Howard Browman

• Ph.D.
• Group Leader at Institute of Marine Research in Norway

The performance of a single commercial accelerometer‐based underwater acoustic vector sensor (AVS) in resolving acoustic azimuth was evaluated. The method involves calculating the active intensity of an acoustic signal to determine the dominant directionality of an acoustic pressure field as a function of time and frequency. While this method effic...

Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) are found on both sides of the North Atlantic and often their spawning overlaps in time and space. Yet, haddock has a much more variable recruitment than cod in areas where they are sympatric, a difference that is consistent across ecosystems. At the larval stages, differences in fe...

This candid perspective written by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds is intended to advance conversations about the realities of peer review and its inherent limitations. Trust in a process or institution is built slowly and can be destroyed quickly. Trust in the peer review process for scholarly outputs (i.e., journal articles) is bei...

Stakeholders need scientific advice on the environmental impacts of offshore wind (OW) before the facilities are installed. The utility of conventional environmental monitoring methods as a basis for forecasting OW impacts is limited because they do not explain the causes of the observed effects. We propose a multistep approach, based on process-or...

With a biomass of ∼4 million tonnes, and annual catches of 900 000 tonnes, the northeast Atlantic (NEA) cod stock in the Barents Sea is the world’s largest. Scientists have been trying to explain the variability in recruitment of this stock for over 100 years, in particular connecting it to spawning stock biomass and environmental factors such as t...

Static magnetic fields (B-fields) are introduced in marine ecosystems by anthropogenic sources such as subsea power cables. Larvae of the gadoids Atlantic haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) and Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) disperse over the continental shelf and may encounter B-fields, which could alter their behavior. We tested the behavior of 184...

Sources of anthropogenic noise in the ocean have temporal and directional characteristics. Characterizing the soundscape requires identifying the directionality of the sources of noise in addition to the non-directional sound pressure. An underwater acoustic vector sensor (AVS) can be used to provide the directionality of incoming noise, and the co...

Psychology and vision science, university of leicester, leicester, uK; j school of veterinary science, Murdoch university, Perth, wA, Australia; k Department of ichthyology, Faculty of Biology, lomonosov Moscow state university, Moscow, Russia; l school of Biomedical sciences, university of queensland, Australia; m Pepperell Research and consulting...

Anguillid eels were once considered to be the classic example of catadromy. However, alternative life cycles have been reported, including skipping the freshwater phase and habitat shifting between fresh, brackish, and saltwater throughout the growth phase. There is a lack of knowledge regarding these alternate life strategies, for example, the pr...

Background Lesser sandeel (Ammodytes marinus) is widely distributed in North Sea ecosystems. Sandeel acts as a critical trophic link between zooplankton and top predators (fish, mammals, sea birds). Because they live buried in the sand, sandeel may be directly affected by the rapid expansion of anthropogenic activities linked to their habitat on th...

The number and size of offshore wind (OW) turbines is increasing rapidly. OW turbines produce continuous, low-frequency noise that could impact marine fish dispersing/migrating through the facilities. Any such impact would be relevant for larval stages, which have limited possibility to swim away from OW facilities. If directional movement of fish...

Seismic surveys are conducted worldwide to explore for oil and gas deposits and to map subsea formations. The airguns used in these surveys emit low-frequency sound waves. Studies on zooplankton responses to airguns report a range of effects, from none to substantial mortality. A field experiment was conducted to assess mortality and naupliar body...

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development requires that all of the Actions it endorses have concrete plans to involve stakeholders in the co-creation of ocean science. As a result, we have a unique opportunity to test different approaches to stakeholder engagement to see what works and what does not. Here, we feature sh...

Submarine power cables carry electricity over long distances. Their geographic distribution, number, and areal coverage are increasing rapidly with the development of, for example, offshore wind facilities. The flow of current passing through these cables creates a magnetic field (MF) that can potentially affect marine organisms, particularly those...

Calanus finmarchicus were reared from eggs to adults at 12 C and 16 C with non-limiting food in combination with ambient (600 μatm) and high (1100 μatm) pCO 2. These conditions are likely to be encountered by the species at the southern margins of its biogeographical range by the end of the century. Dry weight (DW), carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) mass...

Crude oil causes severe abnormalities in developing fish. Photomodification of constituents in crude oil increases its toxicity several fold. We report on the effect of crude oil, in combination with ultraviolet (UV) radiation, on Atlantic haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) embryos. Accumulation of crude oil on the eggshell makes haddock embryos pa...

