Category Archives: fisheries

Clever video aims to reduce rockfish deaths from barotrauma

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This clever video  uses a catchy rap tune, a wise-cracking puppet and some simple, practical instructions to engage fishermen in protecting rockfish from dying of barotrauma, by reaching them how to return their excess catch to the deeps – alive.

Barotrauma results when a rockfish is caught and hauled rapidly to the surface and its internal, air-filled swim bladder expands, often causing the animal’s eyes to bulge and even pushing its stomach out of its mouth. If thrown back in the water, the inflated bladder can cause the fish to float, making it easy prey for seabirds and other hungry animals.

But if the animal can be returned to the deeps quickly, water pressure will often reverse the expansion, allowing the  fish to survive. The video demonstrates a number of effective tools – home-made and commercial – for getting the fish back to the bottom quickly and with as little harm as possible.

The video, funded in part by California Sea Grant, was produced by a team including Alena Pribyl, a NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center researcher who earned her PhD. at Oregon State University while studying barotrauma.

Magnetic navigation may hold a key to salmon migration

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Salmon - photo by Jeffrey BasingerAfter years at sea, sockeye salmon returning to their freshwater homes may be guided by an early memory of the Earth’s magnetic field, encoded at the site where natal streams empty into the Pacific Ocean, according to a an Oregon Sea Grant-supported study published today in Current Biology.

Oregon State University’s Nathan Putnam and David Noakes, along with researchers from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the University of Washington, and the University of California Davis, pored over 56 years of dta from federal fishery scientists who tracked the movements of salmon at the mouth of British Columbia’s Fraser River, where fish must choose to swim north around Vancouver Island, or around to the south. They matched that data with  measurements of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, which shifts predictably in strength and orientation over time and found that fish tended to choose the path where the field strength was more similar to that of the river mouth when they’d left, two years before.

Scientists hope the finding will help solve the mystery of how salmon find their way back to the rivers of their birth across thousands of miles of ocean. It’s already accepted that in the final stages of the journey to their breeding grounds, salmon use odors to guide them back to the stream or inlet where they hatched. But how the fish find their target river remains a mystery, although scientists have suspected for a while that magnetic cues play a role. Last summer, a team including UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Kenneth Lohmann – also part of this study – reported that rotating magnetite crystals in a fish nose responded to magnetic field orientation, providing a possible biological mechanism for magnetic field tracking.

The OSU researchers hope to further investigate the magnetic field correlation by subjecting captive fish to artificial magnetic fields and studying their behavior.

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Register now for Working Waterfronts symposium

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Working Waterfronts Symposium 2013TACOMA, Wash. –  Oregon and Washington Sea Grant are co-hosting the 2013 National Working Waterfronts & Waterways Symposium March 25-28 in Tacoma.

This is the third national symposium on issues faced by working waterfronts throughout the United States, where increased coastal population is generating increasing conflicts over access to and uses of waterfronts.

The symposium is expected to draw local, regional, tribal and national decision-makers; members of the commercial fishing, marine, and tourism industries, developers and property owners; business owners, community planners and waterfront advocates .

Session topics will include discussions about:

  • Economic and social impacts of and on working waterfronts
  • Successful local, regional, state and federal Strategies to address working waterfront issues
  • The future of working waterfronts: Changing uses and changing climate
  • Keeping waterfront industries commercially viable

For complete information about symposium sessions, field trips and registration, visit www.workingwaterfronts2013.org

Kaety Hildenbrand on working with ocean stakeholders

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Kaety Hildenbrand explores the inside of a wave energy deviceKaety Hildenbrand, our Sea Grant Extension marine fisheries specialist on the central Oregon coast, has a great guest article on the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center. Among other things, she observes:

“… I can name fishermen in each port that I have worked with on wave energy issues. But, that isn’t what’s important, not really. What’s important is that I can tell you their wife’s name, how many kids they have, the name of their dog, I can describe the inside of their vessels, tell you what kind of truck they drive, and what kind of drink they order at Starbucks. They could do the same for me. I didn’t need to know any of this, I wasn’t asked to find it out, and I didn’t do it to gain something. It’s part of building a true relationship with someone, its part of doing what’s right, its part of what happens when you focus on building trust and not getting buy-in.”

Read the whole article.

For more about Oregon Sea Grant’s work in marine renewable energy and stakeholder engagement, see:

Rising stream temperatures could spell trouble for salmon

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A newly published study by researchers at Oregon State University and two federal agencies concludes that high temperatures coupled with lower flows in many Northwest streams is creating increasingly extreme conditions that could spell trouble for salmon and other organisms.

The study, published in the professional journal Hydrobiologia, was funded and coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey and the research branch of the U.S. Forest Service. It points to climate change as the primary cause.

“The highest temperatures for streams generally occur in August, while lowest flows take place in the early fall,” said Ivan Arismendi, a research professor in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. “Each period is important because it is a time of potentially high stress on the organisms that live in the stream. If they occur closer in time – or together – they could create double trouble that may be greater than their combined singular effects.”

