spawning is imminent

Farewell Blogger and new Asian carp "Czar"

2010-09-09T22:18:00.012-05:00

Easy! I'm just moving websites. I made some friends over at Southern Fried Science, and they've recently created a network (called the Gam) made up of ocean bloggers from all over. Its like a Carnival of the Blue, except its everyday....instead of once a month. They decided that Spawning is Imminent is worthy and they'd like us to join (haha, I have them fooled).

My new website will be http://www.spawningisimminent.southernfriedscience.com/. It hasn't officially launched yet, but I'm launching it to you guys. I know, I know, you have to change the website in your favorites tab. Take your finger out of your nose and do it. Right now. I'll wait. Here's some music to listen to while you do your business.

"I'll wait" by Van Halen

The reason for the switch is that this will expose my blog to a much larger audience. Don't call me a sell out! I'm that hip indie band that you got used to seeing at your favorite bar. And I just got signed onto a new label. But it's the same music. You guys are my people! My homies. You'll always be my favorites. The site will generally have the same look and feel, but it will be a wordpress blog instead of blogger. I've had to learn a new blogging platform, so it may take me a while to get the hang of it. I'll send a last last post, when it officially launches. Because of importing issues, I'll keep this site up. But nothing new will be posted here.

I need something fish related. I'll keep it short. Asian carp are taking over our country. Instead of explaining, I'll show you. Watch this.

In Soviet Russia, carp catch you!

It's a huge problem, and they're making their way up to the Great Lakes. If you read this article, it explains that the White House has named our new Asian Carp Czar. His main job is keep the carp from coming further north. Good luck pal.

You and the other Czars should become the Super Friends.

They've been considered invasive since 2007, and they've made their way up the Mississippi River and are headed for Lake Erie. These fish are pretty dangerous, they'll jump out of the water and punch you right in the face. One of our attempts to lower their numbers is to market them for consumption. Mmmm....carp, yum. I don't see that working, and that's probably why we're exporting them to other countries that have a better taste for carpyness. Unfortunately, invasions tend to be irreversible...so the game becomes controlling rather than eliminating.

Asian carp, snakeheads, and lionfish everyone. Eat up.

Carnival of the Blue 40

2010-09-08T14:44:00.005-05:00

Hello, my favorite peoples.

The Carnival of the Blue is turning 40 months old. The Saipan Blog is hosting it again this september, bringing us the best of ocean blogging from last month. All in one place. It's bloody brilliant. Some hot topics this month: Lots o sharks, dogfish, sea otters, the smallest and rarest cetacean (its the whale version of a chihuahua), jellyfish!, oil spills, climate change, and poop. I'm serious. And like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box, is my man-o-war post. If you haven't read it yet....you're dead to me.

read about me. and poop.

Be sure to check it out. peace.

Shiny happy people holding hands

2010-08-28T14:44:00.014-05:00

What's been going on in my world the past couple of weeks.

I decided to tag along with a couple of co-workers over at the commercial docks. These guys work the docks during the week, interviewing captains and sampling catch to obtain crucial information about what is pulled out of the ocean. Commercial fishing docks are a different place. A place not too many people think about or get to see up close. A place that to most people...would smell like a fish thats been baking in the sun for a week. To fishermen, it's the smell of money. Tempers flare, ice is flying, and fish are being thrown around. If you're standing in the way, you'll get pelted by a grouper and then get yelled at.

Men with grisly beards and leathery skin, all wearing fishing bibs and rubber boots. Some of them still have most of their teeth. But all of them look about 15 years older than they actually are, and the women...lets not talk about them. They can be the most intimidating bunch you'll come across, or the most friendly. Sometimes, it just depends on the day. The mood can be pretty unpredictable. Tempers will explode one minute...yelling, kicking tubs around, cursing. The next minute, everyone can't stop laughing.

I've also noticed that no two fish houses are the same. Some are decent establishments. Others have been the most shady corners I've ever stepped foot in. Places where you keep an eye on your back. Places where pirates live.

We pulled up to our first stop of the day. It was a clean place that looked to be well kept. The dock was in a touristy part of town and right across the street from the beachfront condominiums and tanning out-of-towners. We unloaded some equipment and set up before the fish started flying. A bottom longliner had pulled up with a catch of reef fish: Red grouper, black grouper, yellowedge grouper, kitty mitchell, scamp, amberjack, porgies, mutton snapper, and blackfin snapper.

We got to work, weighing and measuring, pulling otoliths, and keeping things timely as to not piss anyone off for holding up the line. There's a guy packing fish and slinging ice. You'd think he'd stay the coolest standing above an enormous vat of ice on a 90 degree day, but he's sweating the most. Some restaurant buyers were hanging in the periphery, probably looking to pull a few fish to cook up for the night's dining vacationers at 30 bucks a plate. After 12,000 pounds of catch, we decided to move on to the next fish house.

Our next stop was a little less clean, a little more smelly, and a lot less friendly. As we walked up to a beat up rusty fish house, I figured out where the smell was coming from. A shark boat was unloading, and we saw several fisherman cleaning some sharks. They all glared at us with a "What the hell are you doing here?" sorta look. They were finning the sharks, probably to ship off to Asia for shark fin soup. Most of them were wearing bloody smocks and elbow length rubber gloves. The butchers were all holding some sort of weapon: large fillet knives, gaffs, and hand hooks...and they all looked like they wanted to hurt me. I decided that my job was to stand there, not make any sudden moves and refrain from making eye contact. While my colleague was failing to make conversation, one guy was hacking away at a sandbar shark dorsal fin. He proceeded to slice off every fin on the shark (even the smallest ones), then cut up the body in large pieces...all while smoking a cig with about an inch of ash hanging off the end. We asked them if they had any bycatch that we could sample. They told us they didn't (I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have told us anyway), and I was glad to peace out of there.

Interesting morning. So, what do you typically do before lunch?

On the weekend, I decided to poke around a huge annual spearfishing tournament they creatively call the St. Pete Open. If you've been to a saltwater fishing tournament before,
you've been to them all. It's crazy crowded, especially towards the end of weigh-in time. Most people are chugging down Budweisers and are about 6 or 7 deep at this point.

"Damn man, that fish is huuuuuuuuge!

The fishers come in sun-burned, exhausted, but excited to see where they show up on the board. And when they're in the money, grown men will hug each other on stage.*

I came to take pictures. I have this new camera, so I'm trying to shoot more. Plus, there's a photo contest I'm thinking of entering. I thought I'd share a few pictures with you. I was playing a little bit with aperture, with mixed results. I like to get creative with depth of field. Here are some of the better shots of the day.

While I was walking around, I witnessed a rare bird. Something you may only see once in a lifetime....if you're lucky. It was the most glorious mullet I've ever seen. Behold.

*not that there is anything wrong with that

War on man

2010-08-15T20:31:00.017-05:00

Hola mis amigos.

Anyone keeping up with Spain's news? article

Spain's beaches are swarming with jellyfish. Hundreds of swimmers have been stung along both northern and southern coasts in the past few weeks. This large aggregation of jelly is puzzling the locals, because they've never seen this before. To the north, the coastal waters are filled with Portuguese man-o-war.

For a quick rundown, the Portuguese man-o-war isn't really a jellyfish, it's a hydrozoan colony made up of individual highly specialized polyps that integrate to make up a larger animal. On the business end, the loooooong tentacles are outfitted with nematocysts. Imagine triggering thousands of tiny, toxin filled harpoons that shoot out to burrow into your skin. The man-o-war, I believe, is also the only animal on the planet that can produce carbon monoxide...which is the gas within the air sac. If I'm wrong about this, I'm blaming my invertebrate professor from college. A guy, that if you got him drinking enough, would stand up on a table and entertain you with a drunken, animated, amazing story of how he was attacked by an octopus.

I remember last summer on Pensacola Beach, more times than not I saw a purple flag flying over the guard stands. I've only been brushed by a broken tentacle of a man-o-war, and that was painful enough. To me, it felt like a burn. Like pushing your arm up against a hot oven rack. One of my good friends got it pretty bad a few years ago.

Gather round children, I have a little story about man-o-war stings:

A few years ago when I was still a graduate student, we were sent down to Key West to conduct some fish research. We'd go for a few weeks every January to sample King Mackerel from the commercial and recreational fisheries down there. I know, right? Somebody had to do it.

On this particular trip, I was working alongside my lab mates Kate and Mike. Since the charter boats would typically come in in the late afternoon, we pretty much had the days to ourselves. So on this particular day we decided to go snorkeling for a few hours over at Bahia Honda state park on Big Pine Key. The water there usually has decent visibility, and you can snorkel right off of the beach to some nearby patch reefs. I've seen some cool stuff out there, and on two occasions I swam right next to sea turtles. The water was nice, at least for everyone else but me. I wore my wetsuit, because I become an eight year old girl when it comes to swimming in cold water. To me, all water is cold water.

So, we started off of the beach and we noticed that there were alot of floating, blue, jellyfish looking things everywhere in the water. We looked at a few of them up close and Mike, without much doubt, had decided that they were these:

By-the-wind sailor, or sail jellyfish. Harmless.

they were actually these:

Portuguese man-o-war. Here comes the pain train.

which is not to be confused with him:

Man O' War, the top U.S. racehorse of our time.

We snorkeled around for awhile, dodging the blue floaties for fear that Mike might have been mistaken about his species identification. Wrong we were. so, so wrong. The current was flowing pretty good, and one of them floated right over Kate's hand.