Many anguillid eel species display facultative catadromy. Some eel spend their entire life cycle in marine coastal areas, but the geographical extent of this, especially at the extremes of their distributional ranges, is unknown. We analysed otolith Sr:Ca and Ba:Ca from yellow-stage European eel (Anguilla anguilla) sampled along the coast of Norway...

Disease and parasitism cause major welfare, environmental and economic concerns for global aquaculture. In this review, we examine the status and potential of technologies that exploit genetic variation in host resistance to tackle this problem. We argue that there is an urgent need to improve understanding of the genetic mechanisms involved, leadi...

High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) subsea cables are used to transport power between locations and from/to near-shore and off-shore facilities. HVDC cables produce magnetic fields (B-fields) that could impact marine fish. Atlantic haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) is a demersal fish that is at risk of exposure to anthropogenic B-fields. Their larv...

Like many animals, northern temperate eel can enter a hibernation-like state and become dormant during the winter. Knowledge of overwintering behaviour in eel is sparse and mainly based on anecdotal observations and a few experimental studies on thermal tolerance. We studied European eel (Anguilla anguilla) overwintering behaviour in a Skagerrak fj...

Climate change will increase the magnitude and duration of warming events and the variability in the phenology and abundance of available prey to the early life stages of fish. These factors influence physiological, behavioral and ecological processes, impacting growth, development and survival. Using a fully factorial design with two prey-availabi...

The global response to the challenge of increasingly rapid and severe climate change is shifting from a focus on mitigation and remediation of impacts to a pragmatic adaptation framework. Innovative adaptive solutions that transform the way in which we manage the world's oceans and, particularly, the harvesting of marine resources in a sustainable...

In the North Sea, the number and size of offshore wind (OW) turbines, together with the associated network of High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) subsea cables, will increase rapidly over the coming years. HVDC cables produce magnetic fields (MFs) that might have an impact on marine animals that encounter them. One of the fish species that is at ris...

The goldsinny wrasse (Ctenolabrus rupestris) is a commercially important fish that inhabits coastal areas across the eastern Atlantic. This species moves from a shallow home territory along the coast into deeper waters in the autumn and winter and then returns to that same territory in the spring. Only male goldsinny wrasse exhibit strong territori...

Characterizing the capacity of marine organisms to adapt to climate change related drivers (e.g., pCO2 and temperature), and the possible rate of this adaptation, is required to assess their resilience (or lack thereof) to these drivers. Several studies have hypothesized that epigenetic markers such as DNA methylation, histone modifications and non...

Photo-enhanced toxicity of crude oil is produced by exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) embryos were exposed to crude oil with and without UV radiation (290–400 nm) from 3 days post fertilization (dpf) until 6 dpf. Embryos from the co-exposure experiment were continually exposed to UV radiation until hatching at 11 d...

Anguillid eels grow in freshwater but spawn in the open ocean. The cues that guide eels over long distances to the spawning area are unknown. The Earth's magnetic field can provide directional and positional information and is likely used by catadromous eels during their spawning migration; as magnetosensitivity and compass orientation have been re...

The article ‘No evidence for hybridization between Calanus finmarchicus and C. glacialis in a subarctic area of sympatry’ (Choquet et al. 2020) concludes that “no evidence supports a potential for hybridization between C. finmarchicus and C. glacialis”. We argue that the InDel markers used by Choquet et al. (2020) may have limited capacity to detec...

The movement patterns of three commercially important wrasse (Labridae) species inside a small marine protected area (~ 0.15 km²) on the west coast of Norway were analysed over a period of 21 months. The mean distance between capture and recapture locations varied between 10 and 187 m, and was species and season specific. The extent of movement was...

Lipids, particularly fatty acids (FAs), are major sources of energy and nutrients in aquatic ecosystems and play key roles during vertebrate development. The European eel Anguilla anguilla goes through major biochemical and physiological changes throughout its lifecycle as it inhabits sea‐ (SW), and/or brackish‐ (BW) and/or freshwater (FW) habitats...

We combined fatty acid (FA) and stable isotope (SI) analyses to investigate the trophic ecology of different stages of European eels (Anguilla anguilla) across seawater (SW), brackish water (BW), and freshwater (FW) habitats. Salinity was the main driver of differences in the biochemical composition, and the greatest variation occurred between SW a...

