7/19/2013-SNAPPERS!!!!

Last night the acoustic crew “mowed the lawn” through a pretty sizable area. The scientists determine areas before leaving on the cruise that they would like to know more information about. During the night, the ship literally motors back and forth across the area, using a piece of equipment which collects information about the depth & “hardness” of a wide swath of bottom under the boat based on the acoustic echo that it provides. This is important to finding fish because many fish species (especially reef fish) prefer to live in areas where the bottom is hard (rocky) and/or the depth changes. Therefore, if we can pin-point habitat which seems suitable, there is a higher likelihood of finding the fish we are interested in finding.  In the morning, the mapping crew  gave Zeb the data in the morning. He picked out a few areas to sample. The mapping work had definitely found some good areas. We ended up catching about 17 red snapper(Lutjanus campechanus) throughout the whole day along with hundreds of black seabass (Centropristis striata), tomtate (Haemulon aurolineatum), scup (Stenotomus sp.), and a few assorted oddballs like gray triggerfish (Balistes capriscus), sand perch (Diplectrum formosum), and bank seabass (Centropristis ocyurus).

SEFIS doesn’t need additional information on most of these fish, so they are just measured, weighed, and returned to the sea. However, red snapper is a really high-priority species because fisherman really enjoy catching them & we don’t have a very good idea of how many are out there. We take a variety of samples from every red snapper we capture. These include length & weight, along with a piece of fin for DNA analysis, otoliths for aging, a piece of gonad for sex determination & how ready they are to mate, and stomachs to learn about what they eat. All of these samples are labeled individually & taken back to the lab for scientists to use on shore. All of this information will be invaluable in getting a better picture of how many red snapper are living in the South Atlantic Bight.  After the samples are taken, the fish are filleted and the meat saved to give to homeless shelters when we get back to port.

7/18/2013-First Day of Trapping

This was the first day of trapping. None of the scientists working on deck had ever worked on this boat before. Two are experienced at trapping. The rest were totally green. It was super cute because they teacher, grad student & less experienced folks were extra excited about everything that came up. Sometimes you forget how novel some of this stuff is, how different it is for those who’ve never done it before. It is good to be reminded of this fact.

Before breakfast, the scientists on deck baited 6 traps with menhaden, a stinky, oily fish that brings in the fish we want to catch. After breakfast we arrived on station & set up each trap with the two different types of video cameras that I maintain. A Canon video camera in an underwater housing is posted overlooking the mouth of the trap. A GoPro is pointed the opposite direction on top of the trap to capture habitat that might be behind the mouth.

Cameras are used on the traps for two reasons. One reason is to check for “reefy” type habitat, where the fish we are after might like to live. If a trap is deployed on “non-reef,” we can often disregard the fact that there were no fish inside of it, because we wouldn’t expect the fish to live in that area, anyway. The other (and the reason a higher quality camera-Canon camcorder is used) is that a lot of fish species we are interested in learning about aren’t always interested in entering traps. They may be present in the area, but not go into the trap. Therefore, we can use the video record to determine who was around the trap, even if the trap doesn’t catch any fish (reading the videos for fish was something I did before becoming a teacher & something I still do on the side).

Once the traps are set up, the officer driving the boat drives to the place where the PI (principle investigator) has decided he wants the traps to be set. Once the boat is in position, the Pisces deck crew launch the trap over the side (This is a job that is often done by the scientists, but not on this boat). Once the trap has gone in the water, we move on to the next location. Once traps have soaked for approximately 90 minutes, it’s time to bring them back onboard & find out what was captured, and download the videos to a hard drive to determine what types of habitat were present and what types of fish were present who may not have entered the trap.

This day of trapping was not super exciting. In the first 6 traps, we caught a fairly large number of red porgy (Pagrus pagrus), which is a neat fish, but in my experience often indicates a kindof mediocre habitat. Not a whole lot of other “reef” species like to live in the areas where red porgies live. We did capture some of the largest ones anyone onboard had ever seen. One was almost 2 feet long, which is huge for a red porgy. We also caught 2 greater amberjack (Seriola dumerili) in one of those traps. After completing the first set of the day it was time to break for lunch (a hard morning’s work, ha ha!). During lunch, we motored to the next set of trap sites, and were on station by about 1215 to throw another set of traps over the side. 

