This week, Science published the study “Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?” by Costello[1], Gaine[2] and Lynham[3], which may be used as a road map for federal and regional fisheries managers interested in reversing years of declining fish stocks.

The study has already received a lot of praise from environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) who says that the study shows how the overfishing problem can be fixed by implementing catch shares. “We can turn a dire situation into an enormous opportunity to promote better food security, create jobs and revive ecosystems,” says David Festa, vice president and director of the oceans program at EDF.

Catch share programs is intended to replace complex fishing rules and hold fishermen directly accountable for meeting scientifically determined catch limits. In a catch share program, fishermen are granted a percentage share of the total allowable catch, individually or in cooperatives. They can also be given exclusive access to particular fishing zones, so called territorial use rights. As long as the fishermen do not harvest more than their assigned share, they will retain a comparatively high flexibility and decide for themselves when to carry out the fishing, e.g. depending on market fluctuations and weather conditions.

“The trend around the world has been to fish the oceans until the fish are gone,” says Festa. “The scientific data presented today shows we can turn this pattern on its head. Anyone who cares about saving fisheries and fishing jobs will find this study highly motivating.”

As the fishery improves, each fisherman will find that the value of his or her share grows. This means that fishermen will be financially motivated to meet conservational goals.

In January 2007, a catch share system for red snapper went into effect in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the 2007 commercial snapper season to be open 12 months a year for the first time since 1990. According to EDF, fishermen in the area now earn 25% more and wasteful bycatch has dropped by at least 70%.

Hundreds of new animal species have been discovered by marine researchers studying Australian reefs as a part of the Census of Marine Life, an international effort to catalogue all life in the oceans. The findings include such curious creatures as tongue-eating isopod parasites living on fish and several new species of tanaid crustaceans, some with claws longer than their bodies. The team also found about 150 species of soft coral thought to be new to science, scores of tiny amphipod crustaceans of which an estimated 40 to 60% will be formally described for the first time, and dozens of small crustaceans likewise believed to be unknown to the scientific community. Researchers actually suspect that one or even several new families of species are to be found among the sampled crustaceans.

The investigated locales are the Lizard and Heron Islands (part of the Great Barrier Reef), plus the Ningaloo Reef off north-western Australia. All locations are considered well known and popular among scuba divers, and the research team was therefore quite surprised when they stumbled upon such a prolific collection of species unknown to science. This shows how little we still know about the species that inhabit our planet; even the ones living in habitats frequented by hundreds or even thousands of people each year.

Map of locations

“People have been working at these places for a long time and still there are literally hundreds and hundreds of new species that no one has ever collected or described,” says Julian Caley, a scientist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science who is helping to lead the research. “We were all surprised and excited to find such a large variety of marine life never before described – most notably soft coral, isopods, tanaid crustaceans and worms – and in waters that divers access easily and regularly. Compared to what we don’t know, our knowledge of marine life is a proverbial drop in the ocean. Inventorying the vast diversity and abundance of life across all ocean realms challenges both science and the imagination.”

In order to aid future explorations, researchers left several “houses” – formally known as Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) – for marine creatures to colonize on the ocean floor. The houses consist of layered plastic structures and have been designed to appeal to a variety of sea life. Over the next one to three years, the houses will be collected and their tenants investigated.

See pictures of some of the creatures here

The Census of Marine Life (www.coml.org) is a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans – past, present, and future. The network will release the first Census of Marine Life in 2010.

The young white shark brought to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on August 27 has now been released back into the wild after 11 days on exhibit. She was captured on August 16 in Santa Monica Bay and has now been safely returned to the same waters. During her stay at the Monterey Bay Aquarium she lived in their million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit, but despite her relatively roomy accommodation she only fed once and the staff decided that she would be better of in the wild.

