NECAN Industry Webinar Series
The next webinar in the Industry Webinar Series will be held on Tuesday September 18th, 2018 at 2:00 pm ET.
Register Here!
'OCA Impacts on Shellfish Hatcheries'
presented by Alan Barton, Bill Mook, and Michael Congrove.
Session abstracts are below, for the full webinar series schedule and past recordings, check out the NECAN Industry Webinar page.
Alan Barton, Whiskey Creek Shellfish
Over the past decade, the Pacific Northwest Shellfish Industry has been grappling with the effects of Ocean Acidification on commercial production of Pacific oyster larvae. The region is characterized by strong summertime upwelling, which brings naturally acidic deeper ocean water up onto the Oregon and Washington continental shelf. As such, our region is already ‘on the edge’ of the saturation state threshold required for normal larval shell development. The added impacts of human-induced acidification observed over the past decade pushed our coastal bays over this threshold, leading to devastating seed production failures from 2007-2009. Our industry has made a great deal of progress in understanding, and adapting to OA in recent years, and have restored much of our historic production through coordinated monitoring up and down our coastline along with development of treatment systems in commercial hatcheries. These efforts have not only allowed us to address the direct effects of OA on initial larval shell development, but have greatly improved our understanding of secondary and tertiary factors affecting production, as the advance of OA in our region alters the way our coastal ecosystems function.
Bill Mook, Mook Sea Farm
In 2009, Mook Sea Farm, an oyster farm and hatchery in Maine, began experiencing larval production problems. These problems included the occasional failure of fertilized eggs to become viable larvae, but more often, prolonged larval durations. Larval production was highly unpredictable. West Coast hatcheries had recently experienced similar larval production problems which were determined to be caused by decreased calcium carbonate saturation states in their incoming water. In contrast to the West Coast, our water’s decreased saturation states resulted from a combination of increased atmospheric CO2 and increased freshwater runoff from heavy precipitation events. Hatchery production was restored to better than pre-2009 levels by buffering all seawater used for larval and juvenile production in the hatchery. We use inexpensive pH meters and controllers to maintain the pH in our hatchery culture systems. Along with increasing atmospheric CO2, precipitation in the Northeast is projected to increase in spring and fall months. While we can control seawater chemistry in the hatchery, many questions remain about the extent to which coastal acidification will affect juvenile and market oyster grow out at our lease site. In 2014, working with Dr. Joe Salisbury of UNH we installed sophisticated seawater monitoring equipment to help us answer some of these questions.
Michael Congrove, Oyster Seed Holdings
In Search of a Solution to the Shellfish Hatchery Water Quality Puzzle
Shellfish aquaculture production has seen a steady rise worldwide for the last 40 years. Integral in this has been the ability to consistently produce vast amounts of shellfish larvae in increasingly sophisticated shellfish hatcheries. The fact that these hatchery’s primary task is culturing a calcifying larval organism, a fraction of a millimeter in ultimate size, make them uniquely susceptible to the effects of ocean acidification and/or coastal acidification. Increasing frequency of unexplained poor larval production has spurred commercial shellfish hatcheries in Virginia to loosely organize around the common goal of better understanding the effects of variable ambient water quality on larval production success. Carbonate chemistry being one, albeit big, piece of the total water quality puzzle. This presentation will explore the water quality puzzle and efforts to solve it, as it pertains to shellfish hatcheries from the perspective of Oyster Seed Holdings, a commercial oyster hatchery located on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay in mesohaline waters.
Citizen Science Workshop Outcomes
In the spring of 2018, NECAN held a series of workshops for community and citizen science monitoring programs in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to consider approaches for monitoring Ocean and Coastal Acidification (OCA). The purpose of these workshops was to foster community outreach and encourage communication and coordination among citizen science monitoring organizations, research, and government programs in order to understand both short and long term conditions of coastal acidification across the Northeast region.
The publication of EPA guidelines for monitoring coastal acidification in the Northeast is a helpful step for researchers to use suitable and comparable methodologies when measuring pH, Total Alkalinity (TA), the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2), and Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC). Authors of the EPA guidelines joined the workshops and provided demonstrations of field and lab monitoring equipment.
During round table discussions, local citizen science monitoring sites were mapped and existing relationships were recognized among monitoring groups. Local science advisors provided information from their research programs and gave examples of the types of instruments they use for measuring OCA parameters. Participants discussed ways of sharing data and the new Ocean Acidification Information Exchange was introduced as a forum for continuing communication and collaboration.
For the full workshop summary and a list of materials and resources, visit the NECAN Citizen Science workshops page.
ECOA Cruise
The East Coast Ocean Acidification (ECOA) cruise was a 34-day scientific adventure down the east coast of the United States to better understand what is driving changes in our ocean’s chemistry. This has been the second ECOA cruise in support of NOAA OAP (Ocean Acidification Program) where the major goal has been to monitor changes in inorganic carbon dynamics mainly due to anthropogenic carbon input. With these data we can begin to establish a time series, as many stations remain constant, to increase our understanding of the controls of ocean acidification and how it impacts ocean ecosystems. Scientists and crew aboard the NOAA ship Henry B. Bigelow departed from Newport, RI on June 25th and began the journey towards the cruise’s northern-most point in Nova Scotia. Two weeks were spent collecting data in the Gulf of Maine to better understand physical and biological processes such as freshwater inputs and phytoplankton productivity to help improve current efforts on modeling ocean acidification. From there, the cruise headed south collecting data in the Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic bight, concluding in Miami, FL on July 29th. During this month at sea, the scientists and crew were hard at work, day and night, taking samples in the water column, measuring for various carbonate parameters using a 24 bottle CTD rosette at depths ranging from 15 to 2,500 meters. Optical properties were also collected to help with understanding ocean acidification from space using satellite data. For more in depth ECOA updates, follow the ECOA Facebook page.
