As we wrap up Seafood Month 2019, meet Laurel Bryant, Chief of External Affairs for NOAA Fisheries. Throughout her 25-year career at NOAA, she has championed the benefits of healthy seafood and supported strong partnerships across the seafood industry.

When a right whale dies and we find it in U.S. waters, we work with stranding network partners to do a necropsy so that we can find out more about the whale and what caused its death. The right whale known as “Snake Eyes” likely died from entanglement in Canadian fishing gear.

Check out this video, which shows how observers spend a large portion of their 90-day deployments. Boats fish 24/7, so there are no weekends, except the few hours when the boat is at port offloading.

The Aerial Surveys of Arctic Marine Mammals project records data on all marine mammal carcasses sighted during aerial surveys, and photographs most of them. Aerial surveys for whales offer a vastly different view compared to boat-based surveys.

A recent study found that the survival and eventual return of juvenile Snake River salmon and steelhead to spawning streams as adults depends more on their size than the way they pass through hydroelectric dams on their migration to the ocean. Juveniles that travel downstream through turbine bypass systems survive at about the same rate as those that travel through spillways or turbines.

This NOAA Fisheries–funded study will help managers better understand if crabs that are released back to the wild survive any fisheries-related injuries. The Kona crab (also called spanner crab) is a rare delicacy in Hawaiʻi. It’s also tightly regulated. Research suggests fishermen should release 80 percent of Kona crabs they catch.

On a typical day at Pearl and Hermes Atoll working for NOAA's Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program, research assistant Paige Mino spots a bottle. Of course, the atoll is littered with plastic and glass bottles, but this one contains something special: a 21-year old message.

This is an annual reminder that NOAA Fisheries offers you three ways to receive your fishery bulletins. These bulletins contain fishing regulation information and are typically referred to as "the blue sheets."

The New England Fishery Management Council requested the comment period be reopened due to concerns that an error in a URL in the proposed rule may have prevented some individuals from submitting comments. We are reopening the comment period through November 18, using the correct URL.

In collaboration with shellfish industry and regulatory partners, researchers from the Northeast and Northwest Fisheries Science Centers are using GoPro cameras to investigate how fish and invertebrates interact with different types of shellfish aquaculture.  The data collected from these projects will significantly increase our understanding of how shellfish beds and gear influence habitat availability for wild species. 

The Northeast Fisheries Science Center's fall Ecosystem Monitoring, or EcoMon, cruise aboard NOAA Ship Gordon Gunter has experienced a variety of weather, and some research firsts for that survey. This latest blog post provides an overview of the monitoring activities planned along the Northeast Shelf.