I've never heard a woman scream like that. The sound shot fear up my spine. Honestly, I was looking for blood in the water. But when I saw Kate holding her hand, I knew what had happened.

We had to guide her back to the beach, because it seemed like she didn't know which way was up from the blinding pain. We rushed over to the dive shop, where the dive guide gave us some vinegar to pour on her hand. According to Kate, it didn't even faze the pain and it only made her hand smell funny. We were then looking for another option...

"Kate, do you uh.. want us to umm....?"

"Nobody is peeing on me."

Kate decided that as far as she was concerned the snorkeling was over for the day and she wanted to go home to nurse her wounds. Mike and I grabbed all of our gear and we all headed back to the van. When we reached the van (no joke), Mike and I became a little distracted by some topless, European sunbathers splashing each other in the water just off of the beach. The frolicking ladies were apparently unaware that they were in a Florida state park and not on a beach in the south of France. The entire scene took us a little by surprise. It also seemed to give Mike and I some sort of temporary deafness to Kate's pleads for us to leave.

"GET IN THE &%$#ING CAR AND TAKE ME HOME!"

The tone in Kate's voice snapped us out of our trance, and apparently foiled Mike's plan of going over to introduce himself and to welcome them to America.

So, if your friend is stung by a man-o-war and is freaking out:

First, remove any remaining tentacles (given). Then place tentacle on upper lip and call yourself Tom Selleck. I kid, I kid.

But, certainly try not to urinate on your friend...which they may even beg you to, midst their pain. Urine doesn't help, on any level, unless your friend really deserves it. Vinegar, Ammonia, Meat tenderizer...the typical arsenal of jellyfish sting remedies are all useless.

Use hot water. It denatures the proteins in the toxin, and eases the pain. Kate's pain immediately dissipated after she took a hot shower. I did some research, and there was a study done in Newcastle, Australia (Loten et. al 2006) using hot water to relieve pain from man-o-war stings.

But remember, certain remedies only work for certain species.

This is her hand after it happened. She still bears the scars from the contact 3 years later.

This certainly isn't the first time jellyfish have been a problem in the world's beaches and oceans. There have been reports over recent years about large increases in jellyfish populations off of China and Japan, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mediterranean. In these areas, commercial fisherman trying to catch fish, end up catching tons of jellys along with it only to ruin their catch. Some companies are even developing new fishing nets to try to separate the catch.

Scientists and researchers say that we may have to get used to this because the factors contributing to the jellyness are pretty major. Increasing sea temperature from global warming, overfishing of the jellyfish's natural predators, and the increased pollution that provides nutrients to bloom jellyfish food...plankton. We're doing this to ourselves. The swimming pool is looking better and better isn't it?

I know what you're thinking. "Why is he talking about jellyfish? This is a fish blog."

Well, stop thinking.

Adios.

Indeed

2010-07-28T20:17:00.012-05:00

The other day we set out from the ramps just before dusk. The sun was going down as we motored across the calm waters. The temperature was just right, there was light breeze that aroused and the sky was full of the brilliant hues of sunset. Ahhh, it was a perfect evening for romance.

Spawning was imminent. (Cue up the Barry White)

I tagged along with some other fish researchers on an excursion for spawning spotted seatrout. They've been sampling and studying the bawdy little guys for several years now. As we rode out, they informed me that in the summer during certain moon phases, the seatrout will aggregate at night to get it on. I gazed up and sure enough, there was a full moon low in the sky. The ride wasn't long, and we reached an inconspicuous beach and came to a halt. We turned on an audio receiver to listen for the drumming of the males. Yep, they're calling in the ladies. Contrary to their name, spotted seatrout aren't in the trout family...they're members of the drum family. The males make a drumming sound by beating their abdominal muscles to their swim bladders. Apparently the females think this is pretty sexy, so they come a runnin for some lovin.

once you go trout...you don't holdout.

I jumped out of the boat into knee deep water while holding one side of a long seine net. The boat sped away to make a wide arch coming back into the beach. We brought the two ends of the net together and pulled in the slack. As the catch had become more and more concentrated, I could feel fish banging against my ankles. shut up.

We ended up catching around 40 large seatrout in a single net. According to my colleagues, this was a small catch...sometimes they catch up to 100 per tow. The bulging fish were loaded into the back of the mullet skiff for processing.

I was kind of bummed because it was too wet to bring my camera.

We took lengths, DNA samples, and checked for sex. This was the interesting part. To check for male or female, you have to put a little pressure on the stomach of the fish to check for hydrated eggs. And I found out that the more pressure, the more furiously the eggs spray out of the animal. As I'm wiping off eggs from my shirt, someone called out to the person recording data that the first fish of the night was "a female, running ripe". I've decided that most people would have been disturbed by this.

Fort Knox of Fish

2010-07-20T20:32:00.022-05:00

Hey friends. It's been awhile.

I apologize for my disappearance from the land of blogging. While you were desperately holding your breath in my absence, I had some big life changes. I switched jobs and cities, so to my defense I’ve been a little busy with the adjustment. Ok, it was a long adjustment. I even missed the one year anniversary of my blog. Wow. It's growing up so fast....talking, walking, and still not potty trained.

I guess what sparked me to pick it back up again was a number of angry, bewildered people who confronted me. While backing me into a corner and with tear soaked eyes, they would ask:

“What Happened?”

“You stopped?”

“Why have you forsaken meeeeee!?

Ok, no tears… But more with a tone of confused disbelief. It was a little flattering. I thought only my mom read this. She's always been a fan of my work, and thanks for the potty training mom.

Another spark to continue my second-rate writing for you was a recent NY times article (link) which is a well written synopsis of an infuriating subject I’ve been following for some time now. The disappearance of the bluefin Tuna. The bluefin is critically endangered. The Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks have dwindled 72% in the past 40 years. So endangered in fact, it has joined the list of the ‘rarest of the rare’, its name is written alongside the charismatic notables: Polar Bear, Tiger, and Giant Panda.

photo link

Have you guys ever eaten Giant Panda before? You haven't?! Ohh my gosh, it’s delicious. I know a GREAT place up the road. It’s really expensive, and they only give you like, two pieces of it. We should totally order some teriyaki California Condor wings too. Two orders of the Black Rhino please.

It’s an oh so common occurrence to find a species to be endangered from pollution or habitat loss, but it’s another thing to drive an animal to extinction because it tastes like candy. Fish candy.

Ok, that doesn’t sound good.

Bluefin tuna is the pinnacle of sushi, and the world has been in a reckless love affair with the species for decades. The texture and taste of bluefin sashimi is supposedly unmatched. The biggest proponents of the tuna are of course, the Japanese.

typical day in happy Japan

Google always delivers. I'm sure you've read this here already, but I’m a huge fan of Japan. The culture is so unique. The ancient traditions, Tokyo lifestyle, the bizarre social norms. Not to mention the people are completely bat@#$% crazy. Japan is like an amusement park filled with Asian people. They’re full of contradictions, unfortunately, even down to their food.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the tuna auctions that take place in the enormous Japanese fish markets. But have you ever heard about the stockpiling of bluefin tuna? The Japanese, knowing that they’re partaking in a dwindling resource, have been rumored to stockpiling bluefin in massive warehouse sub-zero (-60 C) freezers. 50,000-60,000 tonnes of bluefin tuna are stocked every year in warehouses for use when supply runs low or out. That much bluefin could be worth 100’s of millions, if not billions of dollars. How long would it last the country's diet? Probably a year and a half. I bet they'd have armed security detail around that frozen compound. Call it the Fort Knox of Fish.

photo link

The Japanese buy and consume 80% of the world’s bluefin tuna catch every year. If a typical sport fisherman off of the Atlantic coast would catch one, it’s immediately packed into a sarcophagus full of dry ice and on a plane to Tokyo. Spotter aircraft find fast moving schools of juvenile bluefin so tuna ranchers can corral them into floating pens out on the high seas and “grow” the fish back into port. Hook and line fisherman use electric harpoons to dispatch them instantly to avoid the fish tainting it's own meat with lactic acid.

Unfortunately, the less there are, the more valuable they become. This encourages increased illegal harvest. The risk vs. reward is more and more worth it, resulting in billions of dollars of illegal bluefin sales occuring every year. The failure of bluefin management is due to the fish's enormous range, wherein unregulated international fishing is taking place. The tuna crosses into many borders where people may not follow the regulations set by ICCAT (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas).

The high seas: where the laws are more like suggestions.

for shame...stop eating

Kung-Fugu

2010-01-13T21:27:00.016-06:00

So, I slacked off over the holidays. Were you expecting more? You should know me by now.

Score! I got my new camera. It's been a long time since I had that giddy feeling while opening a present. I think the last time that happened at Christmas, I was opening up my G.I. Joe, Sgt. Slaughter battle tank when I was 8.

with kung fu grip. recognize.

Since I can't take a picture of my camera....with my camera. Here's a picture someone else took of it.

dope.

I bought the Canon T1i and the "nifty fifty", 50mm f/1.8 mark II lens. I didn't buy the kit lens because I was only going to upgrade anyway. The 50mm is really sharp. The build quality is a little eh, but the image quality for the price is fantastic. I'm ready to buy a zoom lens now. So after lots of homework, I'm thinking either the new Sigma 17-70 OS or the fairly new Canon 15-85 mm. I like to have the wide end for macro pictures (so I can take uber close ups of my belly button) and a little bit of zoom for some decent far off shots. I'd just like a sharp, fairly fast, walkabout lens. So any suggestions are appreciated, ah thank you.

