Tag Archives: Jarrod Santora
Another Thanksgiving, another crab season delay
On a foggy morning in early November, Dan Kammerer hauled a crab trap onto a fishing boat,,, Kammerer, a retired fisherman, is playing a small role in aiding California’s crab fishing industry, On that day, he was selecting crabs to be tested for domoic acid. The toxin is not the only unwanted presence: In the past few years, a handful of migrating whales have been tangled in crab traps. Now, the season cannot open until a majority of the whales are gone. “We’ve gone from a seven-month-long crab season to one that is going to be three months, at best,” said Ben Platt, president of the California Coast Crab Association, which advocates for the fishery. If the regulations keep tightening, Platt said, “there’s a good chance that the Dungeness fishing industry won’t survive.” >click to read< 10:55
Study connects marine heat wave with spike in whale entanglements
A new study shows how the record-breaking marine heat wave of 2014 to 2016 caused changes along the U.S. West Coast that led to an unprecedented spike in the numbers of whales that became entangled in fishing gear. “With the ocean warming, we saw a shift in the ecosystem and in the feeding behavior of humpback whales that led to a greater overlap between whales and crab fishing gear,” said Jarrod Santora, a researcher in applied mathematics at UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering and first author of the study,,,,>click to read< 10:02
