Southern Shore Lines
Nose
Stuffed Up? Try Seawater - April 2008
If you decide to use natural seawater rather than a
synthetic mixture, first boil it, then run it through a coffee filter.
Legal
Note - October 2007
“Dolphin
safe” tuna means those tuna not caught by purse seine. Yellowfin tuna often
congregate below pods of dolphin who are inadvertently enmeshed as the seine is
drawn closed.The public took “dolphin safe ” to heart forcing some
commercial fishermen out of business. Commercial groups asked for a
relaxation of the regulations. NOAA asked the National Marine Fisheries
Service to restudy the issue. Based on one study, NMFS said purse
seining had no effect on dolphin populations.
The Ninth Court has just ruled the study was inconclusive and therefore their
conclusions were “arbitrary and capricious ”. Thus far, the original meaning
of “dolphin safe” still stands.
Nitrogen
Pollution in Estuaries - October 2007
On July 31,2007, NOAA released a report on nutrient pollution in estuaries.
Among other findings, it shows a clear connection between what goes on upstream
and the health of the receiving estuary. The report predicts “conditions in 65
percent of the nation’s estuaries are likely to worsen in the next decade”
while “only 20 percent will improve ”. They also commented that
aggressive management can reverse the trend citing the Tampa Bay estuary.
The Bay’s water has improved “due to regulations that have significantly
reduced nutrient loading, thereby clearing the water and allowing seagrasses to
rebound.
Red
Snapper Rebuild - July 2007
After
years of oversight by a do-nothing Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council,
the Council under mandate by new federal regulations, has set rules for both red
snapper and shrimp catches. The new rules are being villified by all --
recreational and commercial fishermen, shrimpers, and, to a lesser extent,
environmentalists, which means the new rules may do some good.
For the recreational fisherman, the daily limit has fallen from
four to two. This had already been temporarily put into effect. They
must also use circle hooks and carry equipment to successfully return excess
catch back into the water alive (an example of that is a hollow needle to
deflate an enlarged swim bladder). Commercial red snapper fishermen have
had their yearly total cut from 9 million to 5 million pounds per year.
Shrimpers, who affect red snapper population by inadvertently
catching juveniles in their shrimp trawls, must cut their by-catch by 74 percent
from their 2002-3 levels.
The shrimp industry is presently in bad shape from a combination of
rising fuel prices, lower catches per trawl and foreign competition. In
some ports, more than a third of the shrimp boats have quit fishing.
Red Snapper and Shrimp - January
2007
New federal regulations with respect to shrimping beyond the
three-mile limit will go into effect at the end of March 2007. There will be a
ten-year moratorium on any new shrimp boats in the EEZ. Only those who
were shrimping in or before 2003 or who have a long history of Gulf shrimping
will be issued permits. Red snapper catches will also be reduced.The NMFS
recently set new rules reducing the total catch by 2.7 million pounds.
Restrictions will be placed both on recreational and commercial fishermen.
Recreational fishermen will be limited to two fish a day, down from four.
Both recreational and commercial fishermen blame shrimpers, who catch juvenile
snapper as by-catch, for high snapper mortality. The toll may be as high as
80%of the juveniles each year. Shrimpers challenge that amount. Recent changes
in shrimping should reduce by-catch by 50%.
Magnuson-Stevens
Fisheries Act - July
2006
By the time you read this, a greatly modified rework of the present act should
be out of the Senate. It isn't everything environmentalists wanted but
environmentalists, commercial fishermen, and recreational fishermen all say they
can live with it.
The Fox in the Henhouse
- Cape Cod Chronicle - June 2006
The old saying about letting the fox guard the
chickens is often applied to commercial fishermen who dominate the councils that
set catch limits. What the old saying does not address are the few smart foxes
who limit their take so that food is always available.
The Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fisherman’s Association,
realizing that the current “days at sea’ approach to regulating cod catches on
the Georges Bank was not working, got a 20 percent allocation of the total
allowable catch on the Banks from NMFS then self-determined when, whom and how
much for each member within their own organization.
“Scientists set the quota and we manage it locally”
said the executive director of the Association. Basically, the Association has
a contract with NMFS and the fishermen have a contract among themselves. They
have been able to streamline reporting, reduce paperwork and cut the bad blood
among their members. The Feds are impressed by their management style and hope
it will be emulated in other fisheries. How well it all works still depends on
how promptly over fishing ends and stocks rebuild.
Sustainability
- April 2006
If ever there was a word with a murkiness of meaning, "sustainability" is it. If
you look it up in Webster's Dictionary, you won't find it listed. "Sustainable"
is about as close as you will come. As it is commonly used, you could say it is
the capacity to keep an idea, a thing, a condition, a situation or whatever in
balance over an extended period of time. You will often see it applied to
both environmental issues and to the economy. With the latter, it usually
appears with a corollary word-growth. In either instance, the implied goal of
sustainability is the long-term well-being of humans.
Unfortunately, as to its environmental usage, we really don't know at what point
we have exceeded a sustainable state. The evidence suggests we have long passed
that point in a number of places. The real world is a moving target. Change,
fast or slow, is inevitable whether we choose to accept it or not. Each new
generation takes the world in which it finds itself as the norm and over
generations the world is strained more and more by our ever increasing numbers
and over consumption. Nature's resiliency has been stretched beyond its capacity
to bounce back and in too many places on earth we face permanent degradation as
far as human use is concerned.
If we mean to sustain what we have right now, we imply acceptance of current
degradation with the vague promise that it will go no further. The tragic flaw
in that concept is we really don't know the full extent of the damage that has
been done and
what that damage portends for the future. Undoing past damage and preventing
more demands a paradigm shift that, at present, has not gained wide acceptance
by those who have the power to affect change.
