Department of Fisheries Oceanography research
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded SMAST $956,000 under the 2014-2015 Saltonstall-Kennedy (S-K) Grant Program for six projects that help build and maintain sustainable fisheries.
Saltonstall-Kennedy grants, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce, fund projects that address the needs of fishing communities. Continue reading
SMAST Research Associate Dr. Catherine O’Keefe has been invited to address the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Jose, California, in February. Cate’s presentation is entitled “An Incentive-Led, Dynamic Communication Program in the U.S. Atlantic Scallop Fishery.”
Cate is the principal architect of the SMAST Bycatch Avoidance Program, which since 2010 has helped prevent bycatch-related closures of New Bedford’s $600 million scallop fishery.
When the scallop fleet reaches their limit of flounder bycatch, areas are closed to the fleet, preventing full harvest of scallops. In fact, from 2006 to 2009, the scallop fishery was closed early because it approached the flounder bycatch limit, costing the industry approximately $60 million.
Cate and other SMAST researchers worked with scallop fishermen to develop an information sharing system that enables fishermen to avoid bycatch hotspots. The program was implemented in 2010, and the fleet was able to catch their entire scallop allocation, while only catching one third of their bycatch limit, thus making the program a conservation success as well as an economic success. The program has grown over the last five years to include over 70% of the scallop fleet, and the fishery has not exceeded their bycatch limits since the program was introduced.
During the past year, Cate has been working with a group of researchers from both the east and west coasts of the U.S. to advance real-time ocean management. Along with colleagues from the group, she’ll be presenting results from that work at the conference.
The SMAST scallop video survey team reported its 2014 findings to the Fishermen’s Steering Committee last week: populations are up, particularly the numbers of small scallops and particularly on Georges Bank.
“The overall stock biomass measured in scallop meat weight is estimated to be 320 million lbs, a substantial increase from the 243 million lbs observed in 2012,” said SMAST Prof. Kevin Stokesbury, lead scientist of the annual video survey. “However, the extraordinary news is the huge number of new recruits, small scallops less than 3 inches that will reach commercial size in the next few years.”
The US sea scallop resource averages 8 billion animals, but large increases in scallop populations seem to occur once every 10 years or so. A population spike from 2003 has supported a large part of the fishery for the past 10 years. The increase seen this year on Georges Bank is even larger than that of 2003, increasing the total estimated resource to 26 billion scallops.
“If protected and managed correctly,” said Stokesbury, “these scallops could insure sustainable catches for the next decade similar to those over the past 10 years.”
The video survey was conducted this year from May to July cooperatively with the fishing industry.
A three-institution, three-year, three-species research project on Georges Bank is uncovering new information about sea scallops and their interrelationships with common flatfish bycatch species. Since 2010, the study has logged 14 research cruises, timed to cover the entire year, notably the winter and spring months when the fishery is normally inactive and hence not providing data. SMAST has partnered with Coonamessett Farm Foundation and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science on the study, which is supported by the industry-funded scallop research set-aside program. An article in the May issue of Commercial Fisheries News reports on the research in detail, interviewing SMAST staff and students on their respective contributions to the project. In the same issue, Fisheries Research Technician Dave Bethoney contributes an article on the SMAST river herring bycatch avoidance program.
If marine ecosystem-based management is the future, sea floor maps will be our path there; so says the online newsletter Marine Ecosystems and Management. In its December-January issue, the newsletter discusses SMAST’s habitat mapping of Georges Bank, a byproduct of the scallop video survey, as an example of a worldwide trend toward mapping the sea floor for ecosystem-based management. Other examples from Norway, Canada, and South Africa range from mapping marine canyons with sophisticated instrumentation like multi-beam sonar to mapping coral reefs by compiling photographs taken by recreational divers. The original SMAST habitat mapping research, which boosted the resolution of Georges Bank maps one hundredfold, was published in the journal Continental Shelf Research by Bradley Harris and Kevin Stokesbury in October of 2010.
In a pair of articles in the October and November issues of the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, SMAST researchers document significant changes in the Atlantic sea scallop fishery under a regime of rotational management. Professor Kevin Stokesbury and Research Associate Michael Marino and their co-authors report greater concentrations of sea scallop predators (sea stars) on closed areas of Georges Bank as compared to areas open to fishing, and a mass mortality —or “die-off”— of scallops in the Nantucket Lightship Closed Area (NLCA), a Marine Protected Area. The die-off, which occurred between summer 2004 and summer 2005, was estimated by Stokesbury and his co-authors to have removed about 100 million dollars in scallop meat from the fishery at then-current ex-vessel prices. Read more here.