GoToMeeting Auto Voice >> This conference will now be recorded.

Heather Tabisola >> Good Morning, everyone, and welcome to another 2020 Fall EcoFOCI seminar series.

I am Heather Tabisola, co-lead at the seminar with Jens Nielsen.

And this seminar is part of NOAA's EcoFOCI bi-annual seminar series, focused on the ecosystems of the North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea, and US Arctic, to improve understanding of ecosystem dynamics and applications for the management of living marine resources.

Since October 21st, 1986, the seminar has provided an opportunity for research scientists to resent and develop their ideas and promote conversations on subjects pertaining to fisheries oceanography or regional issues, in Alaska's marine ecosystems.

This is including the US Arctic.

And you can visit our EcoFOCI webpage for more information at www.ecofoci.noaa.gov.

We thank you again for joining us today as we continue this all virtual seminar series.

You can find the lineup via the One NOAA seminar series and also on the NOAA PMEL calendar of events.

We are here every Wednesday at 10 AM through December 16th, unless noted, next week being the second of our Monday series.

Please double-check that your microphones are muted.

That you are not using video.

Hi, Susan.

If you could turn off your video, that'd be great.

During the talk, please feel free to type your questions into the chat.

Jens will be monitoring the questions there as will I, and we'll address those at the end of the talk.

Each...

Let's see, so today, I'm really excited, we have Jennifer Provencher, a conservation biologist, at the Environment and Climate Change Canada in Ottawa, Canada.

She is an early-career researcher and spokesperson for the awareness of plastic contaminants in marine life, pollution, and climate change.

Much of her work focuses on the impact of human activities on the health of Arctic seabirds and marine ecosystems.

She received her Bachelor's of Science in Marine Biology and her Bachelor's of Education in Senior Sciences and Biology from the University of British Columbia and has received her Masters of Science from the University of Victoria for her work on seabirds as indicators of change in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

And her PhD in Biology for Environmental and Chemical Toxicology is at Carleton University and focused on parasites and mercury as possible drivers of avian health and reproduction.

And with that, I'm going to turn the seminar over to Jennifer who is sharing her work today, An Old, New Threat: Increasing fisheries and seabird bycatch in the Canadian Arctic implications on growing fisheries there on northern fulmar populations using a variety of modeling, observation and genomic tools.

So Jennifer, I'll turn it over to you.

I'm going to mute myself and...

Jennifer Provencher >> Awesome.

Thank you, Heather, for that introduction and thank you all for taking the time to join today.

I know this is a little different perhaps in terms of geography, but I hope that my talk on on seabird bycatch in the Arctic fishery in Canada will kind of inspire or think about some of the some of the work that you know is applicable to your region.

So, first of all, I just want to, this is my title slide, and I just want to recognize that, the work that I do specifically on, on by cash flow zone, plastic pollution is, is on the traditional territory of the Inuit.

So is on Inuit Nunangat, the homeland of the Inuit.

And you'll see that my title is translated into Inuktitut.

So, this is one of the dialects of, one of the main dialects in Canada of the Inuit and you can see the syllabic.

So it's a really interesting language.

And it has a beautiful history.

And, but I just wanted to note that traditional territory.

And also, you know, we, we do do a lot of community-based work, and we, we translate a lot of our summaries and work into into Inuktitut.

Just want to kind of recognize and and think about that as we move through this, this work, and this is work that we have done in collaboration.

It was part of my postdoc that I started and then got hired with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

So it's work that we're continuing to work on with industry as we kind of learn more about what's happening in the fishery.

So, really quickly, for those of you who don't know northern fulmars, this is a circum-Arctic species.

They are a seabird in the north, breeding in the north, most related to Albatrosses.

Some of you may know, if you're not familiar with directly with the fulmar, in Canada they're specifically, have challenges from plastic pollution.

The center image is actually all the pieces of plastic taken, from one fulmar stomach.

We have natural oil and gas seeps in the region.

So, I have another program that looks at the effects of these natural oil and gas seeps.
 
And so, you get this is actually a picture of a fulmar taken from a boat by a colleague of mine in there, you know, basically swimming and feeding through some of these natural oil slicks.

And then probably potentially more familiar to some of you, the entanglement threat.

So this is actually a picture of a fulmar that's become entangled by a piece of fishing line that, you know, probably got brought back to the colony and then entangled.

So these are all things that are happening on the colony and at sea.

And then, of course, kind of, in a more active way, the plastic, and the fisheries and the entanglement in these birds.

And so this is actually a picture of a fulmar caught in one of the boats, and the picture on the right is actually a colleague's picture from a duck, but at the same kind of thing, they're getting tangled.

And I'll talk more about this, and gillnet, so you can see that the nets are almost transparent, and the birds are actually getting tangled, right, in them, though, just like this duck is on the right.

I do want to kind of in, kind of pause and think about seabird and fisheries interactions.

And certainly there are probably people on this call who have thought a lot more about these types of interactions.

But this is something that we're, we're thinking about actively on this file.

There are certainly those direct, you know, bycatch challenges, seabirds in general

and fulmars specifically what we'll talk about.

But discards also come into play and then direct competition.

And so we're gonna really focus on the bycatch today, but I want you to kind of tuck that into the back of your head.

A lot of the work that we're working on really stems from work that people have been doing for a long time on seabird bycatch.

Birdlife International has done a lot of work kind of summarizing and understanding bycatch in fisheries.

