Tens of thousands of crab pots litter the ocean floor, forming lethal obstacle courses of plastic lines and weighed-down metal cylinders. Lost crab pots are responsible for killing a long row of air breathing ocean dwellers, such as whales, sea lions and turtles. In addition to their effect on marine wildlife, stray crab pots also inflict costly and potentially dangerous damage to passing vessels.

The basic type of crab pot is a squat cylinder consisting of steel mesh and rubber, and with heavy iron that helps it sink to the bottom. Fishermen lose track of their crab pots due to various reasons, including storms, tousling kelp banks, and passing motor vessels that snaps of the line between the pot and the buoy.

In the past five years, two dead whales have washed up on the Oregon Coast entangled in the fatal combination of metallic pots and durable synthetic lines, but a federal stimulus grant of $700,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has now been assigned to pay Oregon fishermen for cleaning up their crab pots – or at least a fraction of them.

As the crab season ends in August, the federal money will be used to charter 10 boats and hire 48 people — including the 31 fishermen who make winning bids. The aim is to recover 4,000 pots over two seasons.

Each year, Oregon fishermen lose 10 percent of the 150,000 pots they put out, according to a statement from Cyreis Schmitt, marine policy project leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

A 22-pound, 5-ounce largemouth bass (picture) has been caught by Manabu Kurita, a pro staffer representing Deps Tackle Co. in Japan. This breaks George Perry’s old record from June 2, 1932. The bass caught by Perry in Montgomery Lake, Georgia 77 years ago weighed 22-pound, 4-ounce – just a tad less than the new Japanese record bass. Kurita’s bass was 29.4 inches long (no girth measurements have been released). It was reportedly weighed on a certified scale.

Kurita caught his 22-pound, 5-ounce bass in Lake Biwa (琵琶湖, Biwa-ko), in Japan’s Shiga Prefecture. Formed by tectonic shifts almost 4 million years ago, Lake Biwa is one of the world’s twenty oldest lakes and home to a very rich ecosystem that includes 58 described endemic species. It is the largest freshwater lake in the country and covers nearly 259 square miles.

After holding the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) all-tackle world record for 77 year, it seems as if Perry might have to if not step down then at least share the first place with his fellow Japanese angler. IGFA rules stipulate that a bass must weigh two ounces more than the current record holder to break the record, so Kurita’s fish will only tie it.

“It will tie [Perry’s record] if that’s the weight,” says Jason Schratwieser, record andconservation director for the game fish association. “For record fish weighing less than 25 pounds, the replacement record must weigh at least 2 ounces more than the existing record.”

In 2006, Mac Weakley caught a 25-pound, 1-ounce bass in Lake

Dixon, California, but he didn’t pursue the record since he accidently foul-hooked the fish, i.e. he didn’t hook the fish in the mouth.

A Japanese team of scientists are now announcing that they are close to completing genome sequencing of the Bluefin tuna. Once they have reached this goal, their next project will be to use their knowledge to create a tuna breeding program for a new type of tuna specially designed for aquacultures.

The wild tuna populations have become severely depleted due to overfishing and the WWF has warned that the Atlantic Bluefin tuna will be eradicated within three years unless radical measures are taken to safeguard remaining specimens.

“We have already completed two computer sequencing runs and have around 60 per cent of the tuna genome,” says Dr. Kazumasa Ikuta, director of research at the Yokohama-based Fisheries Research Agency. “We expect to have the entire sequence in the next couple of months. We plan to use the sequence to establish a breeding programme for bluefin tuna as most aquaculture farmers presently use wild juveniles. We want to establish a complete aquaculture system that will produce fish that have good strength, are resistant to disease, grow quickly and taste delicious.”

The genome sequencing is the result of the collaborative efforts of scientists from Japan’s Fisheries Research Agency, Kyushu University, and The University of Tokyo.

Norwegian fisheries regulators have banned all fishing of the critically endangered European eel starting in 2010 and cut 2009 catch quotas by 80 percent. The Norwegian Ministry of Fisheries also has announced that all recreational fishing of European eels shall stop on July 1st.

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is listed as critically endangered in Norway and on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. As early as 1999, the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) warned fishery authorities about how the European eel stock was outside safe biological limits and that the fishery was unsustainable.