A white shark

“These decisions are always governed by our concern for the health and well-being of these animals under our care,” says Jon Hoech, director of husbandry for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

On September 7, the young female was released in offshore waters in the Santa Barbara Channel at 1:30 p.m. (Pacific Time). Before being released, she was tagged with a tracking device that will provide researchers with data on her life in the ocean. For 148 days, the pop-up tag will collect information about geographical location, depths, and water temperature. After this period, the tag will pop free and deliver the collected data via satellite.

As of now, a total of four White Sharks with tracking tags have been released from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The three other sharks did however stay longer at the aquarium before going a back to the wild; between four and six months. Together with their research partners, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has tagged and tracked 18 juvenile white sharks off Southern California as a part of their “White Shark Conservation Research Project”. The aquarium is also involved in the project “Tagging of Pacific Predators” (TOPP) led by Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, which has tracked 143 adult white sharks off the Central Coast using data-collecting tags.

If you wish to know more about the white shark research at the Monterey Bay Aquarium you can visit www.montereybayaquarium.org/whiteshark/.

According to Christian Agrillo, an experimental psychologist at the University of Padua in Italy, the North American mosquito fish can count up to four. This rudimentary mathematical ability makes it possible for the North American mosquito fish to count how many other fish that are nearby – but only up to four. Similar counting abilities have already been observed in dolphins, but until now researchers only new that fish could tell big shoals from small ones, not that they were able to actually count.

In earlier research, Agrillo and his colleagues found that a female specimen of the North American mosquito fish will swim to the largest nearby shoal to protect herself from a harassing male. In order to do so, she must of course be able to somehow tell the difference between a larger shoal and a smaller one.

To establish exactly how advanced the counting ability of the North American mosquito fish was, Agrillo et al continued their research by testing if a lone specimen would prefer to join a shoal consisting of 2, 3 or 4 other fish. The study showed that female fish could tell the difference between two shoals even when the shoal size differed by only one specimen. Females would significantly more often prefer to join a shoal consisting of four others rather than three, and would also favour shoals comprised of three fish rather than of two.

When a new series of experiments were conducted using even larger shoals, researchers found that the female North American mosquito fish were unable to directly count over four. If two shoals differed in size by a ratio of 2:1 she would go for the larger one, but if the difference was smaller she seemed to conclude that they were “both big”. She would for instance not favour a shoal consisting of 12 fish over a shoal of 8, but could clearly tell a shoal of 16 from a shoal of 8. The female North American mosquito fish therefore seems to have the ability to estimate larger numbers, but not very exactly.

The results of the study can be found on BBC’s site Loveearth.com

A group of scientist from UK, Australia, the US, Sweden and France are arguing that we need to rethink how we protect our marine environment if we want to protect our reefs. The way we protect vulnerable areas today will not suffice to save the coral reefs from the threat of global warming.

The type of small protected areas that we use today were designed by researchers in the 60s and 70s and is good to prevent species from going extinct due to fishing etc but are not enough to protect against the treats reefs are facing today like global warming. This is the conclusion they have reached after extensive studies carried out in over 66 sites across seven countries over more than a decade. The team has published their result in the journal PLoS ONE. The study is the biggest of its kind done to date.

It is however important to stress that they don’t think the present protected areas are to be removed or that new such areas shouldn’t be protected. What they are saying is that this work has to be complemented with a new type of protected areas that need to be located in the right places.

Lead researcher Nick Graham, of Newcastle University’s School of Marine Science and Technology, said: “We need a whole new approach – and we need to act now.

The research the scientist did shows that the location of the protected areas are very important and that many of the world’s existing protected areas are in the wrong place to protect the reefs. New protected areas need to be setup in new locations and the focus need to change from protecting small areas to protecting entire reef systems. It is important to minimize the human impact on the reefs from actions such as over-fishing, pollution and sedimentation as coral dies if they are put under to much stress. If we remove other sources of stress the reef becomes more likely to survive the stress caused by increased water temperature caused by global warming.

Although the research seems to show a grim future with a lot of reef being damaged and showing signs of long-term degradation there were also good signs with some reefs remaining healthy or even recovering from earlier damages.

