Latest Skimmer Articles

• UN publishes evaluation of global progress towards 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
• Over US$63 billion pledged at Our Ocean conference to improve ocean health and productivity (view pledges in map form)
• New elevation data triples estimate of global population vulnerable to sea-level rise and coastal flooding (explore data with Coastal Risk Screening Tool)
• Meta-analysis of MPA coverage highlights gaps in Caribbean, Madagascar, southern Africa, Mediterranean, and Coral Triangle
• Global subsidies to fishing industry more than US$35 billion in 2018 [Read Skimmer coverage of why this matters for marine ecosystems]
• Study finds MPA benefits and drawbacks roughly equal for local communities
• Analysis predicts continued ocean warming will trigger more extreme El Niños
• Sea levels will continue to rise even after global temperatures stabilize
• Offshore wind report offers comprehensive global look at latest technology, market developments, and geospatial analysis
• New report illuminates activities of distant water fishing fleets including IUU fishing and illicit activity
• New guide details how to insure a natural asset [Read Skimmer coverage about insurance coverage for Mesoamerican Reef]
• Tool helps design accurate, statistically meaningful ocean research experiments
• Communications tool to help scientists engage public and decisionmakers now available in Spanish
• Workbook for strategic communication for conservation available
• Nike joins coalition pledged to not ship through Arctic; Exxon partner plans to ship liquid natural gas through Arctic
• Final approval given for first commercial offshore wind installation in US federal waters
• China's ocean waste up 27% in 2018
• Marine planning and management trainings added to Skimmer database

Editor’s note: Thierry Chopin is a professor of marine biology and director of the Seaweed and Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture Research Laboratory at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He is also president of Chopin Coastal Health Solutions Inc. His research focuses on the ecophysiology/biochemistry/cultivation of seaweeds and the development of Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) for environmental sustainability, economic stability, and societal acceptability.

The Skimmer: Can you tell us a little bit about what IMTA is?

Chopin: With IMTA, farmers cultivate species from different trophic levels and with complementary ecosystem functions in proximity. They combine fed species (e.g., finfish that need to be provided with feed) with extractive species (e.g., seaweeds, aquatic plants, shellfish, and other invertebrates that extract their food from the environment) to take advantage of synergistic interactions among them. In these systems, biomitigation operates as part of a circular economy (i.e., nutrients are no longer considered wastes or by-products of one species, but instead are co-products for the other species).

By Tundi Agardy, Contributing Editor, The Skimmer. Email: tundiagardy [at] earthlink.net

A recent publication “Marine zoning revisiting: How decades of zoning the Great Barrier Reef has evolved an effective spatial planning approach for marine ecosystem-based management” published in Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems distills important lessons from Australia’s evolving commitment to manage the world’s most iconic multiple use marine protected area. It casts a critical eye on what has worked and what has not, and it pushes us beyond our marine comfort zone to face the challenge of true ecosystem-based management (EBM), which neither ocean zoning nor marine spatial planning (MSP) in their current applications can adequately provide. With this publication, Jon Day and his coauthors have given the world a valuable gift that will keep on giving – if we can acknowledge this gift and heed it.

Day and his colleagues (including Richard Kenchington, who like Day has been intimately involved in the design and management of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park [GBRMP] through its various iterations over the years) recount how zoning both set the stage for multiple use management and evolved to provide the legal framework for regulations to protect the world’s largest barrier reef. The use of zoning had to be adapted over decades because the GBRMP Authority was a pioneer in spatial management and the allocation of space to uses of the marine environment. Zoning on land may have provided a glimpse of the possible, but adapting zoning approaches to the fluid and obscured ocean realm required experimentation and a fair amount of risk taking.

OCTO and its services (The Skimmer, EBM Tools Network, OpenChannels.org, MPA News, and more) are currently scheduling their 2020 webinar series. If there any topics you would like to see covered or presenters that you would like to hear from, please let us know at skimmer [at] octogroup.org!

Examples of topics we have covered in the past year (recordings available) include:

• New opportunities for reducing coastal risk with natural defenses
• Financing coral reef conservation and management with tourism-related tools
• Conservation targets and how much of the world do we need to protect?
• A toolkit for managing cultural resources in marine protected areas
• The impact of human-caused ocean noise pollution on fish, invertebrates, and ecosystem services
• Managing the ocean in real-time: Tools for dynamic management
• Unmanned systems (UxS): Transforming how we study and manage the marine environment
• Not all those who wander are lost – Fishers communities’ responses to shifts in the distribution and abundance of fish resources

See the full list of upcoming webinars and find recordings of previous webinars.