”The Minister of Fisheries is making an important, and the only right choice, and is showing international leadership in fisheries management,” said WWF-Norway CEO Rasmus Hansson in a response to the new regulation. “Norway’s Fisheries Minister, Helga Pedersen, has used every occasion to point out that Norway is the best in the world on fisheries management, and by making bold moves like this they have probably earned the title.”

WWF now hopes that the Norwegian decision will influence the European Union and its member states to do their part in protecting the European eel. As of today, eel fishing is allowed within the EU despite the grave condition of the European stock.

A study proposing a ban on spear guns and gill nets in the Great Barrier Reef is now being criticised by Australian scientists saying its results – which were obtained from Kenya and Papua New Guinea – aren’t relevant to the Great Barrier Reef.

The study, carried out by an international team of scientists led by Dr Josh Cinner from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, proposed a ban on fishing gear such as spear guns, fish traps, beach seine nets, and gill nets to aid damaged reefs in their recovery. According to data obtained from the waters of Kenya and Papua New Guinea, certain types of fishing gear are more damaging to corals and to certain species of fish needed to help reefs recover from bleaching or storm damage.

“They [corals and certain types of reef fish] are already on the edge because of the overfishing and the additional impact caused by a bleaching even can push them over,” said Dr Cinner, who is based at James Cook University.

According to Dr Josh, spear guns are the most damaging of all fishing gear, particularly to fish that help maintaining the reef by removing seaweeds and sea urchins.

“Spear guns target a high proportion of species that help maintain the resilience of coral reefs, but also can result in a surprising amount of damage to the corals themselves,” Dr Cinner said. “When a fish is shot with a spear gun, it often hides in the reef, so some fishermen break the corals in their attempts to get it.”

Not applicable to the Great Barrier Reef, says other scientists Fellow JCU fisheries scientist Dr Andrew Tobin do not agree with the fishing gear ban recommendation, saying that the results from the study aren’t applicable to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“Some of those findings are probably very reasonable for those areas they’ve studied, but to make any link to Great Barrier Reef waters is probably drawing a very long sword,” Dr Tobin said.

According to Townsville marine biologist Dr Walter Starck, who provides advice to Sunfish North  Queensland, herbivore fish aren’t being overfished in the Great Barrier Reef area.

“Here in Australia, it is completely irrelevant,” he said.

The work towards replenishing depleted stocks of wild sea cucumber with captive hatched ones is moving forward at a steady pace; two Philippine hatcheries has now successfully managed to hatch sea cucumbers outside their natural habitat and one batch, comprised of roughly 2,000 juveniles, has been released inside sea pens in the Philippines.

The sea cucumbers, a broad range of species belonging to the family Stichopodidae, are currently facing both overharvesting and habitat destruction in the wild, and the two Philipine hatcheries are both part of a research project carried out by the University of the Philippines Mindanao (UPM); a project aiming to mitigate the problem of overharvesting through sea

farming.

The first hatchery is a 6,000-square-meter laboratory located within a Barangay Binugay resort owned by the JV Ayala Group of Companies, while other one is situated inside Alson’s, an intensive tilapia operator.

The Barangay Binugay laboratory does not have any breeding stock; instead it collects the eggs from wild sea cucumbers, place them in a tank and fertilize them using drops of sperm – a method inspired by a Vietnamese sandfish sea cucumber hatchery and grow-out facility in tilapia .

The first Philippine batch of tiny cucumbers, each weighing no more than three grams, has now been released inside sea pens near the Barangay Binugay laboratory. Carefully, each individual cucumber was buried just below the surface of the soft sea bottom inside 78-square-meter Australian-designed sea pens.

With a history dating back to at least the Sultanate days in Mindanao, sea cucumber trading is a time honoured tradition as well as an important source of income for the Philippines. The country is currently the second largest exporter of beche-de-mer (dried sea cucumber) in the world, second only to neighbouring Indonesia, and diminishing cucumber populations are threatening the livelihood of countless families.

Beche-de-mer is currently priced at roughly 4,500 Philippine pesos per kilogram (roughly 94 USD/kg), and since large specimens are becoming increasingly rare purchasers are no longer very discerning when it comes to size. Even small cucumbers that should have been left to mature can now be sold to unscrupulous purchasers.