On 22 December 2019, the world of fisheries science and whale conservation lost one of its most ardent champions with the passing of Sidney J. Holt. His career began in 1947 at the age of 21. Ten years later, he and his colleague Ray Beverton published their authoritative monograph on quantitative fish population dynamics. In 1953, he joined the Fi...

Aquaculture now produces more seafood than wild capture fisheries and this production is expected to at least double by 2050. Representing almost half of global production, marine aquaculture will contribute to sustainably feeding the growing humanity. However, climate change will undoubtedly challenge the future growth of marine aquaculture. Tempe...

Small‐scale fisheries (SSFs) tend to target shallow waters, but the depth distributions of coastal fish can vary depending on species, size, and sex. This creates a scope for a form of fishing selectivity that has received limited attention but can have considerable implications for monitoring and management of these fisheries. We conducted a case...

The European eel hatches in the Sargasso Sea and migrates across the Atlantic Ocean toward Europe. At the continental shelf, larvae metamorphose into glass eels and then recruit to coastal habitats and estuaries. Among other cues, glass eels orient in situ using lunar cues, but what role this lunar compass plays in their recruitment to the coast is...

Exposure to environmentally relevant concentrations of oil could impact survival of fish larvae in situ through subtle effects on larval behavior. During the larval period, Atlantic haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) are transported toward nursery grounds by ocean currents and active swimming, which can modify their drift route. Haddock larvae are...

In their Policy Forum “Engage with animal welfare in conservation” (7 August, p. 629), N. Sekar and D. Shiller state that the “overwhelming evidence that animals think and feel” is the basis for their call to include animal welfare in conservation practices. This feelings-based approach is problematic because there is substantial scientific uncerta...

In “The Great Fish Pain Debate” (Issues, Summer 2010), Troy Vettese, Becca Franks, and Jennifer Jacquet rightly state that in Germany the assumption that fish feel pain resulted in court cases and fishing-related legislation from the 1980s onward. The initial focus was on fishing competitions, which were ruled as unjustifiable because their primary...

Beginning in February 2020, COVID-19-related stay at home orders and workplace shutdowns worldwide have disrupted personal and professional lives, including those of aquatic scientists. Manuscript submission and peer reviewing data from journals may be indicators of productivity impacts among aquatic scientists. We tested four null hypotheses: the...

Machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, offers various methods that can be applied in marine science. It supports data-driven learning, which can result in automated decision making of de novo data. It has significant advantages compared with manual analyses that are labour intensive and require considerable time. Machine learning...

The dispersal of fish larvae during the early life stages plays an important role in recruitment. Together with oceanographic processes, larval orientation and swimming behavior significantly influences dispersal. However, currently there is no information of larval behavior in situ for most subpolar species. The Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus)...

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), a pesticide used in salmonid aquaculture, is released directly into the environment where nontarget organisms are at risk of exposure. We determined threshold concentrations for mortality of Calanus spp., the dominant zooplankton species in the North Atlantic, and assessed sublethal effects, focusing on the escape response...

Links between the lunar cycle and the life cycle (migration patterns, locomotor activity, pulses in recruitment) of the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) are well documented. In this study, we hypothesized that the orientation of glass eels at sea is related to the lunar cycle. The European eel hatches in the Sargasso Sea and migrates across the Atl...

The copepod Lepeophtheirus salmonis is an obligate ectoparasite of salmonids. Salmon lice are major pests in salmon aquaculture and due to its economic impact Lepeoph-theirus salmonis is one of the most well studied species of marine parasite. However, there is limited understanding of how increased concentration of pCO 2 associated with ocean acid...

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) hatches in the Sargasso Sea and migrates to European and North African freshwater. As glass eels, they reach estuaries where they become pigmented. Glass eels use a tidal phase-dependent magnetic compass for orientation, but whether their magnetic direction is innate or imprinted during migration is unknown. We...

A preprint is a scholarly work posted by the author(s) in an openly accessible platform, usually before or in parallel with submission to a peer reviewed publication. While the sharing of manuscripts via preprint platforms has been common for many years in disciplines such as physics and mathematics, uptake in other disciplines had, until very rece...

Atlantic Haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) is a commercially important species of gadoid fish. In the North Sea, their main spawning areas are located close to the northern continental slope. Eggs and larvae drift with the current across the North Sea. However, fish larvae of many taxa can orient at sea using multiple external cues, including the...