I think I'll carry the camera along to Cocoa Beach next week. A few of us are going to the Artificial Reef Summit meeting. We'll be presenting some of our artificial reef research as well as getting to see some other talks. Should be a good time. I'll snap off some shots.

I guess I should talk about fish now.

You guys know about Fugu, right? Fugu is the Japanese word for puffer fish, and it's a very popular and notorious dish in Japanese cuisine.

But eating it is like playing Russian roulette. Fugu chefs are rigorously trained to cut the fish while avoiding certain organs (liver, ovaries) that contain tetrodotoxin. This neurotoxin is VERY lethal to humans. It's more potent than cyanide, and there isn't any antidote. It paralyzes all of your muscles, and while you are completely conscious you die of asphyxiation. What's even more crazy is if a customer dies from the Fugu... the chef must commit suicide with his own fillet knife.

This is why I love the Japanese culture. They're completely cracked.

If you're interested in ~~dieing~~ trying it in the states, New York would be your best bet. I've read that they're are only 17 fugu restaurants in the U.S. and 12 of them are in the big apple.

It's a very tasty fish, so people have been looking for ways to avoid the whole "stop breathing" situation. Recently, they've found it with a new farming method to produce non-lethal puffer fish for consumption. A Japanese aquaculture company developed methods to separate the fugu from tetrodoxin laden bacteria that it ingests. Article here.

Introducing, diet fugu light...

I think most of us would agree that taking the bullets out of the gun makes the whole thing less fun. There would be less enjoyment in eating it while knowing there is no risk involved. Plus you have the cultural significance of the dish. They've been eating this stuff for over 2,000 years!

And if I was an elite fugu chef after years of tedious training, I'd be coming after those scientists with my giant fugu knife.

Go Joe.

Every stomach is a big bag of Christmas!

2009-12-16T21:28:00.006-06:00

Hey party people.

It's always a complete surprise. When I pluck a fish stomach out of its alcohol bath, the tenacious nerd in me says, "Man, I hope there's something really cool in here."

Well, I guess cool is relative. Most people would think finding a golf ball or a Yanni cassette in a fish stomach would be cool. I'm always hoping it'll be a really rare fish or crab species, or maybe see some cannibalism. Yes, some fish eat their own.

I was going to reference Soylent Green here, but I feel like 5 out of my 7 readers wouldn't get it. But................I'm doing it anyway. Tell them Charlton Heston...

IT'S PEEEEOPLE!

I've been conducting some fish gut analysis for the past couple of weeks. Gut analysis is one of a few methods to study the food web in an ecosystem. For our research, we're looking at diet of reef fish (snapper, grouper, porgy, triggerfish, amberjack) on artificial reefs compared with their diet on natural reefs. Fish stomach:

Accurate diet analysis requires a good knowledge of all walks of marine life, experience in taxonomy, and some creativity. To put it simply: It's not easy. Obviously, the stomach digests things....so, the diet items that you pluck out:

1. Aren't usually in one piece.

2. Sometimes don't even remotely look like how they should look outside of a stomach.

3. Are all mixed together in one giant gastric orgy.

So David Caruso, you gotta piece together the crime scene, rule things out, look for distinguishable characteristics, classify things as specifically as possible (even to species), and be 85% sure it IS whatever you're going to classify it as. Any less sure, isn't sure enough. And take off your sunglasses, ginger.

Here's a picture of Joe doing science:

As we go along, we've taken some pictures of the more interesting things we've come across. But 90% of what we see is brown goo. Here are some of the highlights.

Rock Shrimp

Fish head. Most likely a Blenny.

Portunid crab claw

Isopod

Thecosomata or "Sea Butterflies". Just google it. Look up "sea kittens" too. Then laugh.

It also makes this work a lot easier if you're good friends with an invertebrate guy down the hall (Thanks, Alex). He knows stuff.

Somedays it hits me. I do weird things at work. But, it's actually pretty fun. BTW, I'm 85 percent sure that this post made you nauseated. And that's ok, because that's what I strive for.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Toilet humor

2009-12-02T09:34:00.013-06:00

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a month. Honestly, there's been little time to write and little motivation on my part. However, aside from the Holidays coming up, time is now on my side and my motivation has never been stronger. Material is a little lacking, but hey....we're past that. I'll just keep posting about things you might not care about because you'll read anything, won't you?

I can't believe it's December already. Up until now, I've been very busy with field work so the time, she flies by. We're going to shut down field work for a few months, for the most part. This gives us time to catch up on laboratory work. And who wants to be on a boat in the middle of the Gulf this time of year? It's bumpy, cold, and wet.

That's what she said.

Pretty soon, Joe and I will be working on some reef fish gut analysis. BTW my right hand man, Joe is one of our technicians in the lab. We've collected hundreds of stomachs in the past couple of months from fish we caught hook-and-line. The stomachs have been pickled in formalin, so we'll be dissecting them and identifying/weighing the contents. So I'll snap off a few pictures and learn you something about fish diet.

Speaking of pictures, I'll be getting myself a new DSLR camera this Christmas. I'm thinking about getting the Canon Rebel EOS XSi. So that means more expensive toys for me to break, and better pictures for you to look at. You're welcome.

So...that's status quo. Oh, I wanted to end the post with a bang. A really gross bang. Here's an article about eating Escolar.

sweet oily revenge

The Escolar (or "butterfish") is sometimes labeled as white tuna in sushi restaurants. I've also seen it prepared in upscale seafood restaurants. The fish contains a high fat content, with a healthy portion of wax esters. These esters can cause anal leakage. Apparently, if you eat enough of the fish (more than 6 ounces), the wax esters pool up and seep out into your trousers.

The more you know.

Bag 'em and tag 'em

2009-11-02T20:46:00.015-06:00

Last week we spent a few days in deep Louisiana at its southernmost port. Port Fourchon (pronounced, Foo-shon), wasn't exactly what I expected. As you drive up to it at night, it's lit up like a Christmas tree. You're thinking you're driving up to a fishing town, but you discover that it's an industrial metropolis. Helicopters always buzzing overhead, you're surrounded by the offshore oil industry. Apparently, this port supplies 16-18% of the US oil supply and produces over 90% of the Gulf of Mexico's deepwater oil.

When you drive into that port, you also realize that this is man country. Offshore oil workers, commercial fisherman, crew boats. I asked the captain of the shrimp boat that I was aboard:

"How many women do you think there are around here?"

He gazed over the Port Fourchon commercial docks.

"Maybe 5, and you'd probably have to pay for 4 of them."

This area of Louisiana is also a fishing mecca. Our mission was to go offshore to catch king mackerel and tag them with pop-up archival satellite tags to estimate their winter migrations. First off, let me show you the King of the Mackerels, courtesy of Diane Peebles.

Satellite tags have been in use for several years now, tracking movements of larger animals. Sea turtles, sharks, marlin, tuna, swordfish, and whales have been the guinea pigs of early satellite tagging studies. Now that technology has gotten things a little smaller, we can now attach the tags to relatively smaller pelagic fish like kings.

So here's what a satellite tag looks like:

If you think it looks expensive, it is. It's like strapping a $5,000 check to a fish and watching him swim off with it.

The tags log temperature, depth, and light intensity. Interestingly, the light data can be used to calculate latitude and longitude. After a predetermined amount of time, the tag detaches itself from the animal, floats to the surface, and then says hello to the satellite. The tag uploads the data to the satellite, and then it magically beams it to your email. That's right, magic...mind blowingly awesome magic.

Of course, bad things do happen. The animal can die, get eaten, or the tag can fall out. You just have to cross your fingers and hope he makes it. And if any of you find one of our tags, we'll give you $500 for it.

So to keep it short, we made it a few miles offshore in the shrimp boat. The seas were rough, but the boat took it well. We managed to catch, tag, and release 5 king mackerel with the sat tags. Things happened pretty quick once the fish got on board, so taking pictures was the last thing on my mind. Here's the only shot I got of us tagging.

The most important part of the process was to keep the fish as healthy as possible so it had a better chance of survival. King mackerel can stress or die pretty quickly if left out of the water even for a short time. As we released the tagged fish back into the water, we tried to encourage them to get moving again; so we would yell, "SWIM!! SWIM!!" "GO, GO, GO!!" "SWIM, YOU #$%&@*!".

I think that helped.

So kings, keep swimming. Send us a postcard from Mexico.

If it’s sustainable, shove it in your pie hole.

2009-10-21T21:36:00.010-05:00

A few years ago, I was down in Key Largo, FL for a ROV conference. It wasn’t a huge gathering, so I met quite a few people because of the intimacy of it all. I met the former director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which was pretty rad. He had moved on to a smaller aquarium somewhere up in the northeast. He gave a presentation on the uses of the ROV for large and small aquariums. When he was still in California, they had an ROV at Monterey Bay for kids to explore the bay behind the building. He also mentioned that they used their little sub to retrieve dead bluefin and yellowfin tuna in one of their bigger tanks. He said they would use the grabber to hold on to the keel right behind the caudal fin, and then pull up the tether to bring the dead fish up to the surface. Crazy.

I love me some aquariums. I’ve wanted to visit Monterey Bay for a while now. I’d also like to visit Churaumi Aquarium in Okinawa, Japan. We just had some friends move to Okinawa, so it may be in the realm of possibility. Check it.