Did you know…..?

… that sea cucumbers are known as the earth-worms of the sea since they recycle detritus and burrow under the sand? These animals carry out an essential ecological task as they continuously shift and mix the sea bead and if they were to disappear it would have serious consequences.

… that at depths below 8.8 km (5.5 miles), sea cucumbers comprise 90% of the total mass of the macro fauna?

… that sea cucumbers aren’t appreciated as food only; some people believe them to be effective against arthritis and high blood pressure?

…that sea cucumbers have been observed engaging in mass-spawnings triggered by the moon? One species is for instance known to spawn three nights after the full moon, while two other species have been seen spawning three nights after the first quarter moon.

… that sea cucumbers have been traditionally used as an aphrodisiac and that some people still use them for this purpose today?

…that large sea cucumbers often are harvested by so called hookah diving, where divers breathe through long tubes connected to an oxygen compressor aboard a boat instead of using normal scuba tanks.

Indonesia is getting ready to sink foreign boats carrying out illegal fishing in Indonesian waters.

“We are glad the House`s Commission IV supports us in this,” Marine Resources and Fisheries Minister Freddy Numbery said at a meeting with the House commission this week.

Numbery says firm action is needed to deter foreign boats from continuing to poach, and that his office and the parliament were currently revising the law on marine resources with regard to dealing with crimes in the seas.

Elviana, a member of Commission IV, agreed with the minister and said that firm actions needed to be implemented immediately to deter foreign parties intending to steal fish from Indonesian waters.

“Tuna fish sells well so that many foreign fishermen are venturing into the country’s waters“, she said. “This must not be allowed to continue.”

Earlier, Indonesian authorities have seized illegal fishing boats and auctioned them out, but this system seems to have been ineffective.

“It is believed auctions have been arranged to ensure that the boats can be sold to their owners who are also the suspects,” Elviana said, adding that illegal boats such as from Thailand still continued operating in a great number.

As reported earlier, fish populations may adapt and change in response to significant fishing pressure. Researchers are now suggesting that the genetic make-up of cod in the Atlantic Ocean might be changing, since cods genetically predisposition to seek out shallower waters are more likely to end up in nets or on fishing lines, while deep-dwellers are more likely to survive and reproduce.

If the current over-fishing of shallow living cod is not put to an end, evolutionary biologist Einar Árnason and his colleagues believes the genetic variant found in shallow-living cod will be lost all together. If the deep-water cods do not spread into the shallows, and Árnason doubts they will since they are adapted to deep water conditions, the shallows may be become devoid of cod within the next 10 years. This will decrease the size of the total cod population and will also force the fishing industry to either give up cod fishing altogether or switch to expensive deep-water trawling.

Árnason and his colleagues have studied cod populations off the coast of Iceland, where fish stocks are still in fairly decent condition compared to the severely depleted populations found in the western Atlantic. In their study, the researchers examined how the genotypes of Icelandic cod have changed between 1994 and 2003.

It was already known that cod living in the Icelandic shallows have a different variant of the pantophysin I gene than the cods found at much larger depts. In their study, Árnason and his colleagues found that the shallow-water variant of pantophysin I is becoming increasingly rare; a change which they attribute to the fact that most Icelandic cod fishers work in shallow waters near the coastline using lines and nets instead of carrying out deep-water trawling.

Árnason and his team also found that Icelandic cod are reaching sexual maturity at a younger age and at a smaller size than before. This is discovery is a chilling revelation for Icelandic fishermen and conservationalists alike, since that was exactly what happened in Newfoundland waters before that cod population crashed completely.

The study has been published in the journal PLoS ONE

Eleven suspected abalone poachers have been arrested in northern California, officials said Friday.

Since the tide was unusually low in Mendocino County, California Department of Fish & Game wardens were aware of the increased risk of poaching activity and kept their eyes on the coast line, including the coral reefs that had become exposed as the water disappeared.

At about 6.15 a.m. on Wednesday wardens noticed suspicious divers exiting waters near Caspar, south of Fort Bragg. Fish & Game Lt. Kathy Ponting, who runs the special operations unit, said her team drove to a spot near the suspicious divers and began surveillance.

