Enabling smart fisheries management
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Fishing is a $200-billion industry in the United States, providing 1.7 million jobs. The economically important Gulf of Mexico Reef Fishery includes more than 890 commercial reef fish permitted vessels and comprises 31 species managed using Annual Catch Limits. Objective, scientific data are necessary to ensure the fishery’s health, but currently, the NOAA Fisheries Observer Program is only able to monitor about 2% of these vessels’ fishing effort.
Mote scientists excelled this year in expanding the available data on high-value snapper, grouper and other commercial reef fish species using multiple technologies. Those include: our already successful electronic monitoring systems on commercial vessels; underwater audio recordings to build a fish-sound library for advanced algorithms to analyze; and a new online data portal where fishers, fisheries managers and scientists can exchange data securely to promote productive, sustainable fishing.
Meanwhile, Mote’s longstanding research on the popular sportfish common snook got an exciting boost this year when Mote scientists released their largest group of aquaculture-raised snook in the past 23 years.
Turning a good fisheries-monitoring system into a great one
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Mote scientists secured more than $750,000 in competitive grants this year to maximize the value of fisheries electronic monitoring—a promising tool for improving the data used in management of the Gulf of Mexico’s economically important, commercial snapper-grouper fishery.
More than eight years ago, Mote and partners began working with commercial snapper-grouper fishers to test electronic monitoring (EM) systems on their vessels with the goal of effectively documenting fish catch and discard rates to aid sustainable fishing and fisheries management. EM—which is required in some U.S. fisheries and has shown promise for use in the Gulf through Mote’s research—involves deploying video cameras and sensors on fishing vessels and allowing scientists to analyze the results confidentially in the lab.
This year, the Center for Fisheries Electronic Monitoring at Mote (CFEMM) and its partners were awarded the following grants to launch efforts in 2022 to maximize what Gulf EM can offer to fishers and managers. -
Can the right size hook help fishers catch fewer unwanted “bycatch” species?
With a $188,995 grant awarded this year from NOAA’s Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program, Mote scientists are gearing up for a 2022 effort to place EM monitoring gear on two commercial fishing vessels to help fishers document whether changing their hook size reduces bycatch—non-target animals caught unintentionally. Fishers and management agencies want to reduce bycatch because it can include sensitive or imperiled species and it can impede productive, sustainable fishing. This idea for this new project arose when fishers approached Mote scientists with their questions and thoughts on how to reduce bycatch. -
Putting the AI in EM:
With a $349,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Mote scientists and partners will explore whether artificial intelligence (AI) software can help identify the fish species in EM video footage automatically. Project partners from NOAA, Mote, Mississippi State University and C Vision AI will team up to use Mote’s EM footage of fish being hauled aboard commercial vessels to help develop the new AI algorithms. Currently, Mote’s small team of CFEMM staff and volunteers review EM footage to identify the species. While the team has optimized the process of turning video findings into usable data products quickly, the goal is to apply AI to further boost the efficiency and value of EM.
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EM opens the door for sampling data-limited fisheries:
With $202,858 in grant funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Cooperative Research Program, Mote scientists will partner with snapper-grouper fishers to gather much-needed biological samples from fishing trips that can’t be covered by existing, government-led sampling programs. Biological samples are critical for science that informs fisheries management. For instance, fish ear stones called otoliths help scientists estimate the ages of fish being caught—necessary information for studying how fishing affects species populations.
Government-led sampling efforts—which can only cover a small fraction of the Gulf reef fishery—recently faced even greater obstacles due to COVID-19 restrictions. While observers couldnt join some fishing trips, vessels continued to fish with Mote’s EM gear aboard—revealing a valuable opportunity to continue sampling.
This new grant will enable Mote to partner with and provide funding to fishers who collect biological samples while Mote’s EM systems document the samples’ timing and location. As with previous CFEMM projects, the participating fishers will receive Mote’s data products describing their fishing effort and results, which can help fishers optimize their efficiency and sustainability.
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Detecting action on deck:
With $15,000 from The Nature Conservancy, Mote’s CFEMM team will serve as a subcontractor in a project to develop an algorithm for processing EM video more efficiently. The algorithm is intended to scan long stretches of recorded video to detect clips showing people on deck—indicating which footage should be reviewed by EM teams to identify the fish hauled aboard. While Mote’s CFEMM team uses fishing-gear sensors to detect such activity on bottom longline vessels in the Gulf, other kinds of vessels—including vertical line vessels also found in the Gulf’s snapper-grouper fishery—may not be able to accommodate these sensors. Project partners include CVision AI and EM experts from Archipelago Marine Research, Mote, New England Marine Monitoring, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, Saltwater Inc., and Teem Fish.