Not only does the Monterey Bay Aquarium provide attractions to the public, but they spearheaded the Seafood Watch program. Seafood Watch educates the public on sustainable seafood choices and raises consumer awareness about the importance of buying sustainably caught seafood. You can view the advisory list here. I’m pretty sure they have also an app for the iphone.

I just took a look at their sushi guide and I noticed that one of my favorite things to order was on the avoid list. Freshwater eel (unagi) is caught or farmed in a way that harms the environment. I never would have guessed. Even though I’ll die a little bit inside, I guess I’ll have to order something else.

Additionally, the Monterey Bay Aquarium just released a benchmark research report about the state of seafood. It’s called “Turning the Tide: The State of Seafood”. It’s a report to be read by the general public on the impacts of commercial fishing, management, aquaculture, and humans growing demand for seafood on our marine environment. If you eat anything that comes from the ocean, read it.

Along with the release of the report, the aquarium has launched a campaign to ask top chefs and culinary leaders to pledge to never serve red “Avoid” items on the seafood watch list. There were even some celebrity chefs on the list, including Alton Brown (I’m a big fan).

It’s hard to make good food choices. People are screaming at you to buy organic, buy local, buy sustainable. But, the majority of us simply look at something we want and we eat it. Unfortunately it’s not that simple anymore. We have to painfully look past the growling stomach and think of where it came from, what it was fed, and how it was caught. We've lost the luxury of eating whatever crosses our path. If we educate ourselves a little bit, we could make some better food decisions.

I'm not one to judge or come down on people for eating something that may have harmed the environment to obtain...But, if I catch you eating bluefin I will shank you.

article link.

Sea Trees? part deux

2009-10-05T11:49:00.018-05:00

Sorry for the lack of writing as of late. I guess its been a mixture of bloggers block and sheer laziness.

The epic saga of the sea trees continues...

We made it back out to the Gulf for some more ROV/Hook Selectivity experiments last week, and it was a fun trip. Kate, a colleague of mine, and her friend Kristy drove from LSU to join the field crew (Btw, I love to use the term "colleague"...it's so humorously academic and pretentious. I can't say it without laughing and rolling my eyes). We also recruited some other charter boat captains and deckhands to help with the fishing. So we had some real cooperative research going on with an equal mix of fishermen and scientists. The ROV worked well, we caught some big fish, and the weather was perfect. Our final stop of the day brought us to the sea trees.

We arrived at a different area of the tree ledge a little further away from our last trip. We sent down the ROV to conduct the transects, and the water looked to be a little more murky than last time. There also seemed to be a higher density of tree stumps, with quite a few trunks that were several feet in diameter. It must have been an old forest. There were flounder everywhere. Flying the ROV near the bottom, I would kick up one every few feet. I also kicked up the silty sediment whenever the machine would get close to the bottom. It looked like the bottom of a lake.

After the transects, we attached the grabber arm to the ROV.

Fetch the stick boy. Get the stick...go get the stick!

It was like being inside the biggest crane grabber game in the world. But instead of going after a pokemon plushie, I had to grab a stick. The ROV grabber has one directional movement, open and close. So it's alot harder than you'd think to grab something.

I went the entire day without any advice from anyone about my piloting skills. But for that ten minutes, I had 5 back seat drivers.

Innuendos. So, so many.

I thought maybe it would feel petrified or something, but it looks and feels like any stick that you'd find in your backyard. Hopefully we'll get this carbon aged pretty soon. How old do you think it is?

Sea trees?

2009-09-21T21:48:00.008-05:00

A few weeks ago we were doing some offshore research, filming some natural and artificial reefs with the ROV, and the Captain and I had an interesting conversation on the way back into port.

“I know a good spot for you guys to film some natural bottom with the ROV.”

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“Trees.”

“Trees?”

“Yeah, trees.”

“Like some logs that were dumped by someone?”

“Nah, these are trees that are kinda growing out of the ground on the bottom.”

“Haha….riiiight.”

Last week, we decided to take a look....and he wasn't joking. I’ve never seen anything like it. Tree stumps, branches, and roots forming a dense, interwoven mat on the seafloor. What?!

It's believed that this area is newly uncovered, and this buried “forest” has apparently been unnoticed until recently. I flew the ROV up to the tree/root ledge and sure enough it looked like wood. There was a relatively large reef fish community running along the ledge for as far as I could see. I saw schools of snapper and tomtate swirling around the submersible as we inspected the structure and ran some transects. We also ran into some grouper, numerous chromis and damselfish species, and a blacktip shark being followed by 4 or 5 cobia. Obviously, it’s a natural reef providing habitat for reef fish species. And this isn't the only spot in the vicinity. There are other pockets of “sea forest” nearby, and some with higher densities of tree stumps. But where did it all come from? Is it some ancient forest that never fully decomposed from being buried for so long? Is it the world's weirdest and most obscure practical joke? I’m really curious. I think the next time we check this area out we’ll take some wood samples with the ROV grabber. Should be interesting, I’ll keep you updated.

Kiwis and Micky Dees

2009-09-12T16:22:00.010-05:00

in all its glory

The Filet-o-Fish sandwich. Regrettably, I’ve never had one. I just can’t bring myself to order it. Maybe it’s because of the shape of the fish "filet". A square puck of deep fried mystery isn’t too appetizing to me. Same thing with the McRib, it’s shaped like it has ribs in it, but where…I digress.

I’ve had some friends of mine say it’s pretty good for a fast food fish sandwich. Well, if you’re curious about the ambiguous square fish, wonder no more. The majestic filet-o-fish fish is what the New Zealanders call: The hoki (or the blue grenadier).

Doesn’t look square to me.

At one time, McDonalds used around 15 million pounds of it annually. It’s not the most attractive fish in the sea, but it tastes great. White, flaky, and slightly sweet. (for another fugly sea treat, read the ugliest, tastiest fish in the ocean). The hoki lives in the deep murky waters off of New Zealand, where it is sought after by a large commercial fishing industry. The species had been certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as a well managed and sustainable fishery back in 2001.

In recent years, New Zealand had cut back the allowable catch of hoki from a quarter of a million tons back to 100,000 tons. This suggests that this fishery is hardly sustainable. The numerous factory trawlers scoop up the dense aggregations of this fish pretty easily, with the side effects of ecosystem damage and unsustainable bycatch.

The hoki is relatively long lived for a fish at about 25 years. About my age. If you hammer the population of a long lived species down enough, it takes that many years to bring it back. For example, the orange roughy, which is also found in this area was heavily harvested for many years. They can live to be older than your grandmother... over a hundred years, with one that was reported to be 149 years old. That fish was swimming around before the civil war. Long lived fish species tend to be resistant but not very resilient to heavy fishing.

Sounds like there is a need for a new management plan. Meanwhile, McDonalds hasn’t been loving it. They’ve made the switch from Hoki to some other white fish. My guess is Pollock. Although, New Zealand is one of the more innovative countries in the world when it comes to fishery management, it looks like the Hoki fishery may not be a poster child of sustainability anymore.

NY Times article, here.

Carnival of the Blue

2009-09-08T22:36:00.009-05:00

The Saipan Blog is hosting Carnival of the Blue XXVIII. 28, I know, it makes my brain hurt too. This monthly blog carnival covers the best of ocean related blogging from the internets.

You should check it out. There are some great ocean blog posts from last month just waiting to be read by your sexy eyeballs...you little ocean lover, you.

New Arctic Fisheries

2009-08-31T22:32:00.017-05:00

Where once there was ice, now there are fishing grounds.

As climate change melts away at the polar ice caps, it's beginning to reveal new areas for commercial fishing north of Alaska.

For those of you that are unaware or are naysayers/inbreeds here is where we stand on the melting arctic ice caps.

mad shrinkage.

The U.S. Secretary of Commerce approved a plan last week to halt the expansion of commercial fishing in Arctic waters until researchers gather sufficient information on fish stocks to prevent adverse impacts of commercial fishing on the arctic marine ecosystem.

This was a little surprising to me, because I really thought it would be something like:
The U.S. Secretary of Commerce approved the expansion of commercial fishing in Arctic waters. On your mark, get set, go!

The Arctic Fishery Management Plan will govern any future commercial fishing for fish and shellfish in federal waters. Apart from some species that are managed under different authorities, the plan will regulate arctic cod, saffron cod, and snow crab fisheries. Since I like pictures and you like pictures. Here are some pictures.

Arctic cod

Saffron cod

Snow crab

I feel like this is the way it should be done. We go into a new environment; we conduct some science, establish procedures before authorizing a fishery, and monitor and adjust the plan as needed after the fishery takes off. Sadly, the reality is that this is an extreme case. In a world full of overfished, fully exploited fisheries, the mistakes have already been made.

Hold on a sec, I need to climb up on this box. Ok…alright.

I sincerely hope that we’re starting to take hold of this precautionary approach with not only the world’s fisheries, but the environment in general. We’ve thrown away our grandfather’s ideals of an “inexhaustible” planet, and we’re desperately trying to give a serious upgrade to our father’s generational “eh, maybe we should have done something earlier” attitude about environmental catastrophes.

I believe it’s up to my generation to not only attempt to solve the mistakes of our fathers, but to embrace the precautionary principle. In a sentence: We have a responsibility to protect the public when we know better. No more fixing it after it breaks, but making sure it never breaks in the first place.

