This year’s Regional Association for Research on the Gulf of Maine (RARGOM) Annual Science Meeting will focus on the role of the physical environment and lower trophic levels on the fate of seafood yield in the Gulf of Maine, featuring CORU’s Dr. William Cheung as a keynote speaker. See more about the event below:
RARGOM Annual Science Meeting
The Regional Association for Research on the Gulf of Maine (RARGOM)
is holding its annual science, the theme of the meeting is:
Will the Gulf of Maine yield more or less seafood in the future, ideas from the physical environment and lower trophic levels?
The 2012 RARGOM Annual Science Meeting will be a session where Gulf of Maine physical and biological oceanographers will be asked to interpret what they are seeing among the varied signals of physical forcing and lower trophic level response, and challenged to inform the community on how upper trophic level organisms have responded and may react in the future.
Date: October 9, 2012
Location: Portsmouth, New Hampshire
The one day meeting will feature three keynote speakers:
William Cheung
University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre
Shrinking of Fishes Exacerbates Impacts of
Global Ocean Changes on Marine Fisheries
Both theory and empirical observations suggest that warming and reduced oxygen will reduce maximum body size of marine fishes and invertebrates. However, the extent to which such changes would exacerbate the impacts of climate and ocean changes on global fisheries remains unexplored. Here, using models that integrate ocean biogeochemistry and biological responses to environmental changes, I suggest that warming and ocean deoxygenation are expected to lead to decreases in maximum body size and changes in other life history characteristics of exploited fishes at both individual and community levels. Changes in body size interacts with expected changes in species distribution and ocean productivity, exacerbating the effects of climate change on fisheries resources. These highlight the need to consider body size changes in assessing and managing climate change impacts on fisheries.
Jon Hare
Northeast Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
Pursuing Hypotheses and the Future of Fisheries Oceanography
Fisheries oceanography is largely an applied discipline with a major goal of improving fisheries management and marine conservation. Hjort’s critical period hypothesis, and its decedents, remain a dominant theme and focuses on early life stage survival as mediated by prey availability and feeding. A second hypothesis focuses on the sequential transfer of energy from primary productivity to fishery productivity. Three recent hypotheses challenge these traditional bottom-up hypotheses: predation of early life stages, maternal condition, and shifting migration pathways. Regional support for these hypotheses will be reviewed and their implications to fisheries management and marine conservation will be described. It is important that these recent hypotheses continued to be pursued and tested. The results must then be integrated into current and future assessments and management decisions.
Andy Pershing
University of Maine School of Marine Sciences and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute
Using Climate Variability to Diagnose How
Marine Ecosystems Work and How They Will Change
Ecological experiments are notoriously difficult to perform on planktonic communities due to the large scale and open nature of the ocean. However, climate variability alters the physical environment on scales large enough to affect multiple ecosystems simultaneously. By comparing how similar ecosystems respond to similar forcing, we can begin to diagnose how physical and biological processes interact to structure these systems. Relationships between plankton community changes and stratification provide a clear indication of how these communities will respond to a warmer and fresher North Atlantic.
If interested in presenting a contributed talk or poster for this important session, please prepare an abstract. Further announcements regarding abstract submission and registration will be forthcoming and posted on the RARGOM website at http://www.rargom.org/.