NOAA Fisheries has announced its plans for funding through the Inflation Reduction Act. For our region, this funding means additional support for North Atlantic right whale recovery, regional implementation of the Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative, support for our surveys and survey modernization, seawater system improvements at our Sandy Hook Laboratory, support for our region’s fishery councils to assist regulatory responses to climate change, and much more.

President Biden officially declared June 2023 as National Ocean Month. What better way to celebrate than to listen to ocean sounds? Good news—you can! Check out our updated collection of ocean sounds that include fish and invertebrates, marine mammals, ocean environments, and human-made.

At the end of May, 240 seventh grade students from Falmouth, Massachusetts public schools descended upon the village of Woods Hole to learn all about ocean science during our first “7th Grade Day of Science.” The students participated in a science scavenger hunt at our Woods Hole Science Aquarium, toured the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s R/V Tioga, learned how and why we’re developing fishing gear to reduce harm to endangered species, how to dissect fish and age fish, and more! We had a BLAST and think they did too! This event was sponsored by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole Sea Grant, and our science center. 

The Best Of Cape Cod Life votes are in and our Woods Hole Science Aquarium is a winner in the 2023 Reader's Choice Awards! We netted a silver award for “best Upper Cape kid's activity.” Our Aquarium is the nation’s oldest public aquarium, exhibiting fish and invertebrates found in our region’s waters and is home to Bubba, our 23-year-old harbor seal. The aquarium is currently open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed on federal holidays. If you’re going to be on Cape Cod this summer, grab your bikes, get some ice cream, and come check us out! 

Cape Cod Life is a regional lifestyle magazine. Its annual reader’s choice awards are the original and longest-running readers' choice awards for Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The awards are based on thousands of votes by their readers.

We recently signed a 5-year formal partnership agreement with the University of Rhode Island to study the effects of offshore wind energy development on marine ecosystems and the people who live near, or work on, the ocean. Under the agreement, the multidisciplinary approach will focus on understanding these complicated relationships on an ecosystem level. 

The latest Current Conditions report is live! These biannual reports led by our science center use data collected during seasonal scientific surveys and other data sources to help show changes and trends in the Northeast U.S. continental shelf ecosystem. The spring 2023 report focuses on the last half of 2022 and includes sections on temperature, fall thermal day transition, chlorophyll, and fish distribution changes and trends.

Did you know we have a blog? It’s called Field Fresh: Science in Motion and it’s a place for our scientists to share their field and lab experiences and adventures. We’ve just posted three new blogs. Aquaculture Systems and Ecology Branch post-doc Sam Gurr writes about his work on bay scallops. He’s looking at how environmental change could jog their cellular memory and help them adapt to climate change. Sam’s work is part of a larger multigenerational ocean acidification study led by our Milford Lab. Cooperative Research Branch field biologist Emma Fowler writes about her work on the spring Gulf of Maine Cooperative Bottom Longline Survey. In her first blog and second blog, she shares some of the sights and scenes, unusual finds, bucket list achievements, and surprises. 

Our 2023 Atlantic sea scallop survey planned for May 13 through June 13, was canceled because of mechanical difficulties with the survey vessel, the R/V Hugh R. Sharp. The University of Delaware owns and operates the Sharp and NOAA Fisheries has been chartering it annually since 2008 for this survey. To address data gaps, we’re in contact with other groups who survey in the region through the Atlantic Sea Scallop Research Set-Aside Program. We’re also working on contingencies for alternative survey platforms including but not limited to using the NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow for sea scallop work.

Commercial Fishing Crew Survey Underway

Our Social Sciences Branch is conducting a voluntary survey to help assess the social and economic well-being of commercial fishing vessel crews and hired captains in our region. It will help us better understand how management and environmental change may affect important, socially vulnerable groups. Survey data will be used to examine trends in commercial fishing vessel crew demographics, participation and practices, views on fishery management, job satisfaction, and well-being over time. This information can help decision makers understand the potential social and economic impacts of management decisions. 

Experimental On-Demand Gear Trials Completed

Between February 1 and April 30, 2023, we collaborated with 12 federally permitted commercial trap/pot vessels to test on-demand (“ropeless”) fishing gear in federal waters that were closed to fishing with static vertical lines. Participants completed 527 hauls, 335 in the Massachusetts Restricted Area and 192 in the South Island Restricted Area. There were no gear conflicts or lost gear during the closed area trials. Our science center’s current exempted fishery permit, required to test on-demand gear, allows up to 100 vessels to help test and improve on-demand gear systems. On-demand systems remove the vertical line in the water column to reduce the risk of large whale entanglement in American lobster and Jonah crab fisheries. 

Our permit expires on August 21, 2023. We have applied for a new permit, covering August 21, 2023 through August 20, 2024. We’ve proposed expanding this work to include more fishermen and gear types. Full details on the proposal can be found in the Federal Register notice. The public comment period is open through July 5, 2023. 

Last January, a peer review panel examined our decision support tool used to inform management options related to endangered North Atlantic right whales. The tool is a software program that helps us understand the relative risk of right whale entanglement in fixed gear fisheries throughout U.S. Atlantic waters. It also allows us to evaluate entanglement risk reduction under different mitigation actions

External fishery experts peer reviewed five mid-Atlantic stocks going through the management track assessment process June 26–28. The assessment meeting focused on deep-sea red crab, scup, longfin inshore squid, summer flounder, and bluefish and marks the final stage for the June 2023 management track assessments. The complete 2023-2027 Northeast Region Coordinating Council stock assessment schedule can be found here. 

A new study published in Fisheries Oceanography reports that bottom temperature, warm core rings, subsurface features, and frontal dynamics explain more than 50 percent of the observed variability in catch of this species since 2011. The work combined expert knowledge from our scientists, other researchers, and industry members to develop a statistical model to identify oceanographic variables driving the highly dynamic distribution of northern shortfin squid. In 2021, this fishery was valued at $19.6 million. However, it’s known for large annual catch fluctuations. This research provides a foundation for future forecasting models.

We completed our spring Bottom Trawl Survey in May with much less success than planned. First, I want to thank our staff who made the best out of a bad situation. They worked hard to collect the data that they could. Second, I want to acknowledge the many people in our region who’ve been working to develop additional data sources we can use in our stock assessments.

There have been long-standing recommendations to develop additional species abundance indices both on the national scale and regional scale. We’ve been working with our partners through various survey programs for many years to implement these recommendations. For example, our Cooperative Research Program’s Gulf of Maine Bottom Longline Survey celebrates its 10-year anniversary this year. They work with industry partners to collect data in rocky and hard-to-reach areas in the Gulf of Maine. Their data complements other data sources like our bottom trawl survey, and provides a more complete picture of fisheries in our region. The Maine-New Hampshire Inshore Trawl Survey and Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s Northeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program Survey continues to collect fisheries data with NOAA Fisheries funding and the Massachusetts Inshore Trawl survey continues to collect data with in-kind support from our science center. 

We’ve also been developing egg and larval abundance indices (PDF, 15 p.) that we use in assessments. We’ve been working with academic scientists to develop catch-per-unit-effort indices (PDF, 236 p.) based on recommendations from the New England Fishery Management Council’s Fishery Data for Stock Assessment Working Group. Working together to develop these additional indices of abundance makes our region less reliant on one data series, more resilient to data gaps, and results in improved and more trusted science.