As for sustainable growth, that phrase is an oxymoron. We must decide when
enough is enough. The current paradigm is there is never enough. Economic growth
must go onward and upward without end. The consumption of goods and services has
become the aim of a good life. Given finite resources and a growing population,
the pursuit of "more" cannot continue indefinitely. That caveat, even in the
face of a mountain of evidence, is rarely heeded when planning for the future,
either singly or collectively. We have to rearrange our rules, laws, economic
interests and ethical guides to both repair environmental degradation and change
our appetites to what we can do without long-term harm to ourselves or some time
down the road we will face sustainability at a much lower level of well-being
than we have now..
-- Dave Bulloch
Safe Seafood?
- January 2005
As we exhaust the supply of wild fish in the oceans,
aquaculture is growing rapidly, both here and abroad. We presently import nearly
two billion pounds of shrimp, salmon and tilapia each year (2003).
The Food and Drug Administration does little monitoring on
imports. The Center for Food Safety in its recent publication “The Catch with
Seafood” warns that these products often contain unacceptable levels of anti-biotics,
dyes, hormones, anti-fungals, pesticides and a host of other suspect chemicals.
Fish are also genetically engineered. Transgenes can trigger allergic reactions
in humans among other effects.
For a full account of these potential hazards write Center
for Food Safety at 660 Pennsylvania Ave. Suite 302, Washington DC, 20003 and
request a copy.
Invasion of the Sea
Squirts -
January 2005
Sea squirts, tunicates to the biologist, are rarely recognized by the casual
tidepool walker but in New England one species has become widely known. From
abroad, this invader is swamping out everything in tide pools and elsewhere.
With no natural enemies it is proliferating from Connecticut to Maine. It is
also offshore, presently covering 40 square miles of bottom on Georges Bank.
Smothering everything including shellfish, USGS scientist David Blackwood
commented “Nothing really wants to eat it, nothing grows on it, and nothing
seems to prevent it from spreading.”
The squirt in question is Didemnum. It forms dense mats that
have the consistency of scrambled eggs. It will also encrust anything
in its way.
There are nine indigenous species of sea squirts off Cape Cod
but none have the characteristics of the invader. Other than using techniques to
avoid inadvertent spreading, no one has yet the foggiest notion on how to
reverse the present trend.
— Oceanus 44#1 p.28
New Robotic Sub
- January 2005
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is constructing a sub designed to go to the
deepest waters of the ocean including the Challenger Deep at 11,000 meters. It
should be ready for business by 2007.
It can either travel independently or go by directions from a
mother ship via a very thin fiber optic cable. The cable is not a tether and
should it break the sub can find its way back on its own. The cable simply
supplies and receives information. Tethers make ROVs difficult to maneuver and
when parted, goodbye ROV. Currently, ROVs are not used in icy water for fear
they will be lost if the tether severs. The new sub can photograph, send back
video images, collect samples, make measurements and can be operated from any
reasonably sized ship at a cost of $10,000 a day, about a third of what current
ROVs cost to operate.
—Nature 437 p.612-3
Dissolving Away
- January 2005
A great number of marine organisms, from tiny forams to massive corals, extract
calcium carbonate from seawater to build their skeletal structures. Surface
ocean water is saturated with calcium carbonate at all latitudes. As human
activity raises the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere more and
more of it dissolves in seawater. This raises the water’s acidity and reduces
the level of carbonate saturation.
If the rising trend of carbon dioxide continues, a number of
marine organisms will find it more and more difficult to to build and maintain
their calcified structures. Orr and others have shown that at carbon dioxide
levels predicted by 2050, some cold water critters face shell dissolution.
Originally, scientists thought this process might not occur for hundreds of
years but Orr finds that at high latitudes it may occur within decades.
— Nature 437, pp.681-6
Oceanus Returns
- January 2005
The magazine of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is again being published. You
can check it out as well as the magazine’s web site at
www.oceanusmag.whoi.edu.
It’s a bit thinner than past issues but seems to be sticking to its past format
that involves a particular theme. This issue covered tsunamis, the recent Asian
one, the detection system and the possibility of one created in the Caribbean.
Nature in the News
- October 2005
The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina has, by far,
become the center of attention nationwide. A couple of weeks before the storm
hit, you couldn’t have interested more than a handful of elected federal
officials in the steady demise of the natural defenses along the Gulf
coastline. Now, those past losses are making their way into restoration plans,
like stopping the loss of soil that now occurs by channeling the Mississippi
River and stopping the continual harvesting of cypress swamps for mulch.
Over-built coastal zones are another matter. Retreating from the sea isn’t easy
for the feds to mandate but they (FEMA) and private insurers can dump the entire
risk on the owners by refusing to insure them.
New Orleans isn’t the only major city at risk. If
hurricane Charley had hit the Tampa Bay estuary instead of Charlotte Harbor much
of Pinellas County would have been under water as well as downtown Tampa, 8 to
14 feet according to one estimate.
-- Dave Bulloch
Eye of the Storm
- October 2005
In September 2004, the center of hurricane Ivan passed over
six wave-tide gauges deployed by the Naval Research Laboratory. The gages
were in 200 and 300 feet of water just at the edge of the continental shelf of
the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. At that point Ivan was a
category 4 hurricane.
Average wave heights ranged between 50 and 60 feet with
occasional highs of 90 feet. The researchers who conducted the analysis
think the wave heights were even higher close to the eye wall's right-hand
quadrant. They also think the wave heights were attenuated by shoaling.
Nevertheless, the wave heights exceeded current model predictions based on the
pressure in the center of the storm.
- Science 309, p.896
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