Fish in the Northwest Atlantic Are Going Hungry New Science From Maine's Department of Marine Resources Helps To Explain Why.

mightyj,

Here's the study you were referring to. From Scientific American (July, 2010):

Researchers at Canada's Dalhousie University say the global population of phytoplankton has fallen about 40 percent since 1950. That translates to an annual drop of about 1 percent of the average plankton population between 1899 and 2008.

The scientists believe that rising sea surface temperatures are to blame.

"It's very disturbing to think about the potential implications of a century-long decline of the base of the food chain," said lead author Daniel Boyce, a marine ecologist.

Fletch, with everything going through the outfall pipes of sewerage treatment plants by the thousands, and including the pharmaceuticals ingested by humans for every ailment from high blood pressure to Prozac for mental health disorders, topped off with a liberal dose of chlorine, the effects must have far reaching consequences for the beginning of the food chain.

It is quite alarming to think that these fish are undernourished, and not reaching their full growth potential. The ramifications of these issues are dramatically important to everything in the ocean, and to us.

This is of extreme importance.

From this article:

Something in the water

What drugs are local residents abusing? A researcher’s solution to that vexing problem suggests just how much our sewage knows about us

Although this article is about tracking drug use in communities to aid law enforcement in detecting the usage of illegal activity, it's not difficult to expand the thought process to include the mega tons of pharmaceuticals flowing from our bodies into the ecosystem.

The data intrigued her, but Field needed someone familiar with drug policies and surveillance to help her put it in context. So she went online, found drug experts, and began cold-calling them. A couple scoffed and said they weren’t interested in evaluating urine and feces. But then Field found a drug epidemiologist in Seattle, Caleb Banta-Green, a research scientist at the University of Washington who also sat on a work group that followed drug use in major cities for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. When Field phoned him, Banta-Green couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In the subjective, unreliable world of tracking drugs, Field had just found a way to quantify results with hard science. “It was the gold standard,” Banta-Green said. He told Field that of course he would work with her.

you can't overfish fish that aren't there. Only 1 percent of herring eggs are estimated to survive after spawning, but the plankton issue is very real and overfishing did not cause that.

baddestbob, please prove your notion of over fishing in 2011, and I'm interested on your take on fighting regulation. Please bring information, I am interested!

The Fishing Industry is probably the most regulated industry in this nation, believe it or not.

This is so obvious, j. I'm just amazed that some of these foundation based "scientist" were satisfied they had found the culprit, fishermen.

The foundation paid organizations have polluted the media with overfishing baloney, while ignoring the sanitizing, and sterilizing of the the bottom of the food chain, and the are in for an eye opener.

http://dicky-g.newsvine.com/_news/2011/09/08/7669054-winners-whiners-and-corporate-shill-liars

Where does it say that?

Pay no attention to tax payer funded research, the only unbiased research.

And really, why even bother making a statement anyway, if you didn't read it?!

The charts and grafts mean nothing either, do they.

Sometimes I wonder if we expect too much from nature.

I'm far less informed than you, but I believe that is the crux of the problem. Sooner or later whatever happens to the bottom of the food chain is transmitted all the way to the top. If we don't figure out what's going on and how to remediate it, I fear the planet will face mass extinctions - including our species.

Remote Viewer, The thing to do is let them fish.

This article will explain the ramifications of jj's statement.

Chronic Underfishing - The Real New England Groundfish Crisis

The TAC (Total Allowable Catch) is the amount of fish, usually expressed in metric tons, that fisheries scientists determine may be removed sustainably from a stock of fish each year. Of the twelve species in the groundfish complex, fishermen had reached (or slightly exceeded) the target TAC for only two: white hake and monkfish. For monkfish, the target TAC was exceeded only in the Southern Management Area off the Mid-Atlantic. For the other ten species, fish that could have been caught (and landed and sold) were left in the ocean. The degree of underfishing (taking less than the TAC allows) ranged from 29% for monkfish from the Northern Management Area to 94% for haddock from Georges Bank. In 2008 the New England groundfish fishermen could have caught from 1/3 more monkfish to 16 times more haddock than they actually caught.

The total target TAC for the twelve groundfish species was almost 170 thousand metric tons. The total catch was less than 43 thousand tons. This was only 25% of what the fishermen could have caught without damaging the stocks. Assuming a conservative value of a dollar a pound for those fish (from 2000 to 2007, haddock returned an average of $1.20 a pound to the fishermen), they didn’t catch 280 million dollars worth of haddock, cod, flounder, etc. that they were allowed to catch. If every dollar’s worth of fish landed generates four dollar’s worth of total economic activity, that’s over a billion dollars lost to the New England economy, and lost primarily to New England’s struggling fishing communities.

With the revelations of this article comes a new, and sound reason to actually reach the TAC!

Not to mention, fishermen I talk to are mentioning the abundant fish they are catching are not as fat as they should be. Is it from lack of feed? It very well could be!

This definitely isn’t a one-shot phenomenon, an aberration due to the explosive growth of a single species. As Table 1 shows, New England groundfish stocks have been tragically underfished – if you count squandered resources and fishing communities in a state of institutionalized turmoil as a tragedy – for years. Going back in the NMFS reports, we see that in 1998, for example, only 20% of the pollock TAC, 1% of the redfish TAC, 9% of the white hake TAC, 15% of the plaice TAC, 21% of the winter flounder TAC, 7% of the witch flounder TAC and 2% of the windowpane flounder TAC was landed. While at that time the target TACs of several other much more valuable groundfish stocks were regularly and significantly exceeded, that is no longer the case.