Unaware of the wardens’ presence, the divers collected abalone from the reef and placed them in tall grass near the beach.

“Then a large van pulled up near the dive area and we watched them load up a bunch of abalone in plastic bags into the van,” Ponting said. The divers went back to the sea, while wardens decided to follow the van. After pulling it over, they discovered 50 abalones inside.

Abalones can sell for up to $100 dollars, but collection is strictly regulated since these molluscs need many years to develop. It can take 12 years for a specimen to reach the legal size. With a California fishing license and an abalone stamp card you are allowed to fetch 24 specimens per year, but no more than three per day. It is also illegal to collect them for sale, and anyone caught with a dozen or more will be considered possessing them with the intention of selling them.

Red Abalone. The only type that can be harvested.

When the van did not return to the divers, the alleged poachers loaded a pickup truck. The wardens followed the car to a nearby hotel and found coolers filled with abalone inside the divers’ hotel room. Most of the abalones were smaller than the legal size.

The wardens found a total of 166 abalones with the group, Ponting said. The suspects were booked on charges of felony conspiracy to harvest abalone for commercial purposes, which carries a fine of up to $40,000, said Game Warden Patrick Foy. Two vehicles also were

seized along with $6,000 in cash.

The black market for abalone is large and poaching is widespread, despite official efforts to eradicate the practise.

“We always only catch the tip of the iceberg, there is so much

abalone poaching going on because of the black market,” Ponting

explained. “We can pick almost any group and watch them poaching

abalone. It’s really unsettling.”

What is an abalone?

The abalone is a medium sized to very large edible sea snail prized for its exquisite flavour. There is roughly 100 known species world wide, all of them being gastropod molluscs belonging to the genus Haliotis. You may stumble upon a species marketed as “Chilean abalone” in the food trade, but this is not a real abalone; its name is Concholepas concholepas and it belongs to an entirely different family.

Since abalones are found in so many different parts of the world, they are known under many different names, such as abulón in Spanish, ormer in Jersey and Guernsey, pāua in

New Zealand, muttonfish or muttonshells in Australia, perlemoen in South Africa, and Venus’s-ears, ear-shells, and sea-ears in British and American English.

Abalones reach sexual maturity when they are comparatively small, but they won’t produce any significant amount of offspring until they grow bigger. A small abalone may release around 10,000 eggs at a time, which may sound like a big number but is dwarfed compared to the 11 million eggs released at a time by really large abalones. As a result of this, the removal of abalones from the sea before they have a chance to grow large is highly detrimental to the survival of the species.

Abalone has been farmed since the 1950s in Japan and China, and during the 1990s the practise spread to other parts of the world in response to dwindling wild populations. Today, it is possible to purchase farmed abalone and refrain from removing specimens from the wild. China and Japan are still major producers of abalone, but has been joined by Korea, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Namibia, Iceland, Ireland, Canada, USA, Mexico, and Chile.

Catching abalone in California

As mentioned above, it is legal to fetch a certain amount of abalone per day and year in Californian waters if you have a California fishing license and an abalone stamp card. The abalone stamp card has 24 tags and captured abalones must be tagged immediately. The legal size is (a minimum of) seven inches (178 mm) measured across the shell. A person may be in possession of no more than three abalones at any given time. Other regulations to keep in mind are listed below. Always check with the California Department of Fish & Game before you go abalone hunting in California to find out if there have been any regulatory changes.

· Scuba diving for abalone is always prohibited; you may only pick them from the shore or use breath-hold techniques.

· Abalone may only be taken from April to November, not including July.

· You may only take Red abalones; no Black, White, Pink, or Flat abalones.

· You may not take any abalones south of the mouth of the San Francisco Bay.

· You may not sell any part of the abalone, including the shell.

· Only abalones still attached to the shell can be legally transported.

A group of conservationists and scientists are planning a research trip to the world’s largest rubbish pile; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, the Pacific Trash Vortex, or simply the Great Plastic Vortex; this gyre of marine litter has been gradually building over the last 60 years but we still know very little of this man-made monstrosity.

The expedition, headed by Hong Kong based entrepreneur and conservationist Doug Woodring, hopes to learn more about the nature of the vortex and investigate if it is possible to fish out the debris without causing even more harm.

