Daily Fishing and Outdoor Report

Reading and looking material ... more later at jaymanntoday.ning.com

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This is not the type shark you want bodysurfing with you ...

NBC40 News's status update.

NBC40 News

Just in time for Shark Week...this bull shark washed up on the Ventnor/Margate coast earlier this morning. Photos sent in by Lisa and Don Doherty.

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Captain Mikes Marina (Backbay Marina LLC)'sstatus update.

5 hrs ·

Captain Mikes Marina (Backbay Marina LLC)'s photo.

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Greg O'Connell

Last couple trips ive been wade fishing Barnegat Bay for fluke with the kids. High numbers (75+ fish) but nothing big enough for the table. So I decided to change it up and make a sweet water run. Been a couple years since I've hit this spot but absolutely love smallie fishing the river. Fish aren't huge but they fight great and jump like crazy. And the scenery and wildlife is awesome.

8-10 smallies, couple 14-16" stripers, rock bass, and a catfish made the trip well worth it.

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Sean Marti

Fun time to look at this -- and recall Polar Vortices.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL0hcNM2bQk&feature=youtu.be

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Below is an important read:

NOAA R/V documenting corals in canyons off Delmarva coast, protection efforts likely to follow

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Baltimore Sun] By Tim Wheeler - August 11, 2014 -

Seventy miles off Ocean City, scientists aboard the federal research vessel Henry B. Bigelow are exploring a lush underwater landscape that until recently few would have imagined — colorful corals clinging to the rocky slopes of deep-sea canyons.

On this and other research cruises, remotely guided submersible cameras have captured scenes of bubblegum corals, sea whips and more growing in the dark, hundreds to thousands of feet below the Atlantic Ocean's surface. Other smaller patches dot the ocean floor in shallower waters closer to shore. Cold-water relatives of the showy corals found in warm tropical seas, these also harbor a rich variety of fish, sponges and other marine life.

"The deep sea is not just this barren place — there's amazing things that live down there," said Martha Nizinski, a National Marine Fisheries Service zoologist leading the Bigelow's recent exploratory cruise off the Delmarva Peninsula.

On Monday, prompted by what researchers found in recent years, a federal fisheries council is expected to move toward protecting some or all of the coral-lined canyons along the eastern edge of the continental shelf, which one environmental group calls "hidden treasures" of the Mid-Atlantic.

"These are fragile and beautiful creatures in areas that are just beginning to be explored," said Joseph Gordon, manager of ocean conservation efforts in the Northeast for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Depending on what the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council decides, he said, it could establish the largest marine habitat protected area ever in the Atlantic — a stretch of ocean bottom as big as Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania combined.

It's a new frontier for science and for conservation. Only in the last several years have scientists realized how many corals can be found in the many "submarine" canyons carved into the eastern edge of the continental shelf, from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras.

"Even though they're right off some of the most populated areas of the United States, most of these canyons have never been explored," other than for some oil surveys in the 1980s, said Thomas Hourigan, chief scientist for deep-sea coral research with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Unlike their shallow-water cousins, the deep-sea corals don't depend on sunlight, as they have no algae growing on them and supplying them food. Instead, the deep-sea corals sustain themselves by trapping tiny organisms carried along in the ocean currents.

Relatively few deep-sea corals are the stony type that build reefs. Many tend to be smaller than the warm-water corals, though some commonly known as sea fans or whips can grow larger.

"Like shallow-water corals, they appear to be hot spots of diversity," Hourigan said, with anemones and sponges growing on them and "everything from crabs to starfishes to shrimp and all kinds of little critters" crawling over and under them.

Experts thought deep-sea corals existed only in scattered patches around the world. With better submersibles and remotely operated vehicles for exploring deep underwater, scientists have learned they are much more broadly distributed, some are hundreds and even thousands of years old, and they're habitat for many fish and other marine life.

"And that's really galvanized efforts, not just in the United States but internationally, to protect these habitats," Hourigan said.

Several years ago, Congress directed federal scientists to make a concentrated search for them in U.S. waters. There have been a series of cruises to probe the depths along the Pacific, Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

The mission of the NOAA vessel Bigelow during its 12-day cruise this month is to explore some of the canyons along the Mid-Atlantic coast. Nizinski said it's too early to say what they'll find. On previous explorations of the Baltimore, Norfolk and other major canyons, she and other scientists have seen many soft gorgonian corals in "fantastic colors,'' ranging from white to shades of yellow, gold, red, pink and orange, she said.

