March 2011 COSAM E-Newsletter
Professor Testifies on Coastal Fisheries Health
SAN LUIS OBISPO – Fishermen and scientists are working together through a Cal Poly project to understand changes to marine resources that result from newly established marine protected areas (MPAs) off California. Their novel partnership deserves continued support, one of Cal Poly’s associate deans told legislators in Sacramento recently.
Dean Wendt, associate dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at Cal Poly and a professor at the university’s Center for Coastal Marine Sciences, testified recently before state legislators during the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture at the 18th Annual Fisheries Forum.
At Cal Poly, Wendt co-directs the grant-funded California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program along with Rick Starr from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. The program involves five harbor communities, more than 500 fishermen, and 15 recreational and commercial fishing boats based on the Central Coast.
Since California established 29 new MPAs along the Central Coast in 2007, Cal Poly faculty and students have been side-by-side with volunteer fishermen who have put in more than 19,000 hours on the ocean. The program has caught, tagged and released more than 30,000 fish within and outside of Central Coast MPAs.
The resulting data serve as a baseline portrait of the status of the Central Coast’s marine ecosystems and can be used to estimate numbers of fish present in the area. Researchers and fishermen are also working together to understand how a variety of pressures impact populations of near-shore fish – whether the pressure is from changing ocean conditions or commercial or sport fishing.
The industry-science partnerships are important to fishing communities, because under California’s Marine Life Management Act, fishing is automatically restricted on species for which there is not enough data, or when fishing stocks decline.
The Cal Poly partnership effort could serve as a good model for other areas in the state, and has already raised interest with marine science and industry groups in Bodega Bay and Humboldt Bay in Northern California, Wendt told legislators.
See Wendt’s testimony in Sacramento online on The California Channel. Click on the video window and pull the hour marker to 1:32:42 to watch at:
http://www.calchannel.com/channel/viewvideo/2052
Find out more about Cal Poly’s Center for Coastal Marine Sciences at:
http://www.marine.calpoly.edu/
Learn more about the collaborative fishing research and Cal Poly’s SLOSEA (San Luis Obispo Science and Ecosystem Alliance) program on its web site:
http://www.slosea.org/