Story Credit: Tyler Mendez
Maine Mollusk Shell Recycling Program for Coastal Acidification Remediation
In 2016, the softshell clam (Mya arenaria) harvest alone in Maine was worth more than $15.6 million at the dock. Quahogs (Mecenaria mercenaria) added another $1.3 million. Non-commercial harvesting is an important recreational activity, and for many residents and visitors, the ability to harvest clams in the afternoon, and share a family clam bake on the beach that evening has been an important family tradition. On the other side of the market, Portland, Maine has become a “foodie” destination, with hundreds of restaurants, many of which serve bivalves like mussels, clams, and oysters. Collectively, these restaurants process many tons of live mollusks annually. Thus restaurants and other food processors are a potentially huge source of bivalve shells that can be recovered from the waste stream and returned to the marine environment as a source of carbonates, as substrate to encourage settling of shell spat, as well as structural material in “living shorelines” and “nature-based solutions” to shoreline erosion.
Research has shown that tidal flats in Casco Bay often have a pH low enough to reduce settling of shellfish larvae and increase mortality of juvenile clams. Data on carbonate saturation is less abundant, but what little research has been done shows a close correlation between pH and aragonite saturation state on the few tidal flats where that has been studied. While acidified condition on tidal flats is by no means the only stressor affecting shellfish populations in our region (non-native predators are also important), acidification of tidal flats is thought to have a negative effect on recruitment and thus potentially on shellfish populations and the viability of the fishery.
Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, working with leadership and support from the Maine Coastal Program, and with the University of Southern Maine Cutler Institute’s Gateway to Opportunity (G2O) program, will pilot a shell recycling program in the Casco Bay region, as a prelude to establishing similar programs statewide.
The pilot project (to be led by Maine Coastal Program Staff) will implement a demonstration recycling program. Components of this project include identifying and collecting sources of shell waste, processing raw shell into useable products, identifying potential uses and users for the shell, and demonstrating beneficial use of shell recycling through remediation of low pH tidal flats, remediation of acidic conditions in Atlantic Salmon waters, use in aquaculture or oyster farming, or use in living shoreline demonstration projects. The project team will also work with local researchers with expertise in the impact of acidification on bivalves and tidal flats to test the effect of use of shell in Casco Bay tidal flats, partner with the Cutler Institute’s Gateway to Opportunity (G2O) program in order to develop a youth engagement strategy for the initiative, and develop a white paper on the potential for larger-scale use of shell in Maine.
New York Department of Environmental Conservation Announces Ocean Acidification Task Force
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos announced the creation of a 14-member Ocean Acidification (OA) Task Force to assess impacts of acidification on the ecological, economic, and recreational health of New York's coastal waters, work to identify contributing factors, and recommend actions to reduce and address negative impacts. The Task Force includes experts in climatology, hydrology, economics, marine fisheries, aquaculture, oceanography, and ecology. The task force's first meeting will be scheduled this fall. Signed into law in 2016, the 14-member Task Force is composed of experts appointed by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, the State Senate, the State Assembly, New York City, and Nassau and Suffolk counties. As the lead agency, DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos' designee will chair the Task Force. The Task Force will also include representatives of the New York State Department of State and the Office of General Services.
More Information on the OA Task Force here.
Upcoming Events
Regional Association for Research on the Gulf of Maine (RARGOM)
Annual Science Meeting, October 26, 2018 in Portland, ME
Abstract submission deadline: October 5, 2018
United States-Japan Natural Resources 46th Scientific Symposium
'Marine Aquaculture in a Changing Environment' November 13 - 16, 2018 in Mystic, CT
Abstract submission deadline: September 17, 2018
New England Ocean Science Education Collaborative (NEOSEC)
Ocean Literacy Summit, November 15 and 16, 2018 in Boston, MA
Maine Ocean and Coastal Acidification Partnership (MOCA)
Winter Meeting, November 29, 2018 in Augusta, ME
Upcoming Webinars
Sharing Ocean Acidification Resources for Communicators and Educators (SOARCE)
Beyond Dissolving Shells in Acid: New Approaches to Teaching Ocean Acidification, September 18, 2018, 6:00 pm EDT
Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network (MACAN) and NECAN Webinar
Managing Global Acidification on a Regional Scale, October 2, 2018, 1:00 pm EDT
NECAN Industry Webinar #4
OCA Impacts on Lobsters, October 4, 2018 2:00 pm EDT
National Marine Sanctuaries
Understanding Ocean Acidification, October 17, 6:00 pm EDT
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If you have any updates you’d like shared with NECAN, please email emily@neracoos.org
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