Ocean Food Systems

Presentation given during session on Food Justice, where Barton Seaver, Director of the Healthy and Sustainable Food Program in the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, described a great nutrition and health crisis in America perpetuated by groups demarketing seafood and promoting meat in the American diet. Seaver noted that Americans consume about 167 lbs. of meat a year and only 14 lbs. of seafood, leading to connected public health and environmental crises, heart disease, and obesity. According to presenter Barry Costa-Pierce: Seafood systems in the USA are our most insane foods; America imports nearly every seafood we eat and export nearly everything we produce. American imports of seafoods from everywhere in the world create “seafood deserts” and protein malnutrition in some of the world’s poorest nations. America has a moral and ethical responsibility to catch and grow its own seafood and restore its working waterfronts and communities. With an expected 12 billion people to come, it is imperative that we learn how to farm the seas sustainably, as 70% of the Earth is ocean and the oceans currently provide only 1-2% of human foods. The blue revolution, aquaculture, is really an evolution. Farmed salmon has dominated the discussion, with little talk of the farming of shellfish, seaweeds, or less energy intensive fish species happening along the world’s coasts suitable for coastal fishing communities. When salmon dominates the discourse, this diversity of sustainable aquaculture systems gets lost in a ridiculously simplistic, black or white, environmentally “good” or “bad”, “red list” argument that confuses consumers and creates discussions which are mostly about what not to eat rather than the many great choices consumers have to support local or regional sustainable fisheries and aquaculture systems. Seaweed and shellfish aquaculture have a growing social acceptability with the public and scientists but oftentimes consumers don’t recognize their oysters or clams as “farmed”. In general, even for farmed salmon, there is a growing global scientific consensus that marine aquaculture food systems are much more productive, efficient, and environmentally friendly - even restorative of the ocean ecosystems – in comparisons with terrestrial protein farming systems. In the near future, even the most controversial ocean farming systems are evolving so quickly that farmed salmon may not be dependent on ocean fishing or on soybeans from industrial agriculture for salmon feeds, but instead, as recent research has shown, may be fed by omega-rich feeds from yeasts that digest wood chips from trees.https://dune.une.edu/marinesci_facpres/1000/thumbnail.jp

Managing Bay and Estuarine Ecosystems for Multiple Services

Abstract Managers are moving from a model of managing individual sectors, human activities, or ecosystem services to an ecosystem-based management (EBM) approach which attempts to balance the range of services provided by ecosystems. Applying EBM is often difficult due to inherent tradeoffs in managing for different services. This challenge particularly holds for estuarine systems, which have been heavily altered in most regions and are often subject to intense management interventions. Estuarine managers can often choose among a range of management tactics to enhance a particular service; although some management actions will result in strong tradeoffs, others may enhance multiple services simultaneously. Management of estuarine ecosystems could be improved by distinguishing between optimal management actions for enhancing multiple services and those that have severe tradeoffs. This requires a framework that evaluates tradeoff scenarios and identifies management actions likely to benefit multiple services. We created a management action-services matrix as a first step towards assessing tradeoffs and providing managers with a DOI 10.1007/s12237-013-9602-7 decision support tool. We found that management actions that restored or enhanced natural vegetation (e.g., salt marsh and mangroves) and some shellfish (particularly oysters and oyster reef habitat) benefited multiple services. In contrast, management actions such as desalination, salt pond creation, sand mining, and large container shipping had large net negative effects on several of the other services considered in the matrix. Our framework provides resource managers a simple way to inform EBM decisions and can also be used as a first step in more sophisticated approaches that model service delivery

Global Spatial Risk Assessment of Sharks Under the Footprint of Fisheries

Effective ocean management and conservation of highly migratory species depends on resolving overlap between animal movements and distributions and fishing effort. Yet, this information is lacking at a global scale. Here we show, using a big-data approach combining satellite-tracked movements of pelagic sharks and global fishing fleets, that 24% of the mean monthly space used by sharks falls under the footprint of pelagic longline fisheries. Space use hotspots of commercially valuable sharks and of internationally protected species had the highest overlap with longlines (up to 76% and 64%, respectively) and were also associated with significant increases in fishing effort. We conclude that pelagic sharks have limited spatial refuge from current levels of high-seas fishing effort. Results demonstrate an urgent need for conservation and management measures at high-seas shark hotspots and highlight the potential of simultaneous satellite surveillance of megafauna and fishers as a tool for near-real time, dynamic management

Sustainable Food Production

XXIX, 1869 p. 375 illus., 252 illus. in color. eR

MARINE SCIENCE ASSESSMENT OF CAPTURE-BASED TUNA (\u3ci\u3eThunnus orientalis\u3c/i\u3e) AQUACULTURE IN THE ENSENADA REGION OF NORTHERN BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO

Final Report of the Binational Scientific Team to the Packard Foundation

A Histopathological-Biochemical Health Assessment of Blue Mussel Mytilus edulis

Aquaculture of the blue mussel Mytilus edulis in the Gulf of Maine is a growing industry at a time when wild mussel populations are threatened by a rapidly changing ocean. Intertidal mussel beds have largely disappeared in the region raising concerns over the long-term viability of mussel farming. Histology and lipid fatty acid analysis were used to assess gametogenesis, energy investment, and pathology of farmed mussels collected twice monthly for three years in Casco Bay, ME. Energy investment in reproduction and storage differed significantly between years, suggesting interannual variability. Wet weight of fatty acids such as DHA and EPA corresponded to pre-spawning periods, when gonad tissue was most abundant. Overall, pathology assessment showed low levels of common pathogens, parasites, and cellular abnormalities. The survey did, however, reveal high levels of oocyte atresia, a probable indicator of physiological or environmental stress from unfavorable spawning conditions. In addition, the presence of the potentially damaging digenetic trematode Proctoeces maculatus was documented using histology, marking the northernmost detection in the Northwest Atlantic and a likely climate-driven range expansion. These trends may signal a challenging future for blue mussels in the Gulf of Maine. Forward-looking farm mitigation practices informed by these results should be developed to ensure future sustainability of this industry