"I have to say we are excited about every dive that we do, because we're just not sure what we're going to find," Nizinski said.

Congress also gave the councils regulating fishing off the U.S. coasts the authority to protect them. The Mid-Atlantic council is the first to use that authority to consider broad-based protection for canyons.

The council, which meets Monday in Washington, is weighing whether to limit commercial fishing either across wide swaths of ocean bottom beyond a certain depth, or in more narrowly targeted zones around individual canyons. The biggest threat to the corals appears to be bottom trawling, in which fishing vessels haul nets across the ocean floor.

"Other places in the world, areas like this have been demolished," Pew's Gordon said.

If the most protective option under consideration is adopted, he said, it could safeguard roughly 37,000 square miles of ocean bottom.

Commercial fishing interests hope the council doesn't bar them from current fishing grounds.

The bulk of the world's catch of longfin squid comes from the Atlantic from Massachusetts to Virginia, according to NOAA. And the prime areas for catching squid are along the canyon rims, said Greg DiDomenico, president of Garden State Seafood Association, an industry group.

Fishermen avoid trawling in the canyons, DiDomenico said, because modern navigation and sonar technology enables them to make precise hauls near but not over the edges. Moreover, it could cost upward of $100,000 to replace nets and electronic gear snagged in the rugged terrain of the steep valleys.

"If we know there's hard and soft corals in the heads of the canyons, there's no way our gear is going to interact with those," he said. "Let the guys fish right next to [the edge] because they've been doing it for 30 years."

Conservation advocates want to "freeze the footprint" of current fishing activity, allowing it to continue but barring it from expanding or moving.

"Over the decades, intensively fished areas have extended farther from shore and deeper due to technological advancements and market demand," said Jay Odell,director of The Nature Conservancy's Mid-Atlantic marine program, "so protecting remnant intact coral habitat where nobody is fishing yet would be a big conservation win."

While protection may be on the way for the corals deep in the Mid-Atlantic canyons, scientists acknowledge they may be more extensive than that.

Monty Hawkins, longtime skipper of the party boat Morning Star, regularly takes groups out from Ocean City to fish over man-made and natural reefs 10 to 20 miles offshore, where the water is 70 feet to a little over 100 feet deep. Underwater video and photography show those reefs have growths of sea whips and bubblegum corals, Hawkins said. And they teem with fish, particularly black sea bass, he said.

"Very few people have any idea we have corals growing off the coast of Maryland," Hawkins said one day recently as he took out another fishing party.

The corals dot the bottom in waters that the federal government has put up for lease to develop offshore wind energy. Hawkins said he's hopeful regulators will ensure that the massive turbines aren't built atop patches of coral. At the same time, he suggested, the structures could provide additional hard surfaces on which corals would grow — and attract more fish.

Hawkins said he's more worried about commercial fishing. Bottom trawling and clam dredging could wipe out some shallow coral communities, he said. He has appealed — without success — for federal agencies to designate the shallower cold-water coral reefs essential fish habitat, which would give them a measure of legal protection.

Hourigan said "the patches we've seen have been relatively small patches. ... It's not immediately clear the extent to which what we see today is all there ever was or whether there was more once and it was destroyed."

Odell, whose organization is seeking to help map corals and other ecologically important features on the ocean bottom, said he's convinced that all of it needs to be shielded from fishing and offshore energy projects.

"The black sea bass absolutely depend on this coral patch habitat," Odell said. "We only roughly know where it is, and it has yet to be mapped and protected. … It's astounding that we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of the sea floor now."

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Study finds eating baked or broiled fish bulks up your brain

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Atlantic] By James Hamblinaug - August 8, 2014 -

Have you ever considered undergoing brain-thickening surgery, only to find that such a thing does not exist? And that the guy in the van was probably not actually a surgeon? Well, consider fish.

Dr. Cyrus Raji, a resident radiologist at UCLA, appreciates value beyond the cosmetics of a thick cerebral cortex. He's the lead researcher in a new study in the current American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found that people who regularly eat fish have more voluminous brains than those who do not—in such a way that stands to protect them from Alzheimer's disease.

