Plumbing the Depths

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.

After a day at work Mel Sanderson hustled home, ate a quick dinner, and set off immediately for the Chatham Fish Pier to meet Captain Bob Keese who was coming in from a scallop trip.

When she arrived she found out from another fisherman that he had just finished unloading and had already left to put his boat , F/V Sandra Anne, on the mooring. But he had left something for her:

Rachel Barrales was in middle school when she first saw the Keeling Curve at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, which shows carbon dioxide levels in the environment increasing to nosebleed heights.

A social science survey on human perceptions of growing numbers of seals and sharks on Cape Cod may play a role in fisheries management in the coming weeks.

Andrew Cummings has had a successful shellfish farm in Wellfleet for 25 years, with room to grow, and has offered employees a salary of $54,000 to start, a yearly five-percent raise, and profit sharing.

Spread over 1,400 square miles in southern New England, five wind farms planned by different companies all must do studies to gauge their impacts.