They have that estimates on, you know, number of birds per year in longline fisheries, gillnet fisheries, and of course trawl fisheries.

And this has been kind of growing over time and as we get more detail in different regions.

Zydelis did a review of this a little while ago specifically around gillnets.

Again, many of you probably know there's a lot more work on the bycatch in longlines, but there is less work on the gillnet side and so it has an estimated about 400,000 birds per year are affected.

But there's a lot of question marks around what that looks like in what different areas and specifically in the Canadian Arctic, unlike the northeast Pacific, we have a lot of new fisheries, growing fisheries.

We don't have as many established fisheries.

So this is really a new area for us to be addressing in this particular geography.

So the first glimpse of data from fisheries in the Canadian Arctic actually came from a paper just in 2015.

This is done by April Hedd, who's also with an Environment and Climate Change Canada.

And she looked at seabird bycatch in eastern Canada so that's the Atlantic region as well as the Arctic, that piece of water between Canada and Greenland.

And this is really the first time that it was looked at.

And what she found was that although there was a few number of boats in the Canadian Arctic, their their catch kinda per effort as best she could assess it, was actually quite high.

And so, in very specifically use it was Greenland halibut or turbot specifically in these Demersal gillnets that are weighted and baited at the bottom of the ocean.

And that they're having these really high, high levels of bycatch specifically a fulmars.

And so under the Arctic Council, and for those of you who don't know, the Arctic Council is the working group of the eight Arctic nations, of course, which Canada and US are both members of, and and through this work under CAFF, which is the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna, and specifically under the Arctic Migratory Birds Initiative, seabird bycatch was included.

And interestingly, both, well, the Canada kind of initiated Arctic Migratory Birds Initiative, and as a really big pusher of this of this program, and it was actually under the American chairmanship of CAFF, which we had the second work plan approved with bycatch included.

And so this has been on the Arctic radar for the last little bit.

But there has been huge amount of kind of cooperation and work under under the Arctic council and specifically CAFF on the subject.

And so that's one of the reasons why we've been able to push this work ahead in the last couple of years is really because of this international collaboration in the Arctic, looking at drivers of, of, of bird populations and specifically seabird populations with fisheries as a highlight.

So just as a, kind of a brief intro to this region.

So we've got the NAFO regions in eastern Canada. We're talking about 0A 0B, so these are these blue regions up here, Baffin Bay, Davis Strait.

And they are all they go all the way out to the EZZ, or EEZ with Greenland, Kingdom of Denmark.

And so, this is what we're referring to as going to the eastern Canadian Arctic in this particular talk, these, you know, 2 all the way through 5, which I often refer to as the alphabet soup.

This is what we refer to in Canada as the Atlantic region, whereas we have 0A, 0B as our Arctic region.

So ours, there's commercial fishing in the region, and it's growing every couple of years.

They increase the quota.

It's, it's, as I mentioned, it's part of Inuit Nunangat, so it's part of the Inuit Settlement region.

And this is, you know, introduces a co-management framework.

So it's, it's, there's a federal government, there's a territorial government, as well, as Inuit government involved in this particular region.

It uses mostly trawl and Demersal set nets, and the gillnets in particular baited.

And so this is kind of information that we've kind of come kinda kinda, sorry, kind of emerged over time so you know how it's baited, how frequently it's baited, what it's baited with, is not necessarily something that's tracked over time, it has emerged in our conversations with fisher, fishermen, specifically.

And just to give you an idea of kind of the region and the traffic, we also have the the ship tracking data, and this is from other environments and climate change.

Data is we actually have a ship tracks from the fishing boat, so this is actually just a heat map.

It's just the fishing vessels.

And you can see that these Canadian fishing grounds off the coast of Baffin Island, these are clearly, you know, where the fishermen do the shelf breaks.

And you can see most of them actually offload into Greenland.

And the more southern boat off the coast of Newfoundland go down to land to offload.

So these are large vessels that are out for months at a time.

They travel to Greenland, offload, and then come back into Canada.

So it is a kind of a complex international system that we're dealing with in terms of fish and birds and in the in the fisheries.

One of the first things that we tried to do is really just figure out how this fishery has changed over time.

And this is just a really simple graph of the total allowable catch, which is, which is fulfilled almost each and every year.

And that's in tons per year.

And as I said, we've got two NAFO regions, areas 0A, 0B.

And you can see 0A, which is the more northern region and the fishery commercial fishery didn't start till 2002 and has grown every year since.

And so we are seeing an increase in the fishery.

And this again continues to grow.

And so that lets you triple C, who has, or you know, the, the migratory bird mandate, to understand, really, what are the species affected, how many you're taken per year and ultimately doesn't actually matter at the population level, which is a question that we're constantly trying to balance as we do have, you know, take of migratory bird and, harvest and other ways so we are managing within a very dynamic system.

So we did do overlap analysis where birds in Canada and and we started by looking at where the seabird colonies are and where the fisheries are.

And this is just an example where we have Thick-billed murres who are are an Alcide species.

These are the locations of the colonies.

The darker inner circle, the shaded circle is 100 kilometers, which we think is a pretty average foraging range, and then the outer circle is 200 kilometers and we think that this kind of the maximum foraging daily range from these colonies.

You can see they are distributed throughout the region and we kind of had these bubbles to see where they're overlapping fisheries.

The, the other dots here at sea is where we actually have seabird bycatch reported in the, in the fisheries data and so it was really just a really brief look at how do we have think about our seabird distribution is overlapping with these fisheries.