"Understanding the effects of fish consumption on brain structure is critical for the determination of modifiable factors that can decrease the risk of cognitive deficits and dementia," Raji and colleagues write. The team has previously shown gainful effects of physical activity and obesity on brain structure.

This study found that eating fish—baked or broiled, never fried—is associated with larger gray matter volumes in brain areas responsible for memory and cognition in healthy elderly people.

"There wasn't one type of fish that was the best," Raji told me by phone, probably while eating fish. "All that mattered was the method of preparation." Fried fish had a unique dearth of benefits to the brain.

"If you eat fish just once a week, your hippocampus—the big memory and learning center—is 14 percent larger than in people who don't eat fish that frequently. 14 percent. That has implications for reducing Alzheimer's risk," Raji said. "If you have a stronger hippocampus, your risk of Alzheimer's is going to go down."

"In the orbital frontal cortex, which controls executive function, it's a solid 4 percent," Raji said. "I don't know of any drug or supplement that's been shown to do that."

Speaking of supplements, the researchers initially looked to omega-3 fatty acids as the driver of these benefits. But when they looked at the levels of omega-3s in people's blood, they didn't correlate with better brain volumes.

"These findings suggest additional evidence that it is lifestyle factors—in this case, dietary intake of fish," the researchers write, "and not necessarily the presumed biological factors that can affect the structural integrity of the brain."

Omega-3 fatty acids have previously been shown to slow cognitive decline. In one study, higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in people's blood were associated with lower rates of brain atrophy observable over just a four-year period. We also know that when rats are fed diets low in omega-3 fatty acids, they haveincreased signs of dementia, possibly mediated by insulin and related buildup of amyloid plaques in their tiny brains.

Eating more omega-3 fatty acids, a lot of fruit, and not much meat, has previously been associated with increased volume throughout the brain's gray matter. Recent research in the journal Neurology found that elderly people with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had better cognitive function than those with lower levels. MRIs of their brains showed larger volumes, too. (The associations also held for vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D, and E, and folate.)

Drs. Deborah Barnes and Kristine Yaffe at UCSF recently calculated in Lancet Neurology that up to half of cases of Alzheimer's disease "are potentially attributable" to seven modifiable risk factors: diabetes, midlife high blood pressure, midlife obesity, smoking, depression, cognitive inactivity or low educational attainment, and physical inactivity. Minimal inroads in those areas, they say, could result in millions fewer cases of Alzheimer's.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine corroborate, "Our research has consistently shown that it is the interactions among these risk factors with the patho-biological cascade of Alzheimer's disease that determine the likelihood of a clinical expression as dementia or mild cognitive impairment."

Specific suspects in the fish-brain benefit paradigm are omega-3s docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which seem to increase the size of the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus, and possibly overall brain volume. DHA and EPA can also affect the way neural synapses fire.

"Something about fish consumption, whatever it is, is strengthening to the brain," Raji said. "It's also possible that we're capturing a general lifestyle effect—that there's something else out there we're not measuring that's accounting for this."

For example, people who ate fish might also eat more tartar sauce, and it might actually be that tartar sauce was responsible here. Though that's unlikely. The researchers did control for obesity, physical activity, education, age, gender, race, and every other variable they could think of, and fish-eating itself remained a strong predictor of gray matter volume.

Even if it is just that people of good birth and cognitive fortune are those eating fish, the number of people with dementia is projected to double every 20 years. Or, as Raji put it to me, "By the time you and I are in our 60s and we start worrying about Alzheimer's, 80 million people in the United States are going to have it."

As that tide approaches, it can be nice to adopt a few hard grains of habit that confer a sense of command in sealing it out. Raji and other dementia researchers note that the challenge is to implement prevention strategies in the decades prior to ages when dementia manifests, before there are any signs of brain structural or functional abnormalities. In the case of fish, this doesn't have to be a foundational life overhaul or even a substantive acquiescence. People who ate fish once per week were just as neurologically fortified as those who ate it daily.

"Nobody wants to eat food like they're taking medicine," Raji said. Unless, of course, they do.

Photo: The Atlantic

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Paul Greenberg's book 'American Catch' getting positive reviews

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Washington Post] by Juliet Eilperin Aug 11, 2014

The United States is, increasingly, a coastal nation. It's estimated that by the end of the decade roughly half of all Americans will live within 50 miles of a coast, and that doesn't include the Great Lakes. Our government controls 13 percent of the ocean as our exclusive economic zone, more than any other country on Earth. But we define ourselves by the land we possess, not the sea. Terrestrial parts of the country get the highest form of praise: the heartland, middle America and so on. Our seafaring days are now in the distant past.

