Stewards of the Ocean

Leading the way to cleaner, healthier, more sustainable oceans

By Craig Collins

For more than 30 years after

a chemical manufacturer stopped dumping waste into the sewers of Los Angeles, the kelp forests of the Palos Verdes Shelf, an ecosystem contaminated with the pesticide DDT and other toxins, recovered slowly. By the early 2010s, only about 25 percent of the original kelp canopy had been restored, stalled in a negative feedback loop: without kelp to provide habitat and cover for animals that fed on sea urchins, the urchins – which devour kelp and other algae – had transformed the area into an “urchin barren,” teeming with spiny animals that gobbled up new kelp plants before they had a chance to grow.

After years of monitoring, research and planning, NOAA and its partners sprang into action. Teams of NOAA-certified volunteer divers ventured out to gather urchins – by the summer of 2020, 4.2 million urchins had been collected in more than 8,000 hours underwater – freeing up space for new kelp plants to grow, provide cover for urchin predators such as sea otters, and restore a healthy balance to coastal waters. 55 acres of kelp forest have been restored so far, on the Palos Verdes Shelf, and many kelp-dependent fish and wildlife have returned.

A NOAA Fisheries team researching Pacific Leatherback turtles homes in on a previously tagged individual to recover behavioral video data. NOAA strives to preserve, protect, and restore the health of the nation’s ocean resources.

The transformation of an underwater wasteland into a healthy, resilient ecosystem was one of many small victories engineered in recent decades by NOAA and its partners in the nation’s coastal waters. Such victories are hard-earned: in the 50 years since NOAA came into existence, the ocean has become a more difficult – or at least a very different – place for many marine species to thrive: warmer, more acidic and more polluted.

Our fates are tied to the ocean. The World Wildlife Fund estimates the oceans’ natural capital to be worth at least $24 trillion to the world, with an additional $2.5 trillion in ocean goods and services produced annually. The ocean provides the primary source of protein for 35 percent of the world’s population, produces half the oxygen we breathe, and absorbs 30 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. The health of the planet – and every organism on it, including us – depends on a healthy ocean.

America’s marine economy, including goods and services, depends on a healthy ocean. It contributed about $373 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product in 2018 and grew faster than the nation’s economy as a whole, according to the marine economy statistics released in June 2020 by two Department of Commerce agencies. By 2030 the global ocean economy is expected to double in value.

A diver removes urchins from an urchin barren to allow for kelp growth on the Palos Verdes Shelf.

The mission to preserve, protect and restore the health of the nation’s ocean resources is a keystone of NOAA’s charter, and NOAA and its partners are adapting, with new strategies and technologies to meet new challenges.

Healthy, Sustainable Fisheries

Today, the United States is a global leader in responsibly managed fisheries, ensuring a sustainable supply of seafood from U.S. waters. In July of 2020, NOAA reported that about 7 percent of the nation’s managed stocks were subject to overfishing, an all-time low. Globally, however, up to 33 percent of fisheries are overfished, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Fisheries management in the United States is guided by the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), a federal law created to prevent overfishing, rebuild overfished stocks, increase long-term economic and social benefits, and ensure a safe and sustainable supply of seafood. Among the provisions of the law was the creation of the nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which includes ocean waters out to 200 miles and applies federal regulations within those waters. Before the MSA, international waters began at just 12 miles from shore and were being fished by unregulated foreign fleets. The 1976 law established eight regional fishery management councils with representation from the coastal states and fishery stakeholders. The councils’ develop fishery management plans that comply with the MSA’s conservation and management requirements, including 10 national standards – that promote sustainable fisheries management.

advertisement

The management process relies on collaboration among stakeholders, government, industry and environmental groups. NOAA has led several innovations that have, in many cases, accelerated the rebound of overfished stocks.

One example of innovative means to prevent overfishing is “catch shares” that dedicate a secure share of fish to individual fishermen, cooperatives, or fishing communities for their exclusive use. In traditional fisheries management, fishers often hurry to catch as many fish as possible before the overall limit is reached. Catch shares allow fishers to pursue their catch when they want to – during bet- ter weather or at times of year when costs are lower or the value of fish is higher. Since the first U.S. catch share program was implemented in 1990, more than a dozen have become operational, producing higher incomes, safer fishing, and reduced overfishing.

Given the stressors now acting on ocean ecosystems, NOAA Fisheries and its partners will continue to emphasize the overall health of the marine ecosystems that support U.S. fish stocks, rather than narrowly focus on species themselves. Through its Office of Habitat Conservation, NOAA and its community partners develop and support targeted projects designed to conserve and restore habitat for managed fisheries.

The Office’s Habitat Restoration Center, for example, has funded more than 70 projects in 15 states to restore natural oyster reefs – including the world’s largest oyster restoration effort, in the Chesapeake Bay, where populations have shrunk to about 1 percent of historical levels. This ecosystem approach, aided by genomic analysis of marine ecosystems, will be a continuing emphasis for NOAA and its partners in preserving these valuable resources.

