Live Cam May Show True Status of Atlantic Cod Fishery

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 Atlantic cod, New England’s most iconic fish, has been reported at historic lows for years, but fishermen hope a new video monitoring technique will prove there are more of the fish than federal surveyors believe.
 

 Ronnie Borjeson, who has been fishing for more than 40 years, says the federal surveys don’t match up with what fishermen are seeing. “I don’t care if you’re a gillnetter, a hook and line guy, a trawl guy,” he said, “there’s codfish everywhere up there. Everywhere. You can’t get away from them.”
 

 Borjeson helped test a video rig designed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth that allows them to record fish underwater and count them on the video later. With this rig, scientists can sample a larger area in the same amount of time and hopefully improve federal estimates of how many cod are left.
 
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<figcaption>For years, Atlantic cod has been reportedly overfished—but a new video monitoring technique may prove otherwise.
 
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 According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, cod are overfished, and in 2014, the spawning population reached its lowest numbers ever recorded. The once-booming cod fishery has been subject to increasingly strict regulations since the 1990s, forcing commercial fishermen to target less-profitable species while they wait for the cod population to recover.
 

 Kevin Stokesbury, the researcher spearheading the project, hoped to create a more effective and transparent monitoring system by collaborating with local fishermen. “They know their gear and they know the distributions. So for me, I’ve certainly never discounted what they say,” he said. “You have to back that up scientifically, and I think that this is a means to do that.”
 

 Federal scientists estimate the cod population by towing nets through randomly selected areas of the fishing grounds and hauling the fish on board to be counted. The results of these trawls are combined with information from fisheries observers and catch estimates to create a picture of the overall health of the fishery.
 

 But cod are not evenly distributed across the ocean floor. The fish gather in tight groups to spawn, leaving large areas of habitat essentially devoid of cod and increasing the likelihood that a random sample will come up empty. The federally managed area in the Gulf of Maine alone is more than 30,000 square miles. With limited time and resources to accomplish their work, federal surveyors must rely on a small number of these surveys to accurately estimate the whole population.
 

 And, according to Borjeson, “The general consensus [among fishermen] is they’re incapable of catching fish.”
 

 Yet as Jon Hare, the Science and Research Director for NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center pointed out, fishermen “are targeting and looking for higher abundances of cod. That could also make their perspective on the abundance of cod different than what’s coming out of the [survey].”
 

 Stokesbury thinks his video system can, at the very least, help scientists get a better idea of how many fish are in the spawning groups and help the fishery managers and fishermen see eye to eye.
 

 The video rig has gone through several iterations to deliver clear images in the harsh, salty environment. The current version has two cameras and a set of LED lights facing backwards inside a fishing net. When fish are swept into the net, they pass the cameras and are funneled harmlessly out the open back end.
 

 Hare agreed that the system holds promise, but cautioned that the work is not yet done. “You still need to extract [the information] from the video. You’re potentially looking at thousands of hours of video data,” he said.
 

 Stokesbury and his team are working on this problem now. Currently the software takes two to three weeks to identify and count the fish for every week at sea. This is a vast improvement over the original method–graduate students counting by hand–but Stokesbury expects to reduce the processing time further as their software improves.
 

 If that happens, Hare believes the system could be very useful. “As humans, we put a lot of faith in visual data,” he said, “Having the real-time visual information is a good approach to having people come to a common understanding.”
 

 Borjeson hopes fisheries managers will incorporate video monitoring as soon as possible. “The system works,” he said. “People love it. They embrace it. It’s absolutely indisputably the way to do a stock assessment.”
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Cod.jpg">
 August Linnman / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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In the Future, Seaweed Could Become Part of Your Daily Commute

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 Most people think of seaweed as a tasty part of their spicy tuna roll or an unpleasant tangle at the beach, but in the future, seaweed may become a part of your daily commute.
 

 The U.S. is striving to become a leading producer of seaweed for biofuel. The Department of Energy recently invested $22 million to begin developing the tools needed for large-scale seaweed production. The funds were distributed between 18 different projects grouped under the Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources program, known as MARINER.
 

 “With a growing population in the world and an increasing demand for food, we wanted to look for ways to minimize conflict between food and fuel,” MARINER director Marc von Keitz said. “And really, the only good large area to expand is into the ocean.”
 
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<figcaption>The U.S. is striving to become a leading producer of seaweed for biofuel.
 
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 Seaweed, or macroalgae as it is known to scientists, has several qualities that make it particularly suited to being used as a biofuel. Unlike traditional biofuel crops like soy or corn, seaweed does not take up land or water resources that could be used for growing food, and it doesn’t require added fertilizer—everything it needs is in the ocean. Under the right conditions, it also grows remarkably quickly, with some species growing up to two feet in a single day.
 

 The projects funded by MARINER span all areas of production, from growth and harvesting to monitoring and even breeding better varieties of seaweed. They are trying to create innovative tools and technologies that would allow the U.S. to dramatically expand its ability to grow seaweed while also helping to minimize the costs.
 

 “They’re starting to talk about economics of scale that hasn’t been seen before, with this grand goal of biofuel production. It’s only with that economy of scale that you begin to be able to have the price come down,” said Erin Fischell, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
 

 Today, most of the seaweed grown in the U.S. is used for food. Most production is done on small aqua-farms that are typically near the coast, where they can be protected from the rough conditions in the open ocean. “Historically these farms have been very manual labor intensive,” Fischell said. “People have had to drive out to them to check on them.”
 