With his new book, "American Catch," Paul Greenberg aims to change that mind-set. It is a call to arms, suggesting that the highest form of patriotism would be to embrace the bounty that can still be found off America's shores, rather than relying on the imported seafood that graces more than 85 percent of our plates. We are, in his words, now "a seafood debtor nation."

Writing about fisheries policy is, to put it mildly, challenging. It is one of the wonkiest aspects of environmentalism, especially when issues such as aquaculture, the mechanics of buying and selling fish, and reef restoration enter the equation. On top of that, the main characters - in this case, Eastern oysters, Louisiana brown shrimp and Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon - don't speak.

But Greenberg, whose previous book, "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food," made the bestseller lists, is skilled at finessing this challenge. He populates "American Catch" with several compelling characters, including autocratic mollusk researchers, profane water-quality crusaders and iconoclastic defenders of Alaskan rivers. These activists are all engaged in the fight to reclaim America's seafood heritage or preserve what is left of it.

The book focuses on three species in three very different locales: oysters in New York City, shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico and sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay. The two strongest sections are the ones exploring Greenberg's home environs of New York and Connecticut and the wilderness of Alaska; those sections speak to America's past and its future.

A fine stylist, Greenberg evokes the glory days of New York City's Fulton Fish Market. The market is now "weeping with water stains," but a century ago, "clunky barges, flat-bottomed oyster skiffs, broad-beamed Hudson River sloops all made their way to this weigh station and docked at buildings that were inherently more geared toward the sea than to the land." Various factors helped destroy this thriving trade: Developers - including our first president, George Washington - drained the region's salt marshes, while polluted water poisoned local oysters so badly that they became a public health threat. Today 80 percent of the nation's wild oyster reefs are gone.

But a cadre of area residents has not given up on New York's estuary and the mollusks that used to dominate it. This group includes Andy Willner, the founder of an organization called the NY/NJ Baykeeper, who peppers his deeply philosophical musings with plenty of curse words. When his daughter asked him years ago on a hot day why she couldn't go swimming off Staten Island, Willner wondered, "Why the f--- can't she swim?" Noting that the Clean Water Act had stipulated that all U.S. waters should be fishable and swimmable by 1985, Willner realized he had legal standing to challenge state authorities for failing to reach that goal: "If you can't eat the oysters, why the f--- can't you eat the oysters?"

Others have pursued similar aims in slightly different ways. One was Victor Loosanoff, a Connecticut-based researcher orginally from tsarist Russia. Greenberg calls Loosanoff, who died in 1987, the "great oyster tamer" for his pioneering work in helping to promote the cultivation of oysters. Steve Malinowski and his son Pete have encouraged wealthy New Yorkers as well as local schoolkids to repopulate the waters with oysters. And Kate Orff, a New York water landscape architect, has coined the word "oyster-techture" in an effort to explain how more robust reefs could help protect New York City in a future when it will be subject to more intense and frequent storms.

Greenberg's section on shrimp, while important, is a little less lyrical than the rest of this tale. It captures an important seafood trend: Half a century ago, 70 percent of the shrimp Americans ate were wild, but now 90 percent are an imported, farm-raised product that comes from Asia and Latin America. Greenberg visits two places to depict this shift: the Gulf of Mexico, which used to be the primary source of our shrimp but was battered by the 2010 BP oil spill, and a fish farm in Vietnam. While this part of the book has some appealing characters - including a Cajun shrimp broker who mocks the federal government's attempts to find him a different line of work after the spill - Greenberg's detailed discussion of shrimp aquaculture is not as reader-friendly as the rest of the book.