“It will take many years to understand and fix the problem,” says Jim Dufour, a senior engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, who is advising the trip.

According to Dufour, research expeditions like this one are of imperative importance since establishing the extent of the problem is vital for the future health of the oceans.

“It [the expedition] will be the first scientific endeavour studying sea surface pollutants, impact to organisms at intermediate depths, bottom sediments, and the impacts to organisms caused by the leaching of chemical constituents in discarded plastic,” he says.

The research crew, which will pass through the gyre twice on their 50-day journey from San Francisco to Hawaii and back, are using a 150-foot-tall (45-metre-tall) ship – the Kaisei, which is Japanese for Ocean Planet. They will also be accompanied by a fishing trawler responsible for testing various methods of catching the garbage without causing too much harm to marine life.

“You have to have netting that is small enough to catch a lot but big enough to let plankton go through it,” Woodring explains.

Last year, building contractor and scuba dive instructor Richard Owen formed the Environmental Cleanup Coalition (ECC) to address the issue of the pollution of the North Pacific. A plan designed by the coalition suggests modifying a fleet of ships to clear the area of debris and form a restoration and recycling laboratory called Gyre Island.

Hopefully, the garbage can not only be fished up but also recycled or used to create fuel, but a long term solution must naturally involve preventing the garbage from ending up there in the first place.

”The real fix is back on land. We need to provide the means, globally, to care for our disposable waste,” says Dufour.

Despite being sponsored by the water company Brita and backed by the United Nations Environment Programme, the expedition is still looking for more funding to meet its two million US dollar budget. Since the enormous trash pile is located in international waters, no single government feels responsible for cleaning it up or funding research. Another problem is lack of awareness; since very few people ever even come close to this remote part of the ocean it is difficult to make the problem a high priority issue. A documentary will be filmed during the expedition in hope of making the public more aware of where the world’s largest garbage dump is actually located.

What is the Eastern Garbage Patch?

According to data from the United Nations Environment Programme, our oceans contain roughly 13,000 pieces of plastic litter per square kilometre of sea. However, this trash is not evenly spread throughout the marine environment – spiralling ocean currents located in five different parts of the world are continuously sucking in vast amounts of litter and trapping it there. Of these five different gyres, the most littered one is located in the North Pacific – the Eastern Garbage Patch.

The five major oceanic gyres.

The existence of the Eastern Garbage Patch was first predicted in a 1988 paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States. NOAA based their prediction on data obtained from Alaskan research carried out in the mid 1980s; research which unveiled high concentrations of marine debris accumulating in regions governed by particular patterns of ocean currents. Using information from the Sea of Japan, the researchers postulated that trash accumulations would occur in other similar parts of the Pacific Ocean where prevailing currents were favourable to the formation of comparatively stable bodies of water. They specifically indicated the North Pacific Gyre.

California-based sea captain and ocean researcher Charles Moore confirmed the existence of a garbage patch in the North Pacific after returning home through the North Pacific Gyre after competing in the Transpac sailing race. Moore contacted oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer who dubbed the region “the Eastern Garbage Patch” (EGP).

Twice the size of Texas

The Eastern Garbage Patch is located roughly 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N between Hawaii and mainland USA and is estimated to have grown to twice the size of Texas, even though no one knows for sure exactly how large the littered area really is. The garbage patch consists mainly of suspended plastic products that, after spending a long time in the ocean being broken down by the sun’s rays, have disintegrated into fragments so miniscule that most of the patch cannot be detected using satellite imaging.

Impact on wild-life and humans

The plastic soup resembles a congregation of zooplankton and is therefore devoured by animals that feed on zooplankton, such as jellyfish. The plastics will then commence their journey through the food chain until they end up in the stomachs of larger animals, such as sea turtles and marine birds. When ingested, plastic fragments can choke the unfortunate animal or block its digestive tract.

Plastics are not only dangerous in themselves, they are also known to absorb pollutants from the water, including DDT, PCB and PAHs, which can lead to acute poisoning or disrupt the hormonal system of animals that ingest them. This is naturally bad news for anyone who likes to eat marine fish and other types of sea food.