Epibenthic predators in estuarine shallow soft-bottom environments are generally considered to have broad ecological niches with a wide overlap. This allows them to cope with abundant but highly variable prey communities. The assessment of trophic relationships in shallow soft-bottom habitats is, however, challenging and often complicated by the bias and low resolution of the analytical tools available ...

Ethical concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have fueled discussions around the ethics training received by AI designers. We claim that training designers for ethical behaviour, understood as habitual application of ethical principles in any situation, can make a significant difference in the practice of research, development, and application of AI systems. Building on ...

The aim of this study was to compare the catch quality of Northeast Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in the Barents Sea bottom trawl fishery caught using the conventional configuration (a sorting grid followed by a diamond mesh (T0) codend) and a T90° turned mesh codend (T90) without a grid. Twenty hauls were conducted, consisting of 10 hauls with the conventional configuration and 10 hauls with the ...

The European Commission’s recently published ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy seeks to facilitate a transition towards a sustainable food system. The strategy moves from a linear understanding of the food system towards a more circular view of the system’s complex interdependencies. Despite these laudable intentions, it does not follow the guidance of the EU’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors that the ...

Size selection and exploitation pattern of diamond-mesh codends with different mesh sizes, 25 to 54 mm, for demersal trawl fishery targeting banded scad (Caranx (Atule) kalla) was tested and compared using the covered codend method in the South China Sea. Our results demonstrated that the selective parameters, L50 (50% retention length) and SR (selection range), would increase as the mesh sizes of ...

The bycatch of unwanted fish species is a main concern in shrimp beam trawl fishery of the South China Sea. This study evaluated the effect of using combined square-mesh and diamond-mesh codends (CSDM codends) on catch efficiency of a shrimp trawl fishery with the catch comparison and catch ratio approach. The trouser trawl method was applied using the commercial 22-mm diamond mesh codend (D22) as ...

ecent events around the world have revealed varying degrees of public support for climate change and environmental regulation. Applying a latent class logit model, this study investigates Norwegian and Scottish public’s economic support for proposed deep sea management policies for novel attributes, identifying the presence of preference heterogeneity. Marine litter and health of fish stocks were ...

Aquatic invertebrates are a major source of biomaterials and bioactive natural products that can find applications as pharmaceutics, nutraceutics, cosmetics, antibiotics, antifouling products and biomaterials. Symbiotic microorganisms are often the real producers of many secondary metabolites initially isolated from marine invertebrates; however, a certain number of them are actually synthesized by ...

We compared the benefits of using extruded feed (EF), against pelleted feed (PF) to guide cage culture investments in Great Lakes. Three out of six cages in the same farm had fish that were fed EF and the other half, belonging to a different farm had fish that were fed PF. The diets were similar in crude protein, lipid and energy content. However, the fiber content in PF was 4 times higher than that ...

Environmental DNA analysis is rapidly transforming biodiversity monitoring and bolstering conservation applications worldwide. This approach has been assisted by the development of metabarcoding PCR primers that are suited for detection of a wide range of taxa. However, little effort has gone into exploring the value of the non-target DNA sequences that are generated in every survey, but subsequently ...