When it comes to the conflict over whether to allow the construction of a huge gold and cooper mine near Bristol Bay, Greenberg puts himself firmly into the fight. Some years ago, he journeyed to Capitol Hill to make the case for blocking the mine on the grounds that the operation's waste could clog rivers that supply nearly half of the world's sockeye salmon. A reception at the Supreme Court was arranged, and Greenberg made the mistake of attending it wearing his fishing hat. A "slightly indignant older woman" yanked the hat down over his eyes and suggested he take it off while in the court; it was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Greenberg mentions in passing the arguments being made by the mine's sponsor, the Pebble Partnership, but he is not heavily invested in doing a traditional back-and-forth. From his perspective, the stakes are too high. Referring to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is weighing whether to block the project under the same Clean Water Act that Willner used to help clean up New York's waters, Greenberg writes, "If [the EPA] does nothing and allows Alaska to continue with business as usual, Bristol Bay could end up much more of a minerals extraction system than a food system."

He captures the vibrancy of this abundant, powerful food source not just through his own tales of fishing - such as one in which rainbow trout literally slip through his fingers, only to be recaptured - but also with the hectic rush of a small, commercial crew cramming its boat full of fish before the season closes. It is a miraculous bounty that will replicate itself indefinitely - that is, if we start taking better care of it.

Juliet Eilperin is a White House correspondent for The Washington Post. She also writes about environmental and fisheries issues.

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7 Reasons Why You Should Never Buy a Hermit Crab

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Written by peta2 staffer Kim Johnson.

Growing up, I lived with two adopted cats who were considered members of the family. So when I started my first year of college, I felt lonely in the university dorms without an animal companion. At a mall one weekend, I came upon a store that was selling hermit crabs and decided that one of these little creatures would be the perfect companion for my dorm room! The rest is history. I took my crab home, named him Herman, and vowed to give him a great life. I followed the store’s “care instructions” and got a plastic tank for Herman, along with some gravel and some branches for him to climb on. I fed Herman every day and took him out of his tank to explore. I also bought a brightly colored spare shell in case he grew larger and needed to switch shells. But Herman never grew. In fact, he lived for only a few months.

Laura Cascada | www.plightofthehermies.org

I thought I was giving Herman a happy life, but in reality, I was only supporting a cruel industry that had torn him away from his home in the wild and shipped him off to a mall to be sold for profit. Here are seven reasons why you should never buy a hermit crab:

1. Just about every land hermit crab sold in a souvenir shop or mall has been captured from his or her home in the wild, as hermit crabs rarely breed in captivity.

2. Hermit crabs need lots of friends! They thrive in large colonies, where they often sleep piled up together. They enjoy climbing, foraging, and exploring, and they even collaborate in teams to find food.

Moving Home | Jenny Downing | CC by 2.0

3. Hermit crabs can live for more than 30 years in their natural habitats on tropical seashores, but after being purchased, most do not live for more than a few months to a year.

Busy life being a crab | Adrian Scottow | CC by-SA 2.0

4. To their caretakers, captive hermies might seem to be acting normally, but over time, many crabs actually die slowly from suffocation because their modified gills require high humidity in order to breathe.

Laura Cascada | www.plightofthehermies.org

5. Hermit crabs also are often slowly poisoned by tap water and/or the toxic paint adorning their shells. Crabs don’t care if they are orange or purple, but they pay with their lives because humans do!

Painted Hermit Craba | Jason Pratt | CC by 2.0

6. Crabs need space in which to molt (or shed their skin) and grow. A crab’s skin doesn’t stretch and grow like ours does, so they need very deep, damp sand to burrow under in order to molt. Without proper space in which to molt, a crab’s body will stop the molting process until his or her death.

Hermit Crab | Laurens | CC BY-ND 2.0

7. The hermit crab trade hurts wild crabs, too. Workers collect thousands of shells from the ocean every year in order to paint them and sell them with “pet” crabs, which deprives wild hermit crabs of homes that are in short supply and contributes to what has been called the “hermit crab housing crisis.” At any given time, 30 percent of wild crabs are inhabiting shells that are too small for them, and after their growth phase in the spring, this figure can jump to nearly 60 percent.

How can you help hermit crabs?

Never, ever buy a hermit crab. They are not “starter pets” or trinkets. Crabs are complex, sensitive animals who want to live in the wild, not in a cage. Even the most well-meaning person who purchases crabs will never be able to give them the life that they deserve.

If you or someone you know already has a hermit crab, check out this hermit crab care guide for helpful tips on keeping crabs happy. Hermit crabs need companionship, plenty of climbing room, substrate to bury themselves in for molting, humidity, warm temperatures, extra shells, fresh and salt water (dechlorinated aquarium salt only), and much, much more! Never release a captive crab back into the wild.