In the fall of 2018, NOAA Fisheries issued a report identifying challenges that lay ahead for fisheries management in the changing ocean environment – which has begun to alter the productivity of fisheries and the way species distribute themselves (some, such as salmon, appear to be drifting northward toward colder waters). The agency’s six-step plan for anticipating and meeting these challenges involves real-time monitoring and advanced sampling with uncrewed platforms such as ocean gliders and saildrones. The genetic information collected in these environmental DNA samples will help distinguish between migratory populations of a single species, assess the health of stocks, and determine their resilience to climate change – all of which will help inform better management decisions.

This Aquapod, essentially a fish-farming cage, allows farmers to grow fish in the open ocean, away from crowded coastlines. With NOAA’s cutting-edge research and industry’s innovative designs, seafood producers can expand sustainable and environmentally sound farming out to sea.

Viable Ocean Farms

The increasing demand for seafood both globally and in the United States makes it unlikely that even the best-managed fisheries can be induced to sustainably produce more seafood. Around the world, wild-capture fishery yields have plateaued during the last 30 years.

Aquaculture – cultivating fin fish, shellfish, and algae – is expanding to meet this growing demand for seafood. In the United States, with the support of NOAA’s Aquaculture Program, a small but vibrant U.S. industry has been firmly established, but still comprises less than 1 percent of the world’s aquaculture production.

Around the country, marine aquaculture operations provide a year- round source of high-quality jobs and economic opportunities in coastal communities that augment seasonal tourism and commercial fishing. Marine aquaculture is also a resource-efficient method of increasing and diversifying U.S. seafood production that can expand and stabilize U.S. seafood supply in the face of environmental change and economic uncertainty.

A close-up of one of the GoPro cameras attached to an oyster cage that Milford Lab scientists are using to observe how other species use oyster cages.

Despite the growing need for sustainable aquaculture, major barriers to industry expansion still exist, and NOAA is working to address these. One of the main challenges facing marine aquaculture development has been the uncertainty of permitting. The U.S. is a world leader in setting and enforcing environmental laws and has a framework of regulations that help ensure sustainability of industries including aquaculture. NOAA has been working with partner agencies to increase the efficiency of this regulatory framework to offer potential growers a more defined path toward getting farms in the water. NOAA is also working to foster acceptance of sustainable marine aquaculture through research and outreach efforts across the Aquaculture Program. The public still encounters farmed seafood information that is often out-of-date, incomplete, or inaccurate. Thanks to efforts by NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, the Sea Grant extension network, and NOAA Fisheries, there is a growing sense of understanding and optimism around marine aquaculture. As more communities become familiar with NOAA’s work and the current industry, they may understand the benefits ocean farming provides for protein production, coastal economies, and as a sustainable seafood complement to wild-capture fisheries.

Protected Marine Species

NOAA Fisheries is responsible for recovering more than 165 marine species listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and protecting most marine mammals under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. In 2015, NOAA Fisheries launched its “Species in the Spotlight” initiative to draw greater attention to, and rally resources around, several high-risk, high-priority species – now nine in number.

For each of these nine species, NOAA Fisheries has developed action plans for protecting and restoring habitat, reducing human-caused threats, encouraging community science and stewardship, and – when possible – breeding in captivity. The population of one of the spotlight species, the Hawaiian monk seal, has declined to about 1,400 individuals, less than one seal per mile of the island archipelago. In this vast and remote area, NOAA Fisheries and our partners have focused on maximizing the survival of every individual seal encountered, in a recovery effort drawing on more than 30 years of research. Over this time period, the rate of decline for the Hawaiian monk seal population has been reduced by half.

The endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle, another spotlight species, ranges throughout the Pacific Ocean, and the west Pacific population of the turtle swims through the waters of at least 32 nations, including the U.S. The species has declined more than 80 to 90 percent over the past few decades, and both the east and west Pacific populations are at high risk of extinction. The primary threats to the species are being caught as bycatch in fisheries and, in some nations, killing of turtles and their eggs for consumption. NOAA Fisheries has been working with partners across the Pacific to ensure that nesting turtles and their eggs are protected. Research efforts include tracking the movements of leatherback turtles via satellite transmitters attached to their shells, and development of fishing techniques to reduce bycatch.

According to Donna Wieting, director of the Office of Protected Resources, monitoring a small number of animals over vast ocean distances has always been difficult. This challenge increases as warming oceans alter the behavior and distribution of some species. Traditional vessel- or aircraft-based surveys come with limitations – and dangers – but uncrewed systems are enabling more sustained observations farther afield.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles, for example, have been used by NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center to track North Pacific gray whales and assess an individual animal’s health throughout their annual 12,000-mile trip from their summer home in Alaskan waters to breeding and calving grounds off the Mexican coast. “Using drone technology, we can get much better estimates of whether the animals are more or less healthy than before,” said Wieting. North Pacific gray whales in U.S. waters have suffered two “Unusual Mortality Events” (UMEs) over the past 20 years – one spanning 1999-2000 and one beginning in 2019 that is still ongoing in 2020 – so new and emerging technologies like drones are crucial tools in efforts to investigate health of free-swimming whales and advance conservation of the species.