We see some overlap, but the murres in particular are not boat-attracted, and they're deep set in that, and so we think that there's pretty minimal interaction.

And that's really what comes in in the data.

We don't see murres in the data.

In contrary these are the northern fulmars, so this is a fulmar, they're tube noses.

You can see again the blue dots are the distribution of their colonies. The gray circles are their average foraging distance of 200 kilometers.

Of course, it's not actually on land, it's all at sea and 500 kilometers is their maximum.

So you can see their max bubbles are way out here and effectively cover the entire Baffin Bay and Davis Strait region.

And so we have high overlap with these fisheries as well as high vulnerability that they're tube noses and so they smell out.

They smell of their food and so this causes a problem, too, to the fulmar in particular, because they are attractive.

So one of the first things that we did was look at the seabird bycatch data.

So on these vessels, depending on the fishery, and the time of year there are at-sea observers.

There's anywhere between 20% and 100% coverage.

Of course, you know, there's never 100% coverage, but that is the target.

And when we started looking at the data from these at-sea observers and this is just one year of data,

we see that northern fulmars are the majority of the data, almost three quarters.

And then the next category, you know, birds, gulls, Phalarope, these are kind of our next topics.

And then we have a few, a handful of these other species in here.

And the most important part is, is that from a bird perspective, you know, 21% of the data is basically useless.

As, you know, we, we can't really use this in terms of species identification, modeling, this is very challenging data to work with.

You know, I always laugh when we get "bird" entered back, because that really doesn't help us at all.

And so one of the challenges that we've been working with is, how do we get this better?

And so, it might seem simple, but it's not.

And I do want to recognize that it's very challenging in the bird world.

So, this is actually a bit of a test.

See who's paying attention.

And the idea is, is that we've got a whole bunch of different birds here.

These are all birds that are reported in the region, and specifically in seabird bycatch.

And my question for you, and I want you to type it into the chat is, how many species do you see?

So I'm going to take a minute there, you can chat.

You can try to Google it.

But what we're looking for is how many species of seabirds do you see?

I want you to enter your number into the chat box.

Don't be shy. I'm not judging.

I see some threes, some fours.

Two, some fours, twos, threes.

Yeah, interesting, no one's got higher than a four.

And anyone out there, I think there's more than four species here?

I don't see anyone committing to more than a four.

[Laughs]

Ok, some revisions.

So, I put this in there to demonstrate that, you know, while we can complain about species identification, it's not straightforward.

And specifically with the Procellariiformes, these petrel species, it's not true for even for seabird people.

And so, there's actually several species on here.

So we have Sooty shearwater in the top corner, Cory's shearwater in the right top corner.

So the Manx shearwater and the Great Shearwater in the bottom left and then the other three are northern fulmars.

And they're different color morphs.

And so the fulmar in particular is a challenging bird because they can have different color morphs.

And so they can go from the very light, which is in the center bottom, to the quite dark, which is on the bottom right.

And then there's a whole lot of inter inter between.

And so this really does demonstrate that it is a challenge even for, for seabird people and people who are familiar with these species.

So, one of the things that we've done is that we've been trying to target training of the at-sea observers in a couple of different regions.

We were currently targeting it in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and these are regions where most of our at-sea observers in the Arctic come from.

But what we have been doing, actually, with our, kind of piggybacking on some of our Pacific colleagues' work is developing these fulmar and Shearwater guides.

And so this is an example of a guide that's been developed specifically for fisheries, where it's queuing in on the indicators or the attribute the species will have, and is visible to that observer when they have that bird in hand.

And of course, the species are difficult to tell apart when they're intact and not kind of half-decomposed or wet.

We're really trying to think about what are the attributes or characteristics that the birds have even when they can't, you know, kinda come up from the map.

And so, this is some of the work that we're trying to really focus on with our partners so that we can get better data to understand what those impacts are from the fisheries on our seabirds.

The other thing that we've been doing is trying to get DFO, which is our Department of Fisheries and Oceans to improve the data collected.

So they had these, you know, enhanced data sheets on marine mammals.

And so we worked with them to get the same kind of data on our, on the birds.

And so, we sent out a few years back, and they entered all the data.

And one of the questions we had was on the baited net question, and so it does come back.

Almost all the birds that we're seeing, all are from these baited nets.

And so that was a really important piece in terms of understanding why the bird they're being attracted, what potential mitigation could be.

And then we also try to get more data about the birds, and whether there are dead, or if they're just caught/struck, caught or struck in the gear.

And so, we kind of these in the at-sea observer data, really, it's only these dead birds that are brought ashore that are only ever counted.

And we really wanted to understand if there was other interactions that were being being done as well.

And so, you know, from this initial data, what we're seeing is that I get about 60% of the birds are dead, and this is the data that's reported in this, the at-sea observer database.

And then we have this kind of other 38% that are caught or struck.

But then we don't know what happens to them.

And, actually, a lot of work out of partners in places like California have, you know, really, I think, illustrated, that these birds are likely injured, and, and probably, you know, die later on.

They're just not caught, and then that's at the time.

But, you know, they can break wings, mostly, and, and go on to die so that we do really understand that the DFO data at the, at the observer, is underestimating the interactions between seabirds and fisheries.

And so, it's really only about 60% of the data is coming through.

We have gone back and taken that data and tried to look at how many fulmars are taken each year, and this is data that we did.