There is Coast Guard mandate that all ships of a certain size must complete drills ((man-overboard, fire, and abandon ship) within 24 hours of getting underway (this happens even on cruise ships). The crew had scheduled our drills for 1230, so once we got the gear in the water, the whole ship’s company moved into “fire drill.” For us, this meant a lot of standing around (since they don’t want to scientists to get in the way while the crew is trying to fight a fire). We moved into an abandon ship drill in which the whole ship’s company pretends that the ship is sinking VERY slowly. We arrive at our muster station with a PFD, immersion suit, long pants, hats, etc. to increase the chances of long-term survival in a life raft. We even had to put the immersion suits on, which is always an experience.

Once drills were over, we hauled the second set of traps, which had been soaking during this time. The first 2 traps were blanks, no fish at all. The next 3 had a few Pagrus in them. The last one had a good variety. Along with the Pagrus, there was a scamp (Mycteroperca phenax) and a moray eel, which are always a bit dicey to handle.  I got everything downloaded & got cameras ready for tomorrow. A very short & easy day at sea for me.

We are currently using the multibeam bathymetry mapping equipment to find new locations to place traps tomorrow. The ship will continuing “running lines” until we have mapped the entire bottom in this one area, looking for reef-type habitats.

7/17/2013-Departure Day

We got up in the morning & met to go over our roles for the trip. Zeb walked me through what I would be doing with the video cameras. When these locations are sampled, one chevron trap is deployed at each location. It is baited with menhaden & two video cameras are secured on top of the traps. My job is to prepare all of the video cameras to go onto the traps & then make sure that all of the data comes back off of the cameras & gets backed up on 2TB hard drives.

The two types of cameras are Canon Camcorders in underwater housings & GoPro cameras set to record video. The big canon camera is facing over the mouth of the trap, while the GoPro is secured facing the other way. The reason the researchers want two cameras is so that they can get some idea of the habitat present in multiple directions.

We left the dock at 1400 (2pm) & motored out of the Navy yard at Mayport. Much different from Tampa Bay, we sailed out of the yard, into the channel between the jetties & were able to see blue water within 20 minutes. There was a very distinctive tide line right near the edge of the channel. The St. John’s River meets the Atlantic at Jacksonville.  All of its muddy, fresh water dumps out into the ocean at this one point. The fresh water creates a lens on top of the salty water of the ocean, which you can see as a very distinct line on the top of the ocean. It’s quite remarkable.

This was another fairly low-key day. Mostly getting off the dock, getting accustomed to the ship & setting up our work stations. I set up all of my video cameras so they are ready to be put in the water tomorrow morning. The seas are fairly flat, so the scientists set up a cornhole game in the middle of the back deck. In part, the folks on the night crew are trying to stay up late so that they can work all night tomorrow night. But, several of us were getting into it. Apparently last cruise, there was a very serious cornhole tournament with brackets and everything. We’ll see what happens this time.

Right now we are steaming toward our first sampling area about 75 miles off of Savannah, Georgia. Tomorrow we begin setting gear. I’m excited to see what we catch. We are going to some areas that aren’t well known, so it is always interesting to find out what type of habitats & fish we find!

7/16/2013-Arriving at the ship

We arranged to meet up outside of the Mayport Navy base at 5 pm. There were 4 vehicles coming from different areas of the Southeast & everyone made it on time. The science crew is made up of a conglomeration of NOAA fisheries scientists, graduate students, and one high school teacher (besides me) who is participating in the NOAA teachers at sea program. 

The graduate students are students at University of South Carolina, East Carolina University & College of Charleston. The NOAA biologists are from Beaufort, NC, Panama City, FL & Providence, RI. The high school teacher is a very animated guy from southern Illinois. He is very excited about his first experience at sea & is interested in bouncing ideas off of me about ways to incorporate what he is learning into hands-on lessons for his students. It should be very interesting to talk to him. It will also be good to get to interact with another teacher & learn some things about incorporating these types of lessons into my own teaching.