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Traces of Fukushima radiation found in Pacific albacore

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Researcher Delvan Neville labels containers of albacore tuna samplesCORVALLIS, Ore. – Samples of albacore tuna caught off the West Coast of the United States show minute traces of radiation that can be traced to the Fukushima reactor disaster, according to an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The radiation levels in fish analyzed to date are far below anything that would pose a risk to humans who consume the fish, the research team emphasized. The findings are preliminary; additional fish remain to be tested.

But the findings could reveal new information about where Pacific albacore travel during their migratory lives – and how what happens in one part of the ocean can affect the food web thousands of miles away.

The team has collected and tested fish caught off the U.S. West Coast both before and after the devastating March 2011 Japanese tsunami and subsequent release of radioactive material into the ocean by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor.

“We’re still processing new fish, but so far the radiation we’re detecting is far below the level of   concern for human safety,” said Delvan Neville, a graduate researcher with OSU’s Radiation Health Physics program and a co-investigator on the project.

People are constantly exposed to radiation from the natural environment, Neville pointed out. “To increase their normal annual dosage of radiation by just 1 percent, a person would have to eat more than 4,000 pounds of the highest (radiation) level albacore we’ve seen.”

Neville will present the team’s preliminary findings on Oct. 27 at the Heceta Head Coastal Conference in Florence. Richard Brodeur, the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center biologist who serves as lead investigator on the project, reported the same findings to the recent annual meeting of  PICES, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, in Japan. The researchers also plan scientific journal articles.

Read the complete story from OSU News & Research Information

Public forum aims to demystify ocean acidification, hypoxia

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How is Oregon's ocean affected by hypoxia and acidification?TILLAMOOK – Hypoxia and ocean acidification get a lot of press, but how many people know what these phenomena are, what causes them and what they mean for marine species and coastal communities? Now’s the chance to find out, in an Oct. 23 public forum that aims to take some of the mystery out of the science behind measuring, understanding and minimizing the effects of of these ocean conditions.

The forum, starting at 6:30 pm in rooms 214-215 at Tillamook Bay Community College, 4301 3rd St., is free and open to the public. Pre-registration is encouraged, but not required. For more information, visit the PISCO Website.

Organized by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Ocean (PISCO) and Oregon Sea Grant, the forum will focus on cutting edge research by scientists from many disciplines, and how resource managers and industries are responding.  A series of speakers will address:

  • The definitions of ocean acidification and coastal hypoxia, and how they are related – Francis Chan, OSU Zoology/PISCO
  • Why this is happening off our coast and what makes Oregon vulnerable – Burke Hales, OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS).
  • How scientists are monitoring the ocean for these changes – Jack Barth (CEOAS/PISCO)
  • The impacts of acidification on shellfish hatcheries – Alan Barton (Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery)

Speakers will be followed by a question-and-answer panel featuring scientists and representatives of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The event is hosted by PISCO through funding from Oregon Sea Grant.

Study guide available for Ocean Frontiers film

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A new university-level discussion guide, developed by the National Sea Grant Law Center, is now available for the  documentary film, Ocean Frontiers: The Dawn of a New Era in Ocean Stewardship.

The film features a profile of Port Orford, Oregon, where commercial fishermen and other community members are teaming with scientists to understand and protect the region’s marine fisheries.

The Sea Grant Law Center describes Ocean Frontiers as “an ideal communication tool to help audiences understand key principles of ecosystem-based management and coastal and marine spatial planning. These complex topics come to life and are easy to grasp through the stories and people featured in Ocean Frontiers.”

This discussion guide was produced for Green Fire Productions by the National Sea Grant Law Center with the assistance of the Ocean and Coastal Law Committee of Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Society to help professors incorpo­rate Ocean Frontiers into the classroom. The guide is available for download here: http://bit.ly/OFdiscussionguide

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Newport’s Commercial Fisheries bay front signs now available online

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Newport dock interpretive signsPeople who visit the bay fronts of Oregon’s harbors often see working boats at dock and wonder about them and about the types of commercial fishing being done along the coast. A series of 10 Newport’s Commercial Fisheries signs are now available to answer some of those questions. Not only can the bay front signs be viewed as you walk along the dock, they can also be found online:

Also available online is a free set of seven short publications explaining gear on fishing boats:

 

Rising ocean acidity threatens West Coast ecosystems

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Humanity’s use of fossil fuels sends 35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That has already begun to change the fundamental chemistry of the world’s oceans, steadily making them more acidic.

Now, a new high resolution computer model reveals that over the next 4 decades, rising ocean acidity will likely have profound impacts on waters off the West Coast of the United States, home to one of the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems and most important commercial fisheries.

These impacts have the potential to upend the entire marine ecosystem and affect millions of people dependent upon it for food and jobs.

George Waldbusser, an Oregon State University ocean ecologist and biogeochemist currently working under Oregon Sea Grant funding to study the effects of acidification on oysters and other commercially important bivalves, says it’s not clear precisely how rising acidity will affect different organisms. However, he adds, the changes will likely be broad-based. “It shows us that the windows of opportunity for organisms to succeed get smaller and smaller. It will probably have important effects on fisheries, food supply, and general ocean ecology.”