Ok, I’m down. Stop throwing stuff at me.

But honestly, who would want to fish up in the Arctic? I’m fine right here in my flippie floppies and my sunglasses. Then again... maybe in a few years when Florida is underwater and it’s hotter than Hades, I’ll be wearing the same thing up in Alaska.

Kelley's blog

2009-08-28T16:11:00.007-05:00

And now for something completely different. My cousin Kelley is studying abroad in the land they call the United Kingdom. She started a little travel blog called Airline Food . She'll be living in a castle for the semester. I know as much as you do about that tidbit, so I'm a little curious. She'll be taking some pictures, meeting some interesting people, and seeing the European sights....and maybe, just maybe, she'll learn a little something from class. She just arrived in London a few hours ago, so now you're caught up.

Kelley, this sign is somewhere in rural England. If you find it, I'll give you 50 bucks.

Have fun, and try not to act so American while in France... Statue of Liberty or not, I get the feeling that they don't like us very much.

Mal de Mer

2009-08-23T21:13:00.021-05:00

It's your own personal hell being seasick. The rocking. The swaying. The heat. And it rarely gets any better once it begins. You can try to take some motion sickness pills, but once it starts it won't let up until you hug a pine tree. You feel like you want to die. Your face turns all kinds of crazy colors, from pink to yellow to a ghostly white to a faint green, and for the entire rest of the day people ask you "how ya feelin' man?", like it's supposed to help in any real way. It's hard to describe to anyone who has never felt it, but it can literally be the worst experience of your life.

I've been involved with alot of hook-and-line trips offshore for tagging fish, collecting fisheries independent samples, and for other various experiments. I've learned that whenever we conduct offshore hook-and-line sampling for research, we have to recruit more than enough people to go. Because it's hard to find people to go fishing during the week (you'd be surprised), we usually find a rag-tag mish-mash of folks to go. So sometimes it can be a little unpredictable. No matter what the seas are, slick calm or a roller coaster...people will find ways to get sick. It's one of the many wrenches that get thrown into the works. If we need 4 fisherman, we'll find 6.

I'm lucky that I've been blessed with a iron clad gut. For as many times as I've been offshore, I've only felt seasick once, and the deck looked sort of like this:

the sea was angry that day, my friends

Plus, I always take a motion sickness pill before I step on the boat. They make you a little drowsy, but for me that just makes for a better nap on the way out.

But, the most entertaining aspect of seasickness is how people deal with it. People perform their own little rituals to deter the queasiness. I've known some people to take enough meclizine that they could ride the Disney World teacups for weeks. Some people adopt unusual eating habits. Some will wear bandannas around their face to avoid diesel exhaust, some stay out on the deck so they can see the horizon, while others find the deepest darkest corner of the ship and stay there all day only to emerge when we're finally docked again. I've even watched guys that are so hardcore for fishing, that they will throw up while reeling in a fish and never skip a beat. I also believe I've witnessed the at-sea record for the most ginger eaten in one sitting.

My absolute favorite happened a few days ago. There was a guy who felt sick a few hours into the trip, thought he had recuperated, and decided to make it out on the deck to help us with our research. We were fishing at the time, so I handed a rod to him and told him to bait up and try to catch something. He took one look at the sloppy bait bucket filled with fish heads, squid pieces, and bait gravy. He shook his head and fell off the horse again.

Know what you're getting yourself into, take some precautions, or feel Poseidon's wrath.

Nat Geo blog

2009-08-17T16:38:00.003-05:00

David Doubilet and Jen Hayes wrote a short post on the National Geographic Magazine blog about our trip with them a couple of weeks ago. Working in Underwater Winds. Check it.

They misspelled my name, but I'm sseriously ok with it.

Bizarre, crazy, insane.

2009-08-16T14:10:00.023-05:00

I'm sitting here watching the weather radar. A string of foul weather is headed in this direction, and the very reason I have time to write is because our offshore trip for tomorrow is postponed. Tropical storms can really churn up the water, and it's going to be a washing machine out there. This hurricane season has been pretty slow to this point, so I guess we're due for a couple of storms. I'm also wondering about when the big one is coming and more importantly, who is going to get it.

Storms aside, it's been an amusing week for fish news. We'll start with bizarre.

A lady up in Ohio was driving along with her daughter on the interstate when she saw the most beautiful bald eagle she'd ever seen in her life. The eagle then dropped one of these on her windshield:

A Lake Erie Freshwater Drum, aka "Sheepshead"

The moderately sized fish torpedo wiggled free from the eagle and was dropped from 40 feet onto her windshield, completely shattering the glass. article here. The sheer optimist in me thinks that a fish dropped by an eagle is far better than falling airplane toilet ice.

Now for the crazy.

A friend of mine informed me earlier in the week about the appearance of a couple of whale sharks off of Destin, Florida. photos here. I was pretty excited about it. But what I just found out is that there have been multiple sightings of whale sharks throughout the entire northern Gulf of Mexico, from Clearwater, Florida all the way to Louisiana. It's a baffling whale shark phenomenon. Here's a video of the sharks seen off of Grayton Beach, Florida earlier this month.

An article I just read explained that there are four times as many whale sharks sightings this year as any normal year. Something is going on, and nobody knows why. It could be a change in upwelling currents or food abundance, but shark scientists aren't sure. We still don't know alot about these creatures.

Whale sharks are large filter feeders that feed on plankton, algae, krill, squid, and other little critters. They suck in massive amounts of water, filter out the good stuff, and then expel the rest out of their gill openings. If they swallow something big like an unsuspecting diver, no problem. They can cough you out. Surprisingly, whale sharks are gentle, if not playful with swimmers despite their ridiculous size. They're also very aware of their enormity and surroundings, so don't worry about the tail swatting you like a fly.

It would be amazing to swim with one of these guys and I hope I get to do it someday.

And now, the completely insane.

Did you know that you can tattoo your aquarium buddies? Especially popular in China, aquarium fish are laser tattooed with Chinese characters meaning "luck", "happiness", "good fortune" and just about anything else you can think of. I've also seen fish tattooed with hearts, polka dots, and stripes. Article.

She's looking for "Y", "M", "C", and "A"

Of course there is a controversy whether this is a novel idea for pet shops, or just plain crude. I'm sure PETA would give anyone hell about it if the American pet shops decided to do this. I honestly think it would never catch on over here, but I could imagine the activists screaming about the laser tattoos only to overlook the fact that pet shops tend to stuff 300 goldfish into 10 gallon tanks anyway. I could also imagine a fish lottery, with an attractive lady pulling numbered fish out of a tank to figure out the weekly winner. The twisted possibilities are endless.

I can think of a good tattoo for one of the firemouth cichlids in my tank. His name is Optimus Prime.

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth dear.

2009-08-11T21:52:00.013-05:00

Last Sunday I decided to stroll over to the pier for the Outcast Mega Shark Tournament weigh-in to see what I could see. Let me tell you, when Pensacola hosts a shark tournament, they throw a shark festival. I walked up to rock climbing walls, water slides, and carnival games. It was a kid’s dream: fumble around in the moon bounce, play in the water fountains, dive into a blue snow cone, and take a peek at the toothy giants that rise up on massive hooks.

Shark tournaments are a little different from inshore fishing slams or offshore championships. There seemed to be a lot of downtime in between the rare moments of excitement of the sharks’ arrival (that may explain the diversions). But when the animals are crane lifted out of the boats and up into the air, the crowds and cameras ignite. The sharks are placed on the weigh hook next to the leader board, the mic man interviews the fishermen, and then the crowd shouts out guesses on the weight of the shark to try to win prizes.

The sharks were weighed and placed in an ice filled bin next to a research tent. I went over to the tent to say hi to a friend, and she let me poke my nose into their work. Whew, to describe the smell…refer to that’s the smell of desire, my lady. They were taking tissue samples, gonads, liver samples, vertebrae, and stomachs. One of the stomachs of a bull shark was spilled out onto a tarp for observation. After a little searching I found some fish otoliths, stingray spines, and some skull pieces. It looked like the bull shark had fed on some hardhead catfish, numerous stingray, and judging from the shape of one set of the otoliths, a red snapper. Sorry the next couple of pictures are a little "wet". Try not to read the blog at lunch. Otoliths are structures in the fishes' head that fisheries biologists use to identify and age the fish (like counting rings on a tree), as well as function as a natural tag of the fish.

The roundish white things are fish otoliths.

To catch this particular shark, the fishermen used a cownose ray. It’s a popular shark fishing tactic to snatch hook a ray, cut its wings off, thread a hook through it, and then throw it out as a struggling, yet stationary live bait.

After the samples were taken, the carcasses were then thrown into a refrigerated trailer to be taken to the nearby zoo to feed the animals.

The leader board showed a 400 pound hammerhead that eventually turned out to be the overall winner. The usual suspects had been caught: bull, tiger, nurse, hammerhead and mako sharks. Most of the sharks that were caught weighed between 100 and 200 pounds: babies, youngsters, and teenagers. Most of the sharks caught and weighed at these tournaments are immature and have never reproduced.

Sharks are long-lived and late to mature, and these kill tournaments take a range of sizes, therefore ages of targeted shark species. I could explain as to why sharks are incredibly important to marine ecosystems, but David over at Southern fried science has done just that in his article, Four things everyone needs to know about sharks. It’s good, give it a read.

