Sightings | Alumni News
Tuna is (mostly) Out; Tilapia is In
Jesse Marsh MEM’02 Helps Consumers Make Responsible
Seafood Choices p.2
Blue Crabs and Sea Turtles, West Coast and
East
Marsh’s interest in the marine environment comes naturally. She grew up in coastal
New Hampshire, where her dad was a fisherman and her grandfather was an avid
sailor.
Her love of the ocean and interest in the environment meshed during a “standout semester” when, as a Boston University undergraduate, she spent three months at the School for Field Studies in Baja, Mexico, studying the sustainability of a blue crab fishery there. Once a week, with three other students, she went into Magdalena Bay with local fishermen and measured their catches, helping to create a data set that would show whether the crustaceans were being overfished.
It was the first time the environmental science major was introduced to research that involved stakeholders in an environmental problem. “These people grew up fishing,” she says. “They were interested in learning how to continue working without depleting the crab populations.”
Ocean conservation became her passion, and the combination of science and policy offered by the Nicholas School was compelling, so Marsh came to North Carolina in 2000 to pursue a Master of Environmental Management degree at Duke.
With a focus on coastal environmental management, she spent a good deal of time at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort. “It is a really special place, unique,” she says. “The community there, from the maintenance crew to the women who worked in the offices to the professors was really strong.”
At the Marine Lab, sea turtle expert Larry Crowder presented her with an intriguing Masters Project prospect. Crowder, the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology, is nationally recognized for his research into declining populations of sea turtles as a result of fisheries bycatch. But in the nearby Core Sound, fishermen considered the massive turtles to be pests, because they destroyed crab pots trying to get at the bait. That’s why local fisherman Joe Benevides had approached Crowder.
Benevides wanted to redesign the traditional crab pot to keep turtles out, and he asked Crowder for assistance in evaluating the new model. While Crowder was skeptical that anyone could turtleproof a crab pot, he was intrigued. “It was a karma thing,” he says. “Sea turtles are a protected species, but in this case they were a pest. If we are going to protect sea turtles from fishermen, we should protect the crab fishermen from them.” So he asked Marsh to help.
Her resume says, “Fished 90 experimental crab pots daily in Core Sound to determine changes in catch rate and turtle damage related to crab pot design.” The reality was grittier. “For 30 days,” Crowder reports, “Jesse was out on the water at 6 a.m., working shoulder to shoulder with a commercial fisherman, shaking out pots and noting damage by turtles. A lot of students would be timid about going out with a fisherman and the hard work involved. She was totally into it.”
Traditional crab pots are 2-foot cubes made of coated chicken wire, “baited with stuff turtles like to eat,” according to Crowder. Benevides wanted to test a similar model with stouter wire and a second, low-profile or rectangular model, also with the stronger materials, that he thought the turtles would have a tougher time tipping over.
The low-profile pots did in fact show a greater survivorship rate, Marsh’s research indicated. But she and Crowder agree that, as those pots are more expensive than the traditional models, they will be slow to be adopted.
“The nice thing about her project is that it was not hypothetical; it was a real-world issue,” says Crowder. Two of Crowder’s students have since followed up by investigating the best placement of crab pots to avoid turtle damage. “Jesse opened that door for us,” he says.