And if you're interested in this, you know, I'm happy to unpack this a little bit more, but I know some people will be interested.

So, you know, we went through, we looked at different time periods, because of the different observer coverage.

We looked at gear type, so long lines, gillnets and mobile trawls.

We also considered the level of fishing in Canada and Greenland and what kind of gear that they used.

And the and we looked over several years to try to get, you know, an average.

Because there's high variability in the fulmars that are reported each year.

And the idea is that we came up with some average.

And then we did some regional demographic modeling to get this question of, does it matter the population of number.

We then took, you know, we use kind of where the fishing happens data, and considered some of the tracking data that's an element species.

And so, just as an example, this is a bird that was tagged in Scotland.

And you can see it kind of goes all the way across the North Atlantic and all the way back.

So, looking at how far they go, and again, using this tracking data, we came up with these three different scenarios that the fisheries could be affecting.

So, the blue hashes in this diagram are the fisheries, are, again, 0A, 0B, and one, our first demographic model was thinking about what if, just the local colonies right in around the fisheries are being affected.

So, these are mostly three Canadian colonies, you know.

The next scenario was, OK, what happens if it's more of a regional level?

So, we've got Canadian colonies and Greenlandic colonies of northern fulmars.

And then the largest demographic model that we projected was, what if all the colonies in Canada and Greenland are being affected by these northern fisheries?

And we thought that these were, you know, realistic options to consider in this first, you know, first assessment.

So, really local to kind of the entire region, which we know has a population in the area.

This is work that Christine Anderson led and we published a few years ago, and again, we've got this small, local population level, intermediate, and then the 500,000 individuals.

These are the fulmars in Canada and Greenland.

And you can see, if I can just kinda walk you through this for a second, we have our bycatch mortality on the on the on the bottom.

This dotted line is that 212 level, which we got from our at-sea observer data.

And then we have our growth rates on a vertical.

So if you're at a zero level here, which is the red bar, across all of these, you, it basically expect a stable foundation anywhere, the black line crosses and it's down here on the bottom, we're seeing population declines.

And anything above here, we're going to be seeing population growth.

And of course, on the line is going to be stable.

The real take home message here is that, at the current level, so where the dotted line crosses the solid black line, we're below zero.

And so we're thinking that we're probably experiencing population decline.

What's really interesting is, I think, if we're thinking about here that this larger regional level, which, which we might be at, it's not a huge job.

It's only a reduction of bycatch by about 25%.

And we would actually be getting the fishery to having you know, negligible impact on the fishery.

So this is something that was encouraging to us that we we think could be interesting to discuss.

And then, of course, there is this larger population that it could be affected, you know, we have...

Sorry, we have fulmars messing in Iceland and in Europe who, who may be coming over and being caught in the nets.

But we didn't really have the data to kind of thing, but we're certainly aware that we could be actually affecting a larger population, though the affected population size created really, you know, be any one of these, these levels.

So we want to explore that.

So that, you know, really points, OK, well, what does the population size doing in Canada?

And this is where a lot of my colleagues kind of laugh at me.

So some of our data from this region actually dates back to 1974.

And so it is for some of us, the data is actually older than some of us are.

And so it's really challenging.

So you know, this kind of gives you an example of the nesting habitat.

So these are cliffs on Baffin Island.

You can see the sea ice kind of along the bottom.

Then, these green areas, these are the photos from 1974. The green areas have been scanned in, and then digitally gone through, and kind of highlighted where the birds are.

And so, this is, you know, clearly needing updating.

And I really point out that the last survey was 2001.

And if you remember, the fisheries really started to take off in 2002.

And so, while it's great that we have this historic data that dates before the fisheries, we don't actually have much data since the fisheries.

And this is a large problem.

And so, again, this is a lot of information, but just kind of so that you understand that these are our colonies.

We have our protected areas.

We have co-management of these populations with Inuit communities, and so, these are the communities that we work with to co-manage these, these colonies.

And then we have our last year surveyed and our colony size.

So, you can see it's very, very variable in terms of when our data is from.

And so, the goal was to focus on these Baffin colonies, these are the colonies right beside the fisheries and really update these values.

And so we have the, kind of again, historic data, which is great, but we don't want, and can, we don't, we did not have any contemporary data.

So in 2018, we launched a fairly sizable program with three communities: Clyde River, Pond Inlet, and Qikiqtarjuaq.

And you can see, this is our our collaborative researcher, northern community member team at on the land.

And you can actually see this is the colony in the background where the birds birds nest.

And so we're able in 2018 to go out and actually assess, re-census the colony.

And, so, this led to a paper we published this past year.

And the take home message is we were able to go to all three of these colonies with a, a certain degree of confidence that we're able to publish new numbers at.

We see declines in all the colonies visited in 2018.

We did drones to do some of the colony surveys, and this was actually very useful to better assess the top of the cliffs, which is previously almost impossible.

And interestingly, although the historic data is not great at most of them, or even any of them, we do see that it looks like a, you know, between one% to 3% decline of the colonies over each year, over that time period.

And so, you know, getting a lot of data is not perfect.

It is consistent along the colonies and really did show a decline, and so, this was, you know, further evidence that we needed to understand the fisheries a little bit better.

So, you know, we updated these source population sizes, so we've got these new numbers, it was really exciting to update these in our database.

We weren't able to get to all of them.

This is a really hard colony and demonstrated we haven't been able to get there since 1973.