Editor’s note: In 2016, roughly one-third of the total value of the world’s trade of fish and fish products was invertebrates. (They were approximately one-fifth of the global fish trade by live weight.) To learn more about the state and future of invertebrate fisheries management, The Skimmer interviewed Heike Lotze, a professor in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. In this interview, we discuss several of her papers published over the past decade on the recent expansion, ecosystem effects, and management of invertebrate fisheries, including a recent synthesis “Ecosystem effects of invertebrate fisheries” published in Fish and Fisheries in 2017.

The Skimmer: As global catch of invertebrates increases, what impacts are invertebrate fisheries having on marine ecosystems?

Lotze: Invertebrate catches have increased more than six-fold globally since the 1950s. Catches include all major species groups – from lobster, shrimp, and crabs (crustaceans) to octopus, cuttlefish and squid (cephalopods) to mussels and snails (mollusks) to sea urchins and sea cucumbers (echinoderms). In many countries, invertebrates are some of the most lucrative commercial fisheries and provide coastal communities with valuable livelihoods and associated benefits. The global increase in catches has been accompanied by the spatial expansion of invertebrate fisheries: many more countries are engaging in fishing invertebrates, and many more areas within countries are now fishing invertebrates. For example, sea urchin and sea cucumber are now fished around the globe, and fishing for invertebrates has expanded from shallow to deeper waters to maintain or enhance catch levels. Fisheries have further shifted from large- to smaller-sized individuals and from high- to lesser-valued species, usually in response to declining catches and following a ‘fishing down the value-chain’ pattern.

Many people may think it is ‘just’ invertebrates, but these species play important ecological roles in marine ecosystems. These roles are often more diverse than the roles that fish play, consequently the impacts of invertebrate fisheries on other species and marine ecosystems are more varied than those of finfish fisheries. For example:

• Many invertebrates are important prey for higher trophic level species, such as fish, whales, turtles, and seabirds, and reducing invertebrate abundance can have ripple effects through marine food webs, comparable to those of forage fish;
• Many mussels, oysters, and sponges enhance biodiversity by creating three-dimensional structures that are important habitat for other species – for settlement, finding food, finding shelter, breeding, and nursery grounds;
• Many invertebrates filter feed which improves water quality and clarity and provides benefits to other organisms, including humans;
• Herbivore grazers, such as many urchins and gastropods, act as lawn mowers keeping algal carpets in check; and
• Detritivore sea stars and sea cucumbers clean up ocean floors as the scavengers of the sea.

• New IPCC Oceans and Cryosphere special report paints dire picture of ocean health
• Experts describe best options for using oceans to mitigate climate change
• UN International Seabed Authority continuing discussions on regulations for deep-seabed mining; environmental organization seeks mining moratorium until deep sea better understood
• Scientists assess what is needed for restoring deep sea ecosystems
• Study provides new framework for understanding blue carbon ecosystem dynamics
• Marine heatwave in eastern North Pacific weakening
• New report describes best policies for reducing ocean plastic pollution
• Publication describes ways microplastics research needs to improve
• New online tool will provide easy access to migratory patterns of oceanic endangered species
• Oceanscape portal maps ocean organizations and their connections
• Input requested on information needs for coral reef management

Editor’s Note: From the Archives calls attention to past Skimmer/MEAM articles whose perspectives and insight remain relevant.

Coverage of social media usually focuses on how social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) can be used to communicate with and educate stakeholders and the general public. But social media also provides publicly available information on how people are using and feeling about the marine environment. Learn how social media and other digital data are being used for marine conservation and management.

Editor’s note: We’ve all read about how ocean noise can harm marine mammals. New research reveals that it can have profound impacts on lower trophic levels as well, with likely consequences for marine ecosystems. Catch up on the latest research with this month’s Skimmer.

A little background on sound in the ocean

• As we get started discussing how ocean noise affects marine animals (and marine ecosystems), there are some critical points about sound in the ocean to keep in mind:
   
  • Sound is a “compression wave that causes particles of matter to vibrate as it transfers from one to the next.” How loud or soft a sound is perceived to be is a function of the amplitude or intensity of the wave^[1] and the receiver’s hearing. Sound waves with higher amplitudes/intensities are perceived to be “louder” than sound waves with lower amplitudes/intensities.
     
