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At the beginning of this century, the coho in the Russian River were almost completely eradicated.
“We were seeing less than 10 adults returning to the Russian River watershed, when years ago there were thousands of fish returning,” says Mariska Obedzinski, who helps run California Sea Grant’s Russian River Salmon and Steelhead Monitoring Program.
The Russian River watershed was once a stronghold for Central California’s coho salmon population, but Obedzinski says things like extreme habitat loss and drought years have led to the downturn.
Over the past few months, graduate students and researchers at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories have scoured coastal waters, collecting seaweed in the hopes of finding a native species that could help gassy cows.
Cows belch—a lot. And their burps (as well as those of other ruminants) make them the top polluters of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. A researcher in Australia published a study showing near-complete reductions of methane in the burps of cows that were fed minute amounts of seaweed—specifically, asparagopsis taxiformis at 2 or more percent of the total feed.
Dr. Luke Gardner, a California Sea Grant Extension Specialist based at the Moss Landing laboratories, is hoping to find a native California seaweed with properties similar to asparagopsis.
The Tuna Harbor Fishermen’s Festival brings together fish, consumers and commercial fisherman to promote the local catch and sustainable practices.
“This is a way to connect people to the source,” said Nina Venuti, a researcher with California Sea Grant. It’s also a way to get people thinking of San Diego commercial fishing as more than tuna, she said.
For more than 25 years, tens of thousands of young white sea bass have been under the care of volunteers from the Balboa Angling Club, who want to see more of the fish in the Pacific. The fish will stay in the grow-out pen before being released when they’re about a foot long to continue maturing in the wild, enhancing a population that was nearly decimated between the 1950s and 1980s.
Recovery rates, however, have been low, according to a 2017 paper by the California Sea Grant Extension Program out of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Of about 2,000 fish recaptured throughout the life of the enhancement program, about 200 had Newport tags. With more than 2 million fish released so far, that’s an overall return rate of less than 1%. Recapturing some of the fish is intended to see if and how fish reared in captivity enhance the total population.
California Sea Grant Extension Specialist Luke Gardner leads a project to explore whether adding California-grown seaweeds to cattle feed could help reduce methane emissions. Scientists at Moss Landing Marine Labs aquaculture center, where Gardner is based, hope that the project could help revitalize the dairy industry while simultaneously propelling the algal aquaculture industry and reducing U.S. dairies carbon emissions.
Luke Gardner, California Sea Grant Aquaculture Specialist at Moss Landing Marine Labs, notes that Hog Island Oysters must now raise the pH of their Humboldt Bay hatchery waters in order for their oyster seed to settle and grow. To support the industry, aquaculture center researchers are studying ways to buffer ocean acidity through integrated techniques where algae and shellfish grown together in multi-chamber recirculating tank networks. This research is critical, notes Gardner, because we are “rapidly approaching a time when shellfish growth will be impacted by ocean acidification.”