Publications

New information on growth spurts and the potential impact on estimates of lifetime growth rate and age at first reproduction for the Hawaiian population of green sea turtles.

An examination of the effects of quota reductions on the Hawai'i longline fleet.

The eastern population of the North Pacific right whale is one of the most endangered baleen whale populations in the world numbering in the tens of individuals due to historical whaling followed by illegal catches in the 1960s.

This study estimates nearshore reef fish production for the main Hawaiian Islands at the island scale using commercial and non-commercial catch and characterizes the non-commercial fishery.

This summary will provide an update on NOAA-AFSC’s latest research on seal-vessel interactions jointly conducted with the National Park Service. This research builds on studies since 2002 on ice-associated harbor seals in Disenchantment Bay which have focused on proximate effects such as when, where, and at what distances vessels were causing a disturbance. By employing GPS satellite tracking (for both seals and ships), we aim to address broader population-level effects, and in particular to better understand how vessels entering glacial ice habitats may approach and alter the haul-out behavior of nursing pups, thus potentially increasing their energetic costs of thermoregulation in the water. There is concern that chronic disturbances could reduce body mass of pups at weaning and survival, and ultimately impact population stability.

The paper identifies plastic debris as a pelagic threat to marine turtles, allows identification of plastic type and origin, and the quantification of plastic type most ingested by protected marine turtles.

JABBA is an open-source modeling framework for simplified, data-moderate stock assessments which has already been used in five assessments worldwide and will be applied to domestic and international stocks in 2018.

The lack of reproductive pathogens identified in the sampled population indicates that factors other than reproductive pathology, such as resource limitation or other external stressors, may drive the observed variability in monk seal reproductive rates.

In Hawaiʻi, where night fishing accounts for more than one third of the total shore fishing trips on Oʻahu, implementation of a fixed time-block sampling design for private boat survey is feasible.

A study on the velvet dogfish (Zameus squamulosus) shark species in the Hawaiian longline fisheries.