Why haven’t the fishermen caught this potential windfall? Not because they didn’t want to, not because they didn’t have the expertise or the capacity or the equipment, but because the unbelievably complex web of regulations dictating where, when and how they can fish wouldn’t allow it. Fishermen today – and that includes New England’s groundfish fishermen – are restricted by areas that are closed permanently or sporadically to particular types of fishing gear, they are restricted in the type or amount of gear they can use (net mesh size, number of hooks, size of nets, etc.), they are restricted in the number of days they can fish, in the amount of fish they can keep, in the size and horsepower of the boats they fish from, in where they can offload their fish, in who they can sell them to, in short in just about every aspect of fishing up to but not yet including what they can eat for lunch - but there’s always next year.

Thanks, bh - I have been reading your excellent articles about misguided regulatory actions, and I begin to see how all of this is connected and interdependent. When I read Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle back in 1971, it brought many revelations. I suppose the book is somewhat dated, but the insights are still valid.

RV Some things are timeless!

1971 I was in boot camp!

Holy Mackerel.

MightyJ. & Bore-head 007, i am in class here; awestruck with an eye-opening reality. A lesson to read & take very seriously; today for tomorrow.

mightyj,

The 1% annual decline in phytoplankton was revealed in a study published in Nature last year. If you're unfamiliar with that journal, I can only say that it's one of the most respected and prestigious science journals in the world.

Here's the abstract:

In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth.

Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends.

Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899.

We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year.

Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

We conclude that global phytoplankton concentration has declined over the past century; this decline will need to be considered in future studies of marine ecosystems, geochemical cycling, ocean circulation and fisheries.

If you're interested, go to the link, and scroll to the bottom of the abstract. There, you can access some very interesting figures. Figure 2 is most telling (although you'll need to zoom up your screen to actually read it) Compare the two global maps for phytoplankton density. It's astounding.

Basically, here's what they did. The study's authors used the best historical data available, based on a device called a Secchi disk (and other shipboard analyses of various types).

You can read more about the Secchi disk at the link, but it's been used since 1865 to measure ocean transparency/turbidity (cloudiness), and we have Secchi disk readings from around the world, including a very good data set from 1899.

So a new set of Secchi disk data was gathered in the early 2000s, and compared to the historical data. The comparison of the two sets shows an average 1% annual decline in phytoplankton for the last 100 years (that's an average - it probably was slower at first, and faster now).

Satellite measurements taken since 1979 were then used to look for causes/trends. That's where the temperature link showed up. Warmer surface waters showed a very strong relationship to phytoplankton decline.

So they concluded that phytoplankton biomass is falling dramatically (probably explains, in part, where all the big herring have gone), and the rising ocean temperatures are causing it. Combined with the oxygen data in the article I seeded a few days ago, and you start to get a good idea of what's driving all of this.

The fish are starving and gasping. Which, IMO, explains why fisherman are seeing smaller and smaller fish. It might not ever have had much to do with historical overfishing (that's still up for debate).

But now that 'overfishing' has been controlled, and yet all we still see are smaller fish, it's hard to conclude that 'overfishing' was the driving factor for this entire trend.

That's just my opinion - I'm not a marine biologist.

I wonder what the evidence was they used to refute that study.

Sorry, I forgot about this part of your post.

Several shorter-term data sets, from Hawaii, California, and a few other places, don't seem to support this conclusion.

This is a good time to ask you about your own, real-world experience on the seas. Based on your personal observations, does it seem to you that fish are declining in numbers, or in size? Or both - or neither?

Aren't zebra mussels invasive? They are here, at least.

Why is it, the ones like Danial Pauly can get the lead in to an article seeded by an intelligent man?

I read this a couple of days ago. More baloney.

The author is incredible.

Anyone that prints an article that has ramifications claimed, should have links to support those claims, and as much as I searched, I found none. NONE.

More ENGO hyperbole.

http://dicky-g.newsvine.com/_news/2011/09/08/7669054-winners-whiners-and-corporate-shill-liars

http://jjthefisherman.newsvine.com/_news/2011/07/21/7126988-environmental-profiteers-ocean-in-peril

mightyj - The oceans are in bigger trouble that just this seed.

ANCHORAGE — Scientists tracking a rare western Pacific gray whale were shocked last winter when the endangered animal left the Asian coast, crossed the Bering Sea and swam south along Alaska, British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest coasts.

The Top of the Vine tonight.

One more for you -

The Chesapeake Bay looks like a dirty bathtub, its waters turned brown with mud and awash in pollution and floating debris, including uprooted trees, propane tanks, even a battered dining-room chair.

Braving boat-damaging hazards, scientists are swarming over the bay to see if the massive stormwater runoff from Tropical Storm Lee last week is going to knock the troubled estuary for another loop, just as it was recovering from an especially rough summer.

"It just doesn't look right," Jamie Strong, a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said of the malted-milk hue of the water as he and state biologist Zofia Noe cruised north from the Bay Bridge on Wednesday to sample water conditions. Along the way, they dodged partially submerged tree trunks — not always successfully — and skirted sprawling mats of grass and trash atop the water.

http://coloradobob1.newsvine.com/_news/2011/09/14/7766662-chesapeake-bay-fouled-by-susquehanna-flooding
The oceans are in bigger trouble that just this seed.

The oceans are in bigger trouble that just this seed.

A group of Russian and U.S. scientists will leave the port of Vladivostok on Friday on board a Russian research ship to study methane emissions in the eastern part of the Arctic.

"This expedition was organized on a short notice by the Russian Fund of Fundamental Research and the U.S. National Science Foundation following the discovery of a dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas from the seabed in the eastern part of the Arctic, said Professor Igor Semiletov, the head of the expedition.

The group consists of 27 scientists who would attempt to measure the scale of methane emissions and clarify the nature of the process.

http://en.rian.ru/science/20110902/166364635.html

Just a couple of students.