This was one of the most harmonious research cruises I have been a part of. Everyone onboard the vessel was highly professional and engaged. Everyone knew their job and got it done like clockwork. We may not have captured as many red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) as people were hoping in our traps. However, the videos were another story. Most of the sites the last several days had red snapper observed on the cameras, and these will be counted along with a variety of other species when the videos are analyzed in the next several months (For the 2012 season I analyized 75 videos, and expect to do about the same for 2013).
All of these data will be combined together for the red snapper stock assessment meeting which will take place next August (2014). Based on the data that has been collected over the past 4 years, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council will decide on the catch limits for commercial and recreational fishers for the following several years. If the data that we collected shows that the population of L. campechanus is healthier than previously thought, the council may open the fishery for longer periods of time or allow larger numbers of fish to be harvested. Our one cruise will not give us this answer. It will be combined with similar data from many cruises over the past few years to make these decisions, and this will be a very short-term dataset. The folks making decisions would like to have at least 10 years of data to go on. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
I would like to close this blog with a note from my friend Zeb, our chief scientist for the trip. I think he says it better that I could.
"The second leg of the 2013 SEFIS cruise on the Pisces completed operations today, and we are now steaming back towards Mayport for a sunrise arrival. It was another successful sampling trip aboard the Pisces, splitting our time between the mid-shelf waters near the Georgia/South Carolina border and those off north-central Florida between St. Augustine and Cape Canaveral. We mapped 148 square kilometers across 21 different areas, resulting in 213 new video/trap stations being sampled.
A big thank you goes out to the night shift (Warren Mitchell, Matt Wilson, David Berrane, Dawn Glasgow, and Neah Baechler), whose long efforts at night consistently resulted in solid multibeam maps every morning from which to choose stations for the day. The quality of maps continues to improve as Warren and Matt whittle down the remaining issues that stand between us and charting-level products. While a few outstanding issues persist, they have worked to document all the effort that has been put towards correcting them and identified some potential next steps.
Video and trap sampling during the day met a series of challenges, from high seas and strong current in the north to very cold bottom temperatures in the south. Overall we caught 35 red snapper, almost all in Georgia, as well as a handful of groupers (red grouper, scamp, coney). Early in the trip we also had a lot of catch of the typical inshore characters (black seabass, triggerfish, tomtates, etc.), but as we moved to Florida and the cold temperatures set in catches were restricted to small catches of almost exclusively black seabass--most other fish appeared to either not be present on the reefs or not interested in the bait. Despite the small catches, however, the video samples revealed lots of new habitat that can be added to our sampling frame as well as many snapper in areas where we caught none. Deck efforts were expertly led by Patrick Raley from the NMFS Panama City lab and Julie Vecchio, a science teacher from St. Petersburg, FL, who is also a longtime colleague of ours in the video sampling world. Many thanks to them as well as the rest of the deck crew, Doug DeVries, Jenny Ragland, and Zach Gillum.
We also had the pleasure of sailing with a NOAA Teacher At Sea, Paul Ritter from Illinois. He was extremely enthusiastic and anxious to help, and, in a first in my experience in sailing with participants in this program, was actively looking for ways to get his students to engage with the actual data we collected on board. By the time we disembark in the morning, he (along with Julie) will have finished designing a science lab for high school students that incorporates some of the videos we collected to teach them how NOAA uses video to monitor fish populations--an impressive feat considering he also worked long days on deck.
Finally, a big thank you to the officers and crew of the Pisces. It's always a pleasure to sail on this ship, as accommodating and professional a team as exists in the fleet. I'm looking forward to being back here again in 2014!"
For me, I met some great people, got to interact with some long-time colleagues, saw some amazing things & had a lot of laughs. I always learn something going to sea & this trip was no exception. I hope you learned something from reading my musings.
I had totally neglected to link to the official teacher at sea blog for this trip, so here it is (sorry Paul). If you are interested in a slightly more zany & entertaining analysis, here it is. Paul Ritter's blog
I had totally neglected to link to the official teacher at sea blog for this trip, so here it is (sorry Paul). If you are interested in a slightly more zany & entertaining analysis, here it is. Paul Ritter's blog