But it remains elusive to get to.

So we're hoping to get back to this one.

But we have these other regions outside of the Baffin region.

These are the ones now, and in the red.

And of course, we did plan to go to all of these.

And we had the funding and logistics in place to go to these other colonies in 2020.

And unfortunately, because of Covid, of course, travel is not permitted at this time.

And so we are hoping to go to 2021.

We are currently in the process of, you know, finding and replacing 2020 to 2021 and all of our permits and applications.

And we have every reason to believe that, if travel is permitted even regionally, within the territory of Nunavut, that these permits will get underway.

And so we're hoping to get back to these colonies to do more work.

So, to kind of go onto, the next question is, you know, one of the reasons, or sorry, one of the other pieces of information that we can get in is actually partnering with Queen's University and Vicki Friesan, who is a geneticist and specializes in seabirds.

And so, we've been exploring how genetic assignment to these colonies and populations could be useful in this particular project.

And, again, understanding which of these colonies are affected, you know, we've got that small, medium, and very large potential source population.

And we thought that maybe genetics could help us understand, again, what the source population is for these fisheries.

So over the last couple of years, we actually worked with the fishing boats, the quota holders.

We prep these these coolers with the permits, and data sheets.

And and kind of asked and trained staff on the boats to do collections of the fulmar.

So rather than, you know, putting fulmars overboard putting them into the cooler and shipping them to us.

It was really exciting.

I love getting e-mails from the fisherman you know, showing you the coolers on the boat, which is always great.

And this is specifically from the Nunavut Fisheries Association and their partners in this work and have been very, very supportive.

We got, ended up getting three coolers from two boats, all fulmars, a total of 19 birds.

And so we've used these birds to actually look at some of the genetic kind of variation among populations.

And so this is work that Lily Colston-Nepali did for her Masters at Queen's University with Vicki.

And I'm going to walk you through this one a little bit.

I'm not a geneticist, I'm not a genetics expert, so bear with me if you are.

But the idea is, is that this is a PCA analysis of three known colonies, so Arctic Canada.

All of these samples are from, from the colonies so we know that these birds were born on Arctic Canada colony.

So they kind of cluster together.

The Faroe Islands is this green cluster.

So again, we know that this, we know their source colony, their source population.

And then Bjornoya is in Norway, and so we know that these birds, again, follow genetically slightly different, so you can differentiate them a little bit.

And so what we did, Lily did, was then apply

so we have Labrador sea birds, these are birds that were collected off of off of Newfoundland, by hunters.

And then we have our Baffin Bay bycatch.

So these are two types of bird collections that took place at sea.

So we don't know where they came from, but we know they were caught in Canadian waters in two different regions, Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay.

And what we see is that the Labrador birds map onto, it's a real mix between the Faroe Islands birds, birds that were born in the Faroes, and birds that were born in the Canadian Arctic.

And then the Baffin Bay bycatch birds almost map right onto the Arctic Canadian-born birds.

And so it does seem like the Labrador sea birds again, are mostly the European or fairly source.

Whereas the bycatch birds in the Arctic are most likely those Arctic breeders.

And just to kind of break this down.

Again, this is a lot of information, but I just want to recognize all of these different tests that Lily did.

So Lily ran these tests in a couple of different ways, tried to break it down in a couple of different ways.

And really, the take home messages is these Labrador sea birds, birds that are caught in Newfoundland waters,

it's a real mix of Arctic birds and European birds.

And kind of, does it matter what tests you apply?

All these different ones really point to the fact that it's a mixed population between North American populations and European populations in the Newfoundland waters.

And so that really points that we have to figure out how do we include these Arctic Canada birds when we're doing different demographic modeling?

Because certainly mortality of Arctic Canada birds is not just taking place in Arctic Canada.

And the other real take home message is that the bycatch from the northern fisheries does appear to be all Canadian Arctic breeders.

And so again, she's done a couple of different tasks.

And, if you're interested in, I can point you to the paper where Lily details all of this, but, again, the point is that the bycatch birds do seem to be all of these larger colonies.

And there is a mix of colonies in the north and the south.

So they're not just talking local colonies, we're talking about all the colonies in Canada.

And so if we go back to our demographic modeling now based on Lily's information and Lily's studies, we can kind of rule out this idea that there are these two smaller versions.

And it's unlikely that the bycatch birds are going to be the larger model, where we have European birds, but we do think that it's really sitting nicely in the kind of regional, regional, population.

So about 500 individuals.

So this has been a really helpful, in terms of using genetics to kind of get at what level of, sort of population we're looking at.

So just a little bit about kind of, where do we go from here?

And so, again, we're partnered with the Nunavut Fisheries Association, so, you know, EC under my program has been trying to do all these things in the last couple years. Resurvey of colonies is under work, we're continuing to do demographic modeling, carcass collection, and increased training.

So, these are all things that we are, you know, have done or continuing to do.

And then, the Nunavut Fisheries Association has actually supported MITACS grants and MITACS,

I'm not sure if you guys have MITACS in the US, but MITACS is a program in Canada where you can do industry-supported work.

And so they have supported a PhD student to that at the University of New Brunswick, her name's Allison Anholt.

And she's with Heather Major.

And so, she'll be actually doing some other work.

So Fisher Knowledge Survey, to understand really where the fishery-bird interaction is happening.

We want to again understand that taking the bycatch, sorry, take of fulmars along the entire flyway, beyond 0A, 0B.