 Fischell and her group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute received a portion of the MARINER funds to develop a system for monitoring seaweed farms in the open ocean using unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The vehicles would be stationed at offshore farms long-term, monitoring the seaweed autonomously and relaying information back to shore.
 

 The MARINER program is intended to jump-start the development process for large-scale seaweed farming, but private investors or other grants will need to take over once the three-year program ends. For people to consider investing private funds, seaweed-based biofuel has to be economically feasible. If it’s too expensive to produce, it won’t be able to compete with other fuels on the market.
 

 MARINER’s cultivation and harvesting projects have a concrete financial goal to meet: a dry metric ton of seaweed should cost no more than $80 to produce. According to Michael Heussman, project leader for a group working out of the Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Washington, projects that cannot get their estimated costs to this level will not be funded after the first year.
 

 “This is going to be tough,” Heussman said. “That’s why it has to be a simple system. You can’t have a complex system and meet this target.” His project received $500,000 for the first year to design a free-floating seaweed farm that would follow nutrient-rich currents in the open ocean.
 

 The day when you’ll be pouring seaweed into your gas tank is still a long way off—if it arrives at all—but with the MARINER projects, researchers hope to make that future just a little more likely.
 

 “I think it’s definitely doable, but it will not happen in the next five years,” von Keitz, said. “This is something that will probably take ten, 15, 20 years at least to get there.”
 
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 Photo credit: Public Domain

In a paper published earlier this year, Javier Buceta, a researcher at Lehigh University, focused on tracking the virus through bats instead.

Researchers use migratory bats to track Ebola

Researchers hope to use bat migrations to determine where and when the next Ebola outbreak will happen.In 2014, the virus swept through West Africa, killing more than 11,000 people and infecting over 28,000, according to the World Health Organization. The outbreak is thought to have originated with a young boy in Guinea who was playing near a hollow tree full of bats, known carriers of the Ebola virus.
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As the outbreak grew, scientists began creating models to predict the spread of Ebola as it is passed from person to person. In a paper published earlier this year, Javier Buceta, a researcher at Lehigh University, focused on tracking the virus through bats instead.Buceta and his team hoped be able to pinpoint the places and times of year where people are most likely to be exposed to the disease. “If you know beforehand when it is more likely that an outbreak can happen,” Buceta said, “you can use your resources in an optimized way.”Ebola spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids: blood, saliva, or excrement. In Africa, the disease may jump to humans when bats and people are living in close proximity, increasing the chances of water or food contamination, or when humans are hunting bats for meat. If policy-makers could predict areas where infected bats are likely to be, they could encourage locals to take extra precautions and be prepared to contain a potential outbreak before it can spread.But determining where humans and bats may overlap is more complicated than it might seem. Africa has more than 300 species of bats, each with different food sources, habitat preferences, and movement patterns. And researchers are still missing a lot of information about how Ebola travels in bat populations.“[Scientists] have not done a lot of research on bats,” said Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist and epidemiologist at Montana State University. “We don’t know much about the individual immune mechanisms of many wildlife species.”Plowright and her team have focused on bats in Australia infected with Hensa virus, another disease that can be transferred to humans. She said there are several theories for how diseases might function within a population of bats, and each of them would require different models to predict where and when humans might be at risk for infection.“We ask totally different questions,” Plowright said. “It’s really critical—to understand spillover [of pathogens into humans] we need to know how these viruses maintain within bats.”
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The theory Buceta uses is based on the idea that Ebola spreads through bats like chicken pox. Animals are infected, recover, and then gain immunity, although it is possible this immunity could fade over time. There is some evidence that this is how Marburg virus, a better-studied relative of Ebola, functions in bats.Buceta’s model provides a way to estimate how many bats might be infected at any time. Bats would be more likely to become infected when they were gathered together competing for resources. As food becomes scarce, due to the changing seasons, sudden droughts, or other factors, Buceta predicts increased competition followed by waves of migratory bats carrying Ebola to new areas.David Hayman, an associate professor at Massey University in New Zealand, is working on a similar modeling project, linking previous studies on deforestation and bat reproductive rates to the species most likely to carry Ebola. He said Buceta’s model could help inform future studies, but he questions whether migratory bats are tied to the spread of Ebola.“From the biology perspective, it doesn’t look like the bats that migrate are typically infected with Marburg and Ebola virus, from the limited data we’ve got in the field,” Hayman said. It is possible the virus was already circulating in the local bat population and other factors triggered the spillover into humans.Buceta’s further work in this area may be illuminating. In a paper that is currently under review, his team has applied the 2013 data for seasonal weather, vegetation, and other factors that would impact resources for bats in Africa to his model.“When we apply all that data to our model, to our Ebola model,” he said, “we were able to pinpoint the area and the time of the year when the outbreak happened in 2014.”
Photo credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bats_flying_(9413217529).jpg">USFWS/Ann Froschauer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)</a>
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Laura Castanon

Articles

Live Cam May Show True Status of Atlantic Cod Fishery

In the Future, Seaweed Could Become Part of Your Daily Commute

Researchers use migratory bats to track Ebola

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