There are many sport fish tournaments that operate on a completely no-kill basis. Tarpon and Billfish tournaments are a great example of this. Fish are caught, tagged, and video captured. This allows the fishermen to compete while the animals get to swim away. Of course, if the shark tournaments operated this way, people would complain that the weigh-in would be a wash. Next year, let’s get a Ferris wheel, some smoked turkey legs, and friggin' fire eater. You want to kill something that ecologically important just to hang it on a hook, take a few pictures, get some “oohs and ahhs”, and then give it to the flies? I ask, why not a no-kill shark tournament?

Recently, Fort Myers Beach, Florida has made the switch with their tournament this year. Link. Hopefully, more and more venues will follow this example.

Instead of a festival celebrating man versus beast with dripping carcasses hanging from hooks…how about a victory party with live music, a fishing seminar for children, and a boat show? We could even throw in a mechanical shark that people can ride.

Let’s face it. It’s a lot better than what kill tournaments could become, and nobody likes carnies.

Our day with National Geographic

2009-08-04T22:10:00.019-05:00

I didn’t think we could fit that much stuff on a boat. ROVs, tethers, monitor boxes, toolboxes, dive gear, Nitrox tanks, lights, generators, and some cameras that are worth more than my car. We met National Geographic’s David Doubilet and Jen Hayes at the dock in the wee hours. I was happy to find that they are both very interesting and pleasant people. Jen is talkative, spunky, and tough while David is a bit more reserved, mild mannered, and witty at times.

After we loaded on the heap of stuff, we set out for one of our artificial reef study sites. David and Jen explained that they wanted to get a realistic view of our ROV research so they wanted to shoot specifically on our study reefs. Jen was very inquisitive on artificial reefs and how/why they’re deployed, their function, and their controversy in the Gulf of Mexico. She took some notes down and mentioned to us that we’d be giving more formal interviews a little later. After she asked us all of her questions to get a feel for what we do and our research, I had some questions of my own about her work and travels. Her and David jet set around the world on numerous assignments, so she had plenty of amusing stories to tell.

When we reached our shoot location, there began a frenzy of activity to get things ready for both the ROV team and the dive team. David sat down with us to go over what he hoped to capture down on the bottom and what hand signals he may give to me through the ROV camera for direction. He gave me approximately 20 signals…I think I actually remembered 3.

This signal means "this gear is heavy, and I could use a lower back massage."

David and Jen geared up and performed a standard backwards flip off the boat. I won’t go into too many details, but the first dive was unsuccessful due to a heinous mixture of water current, entanglement, sea sickness, poor line placement, and bad visibility. The two made it back on deck for a rest and a new game plan. We readjusted the lines, changed tanks, and put them back in the water. Meanwhile, the ROV had been sitting on the bottom twiddling its thumbs for an hour or so.

They touched down on the reef site at about 100 ft, and I followed them around with the ROV like an eager little puppy. Once they readied the cameras and lighting, David signaled me to fly broadside the reef to get some good shots.

Yes! Yes! NO! NO!

After a few minutes of posing and shooting, the ROV ran into some trouble. I had gotten a little too close to some fishing line attached to the reef. The fishing line got sucked into one of my propellers, disabling some of the controls. This resulted in very erratic movements, many of which were in the wrong direction. I was not only scaring all of the fish, but also annoying the crap out of David. David later told me that he compared the ROV to a loud, irritating mosquito that would quickly zip around randomly. He called the fiasco, “ROV behaving badly”.

We then had a little talk. An "understanding", if you will.

Jen had to grab a hold of the ROV and put it into the shot by hand a few times. After 30-40 minutes of bottom time, they made it back up to the boat. I was worried that David would pop up to say that he left the lens cap on. They seemed happy about the shoot, which was a good thing because they didn’t have any tanks left.

Jen also took some shots of us on deck with the ROV equipment. She mentioned that these pictures would most likely make it on to their ROV blog via the National Geographic website. When I find the link, I'll let you know.

David and Jen thought the shots looked good, but they may try to come back in a week or two to “sex it up”. I think they want to shoot the ROV on some other reef sites off of Florida. We’re definitely up for it. They told us that the article would be in National Geographic in the spring of 2010.

By far the coolest thing I've ever done.

Dropping the F bomb

2009-07-20T22:55:00.011-05:00

It’s funny to think of my grandfather sitting in a boat in the middle of an empty Ohio lake. No bait, no tackle…not even a fishing pole. Just a net, a lit cigarette, and some TNT he borrowed from the family coal mine. I imagine him taking a puff off of an unfiltered Lucky Strike and lighting the stick. I would bet that no matter how familiar you are with dynamite, even if you’ve used it a thousand times, you would still get a rush watching the sparks fly off of that fuse. I see him lobbing that bomb in the air and hearing a distinct but satisfying,

"ssssssssss...bloop...BOOM!”

I bet his chest felt like it was going to burst as he witnessed the water spout. And I can only imagine the look of all the creatures that made their way up to the surface, ready for the picking. I have a feeling that dinner was easy to catch that day. I’ve also heard a tale or two about some other activities with the boom sticks that didn’t turn out so well for him during his adolescent years.

What can I say, my grandfather was a pyro.

Believe it or not, but people around the world still fish with the stuff. Some artisanal blast fishing still exists in parts of Southeast Asia, the Aegean Sea, and Africa. It’s extremely destructive to marine habitats, especially coral reefs. Fishermen typically use homemade bombs made of potassium nitrate or ammonium nitrate/kerosene mixture poured into glass soda bottles. Mmm…just like momma used to make. They then throw the bombs directly over shallow coral reefs to kill fish, only to leave a car-sized hole in the reef as an unfortunate side effect. While the local communities often support law enforcement of this damaging fishing practice, it’s almost non-existent in these remote areas.

In the Gulf of Mexico, something similar is happening. Instead of a fisherman with a homemade molotov, it’s an engineer using explosive charges with the intent to decommission an artificial habitat. A massive fish kill is the consequence.

Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas platforms

A whole bloody mess of them

There are two ways in the Gulf of Mexico to decommission a platform, non-explosive severance and explosive severance. Non-explosive methods involve cutting (sand jet, rotary, diamond, arc torches, etc.) facilitated by commercial divers. This method can be potentially dangerous for the divers, and has very little impact to the marine environment. The explosive method uses charges to achieve severance. The explosive method is much safer for offshore workers; however, the pressure waves and acoustic energy that is produced is extremely damaging to the local marine life that are attracted to the structure.

Tens of thousands of fish surround these structures at any given time. The detonation produces intense concussive effects on fish and marine mammals, imploding gas filled organs and causing massive internal damage to the body. The animals close to the blast tear into pieces; while the fish further away turn into jelly, even further away the fish suffer concussion, and then just a really bad headache at about half a mile or more from the blast.

Here’s a photo taken by a fisherman after the decommissioning of an oil rig off of Dauphin Island, Alabama last month. Article here.

Most of the fish you see floating on top are red snapper, but the vast majority of the bodies are lying on the bottom. Divers reported a mass of red snapper, amberjack, spadefish, and cigar minnows on the seafloor. This was only a 5 pound explosive charge, which is considered a small blasting scenario. A standard blast uses 20-80 lbs. And a specialty blasting can use up to 500 lbs of charges. Take the kids, you could go fishing with a baseball glove.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Gulf of Mexico contains nearly 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms. Many have already been decommissioned and most of the remaining platforms need to be removed by year 2020. On average, there are about 80-100 decommissionings in the Gulf of Mexico per year using explosive methods. If one blast can kill 500 red snapper, that’s 50,000 of them killed every year from oil and gas platform removal alone. That’s 25,000 recreational limits of red snapper…and snapper don’t top the species list for the highest kill count. Atlantic spadefish and blue runner take the most beating. Other snappers, grouper, red fish, triggerfish, and numerous other species in low abundance are also rubbed out. It’s just a little too much to ignore, in my opinion.

Vernon Minton, the director of the state of Alabama’s Marine Resources Division, after seeing the floating snapper photo stated that he would bring this issue up at the next Gulf Council Meeting. Looking forward to it, Vernon.

As for my grandfather fishing with dynamite. I'm not sure if it was a one time thing or what. Maybe my dad can elaborate. But, I'm pretty sure he was using the tools at hand to feed the family. He taught my father to fish, and a little later he taught me a few things.

About fishing...not explosives.

Electronics versus saltwater

2009-07-09T22:03:00.003-05:00

Currently the lab is working on several projects, most of which require ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) video sampling of artificial reef fish communities. So, we've received quite a bit of funding to do this work and we're in need of a new ROV. We're conducting video transects of different reef types: natural reefs, artificial reef modules, and wrecks. To perform the transects, we need to know the ROV's position on the sea bottom. Recently, Videoray has put out its newest model, the Pro-4, which can be outfitted with the tools we need.

This machine makes our other two look like toy boats. It has better navigation, more power, and a ballast system. We're also going to equip it with a smart tether positioning system which will allow us to track the ROV's movements with real time GPS. The movement data can also be uploaded into Google Earth, which is nice.

Looks like I have another user manual to read and memorize. Because I'm the guy that should have all the answers when this thing gives us trouble. Yes I said "when" and not "if". ROVs break. Tethers break. Video recorders break. Generators break. You name it...I've broken it. The amount of money it has taken to replace all the stuff I've broken could pay for the entire college education of my wife and I. This is why nobody lets me borrow anything.