There's discussions about vulnerability mapping and, you know, there's a whole lot of environmental, you know, kind of other data beyond just the bird and in that, that we haven't really explored.

So, we're hoping that Allison can really dig into some of these things throughout her PhD.

Again, what, I think that's really interesting, and not specific to Canada, but very present in Nunavut, is that, it is a co-management system, Nunavut is, is a territory and has a ecosystem-based management framework there that, you know, developing their new fishery strategy.

They're promoting fisheries in the region.

And so, we do have these co-management boards that frankly, are one of the few groups that have a management mandate over seabirds and fisheries.

And so, I think similar to the US.

You know, our DFO, the fisheries Environment Canada seabirds, but it's a co-management.

It's unique in Canada that the, the co-management boards actually have a mandate for both seabirds and fisheries.

So, it's been really interesting to work with those with this program.

And then, of course, the Marine Stewardship Certification is ongoing because there, this is very much being promoted under the Nunavut fishery strategy.

And, just a really kind of quick mention of that certification, the fishery in 0AB as well as a few other regions for Greenland Halibut has gone for certification.

There's a little bit of a timeline there.

But, again, if anyone wants to talk details, I'm happy to do so.

But I really want to draw your attention to in October 2019

so just a year ago, we actually got confirmation that really northern fulmars are specifically named in the, in, in, in the certification, in the review.

And so, that really holds, you know, all of us, I would say Department of Fisheries, Environment Canada, as well as the fisheries industry to doing more work on this over time.

And really assessing what those biologically-based limits are to ensure that the recovery of this species is not hindered.

And so that was, I think, a real collaborative win. It is included and we'll continue to work on this.

I do want to come back to this idea of fisheries and seabird interactions.

And so one of the things that we've gotten through talking with fishers in the region is that the bycatch is happening because the discard is happening, and so different boats actually use different kind of processing

and you know, discards, I don't want to say "protocol", but just kind of mechanisms.

And so one of the things that we really want to explore, specifically through the fisher surveys, is how do we how are these interactions actually happening?

And so we think that by really tackling discards, and bycatch together, we can actually, you know

through reducing discards, we can actually reduce bycatch.

So this is work that Allison will really be following up on.

I wanted to kind of touch on two other kinds of bycatch birds, sorry, bycatch questions that we've been talking about specifically in the Arctic.

We did a joint project again with the Arctic Council on lumpsucker fisheries.

And so this has been interesting to try to get the data from. We had to get data from, I believe it was 4 or 5 countries, it was a real challenge.

It's a small fishery.

But, potentially, as high impact on birds.

And Signe Christensen-Dalsgaard published this last year.

And it's a really interesting example of how do you bring bycatch data together from across a single fisheries

but you do it at the scale of all of the fisheries and look at the fishery-wide impact and specifically on birds for this case.

And so this has been an interesting, you know way we often thinking about doing it from the perspective of the bird.

But this is a really international way to look at fisheries and think about how this might be affecting seabirds.

What's really interesting is that through this project we've looked at, this is actually the number of participants in the lumpsucker fishery over time in Canada.

Again, these four Napa regions, these really decreased over time.

And so although this fishery was identified specifically in Iceland is a huge problem for seabirds.

We actually think that this is a past problem for seabirds in Canada, and so this fisheries is doesn't really exist anymore.

So while we're super happy to contribute to this, you know, we don't, we don't actually see this as an emerging fishery, it's a very small fishery in Canada.

On the flip side of that, we also have a lot of Arctic char fisheries in Canada, and this is a project that I work on with with DFO and colleagues at Acadia University and University of Toronto.

This is Bonnie Hamilton, who is a PhD student that I work with, and we're specifically looking at plastics and plastic pollution in fish.

But through this work, we, you know, we work collective or collaboratively with the Cambridge Bay, so this is where Cambridge Bay is in the central Canadian Arctic.

And we started to really dive into some of the seabird bycatch of these small-scale, subsistence commercial gillnet fisheries.

And so, again, this is a little snapshot of the data that we've looked at over time, and this is kind of in, this was in prep, I'm hoping that we'll have a first draft of it to, you know, look at in the next month or so.

But we see this as a growing problem for seabirds and I think this is something that is really interesting to think about it as we have, you know, changing fisheries practices in worldwide but specifically in the Arctic.

And we have some of these, some of these fisheries going again for these these different assessments, Seafood Watch, OceanWise are the ones that we kind of think about.

They often publish those certifications based on published data.

But when there's no data, they have nothing to rank on.

And so we, we're trying to really think strategically about how do we get some of those data published so that it is being understood by fishers and certifications that we cannot assert to collectively nudge towards solutions.

And so we're, we're working on this collectively to try again, try to influence and think about this in different ways.

So, I'm going to pause or stop there and, and thanks everyone for listening and hopefully I can take a question or two.

Heather Tabisola >> Thank you so much, Jennifer. I'm gonna give a clap, give a round of applause like I do for everybody.

Jennifer Provencher >> [Laughs]

Heather Tabisola >> And I think we're, folks, I know we've been going with video but it sounds like Jen's connection discourages her from doing video.

So, unless you want to try it, Jen, I don't want you to get bumped off

But I will stay off video as well, because I don't want to ruin that connection.

See if what happens?

Jennifer Provencher >> I'll try.

Heather Tabisola >> OK.

Jennifer, everybody.

And if you have questions, please put them in the chat.

