Plumbing the Depths

Years ago, researchers were looking for butterfish off Cape Hatteras because that is where they were supposed to be at that time of year. Fishermen told them the fish were in the Gulf of Maine.

“None of the academic oceanographers had heard of that,” said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution senior scientist Glen Gawarkiewicz.

Oceanographers also thought melting ice in Greenland, caused by climate change, would bring cold fresh water from the north to the continental shelf. Fishermen said the opposite was happening. The fishermen were right.

As I landed in the Kona airport, I was curious about what made Hawai’i such a special place for aquaculture.  So special that the Builders’ Initiative (an offshoot of the Walton Family Foundation) paid all the expenses for two dozen participants to spend four days in Hawai’i on an educational site visit organized by Meridian Institute and Ocean Strategies. Participants came from around the country, representing commercial fishing, recreational fishing, environmental groups, native Hawaiians, and the aquaculture industry.

As anyone who spends time near the water knows, seals have made a dramatic comeback. Check out Google’s aerial images of Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge; see all those little ant-like blobs on the beach? Each one is several hundred pounds of ocean-going carnivore. We’re a long way from the early 1900s, when both Maine and Massachusetts paid bounties for seals, and we nearly exterminated them from the region.

A few years ago, dragger fishermen were calling John Pappalardo, CEO of the Fishermen’s Alliance, saying they were catching a lot of fluke.

There is a good market for the tasty, white fish, but fishermen were frustrated because they were throwing them overboard.

“They don’t have permits to catch them,” said Pappalardo.

Years ago, fisheries scientist George Maynard was working with a fisherman so interested in the ocean’s temperature – and how it would affect his catch – that he created a unique method to figure it out.

“He had been using an infrared heat gun from Harbor Freight Tools to take the temperature of fish as they came up in his nets,” Maynard remembered.

When scientists were poised to install the Coastal Pioneer Array, a system that depends on 10 moored monitors as well as underwater gliders and autonomous underwater vehicles, fishermen raised alarms about all that instrumentation in the ocean.

Glen Gawarkiewicz, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute senior scientist who relies on data from the array, remembers the “hullabaloo” and one meeting where researchers explained how information collected would increase oceanic understanding.

Fishermen were convinced. One captain, Fred Mattera, executive director of Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island, asked a question: Why is the temperature of the continental shelf 72 degrees in December?

The waters off the Cape have long been popular for tuna, marlin and sharks, as well as the fishermen that chase them. Recently, those waters have proved attractive for wind energy companies as well, and it’s unclear what that means for the fisheries.   

“If you put in hundreds of turbines, what is the cumulative impact?” asked Michael Pierdinock, who serves on the U.S. International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas Advisory Committee.