The ROV is a fantastic tool for conducting fisheries research. Videoray does great work and we've been happy with their machines and service. But the nature of it all....electronics dipped in salt water? There are a million components to a working system, and if one goes wrong, then research can't be conducted. No video...no data. For this reason we have backups, and we have backups for backups. We're pretty rough on the machines doing offshore work, so every time we go out we carry hundreds of pounds of equipment onboard. Just in case the inevitable happens.

Working.

complete and utter breakage

So when the new machine arrives, it's time for me to hit the campus pool. Its where we go to practice with the ROV, perform experiments, and sometimes just to chase the old people around during lap swim. I have to learn how to use this thing before we go offshore in a few weeks to work alongside David Doubilet and National Geographic. He contacted us last year to see if we would be interested in working with him on an article for the magazine. He wants to take some underwater shots of our ROV on some artificial reefs off of Florida. In other words, he wants to film us filming fish. He'll be here in August, and if things go as planned, the article should be in the magazine by Fall 2010.

You should check out his work. Impressive is an understatement. I'm pretty stoked about the whole thing, so I'll definitely let you guys know how it goes. Five bucks says I'll probably end up crippling David's equipment somehow. Why? Because it's probably more expensive than ours.

A new record for me to beat.

2009-07-05T14:44:00.002-05:00

I don't know if you guys ever watch the annual Nathan's hot dog eating contest on the 4th, but I do. I never miss it. As I watched this years contest, I felt a myriad of emotions...excitement, disgust, sheer amazement, and more disgust. How is it physically possible to eat 68 hot dogs? Ask Joey Chestnut. It's his third contest win in a row, and he broke the world record again this year. He again ripped the title away from the Japanese, with Takeru Kobayashi coming in second with 64 dogs.

You should try to find Chestnut's interview after he won. He's about to spew the entire time. The interviewer keeps asking him questions, and Chestnut looks like he's trying to focus on not unleashing a tide of chewed up hot dogs on the dude. It was entertaining and completely nauseating.

But, the Japanese got back another world record the day before the hot dog eating contest. The world record Largemouth Bass. The bass was caught on Lake Biwa in the Shiga Prefecture. It was caught by Manabu Kurita, a pro staffer at a local tackle shop. The beast weighed 22 lbs and 5 oz. beating the previous record by an ounce. The previous record stood for 77 years. The 1932 record was held by George Perry who caught a 22 lb 4 oz bass on Montgomery Lake in Georgia.

I've seen the world record replica of Perry's bass. Its mouth looked like the opening of a 5-gallon bucket. As a bass fisherman myself, I was pretty amazed.

Here's the catch. Even though the Japanese bass is technically heavier than the American bass, the International Game Fish Association rules state that a replacement record must weigh 2 ounces more than the previous record. So on paper, it's considered a tie.

Lake Biwa is one of the most ancient lakes in the world. Its more than 300 feet deep, and its considered to be 4 to 5 million years old. Interestingly, large mouth bass are an invasive species in the lake, and Japanese officials have been trying to rid the lake of bass and other invasives. Looks like there's one less lunker in there.

They asked Manabu what lure he used to catch the giant fish. He wouldn't give any details. I bet it was hotdogs.

they'll eat anything.

2009-07-02T23:14:00.001-05:00

Might as well keep rolling on the food subject. I'm a bit of a foodie myself. I'm always interested in world food culture, especially Asia's. I love Asian food...Japanese, Korean, Indian, Thai, etc. But, I think everyone would agree that Asians eat some questionable stuff. Over there, anything that comes out of the water is fair game. And they don't waste anything. Nothing. Eye balls, guts, skin, bones...yeah. They know how to cook it, and it's mind-blowingly spectacular.

This also leads us to the bigger picture of American food culture. We're spoiled and grossly ignorant when it comes to our food. You give a fish to an American, he fillets it, skin off and throws the rest in the garbage can. Then he looks at you funny because all you gave him was ONE fish. You give a fish to anyone else in the world, they would cook it whole... and enjoy every bit of it. The American would look at this, cringe, express extreme distaste under his breath, and grill up his meager meal feeling culinarily superior and a little hungry after eating it. Some of the best parts of our seafood (or any food for that matter) are the parts that we dismiss. And parts that, even in my opinion, are meant to be dismissed are also gladly eaten elsewhere in the world. What I'm trying to get at is that we as Americans don't appreciate our food. All we know is that we want it, we want as much as we can carry, and we want some more of it for later, too.

I've worked the charter boat docks for a couple of years now. I've watched group after group of paying fisherman go offshore to catch 100s of pounds of whatever they can hook. It's like an indian tribe shooting down as many buffalo as they can so they can survive the winter. They bring back enough fish to feed a very large village, and it all goes into their second freezers at home. They might get around to eating it, or it might hang out in there for 6 months to a year, get freezer burnt, and then get tossed out because it's time to go out and load the freezer again. What ever happened to going fishing with your buddies, drinking beer, and just catching dinner? I feel like now it is less about the fun of a day of fishing, and more about the harvest. Fishing like its going out of style, or more likely, fishing like its a race.

My favorite part about doing research on charter boats is that when we are on our way back to the dock, we'll make a "grocery" stop. We'll hit a few spots to catch some dinner. After we catch a few and everyone can take a fish or two home, the captain encourages us to keep fishing to catch our limit anyway. And not only catch our limit, but to try to catch the biggest fish we can. It's not because we want to bring more fish home, its because he doesn't want to show up at the dock with a slightly vacant cooler. It's ego. It's pride. We need to catch our limit. We HAVE to catch our limit. I can see why they act like this. It's good for business. You show up to the dock everyday with your limit and line the planks with big fish, you make yourself a name as a good captain. It brings customers back to line that cooler again. It shouldn't be like that.

And its not just charter boats, recreational fisherman can be the same way. Everyone catches as many fish as possible right up to the point where it's illegal, and sometimes that doesn't stop them. You're not starving, guys. In fact, a lot of us spend more money catching the fish than it costs to buy the very same fish at the market. I think they want to justify the gas, the ice, the bait, and the tackle expense. On most days, you'll never catch up. It shouldn't be about the return, it should be about the day.

Again, it comes back to pride. "Dammit, I spent all of this money getting ready for this fishing trip, and I'm sure as hell going to bring back everything I catch whether its legal or not." Or a lot of times, it's fed by a personal vendetta against management. People will break the law every time they hit the water to spite "the man." The animosity that gets thrown my way about fisheries management in the Gulf of Mexico... it would take me days to write about that.

A little change in our food culture and our attitudes about fishing couldn't hurt. So get on it. By the way, the throat of the fish is the best part.

peace

Eating lies.

2009-06-22T22:58:00.001-05:00

Over the past couple of years, I've learned a little bit on how fish are caught, how they're sold, and how they end up on our plate. Some of you may already know this, but we may not be eating what we think we're eating. We're being fooled, even at our favorite seafood restaurant or fish market. Seafood can be re-labeled or renamed as something that sounds familiar or more appealing, farm raised seafood can be sold as wild caught, and restaurants will right out lie and serve you lower quality food with the top shelf name and the top shelf price.

Renaming a fish to something that sounds more delicious has been a clever marketing ploy. Ever heard of Patagonian toothfish? You might know it as Chilean Sea Bass. Channel catfish are sometimes renamed Southern Trout. And my personal favorite, Slimeheads... which have been renamed, Orange Roughy. Many species have zero market value until their names are changed. Just by renaming them, they go from trash fish to upscale dining.

Here are some popular seafood items that are susceptible to the bait and switch. And by bait and switch, I mean douchebaggery. It's almost like ordering a filet mignon, and getting a piece of bologna (aka, Alabama round steak).

What you order:

Sea Scallops

What you get:

Frequently, sea scallops are plugs of muscle punched out of stingray/skate wings or shark fins.

What you order:

Pacific Red Snapper

What you get:

No such thing as a pacific red snapper. You'll be served one of several species of rockfish.

What you order:

White tuna in sushi restaurants, Grouper, red snapper

What you get:

Farm raised Tilapia, Catfish, Pollock

What you order:

Swordfish

What you get:

Mako shark

What you order:

Lobster

What you get:

Langoustine

What you order:

Wild Salmon

What you get:

Farmed Salmon

What you order:

Fish and Chips

What you get:

Expecting cod? If you're eating it in the UK, it's likely spiny dogfish. If they also give you fake potatoes, that would also add to your embarrassment.

What you order:

Blue Crab, Rock Crab

What you get:

Krab. A crab-like product made from fish. Failure nuggets.

This is the part where I tell you handy tips to ensure that you buy the right seafood. Honestly, its really hard. Going to a higher quality restaurant or fish market obviously helps. Even I still fall for the 12 dollar 'fried grouper' sandwich... and end up with a mouthful of cheap tilapia whilst hating my life.

The more you know.

That's the smell of desire, my lady.

2009-06-17T23:08:00.000-05:00

Yeah, so we did some offshore sampling out of Orange Beach, AL last week for some reef fish. We're conducting a study looking at hook sizes/types, reef types, and fish size. We ended up catching a ton of fish to bring back to the lab for processing. We took otoliths, guts, and tissue samples from several species of snapper, grouper, jacks, and grunts. This was on a Friday.