I always love observer questions as an ex-observer myself who did marine mammals and seabirds and it was fun.

Fun challenge.

Any questions?

Jens, do you see any questions in the chat?

Jens Nielsen >> No, but I...

Jennifer Provencher >> We actually have one from...

Go ahead.

Jens Nielsen >> I was going to ask a question, but...Feel free...

Jennifer Provencher >> No, I'll take your question, and then I actually see there's one in the chat to me, but I'll talk to the group. So why don't you go first?

Jens Nielsen >> Yeah, I was just curious, when you showed colonies and not a lot of sampling in the past, kind of wondering about how much does the colony sizes sort of vary between warm and cold years?

Are they pretty consistent, or does it change? And I guess, in relation to that--do you suspect colonies are shifting northwards with warming climate, if that makes sense?

Jennifer Provencher >> Yeah, those are great questions.

I, so in the Canadian Arctic, I think probably similar to the US Arctic, those colonies are really hard to get to.

In North America, and, you know, inclusive of Greenland, all of those former colonies are quite far north.

And so, we rely specifically on a lot of our demographic modeling data and that type of data in terms of like colony attendance and warm years and cold years.

We rely on our European colleagues. So, to get to get a, you know, North American colony, you know, there's like multiple planes involved, sometimes a snowmobile is involved.

Like, it's, you know, in Iceland, you just drive to the colony. Like I was on a bus tour for the, you know, a like an Arctic duck symposium that took place in Iceland and we just got on a bus and like drove to a northern fulmar colony.

And so we rely on a lot of, I would say, European fulmar demographics.

And as far as I know, they, there's, you know, relatively high site fidelity.

There does not seem to be kind of a connection between warm years and cold years.

And we don't see a northern movement in this species, at least yet.

That's not true of all birds, it seems, I think, the auk, certainly we see other species razorbills and things moving into the Canadian Arctic, but we don't see northern fulmars shifting.

So, the Canadian Arctic would be a horrible place to address those questions because it's so big and under monitored.

So, again, we rely on some of our European colleagues to fill in a lot of those demographic questions for us, because their colonies are super accessible compared to ours.

Jens Nielsen >> Thank you.

Heather Tabisola >> Thanks, Jens.

Let's see, Colleen Harpold says, "Thank you for such an interesting talk."

Ash Adams has asked, "Do you offer internships or research assistant positions?"

Jennifer Provencher >> [Laughs] Yeah.

I mean, normally we do, so I often have students, and I have [inaudible] students.

One of the real challenges right now is, of course, travel, most, I have to admit most people want to work with me because they want to go to the Arctic and that is basically impossible right now.

We have a travel ban on and so we're not taking any students on

that basically require travel to the north.

I don't, I don't know if any of you kind of are aware of the Covid landscape in Canada.

But up until two weeks ago, the territory of Nunavut was actually Covid-free.

And so, they've had travel restrictions on since March and have just gone into lockdown.

So, we're projecting, not going to the Canadian Arctic Nunavut for at least, probably a year or until there's a globally available vaccine that can be widely distributed.

So, yeah, it's a tricky one.

The answer is, yes.

But it's hard right now.

Yeah. And, then, Thomas Goode actually just gave a question.

I can so, the question was, "Any work being done to mitigate northern fulmar bycatch at the source?"

So, yeah, it's a that's a really good question.

And, that's a really complex question that we're hoping Allison can dive into.

So, what we think is happening is that

the boat that are taking Greenland halibut in, some of them have this,

again, I'm not a fisheries person so don't laugh at me, it's hard, but they have,

you know, they have a machine that the but the, the fish come in and they get placed and all the guts gets sucked out and it's kind of held in this vacuum tank that's holding tank

because the sucking happens in a vacuum.

And so, when they are hauling and taking fish in, they're, this machine is happening but because of the mechanism at the vacuum,

but by virtue of that, they have a holding tank and so they don't haul and discard at the same time because that's how this machine works.

But other boats have have machines that can haul and take the halibut in and get the halibut and then discard continuously as they're hauling.

And so there is some suggestion through talking with partners, that just this simple difference between the, I hate to say it, but like the gut, I don't know what the popular is, like gutting machine, the machine that guts the fish, having a holding tank versus not having a holding tank, could mean the difference, basically, between having bycatch and almost having no bycatch.

Given this data we see, it is really episodic.

So the birds, the boats are, not even the boats, the times that because they get fulmars, they get a lot of fulmars, and then there's a whole bunch without it.

And so, that's kind of our discussion point right now.

And we're trying to get through it surveys.

So, the challenging part is that this system is that we know bycatch is happening.

We know the species. We know the fisheries.

We know the gear type.

But we don't know how and when, we just know that the birds end up dead in the net.

So we don't know more about that.

And so part of Allison's work will be talking with the fishers to explore that more.

What are their observations?

Because if it's simple as recommending, you know, a non-discard machine, or maybe it's some kind of form of tori lines as they're kind of hauling, you know, those mitigations are pretty simple.

But we don't know what to recommend yet because we actually don't know what the interaction is.

Heather Tabisola >> Just such a good question, and a really hard topic to address, right?

On those lines, Diana, I see your question.

I'm gonna ask Melanie's first.

Melanie, um, Melanie Paquin asks, "Can the net filaments, can you change the color of them to help as an avoidance measure?"

Jennifer Provencher >> Yeah.

And that's a really great question.

So the challenge of this fisheries is most gillnet fisheries we think of as a problem.

