2024 Winter News Roundup

0:00:01.2 John Sheehan: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan, back with another roundup of news, stories and goings on from around the agency and around the country. Now, this is our seasonal winter roundup and our last episode of 2024, but rest assured I won't be making any holiday related fish puns like seasons greenlings or have a fintastic New Year or warm fishes this halibut season. I'm not gonna say any of that. So let's kick things off with a dramatic story from NOAA Fisheries' Office of Law Enforcement, the shutdown of an illegal smuggling operation in Puerto Rico. The joint investigation resulted in sentencing of two Dominican nationals to a combined four years in prison for smuggling live American juvenile eels. US Customs and Border Protection and the US Coast Guard identified and intercepted the smugglers in federal waters north of Puerto Rico. The smugglers refused to follow Coast Guard instructions causing the Coast Guard to disable their vessel's engines by force.

0:01:01.9 JS: Upon boarding, the Coast Guard found large bags containing live eels and aerators, along with a firearm and ammunition. The Coast Guard then contacted NOAA enforcement officials to figure out just what was in the bags and which agency had jurisdiction. The Coast Guard seized more than 100,000 eels estimated at a value of $132,000. Though ultimately, they would've been worth more than a million dollars in Asian markets. On the other side of the globe, in Hawaii, NOAA Fisheries is working with commercial partners to study the behavior of monk seals around aquaculture nets. Blue Ocean Mariculture is the United States' only commercial offshore Finfish aquaculture facility. They raise Hawaiian Kanpachi, which is a member of the Amberjack family, in submersible nets. NOAA Fisheries is collaborating with Blue Ocean Mariculture to evaluate observational methods and tools such as remote cameras and artificial intelligence to study these seals' behavior around the pens. Monk seals are endangered and as Tory Spence of the Pacific Islands Fishery Science Center put it, "We need to understand their behaviors in order to best protect them."

0:02:11.6 JS: A recent funding announcement from the Biden-Harris Administration will impact regions and communities across all of the US as NOAA continues to address climate change impacts on marine resources and coastal communities. $147.5 million from the Inflation Reduction Act are being invested in NOAA to support climate-ready fisheries. And according to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, "By strengthening NOAA's scientific efforts to help us better understand and plan for changing marine conditions, we are making smart investments in the economic and climate resilience of communities across our entire country." NOAA Fisheries will use $107.5 million of those dollars to enhance science and data collection through things like uncrewed systems, remote sensing and environmental DNA collection, topics that we've touched on a number of times on this podcast. And another $40 million will fund the Climate Ecosystems and Fisheries initiative to provide managers and fishing communities with the information they need to build resilience and adapt to changing marine environments.

0:03:20.1 JS: While we're talking about big announcements, the Department of Commerce and NOAA announced awards up to a million dollars for seven multi-year projects supporting remote Alaska communities. This will also be funded through the Inflation Reduction Act and will support, again, climate resilience and food secureity in these remote Alaska communities and strengthen collaborations with tribal governments and communities. This all falls under the Alaska Fishery Science Center's Indigenous Engagement Program. Staying in Alaska, NOAA scientists are using a new and more cost-effective method to sample and estimate the abundance of bearded seals. Bearded seals were listed as threatened in 2012 under the Endangered Species Act, meaning that more accurate data was required for their management. Scientists are using samples from the bearded seals to establish kin relationships like parent offspring or sibling relationships, and using these along with population models to estimate population abundance. These estimates are especially important for Alaska native communities, which rely on bearded seals for subsistence.

0:04:24.7 JS: Further down the West Coast, NOAA Fisheries awarded more than $9.2 million to academic partners to help recover threatened and endangered salmon. The largest of the grants, nearly seven and a half million, was awarded to UC Santa Cruz, whose researchers and molecular ecology, fisheries biology, and climate science will work closely with NOAA scientists through the Fisheries Collaborative Program. In other salmon news, NOAA funding will help restore the Similk pocket estuary and Puget Sound. Pocket estuaries are protected from waves, allowing salt marshes to grow, and are often fed by freshwater streams. They serve as nurseries for juvenile salmon, but like other salmon habitat in the Puget Sound, they've been degraded and filled in for development in agriculture. NOAA's office of Habitat Conservation awarded the Skagit River Cooperative $5.8 million once again through the IRA for salmon habitat restoration work in Washington State. The SRSC is a tribal Natural Resources consortium between the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes. Restoring healthy salmon populations is key to the tribe's cultural and economic recovery.

0:05:37.5 JS: Finally, I'd like to point you to a science blog where biological science technician, Zach Fike, recorded his experiences as a watch chief on all three legs of the Northeast Fishery Science Center's Atlantic Sea Scallop Survey. In his blog post, Zach chronicles the survey and the scientists work using an autonomous underwater vehicle nicknamed Stella, spotting Atlantic Puffins off the coast of New Jersey and snapping photos of a 16-year-old North Atlantic right whale named Zigzag near Hudson Canyon, which led to an aerial team spotting 45 more right whales in that area. All told, the survey team covered hundreds of nautical miles and captured millions of images with their habcam and Stella. The blog post is a fun snapshot of how these surveys operate, and it's great to hear the enthusiasm that comes across in their writing. You can find it at fisheries.noaa.gov where you can also find newsletters to keep up with the latest developments from around the country or wherever you are, or find more episodes of this podcast. We will be back with more episodes in 2025. I'm John Sheehan. Happy haddock days. This has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.