The Hawaiian monk seal is one of the endangered species highlighted in NOAA’s “Species in the Spotlight” campaign.

In the Atlantic, the North Atlantic right whale – one of the world’s most endangered species, with only about 400 animals left, including fewer than 100 breeding females – has been difficult to track. “With climate change and other changes in the environment,” Wieting said, “some animals are moving from places they used to be. The scientific thinking is that their food is moving, and they’re seeking it out.” Beginning in 2017, several right whales were killed primarily by vessel strikes or fishing gear entanglements in U.S. or Canadian waters, which necessitated NOAA Fisheries to declare a UME for the species and launch an investigation with international partners. Over the past three years, 41 whales (31 dead and 10 seriously injured) have been documented so far in the UME, which represents 10 percent of the remaining individuals in the population. The mortalities in Canada occurred in waters where scientists did not expect to find the whales, and underscored the changing distribution of North Atlantic right whales and their prey. Uncrewed systems, either in the air or underwater, help to locate individual animals – to issue warnings to approaching vessels in the area, for example, or perhaps to mount a rescue effort for an animal in distress – and, more importantly, to target conservation actions that mitigate threats to the whales.

”The ocean is vast and the animals are cryptic, so having these new ways to find out where they are, and whether they are encountering threats, is really important, because we’re working hard to minimize threats to these animals,” said Wieting.

Conserving and Restoring Coral Reefs

Uncrewed systems may also become instrumental in gathering data critical to protect and restore ocean corals, many of which are battered, scarred or dislodged from the ocean floor by more frequent and more intense tropical storms. The increasing temperature and acidity of ocean waters make corals more prone to diseases and to bleaching, in which coral polyps expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues.

advertisement

Coral reefs anchor the most biodiverse habitats in the ocean, critical to the survival of thousands of other marine organisms, including commercially valuable food species. It’s been estimated that 25 percent of all marine species spend some portion of their lives on a coral reef. According to Jennifer Koss, who directs NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program, using uncrewed gliders and remotely controlled underwater vehicles may help make the collection of environmental data faster and more thorough, yielding a trove of data that can be analyzed by artificial intelligence. “We have a partnership effort where we’re training computers to analyze photos of corals and identify what species are in the photos, so we don’t need a bunch of coral biologists in Hawaii poring over these pictures,” she said. The data can also be stored and processed in a cloud platform that will enable greater access and computing power.

New technologies, including genomic analysis, introduce the potential to overcome some early limitations in the emerging field of coral reef restoration. “We’ve cut our teeth on restoring corals after a ship grounding, or after a large storm event, where we go in and gather up the corals that have been dislodged or broken up, consolidate the reef matrix as much as we can, and then go back and plant those rescued corals to address the acute damage,” said Koss. “Now, in Florida and other parts of the Caribbean, the reefs are degraded and have lost much of their structure, requiring a lot more active large-scale restoration to regain their ecosystem function.”

The Experimental Reef Laboratory features 16 aquaria that researchers are using to study how corals respond to ocean warming and acidification.

The trouble with simply reattaching pieces of coral to the reef, said Koss, is that if they are all the same individual within a single species, they won’t be any more resilient to future stress events: “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to create tens of thousands of coral fragments that are genetically identical and put them out in the water,” she said, “it’s analogous to recreating an Irish potato famine scenario and we’d be doing the environment a disservice knowing that with a single disease or bleaching event, they could all get wiped out. A diversity of coral species and individuals within those species is the key to coral restoration moving forward.” With NOAA models predicting that warming and acidification will worsen in the coming decades, scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory recently designed the Experimental Reef Lab at the University of Miami, to study the molecular mechanisms of coral resilience. Established in 2017, the laboratory will help to forecast how corals will respond to these stressors, and to inform future mitigation, management and restoration strategies.

The Coral Reef Conservation Program has funded grants supporting studies in “stress-hardening” corals to leverage their innate genetic makeup and make them more resilient. “We’re hoping to learn both the simple things, such as whether you can breed two corals that you know to be resilient, because they made it through some disease event or a thermal event,” she said, “as well as the feasibility of things like gene editing. We’re not there yet. But knowing whether we can get there, applying these ‘omics sciences, is why we have our lab in Florida as part of our coral conservation program.”

The prospect of genetically engineering corals to withstand the stresses of a warmer, more unpredictable ocean environment might have seemed outlandish just a few years ago, but Koss seems to think it’s inevitable. The suite of technologies being matured at NOAA and around the world today will enable scientists to learn more about the changing ocean environment, anticipate changes, and protect the long-term health of the oceans on which our lives and livelihoods depend.