So in more southern Canada, eastern Canada, you know, they put the gillnets out, and then there's been a lot of research on changing the gillnet color, or putting flashers on them.

Or, there's ones with acoustic deterrent.

And so, you're altering the gillnets, because the birds, you know, they're putting the gillnet out, and then the birds are caught in it, and then they're coming back, and they're bringing the nets in and then the birds are in the net.

And then, again, these are the MRSA gillnets so they're hundreds of feet down.

And so the problem is, is that it's so, for all our conversations with fishers the nets get set without bird incident.

The nets are weighted and baited for the, the fish to be attracted to them.

And they are hundreds and hundreds of feet down, so they are way down at the bottom.

But the problem is, and we can see the interaction is, is when they pull the nets back up, you got baited nets, you've got fish in the nets, and because the fulmars are tube-noses, they're attracted to the smell of fish at the surface.

And so they're flying in and so this is why we think either tori lines or that discard connection is really the problem

because it's not a visual cue, it's an olfactory cue.

And it it's happening at the surface on that hauling stage.

It's not kind of when there, it's not, most gillnet problems

the interaction is happening when they're set, whereas this problem is happening on when they are hauling the net.

And so, this is the other interesting part, is that, and I think this is really interesting to talk about because just because you have a gillnet problem, the solution is not going to be universal.

The solution could be really fishery-specific depending on the fishery and the depth and the location.

And then like the other one that, you know, people often say is like, well, what about night setting because that's worked really well in some other regions?

But, unfortunately, in the Arctic, like many of you know, there is no night during some of the fishing season, and so, we have to think about what are the mitigations that are appropriate for gillnets and what are the mitigations appropriate for the Arctic.

And so, it's a really interesting problem.

Heather Tabisola >> Alright.

So, I think we have time for one more question.

So, Diana, I'm going to ask yours.

She said, "Great talk, Jennifer. I'm curious if the color morphology of fulmars in the Canadian Arctic colonies support [inaudible] theory of migration or gene flow between the colonies.

Jennifer Provencher >> Yeah, the answer is no.

Lily did look at the color morphs.

And so, again, if you know about fulmars, you know that there are certain areas of the world that have kind of more gray morphs, or dark morphs, or areas have light morphs.

And the work that she did suggests that, like clearly, there's a genetic link to color.

But the genetic, the overall genetic structure was very loose. And so they're, in Canada, we don't have, we kind of have a very loose structure.

There's no, there's one kind of what we're calling Management Unit.

And so the frustrating, the easy and yet, complex answer is, no.

We don't see any kind of direct or very straightforward link between color morph and gene flow, or genetic structure.

Heather Tabisola >> Thank you to the Arctic...

Sorry, I just want to end this real quick.

I know a lot of the Arctic ARP folks have to head out because they have their meetings starting.

But I just wanted to thank everybody, um, that is taking off because of that.

Thank you for joining.

Um, and, uh, let's see, we can do the one last question that's here from Elizabeth, and she asks, "What are the primary bird bycatch species?

The char gillnet fishery?"

Jennifer Provencher >> Yeah, great question.

Loons is the easiest answer, and, you know, if, for those of you who are familiar with the species, you know, that could be several species.

So as, again, raise an ID problem, we think that the species here, pictured here, this is again, by Bonnie, these are, we think that these are, I think they're called Thick-billed loons, so I'm not, I'm not a very good loon person.

But one of the challenges are, when we look at the again, the at-sea, sorry, well, it's not at-sea, but the observer data from the gillnet fisheries, and it's all loons.

But that could be three species. So we thought, it was going to be Red-throated loons, and we're kind of we're going that direction.

And then we start getting these photos of these Thick-billed loons, which kind of, or sorry they're not Thick-billed, but um, these are Broad-billed loons, but they're like another species.

So we're, we're actually have a study where we're going to do a survey and again, because this goes back to like Inuktitut and getting the words right and making sure you're using the right terminology.

Is it gonna be a fisher survey, a pictorial fishing survey, to collect the names of the three species in Inuktitut and confirm what they're, what they're reporting in future data to try to get it.

So loons are, or the, you know, the group, but unfortunately that gives us three different species in this, in this region.

And certainly what we think of as the most common loon species is not what our pictures are of, so, you know, "to be determined."

Heather Tabisola >> Isn't that always the case with science? Still looking into it. We'll find out. [Laughs]

Jennifer Provencher >> More questions, always. [Laughs]

Heather Tabisola >> More to do!

Let's see. Yeah, I don't see any other questions in the chat.

Ash, definitely reach out to Jennifer directly and talk with her.

Jennifer Provencher >> Absolutely.

Heather Tabisola >> And Jen, maybe you want to just drop your email in the chat box, just in case, they, Ash doesn't have that from the seminar series.

Yeah. Thanks so much for your talk today.

As a reminder, next week, we will be meeting on Monday for seminar.

It will be with Julia Grosse, who's a PhD Biological oceanographer at GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany.

And she will be sharing about her winter on the RV Polarstern.

So, that'll be, I think, another really fun one.

And then, of course, if you missed any of our seminars or want to re-listen to any, you can find them on NOAA PMEL's YouTube page, and there's actually a specific link now just for our seminars.

Again, Jennifer, thank you so much for doing this.

And I hope we can stay in touch, and everybody, thank you for joining us.

Jennifer Provencher >> Thanks, everyone, have a great day.