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One-stop shop for Gulf EM data: Through ongoing support of the Net Gains Alliance and NOAA Fisheries, this year Mote scientists launched a password-protected website where commercial fishers, fisheries managers and marine scientists can exchange knowledge produced through EM in the Gulf of Mexico. Mote’s new CFEMM Home Port allows fishers to download short videos of their trips and access data products* to help them optimize their sustainable fishing—for example, maps and tables containing productive fishing areas, hotspots for bycatch, rates of discards (throwing back non-targeted animals) and interactions with dolphins and sharks—species that fishers aim to avoid because they can prey on caught fish.
CFEMM Home Port allows fishery managers to request data and data products* from CFEMM’s participating commercial fishing vessels in the Gulf of Mexico’s reef fish fishery from 2016 to present. These data products can include catch and bycatch hotspots, fishing effort and rates of depredation (predatory animals feeding on catch).
These data products aren’t just useful—they’re also available quickly through the protocols established by the CFEMM team. In many cases, Mote scientists can translate five years of EM data into a useable product in just five minutes.
Overall, CFEMM Home Port focuses on facilitating discussions on how EM can help answer pressing fisheries questions and enhance stock assessment processes.
*Note: Confidentiality of individual vessel data is of the utmost importance to the CFEMM and is protected through national policy guidance and/or at a CFEMM participants' request.
Sounds like great data
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Mote scientists are building a library of fish sounds to help machine learning systems extract data valuable for science and fisheries management:
By the end of the current fiscal year, Mote scientists had reviewed 83,867 underwater sound files collected by Mote and others, finding 15,591 fish calls that were entered into the library, thanks to funding support from SECOORA (the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association). Those calls were from: black grouper, red grouper, red hind and goliath grouper. -
To continue monitoring of the of high priority for management and conservation of Goliath grouper, Mote operates 10 hydrophones (underwater microphones) offshore of Jupiter on Florida’s Atlantic Coast and three off Sarasota on the Gulf Coast. Most recently, Mote partnered with Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF) to add two acoustic receivers at Gulf Coast sites in Charlotte Harbor, where water quality data are also being collected. Such paired monitoring will enable the scientists to explain how changes in environmental conditions affect soundscape data, including fish sounds associated with courtship and spawning, marine mammal sounds, and vessel traffic daily, seasonally, in the case of disturbances such as red tide events and hurricanes, and amid the effects of river flow and water management of the Caloosahatchee system on the habitat of lower Charlotte Harbor estuary.
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Mote scientists are also testing innovative tools to determine if they can improve our collection of sounds of Goliath grouper at spawning aggregation sites species. This year, Mote’s team deployed a hydrophone attached to a small, solar-powered sailboat to test its performance as a mobile recording platform. Ultimately, the researchers hope to expand recording coverage where goliath grouper aggregate. These huge grouper have been prohibited from harvest for three decades to help populations recover from past overfishing. However, limited numbers could be harvested again soon because of a draft rule approved by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) this year, with potential for final approval in March 2022.
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Through a partnership with Axiom Data Science, Mote’s growing library of sounds will be used to “train” computer algorithms to detect and classify vocalizations from target fish species. The purpose is to make the processing of large acoustic time series data more efficient. The team will test the model’s efficiency against a separate, smaller “testing library” of sound files that were classified by Mote volunteers.
Mote scientists’ goal is to use this machine-learning process to detect which species are present —important data for confirming which species rely on a given habitat and for detecting changes in their presence over time. The researchers are exploring whether it’s possible to extract other valuable data too—for example, how many fish are present and whether vocalizations differ among individuals of the same species.
10,000 new opportunities to study sportfish
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This year, Mote scientists tagged and released more than 10,000 common snook into tidal creek systems of Sarasota and Charlotte counties. All of these fish came from a single snook spawning event at Mote Aquaculture Research Park—showing how effectively Mote’s sustainable aquaculture technology can produce native sportfish to help restock wild populations that may need help rebounding from environmental challenges.
These snook—the largest annual total Mote has released since 1998—are tagged with microchips that can be detected by antennae on shore or marked by laser-etched coded wire tags that can be detected by special scanners used by Mote scientists. Each released snook can give us new data about where the fish go and clues about how to enhance fisheries more effectively. Common snook are immensely popular with recreational anglers but are sensitive to many environmental disturbances, from Florida red tide and extreme cold temperatures to habitat loss and water quality changes. -
As part of these snook-release efforts, Mote scientists partnered with Riverview High School students to release snook into Phillippi Creek for the fourth year—one of many ways we share fisheries enhancement concepts with the scientists of tomorrow.
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Mote scientists are applying their fisheries expertise to multiple habitat restoration efforts in southwest Florida.