$1.4 Million to New Projects
Biologists, Physicists and Experts in Finfish Culture and Pathogen Pollution Win Awards
Contact:
James Eckman, Director
California Sea Grant College Program
La Jolla, CA
E.: jeckman@ucsd.edu
T.: (858) 534-4440
Relevant Links:
Tools:
Share This Story:
Revised:
January 30, 2012
Without sandy beaches, coastal tourism in Southern California would take a dive. A new Sea Grant project will explore what changing sea levels and storm intensities will mean for local beaches. Suzanne Johnson
January 30, 2012
Media Contact: Christina S. Johnson, csjohnson@ucsd.edu, 858-822-5334
LA JOLLA – A fish ecologist at UC Berkeley with an idea for rebuilding Central Valley salmon and a marine ecologist at the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research who studies the consequences of oceanic conditions on prey availability are among this year’s recipients of California Sea Grant research grants.
Others receiving awards include a physical oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who wants to know what changing storm intensities will mean for local sandy beaches, and a biologist at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute with a vision for creating a sustainable domestic tuna farming industry.
“On behalf of California Sea Grant, I am delighted to announce our support for these new projects,” says California Sea Grant Director James Eckman. “All the projects are quite novel, and they continue California Sea Grant’s long history of excellence in focusing fundamental research on a range of important coastal issues. These include changes in coastal ocean conditions and their impacts on ecosystems and beach dynamics; fish aquaculture, and the general health of our coastal ecosystems.”
Five hatcheries in the Central Valley produce chinook salmon smolts for release in the wild. Scientists hope to improve returns of adults. Dick Pool/Proll-Troll Fishing Products
In all, California Sea Grant awarded about $1.4 million to support nine new projects, all of which were reviewed by outside experts for their scientific merit and relevance to current marine issues. Most of the awards also include support for graduate students. The 2-to-3-year projects are slated to begin in February.
“We are very excited by the award and its potential to help guide management,” says Stephanie Carlson, an assistant professor of fish ecology at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley.
Carlson, a first-time Sea Grant investigator, studies the dynamics of Pacific salmonids, their ecology and evolution, and the factors influencing their persistence. Some of her recent work has led her to believe that hatchery practices in the Central Valley may be contributing to boom-bust cycles in salmon returns. Managers currently release large numbers of salmon smolts directly into San Francisco Bay in a big pulse, creating a lottery effect, potentially, whereby lots of smolts risk entering the sea when food resources are scarce.
With Sea Grant support, she and colleagues at UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries will explore whether it might be possible to plan hatchery releases to coincide or “match” with the timing of the spring phytoplankton bloom, which ultimately generates krill, a staple for young salmon.
While Carlson’s team seeks strategies to stabilize and ultimately rebuild Central Valley salmon, another grant winner will attempt to develop a model that could help optimize hatchery releases and improve ecosystem-based fisheries management.
William Sydeman, president of the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research in Petaluma, studies “matches and mismatches” in predator-prey relationships and their linkages to large-scale oceanographic processes. Some of his previous work has shown that the breeding success of Cassin’s auklets in the Gulf of the Farallons is an 18-month leading indicator of Central Valley salmon returns and that the position of the eastward flowing North Pacific Current can dramatically influence krill resources for these animals.
Juvenile salmon, seabirds and rockfish feed on tiny shrimp-like crustaceans known as krill. Jaime Gomez-Gutierrez
The Sea Grant award will allow Sydeman and colleagues to attempt to forecast inter-annual krill availability based on ocean conditions.
Physical oceanography professor Robert Guza at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is leading another new project – one that will apply what’s been learned about surf-zone currents and shallow-water waves to study beach erosion in Southern California.
“We know sea level is probably going up and that storm intensities are likely changing,” says Guza, whose fieldwork for the Sea Grant project will take place at Torrey Pines State Beach in San Diego. “Here is a question: 'What’s going to become of our beaches?’ There is a problem brewing here.”
Results from Guza’s project will be shared with local governments that together oversee a regional strategy for beach sand replenishment.
Yet another new project aims to establish husbandry techniques for mass-rearing captive-bred yellowfin tuna larvae.
Tuna ranches are currently operated as grow-out facilities, in which juveniles are caught in the wild and towed to pens, where they are fed sardines until they reach the desired harvesting size, explains the project’s principal investigator Mark Drawbridge, director of aquaculture research programs at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute in San Diego.
“There is no long-term growth for this approach, and it does nothing to relieve pressure on wild tuna stocks,” says Drawbridge, whose collaborators on the project include scientists at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission in La Jolla and Panama. “There is world-wide interest in closing the life cycle of tuna farming at a commercially viable scale, and the bottleneck is early life-stage survival. There is a huge opportunity here.”
The other projects and their investigators are:
Identifying morphologically similar fish eggs and larvae molecularly – Ron Burton, Scripps, UC San Diego
Investigating effects of low-oxygen and low-pH conditions on squid egg development – Lisa Levin, Ed Parnell and Todd Martz, Scripps, UC San Diego
Modeling larval connectivity for a network of marine protected areas – Steven Morgan, UC Davis and Christopher Edwards, UC Santa Cruz
Investigating effects of ocean warming and acidification on kelp and seaweeds – Jennifer Smith, Scripps, UC San Diego; Scott Hamilton and Michael Graham, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
Evaluating implications of noroviruses on shellfish culture and human health – Stefan Wuertz, Karen Shapiro and Woutrina Miller, UC Davis
.gif){kind=logo}
