Fisheries/Aquaculture

Five years after the Christie administration ordered scientists to remove oyster beds designed to clean pollution, the state Senate is poised this week to vote on a measure that could put the bivalves back into state waters… The bill would effectivel…

Olaf Jensen, assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, is one member of the scientific community who helps decide how best to manage fish species in New Jersey as a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee… Jensen explained the challenges and difficulties in assessing dynamic fish populations. To put his audience of mostly recreational fishermen at ease, he told a funny story about a forester and a scientist having a conversation on numbers. “The forester says he goes out and counts the trees and makes a decision on how many he can cut down while still sustaining the forest. The fisheries manager says, “I do the same thing, except you can’t see the fish and they move.”… Determining the amount of the black sea bass biomass and subsequently setting fishing limits has been made more difficult by the biology of that species. Black sea bass are “protogenous hermaphrodites,” said Jensen. “They start out as females and change sex,” he said.

Up in Maine, lobsters are thriving. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission reported last month that stocks there have reached a record high… Down the coast, however, the story is different. In southern New England, lobster stocks have plummeted to the lowest levels ever recorded, putting many lobstermen out of business… Global warming is going to reshuffle ocean ecosystems on a scale not seen for millions of years. Marine biologists can’t yet say what these new habitats are going to be like… “If you put a bunch of species in a blender, you’re not entirely sure what’s going to come out,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University… Dr. Pinsky, who was not involved in the study, also sees ominous signs for humanity in the research.

Right now, there are thousands of robots roaming the Earth’s waters. More and more, scientists are relying on bots to fill a knowledge gap, sending autonomous technology where humans cannot go, and gathering data on vast and diverse ecosystems that are increasingly under threat… A study published in the journal Science at the beginning of the year had dire warnings for Earth’s marine life, but researchers were quick to say it is not too late to avoid cataclysm in the ocean… “We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

Rutgers marine scientist Thomas Grothues is well known for his expertise in tracking fish. He was recruited last year by a colleague from England to track a rarely seen shark species in the Philippines… The underwater adventure – in which Grothues pl…

A study of global fish populations has suggested fast-growth fish species are more vulnerable to population collapses than previously thought… “On the land, slow growing animals are at most risk of decline and we used to think the same was true in the oceans,” explained co-author Malin Pinsky from Rutgers University, US… Dr Pinsky and colleagues found that over the past six decades, fast-growing species that were commercially fished were three times more likely to experience a population collapse than their slow-growing cousins. He told BBC News that the team identified two main risk factors that made species particularly sensitive to overfishing… Dr Pinsky said that the findings suggested that management measures needed to pay closer attention to seasonal changes in the environment… “If you are fishing at a certain level and then the environmental conditions become poor and the fish population starts growing more slowly, it is very easy to drive that population to collapse,” he observed.

A Rutgers marine biologist studying the rise and fall of fish populations worldwide recently made a counterintuitive discovery: ocean species that grow quickly and reproduce frequently, such as sardines, anchovies and flounder, are more likely to experience dramatic plunges in population than larger, slower growing fish such as sharks or tuna… “Rabbits are doing pretty well compared to rhinos,” said Malin Pinsky, assistant professor of ecology and evolution in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “Mice thrive while lions, tigers and elephants are endangered.”… For example, this effect is apparent in sardines off the coast of southern California, whose populations have fluctuated naturally for thousands of years. But these fluctuations are not enough to explain why so many fast-growing fish species have collapsed in recent decades – meaning a drop to less than 10 percent of historical levels.