A new species of giant clam has been encountered by researchers in the Red Sea and given the name Tridacna costata. The new species is fairly similar to two other well-known species of Red Sea clams and it was therefore first suspect to be a hybrid, but genetic analysis has now deemed it a separate species. Further research carried out in the Red Sea also supports this; there are significant differences in behaviour between the two other species and the newly discovered clam. The two previously known clams spawn during a long period in summer while the new clam spawns during a short period in spring.

Fossil evidence uncovered by researchers has now unveiled something even more interesting; Tridacna costata might be one of the earliest examples of marine overexploitation by humans. Fossil records suggest that the Red Sea Tridacna costata population began do decline rapidly roughly 125,000 years ago. This is the part of our early history when scientists believe modern humans to have first begun to migrate out of Africa. Before this point in history, Tridacna costata accounted for over 80 percent of giant clams in the Red Sea – at least according to current fossil studies. Tridacna costata is a two feet long clam and it is not unreasonable to suspect that it would have been a splendid catch for early humans in search of food. Today, the species is believed to constitute less than one percent of giant clams, but this figure can of course change as the Red Sea becomes even more thoroughly explored.

Tridacna costata is the first new living species of giant clam found in two decades and was accidently discovered by scientists engaged in a Tridacna maxima breeding project. Tridacna maxima, another giant clam, is a much sought after clam in the aquarium trade.

If you want to find out more, the researchers behind the finding have posted their article online in the journal Current Biology on August 28.

Compared to just over a century ago, the pH-value of the sea’s surface water has gone down by 0.1 (i.e. 25 percent). This has caught the attention of Jon Havenhand and Michael Thorndyke, researchers at the University of Gothenburg, and they have together with colleagues in Australia studied if and how this decrease affects marine animals.

spatangus purpuerus – Sea urchin

As part of the study, Havenhand and Thorndyke used sea urchins of the species Heliocidaris erythrogramma to study reproduction. Sea urchins reproduce by releasing eggs that are fertilized out in the open water. In the study, Havenhand and Thorndyke studied breeding sea urchins in water where the pH-value had been lowered from its normal 8.1 down to 7.7. This might not sound as a significant drop, but a change from 8.1 to 7.7 means that the water becomes three times as acidic as before.

Havenhand and Thorndyke found out that in this changed environment, the sea urchins’ ability to reproduce was decreased by 25 percent. The low pH-value made the sperm swim slower than normally and move less effectively, which lowered the fertilization rate. But the problems didn’t stop here; when an egg was fertilized, the low pH-value could interfere with larval development and this too decreased the amount of eggs that actually developed into healthy sea urchin larvae.

More research is now needed to find out if these reproductive problems linked to acidification can be observed in other marine animals as well.

September 27, 2008 is the projected date for the Smithsonian Institution to open its new “Ocean Hall.” The hall will be an astounding 23,000 square feet of displays, facts, history, exploration, and countless other exhibits to help bring man and the oceans together. Ocean Hall will cover an immense array of oceanic topics using an auditorium, high tech video feeds, and fossils; but perhaps the most exciting, for any fish enthusiasts, will be the wonderful live displays.

Ocean Hall will be housing a 1,500 gallon coral reef tank; the coral tank will hold a vast number of fish, corals, and other inhabitants that make the coral reefs so amazing. Perhaps, the most impressive live exhibit will be the 1,800 gallon tank that the Smithsonian will be using to accommodate a 24 foot long female giant squid.

Multiple changing galleries will be set within Ocean Hall, the galleries exhibits changing themes every 18 months; the first of many shows being titled “Going to Sea.” Which covers many important issues in mans relationship with the oceans. This will be the largest remodeling that the Smithsonian has undergone since it opened its doors in 1910; and perhaps one of the most important; raising awareness amongst people about how important the oceans truly are to us.

To read the full article on Ocean Hall and to gather a complete list of all that Ocean Hall will bring to the Smithsonian Institution visit usa today at: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2008-04-25-ocean-hall-smithsonian_N.htm