parties regarding why the 2010 amendment to the New England Groundfish Management Plan, Amendment 16, should either be thrown out or upheld.

September 7 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, September 7 – In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, the US Court of Appeals hears arguments on catch shares; a tagging derby raises money for tuna research; lobster overproduction may be linked to warmer waters; Michael Conathan argues for a new start for New England groundfish; NEFMC announces the agenda for its next meeting; bonito venture farther north; the Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby opens; Menino brings New Bedford fish to farmers markets; and trawling may influence underwater canyon morphology.