I am excited to get to interact with some folks I’ve known for several years as well as some new people who I haven’t met before. It will be really interesting to hear what the graduate students are working on and see how things are done on this coast. I am excited to get started. We will muster on the back deck at 9 am tomorrow to start getting a few things rigged & getting ready to leave the dock. We are scheduled to leave at 2 pm tomorrow. Let the fun begin!

Packing for Mars

Starting to get my gear read for my upcoming research cruise aboard the NOAA ship Pisces. This cruise will be 16 days at sea, plus one day to get to the ship, load the ship, etc. The scientific crew will converge on Jacksonville, FL tomorrow (Tuesday, July 16) and leave the dock in the morning of the next day (Wednesday, July 17).

Background (Purpose of cruise): This research cruise is one of the principle sampling events for NOAA's SEFIS Program (Southeast Fisheries Independent Survey). The purpose of the SEFIS program is to record population sizes for reef fishes (primarily groupers and snappers) found in an area of the Atlantic called the South Atlantic Bight (SAB), which extends from Cape Hatteras in the north to Cape Canaveral in the south. This is an incredibly huge area and rather a large task, but it's an important one to get right.
The federal law known as Magnuson-Stevens dictates that all fisheries within United States territorial waters must be maintained at a "sustainable level." Basically, this means that fisheries (commercial and recreational) are not allowed to catch more fish of a given species than can be replaced by the population continuing to breed.
In order to have even a guess at how many fish may be killed, NOAA has to know with some degree of certainty how many there are. There are two main types of data which contribute to NOAA understanding how many fish exist in a population. Those are fisheries dependent data (information about the fish that fishermen keep, which is influenced by current regulations, how much $$ they are going to make on that species, etc.) and fisheries independent data (information created by scientists searching for fish irrespective of these outside factors).
For many years the primary form of data for snapper and grouper fisheries in the SAB has been fisheries dependent data. This state of affairs has created a scenario in which fisheries managers never see data on small/young snappers (since they are illegal for fishers to keep). Therefore, the population models have said that the snapper populations are small, with very few young individuals (because fishers are not allowed to keep them, and this was the only source of data available). Enter SEFIS, a program designed to collect the fishery-independent data necessary to create a more accurate picture of the fish populations and possibly increase the total allowable catch for the fishery in the future. (Hopefully that long-winded explanation gives a little background on how fisheries decisions are made & why anyone would want to do this in the first place...)

Now for my involvement: throughout my career as a fisheries biologist (which I was before I became a teacher) and other wanderings since college, I've been on a number of research cruises & sailing voyages. By and large, I have enjoyed them & I have always learned quite a bit from each trip. I was offered the opportunity to join this cruise & I thought that it would be an excellent opportunity to increase my knowledge of fisheries as well as possibly come up with some new experiences to share with my students.

Sometimes I feel like I am packing to go on a Mars mission when I start packing to go offshore. I'm sure this is over-stating the case, but I always remember when headed offshore that there are no stores out there. If I forget something, I will live without it until I get back. In many cases, this isn't really a big deal. Do I strictly NEED my ipad? Of course not. If I forgot it or the charger, I would survive. Camera, same thing. Of course, other things are a little more of a bummer if I forget them. Underwear, for example. Living basically outdoors for 2 weeks with a single pair of underwear would be a major bummer. Toothbrush? same deal. So, I make a list & start a couple days ahead of time. The other analogy I can draw to traveling to outer space is that I always want to pack as efficiently as possible. I want to have all of the gear I will use, but I don't want to lug extra stuff with me that I will have to store in my bunk if I'm not going to be using it.

Throughout the cruise I will be attempting to update this blog with additional background on fisheries, my role on the scientific crew, information about working aboard this ship, and any interesting critters we happen to see or catch. Stay tuned...