Our fisheries lab is within the General Biology Building on campus and we do alot of fish processing on the premises. All of the fish "leftovers" usually end up in the dumpster behind the building. And of course a ripe, foul stench usually follows suit after a day or two. Everyone else in the building knows its us, and they kind of deal with it. The dumpster gets emptied twice a week, so it usually doesn't get that bad.

We finish up the processing and the fish parts go into the good ole' dumpster. I left that afternoon to go out of town on a weekend trip to see the family. I didn't get back until Monday afternoon, at which time I was assaulted with phone calls and emails about a very smelly incident up at the building. Apparently the heat index over the weekend soared to over 100 degrees. The bag that the fish goodies were in had been split open due to some local wildlife, and the smell coming out of that hellish dumpster could literally melt your face off. It could gag a maggot.

My favorite email came from the Director of Biology:

Hear Ye, Hear Ye. No animal carcasses are to be placed in the dumpster at the back of the biology Bldg. Please keep in mind that the air intake for the AC system is located over the loading dock and sucks all smells into offices, halls and ultimately classrooms in Bldg 58.

Yes, not only was the god awful fish funk on the outside of the building, but it crept its way up into the A/C and into the building. The WHOLE building was defiled. Luckily, the dumpster pickup is on Tuesdays. I bet the guy driving the garbage truck had to hold his breath for that one. The source of the smell disappeared, but the building still embraces a faint waft of fish death.

Sorry for violating your nostrils everyone.

I'll find another dumpster next time =)

The ugliest, tastiest fish in the ocean

2009-06-01T15:13:00.001-05:00

The monkfish. It's a fish that lays on the sea bottom, and it looks like a flattened turd with some gnarly teeth. When staring at the face of this nature's hiccup, who thinks to themselves, "I want to eat you"?

Only a mother could love this face. Maybe a very blind mother.

People on the northeastern coast also call this fugly pancake with fangs a "goosefish". It is reminiscent of an anglerfish, with its filamentous fleshy lures. When the lures are touched by a prey item (or anything for that matter), the massive maw sucks the snack in and the toothy trap slams shut. Monkfish can be up to 5 ft long, and apparently they taste delicious. The tail meat of the monkfish is very similar to a lobster tail, dubbing the meat "poor man's lobster". The fisheries for the monkfish are in north western Europe and North America, where they use beam trawls to stir up the fish from the bottom and into the trawl net. The beam trawl incorporates a solid metal beam that is mounted on a frame which keeps the net open. The beam is about as long as a bus, and weighs between 4 and 8 tons. It is also outfitted with several tons of tickler chains, which are mounted in front of the beam and function to agitate the sea bottom to "tickle" fish into moving upwards and into the net.

Beam trawls are extremely destructive to marine habitats, digging up to 8cm of sea bottom as they are pulled along. Any vertical habitat the trawls are pulled across instantly turns into a parking lot.

Two monkfish fisheries in the Atlantic have been reported to be "rebuilt" by NOAA's Fishery Service a few days ago, along with Alantic Bluefish and Gulf of Mexico King Mackerel. They were fished unsustainably in the past, and recent management has reversed their diminshed numbers. Despite the rebuilt monkfish population, some supermarkets and fish markets continue to boycott species like monkfish, because of the destructive fishing practices that bring them to the dinner plate.

HO HO HO HO, AH HA HA HA...

Honestly, I'd like to try it. I'm pretty open for trying new things, especially from the ocean. But most people after taking one look, would probably rather eat bantha fodder.

She's going down!

2009-05-16T09:37:00.001-05:00

I don't know if you guys have heard of this, but the city of Key West is about to intentionally sink the Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg as an artificial reef at the end of May. The ship had been traded between the navy and army back in the 40's and 50's as a transport ship, later it was given its final duties as a missile range instrumentation ship in the 60's. The ship was then retired in 1983, so it's been a rust pile ever since. Heres a picture of it when it looked a little newer.

Yeah, never thought I'd be on a boat. It's a big blue watery road (yeah)
-T Pain

Apparently a group of big wigs in the city of Key West bought the vessel off the auction block up in Virginia. And a few weeks ago, they sailed the ship down the coast to its final home in Key West.

Why do people want more reef material when they are surrounded by an abundance of beautiful, productive, natural coral reefs? My guess is that they noticed the economy boost in Pensacola, FL after the mothballed aircraft carrier, USS Oriskany was sunk as an artificial reef 2 years ago. They also mentioned that the ship would pull the recreational divers away from the natural coral reefs, reducing further incidental damage to the reefs. But something tells me its more about the dolla dolla bills from diving tourism.

Here's a video of the sinking of the Oriskany:

I love how they make it so unbashedly patriotic. U-S-A! U-S-A!

When they prepared the Oriskany before it was sunk, they stripped out the ship and removed most of the toxic substances, including the bulkhead insulation that contained PCBs. The thousands of miles of wiring in the ship also contained hundreds of pounds of PCBs, but it was too costly to remove.

Hi guys! I give you dermal and ocular lesions, irregular menstrual cycles, fatigue, headache, cough, unusual skin sores, and a lowered immune response.

Sure there are good things that come from creating artificial reefs from retired military ships: increasing diving revenue, providing habitat for fish species (whether it's productive habitat or not, thats another story), and creating jobs. But there are as many problems as there are benefits: leaching toxins or other contaminents of concern, shifting or destructive debris from hurricanes, displacement of marine species, and disruption of migratory patterns.

The navy is looking to reduce its inactive fleet, and it costs less to sink the ships rather than scrap them. I think we're going to see more and more military ships finding their way to the bottom of the ocean, and I'm convinced that the Navy has found its new junkyard.

cool article with some pics of spectacular shipwrecks:http://www.artificialowl.net/2009/05/10-most-spectacular-shipwrecks-from.html

What I do.

2009-05-11T10:37:00.001-05:00

I'm really not sure what direction I'm going with this blog, but I thought I'd hit on some interesting fish topics, things/hobbies going on in my life, science nerd ramblings, and some other junk.

For starters, I live in Pensacola, FL with my lovely wife and two dogs.

Currently, I'm working as a fisheries research technician at the University of West Florida fisheries lab. I just finished my masters thesis, and I couldn't find a job....so my advisor offered me a tech job for the next year. And the best thing is that not only do I get paid a little more, I keep getting to do what I do.

For the past couple of years as a grad student, I've studied artificial reefs off the coast of Florida. We video the fish communities on the reefs with an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle). It's basically an underwater camera with thrusters on it. Here's the one we use:

It's a VideoRay Pro III model, and its about the size of the printer sitting on your desk. The little sub has a color camera up front, a black and white camera in the back, two horizontal thrusters, one vertical thruster, and a missile launcher. Here is some footage taken of some artificial reef modules that were deployed off of Pensacola, FL:

Sorry about the piloting skills, I was throwing back some budweisers. Tons of fish, right? Its my job to identify and count them all.

Another part of the artificial reef study was to map out the movements of reef fish. So we conducted a fish tagging study. I used internal anchor tags that we implant in the side of the fish that look like this:

Here's a tagged red grouper caught on a reef very similar to the video above.

So, the fish get tagged, swim away, and then get caught by fishermen who call the phone number on the tag to claim a small reward. As long as they give me the location of where the fish was caught and the coordinates of the secret rebel base, I send them a check for 10 bucks.

There's a tidbit of my job, I do some other super nerdy stuff in the lab...but that's not very interesting to post here, plus I do some amateur wrestling on the weekends.

peace.

Don't flush your pet down the toilet, kids.

2009-05-08T09:35:00.001-05:00

ok, so you're moving away and you're not quite sure what to do with the aquarium fish.

"What do we do with Spartacus?"

"I don't know, flush him."

"Nah man, I'll let him go in the bay out back."

Kirk Douglas will CUT you.

So it turns out that Spartacus broke free of his four walled, algae riddled prison and into a bay...which leads to the ocean. And Spartacus doesn't happen to be from Miami, his natural home was in the Pacific. So if you have enough animals to break free into the open and get freaky with each other, then you have an exotic species outbreak. That's whats going down in South Florida, the Carribean and up the east coast with all sorts of species, from Burmese pythons to lionfish (Which is what Spartacus happens to be).

I get a million friggin emails a day about this guy. "Lionfish spotted in the Dominican Republic", "Diver observes lionfish on a reef in the Bahamas", "Lionfish found in my pants". People are discovering them everywhere. So it also turns out that lionfish are really good at eating stuff, and there's not too many predators out there that can eat them. So basically, they're taking advantage of the situation and multiplying...exponentially. They're wrecking whole reef ecosystems. Lionfish outcompete grouper and snapper by eating all of their prey. The favorite snack of the lionfish? Grouper and snapper young. So, everyone is panicking on how to get rid of them. The only bright idea was to go out and physically catch the lionfish. Teams of divers have been sent out to "collect" lionfish on reefs, stuffing them into bags as they swim along. Sounds like a drop in the bucket to me.

Not only do lionfish look like they had an unfortunate accident with a paper shredder, they're venomous. In fact, the most venomous fish on the ocean floor. word.

I'm in ur reef, killin ur dudes

Wikipedia entry on lionfish stings:

If a human is envenomed, that person will experience extreme pain, and possibly headaches, vomiting, and breathing difficulties

I'm pretty sure that if you get stung by a lionfish and don't die, you're going to want to.

The lionfish is one of thousands of different animals in the pet trade that end up back out in the wild where they aren't endemic to. They find a niche, they outcompete, and they spread like wildfire.

But the ultimate question about the lionfish is...Do they taste good?