  • Sound travels a lot faster and farther in seawater than through the air. Sound travels nearly five times faster in seawater than on land (1500 vs 340 m/s) and can travel hundreds to thousands of kilometers in seawater versus tens of kilometers on land. As a rule, lower frequency sounds travel farther than high frequency sounds because lower frequency sound waves lose energy (“dissipate”) more slowly. In addition, higher amplitude/more intense/louder sounds travel farther than lower amplitude/less intense/softer sounds because they have more energy to start with.
     
  • In the ocean, vision is limited to tens of meters at best, and sense of touch even less than that, while smell and taste are greatly dependent on local environmental conditions such as water currents. Consequently, many marine animals – including invertebrates – use sound as their principal way of sensing the environment. They use sound for finding food, finding mates, locating offspring and other community members, finding appropriate habitat, avoiding predators, navigating, and more.
     
  • Sound in the ocean has two components: a pressure component that acts in all directions at once and a particle motion component that has directionality. While mammals primarily sense the pressure component of sound, marine fish and invertebrates primarily sense the particle motion component of sound.
     
  • The “silent oceans” are anything but silent. The oceans have rich natural soundscapes from both abiotic and biotic sources (e.g., rain, waves, earthquakes, animal vocalizations). Sound does not travel well across the ocean-atmosphere boundary, however, giving outside observers the false impression of relative silence.
     
  • “Noise” is simply sound that is unwanted, unpleasant, and/or disruptive. If you think back to that list of things that marine animals use sound for (i.e., finding food, finding mates, locating offspring and other community members, finding appropriate habitat, avoiding predators, navigating, and more), manmade sounds have the potential to disrupt all of them. Given that manmade sound has intensified over a very short period of time in evolutionary terms (50-100 years) and most animals have not had time to adapt to these new sounds, it is assumed that most anthropogenic sound in the ocean is indeed “noise” to marine animals.

• Nearly 60% of ocean experiencing significantly increasing cumulative impact
• Marine wildlife populations decreased by half in past 40 years
• High European fisheries profits linked to sustainable practices
• US’s first large-scale offshore wind development held up by fisheries concerns
• Top ocean science research priorities for sustainable development identified
• New research brings spatial analysis approach to coastal adaptation planning
• New navigator helps practitioners find ecosystem-based climate adaptation tools and methods
• New toolkit assists with climate adaptation of coastal and marine protected areas
• Reports provide information and decision support for coral reef interventions
• Global atlas of surface ocean carbon-dioxide observations available
• New interactive map connects US home values and risk of sea-level-rise-related flooding
• New website compiles resources for deep-ocean stewardship
• Marine planning and management trainings added to database
• Responses request for surveys on US marine and coastal adaptation and capacity development for ocean projects

Editor’s note: Heather Welch is a research associate with the University of California at Santa Cruz and the (US) NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center’s Environmental Research Division. The Skimmer spoke with her about her research, which focuses on understanding and planning for the spatial and temporal dynamics of large-scale marine processes.
 

The Skimmer: We last covered dynamic ocean management and dynamic ocean management tools in 2014. Can you tell us a bit about how the field has progressed since then?

One area of progress is that dynamic ocean management is now better located within the larger field of dynamic management, allowing us to borrow concepts and methodologies from more established disciplines. Weather science has been developing dynamic management tools such as weather forecasts and hurricane forecast tracks for over a century. While on land, established dynamic management tools track floods, wildfires, and disease outbreaks. Understanding the parallels between dynamic ocean management and dynamic management in other realms allows us to leverage lessons learned and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Another area of advancement is that dynamic ocean management tools are moving towards producing forecasts. Initially, tools were producing hindcasts and nowcasts, i.e., predicting where species were last month and where species are today, respectively. Now, dynamic ocean management tools are forecasting species distributions days to seasons in advance. For example, the Atlantic Sturgeon Risk Model predicts Atlantic sturgeon habitat one to three days in advance to help fishers avoid the bycatch of these endangered fish. A seasonal forecasting system in the Great Australia Bight predicts the distribution of Southern bluefin tuna several months into the future to help fishers efficiently locate and harvest their target species. These types of forecasts give end-users time to plan ahead for future conditions.

Lastly, dynamic ocean management is moving from single-species tools to multi-species tools that can address greater proportions of biodiversity. Single-species management was a natural starting point for the field, but established methodologies and technological advances now allow for more complex tools. For example, TurtleWatch helps fishers avoid the bycatch of loggerhead and leatherback turtles. On the US west coast, EcoCast helps fishers maintain their target catch of swordfish while avoiding the bycatch of loggerhead turtles, California sea lions, and blue sharks.