Seismic surveys use airguns that emit low frequency high magnitude sound to detect subsea resources and to map seabed geology. The effect of seismic blasts on Calanus spp., a key food source for commercially important fish, was assessed in field experiments. Immediate mortality of copepods was significantly different from controls at distances of 5...

Recent estimates suggest that the mesopelagic zone could contain a total fish biomass of 2-19.5 gigatonnes, roughly equivalent to 100 times the annual catch of all existing fisheries. In addition to the possibility of direct consumption of mesopelagic species, there is interest in their use for fishmeal, as a source of dietary supplements for human...

Chemoreception is critical for marine ectoparasites - such as salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) - to identify and locate salmonid hosts. The molecular receptors that parasites employ to detect host-specific chemical stimuli from hosts (kairomones) have not been well characterised. In the present study, transcription of the sea louse Ionotropic...

We revisit the evidence attributing sentience-pain-suffering to aquatic animals. The objective is to inform readers of the current state of affairs, to direct attention to where research is needed, and to identify "wicked" questions that are difficult to resolve unequivocally. By separating the ethical from the scientific debate, applying organized...

Chemical signals are a key element of host-parasite interactions. In marine ecosystems, obligate ectoparasites, such as sea lice, use chemical cues and other sensory signals to increase the probability of encountering a host and to identify appropriate hosts on which they depend to complete their life cycle. The chemical compounds that underlie hos...

Infective-stage (copepodids) of the salmon louse. SEM image. Abstract The cover image (doi/abs/10.1111/jfd.12829), by D M Fields et al., is based on the special issue article "Behavioural responses of infective‐stage copepodids of the salmon louse (Lepeophtheirus salmonis, Copepoda:Caligidae) to host‐related sensory cues". DOI: 10.1111/jfd.12690....

Increasing the size and number of marine protected areas (MPAs) is widely seen as a way to meet ambitious biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Yet, debate still exists on the effectiveness of MPAs in achieving ecological and societal objectives. Although the literature provides significant evidence of the ecological effects of MPAs withi...

The calyptraeid gastropod Crepidula fornicata is native to the eastern coast of the United States but has now become an extremely successful invader along much of the European coastline. As the northern limit of its spread is thought to be determined by an inability of adults to tolerate prolonged exposure to low winter temperatures, this study sou...

The salmon louse (Lepeophtheirus salmonis [Krøyer]) is an ectoparasitic copepod that causes disease in farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and may play a role in the decline of some wild salmonid populations. Controlling lice infestations is a major cost for the salmon industry; this has stimulated the pursuit of alternative approaches to controll...

European eels (Anguilla anguilla) migrate between the southwestern Sargasso Sea and the European and Mediterranean coasts. In a recent paper in Current Biology, Naisbett-Jones et al. [1] claim to “provide the first evidence that they [eels] derive positional information from the Earth's magnetic field” and that this information guides their migrati...

Ocean acidification is the increase in seawater pCO2 due to the uptake of atmospheric anthropogenic CO2, with the largest changes predicted to occur in the Arctic seas. For some marine organisms, this change in pCO2, and associated decrease in pH, represents a climate change-related stressor. In this study, we investigated the gene expression patte...

"Ocean connectivity" is a dynamic and rapidly evolving field of research in marine science, partly because there is an increasing demand for information on connectivity that informs effective assessment and management of marine resources. Achieving this will require a better alignment between ocean connectivity tools and developments and the needs...

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has one of the longest migrations in the animal kingdom. It crosses the Atlantic Ocean twice during its life history, migrating between the spawning area in the Sargasso Sea and Europe, where it is widely distributed. The leptocephalus larvae drift with the Gulf Stream and other currents for more than a year and...

Ocean acidification (OA) continues to be one of the most studied single topics in marine science. Almost 800 articles on OA appeared in 2016 alone. Forty-four of those were published in a special themed issue of the ICES Journal of Marine Science, "Towards a broader perspective on ocean acidification research." Submissions to that themed initiative...

Rensefisk er oppdrettsnæringens viktigste ikke-medikamentelle verktøy mot lakselus. De viktigste rensefiskartene er rognkjeks (Cyclopterus lumpus, oppdrettet), berggylt (Labrus bergylta, både villfanget og oppdrettet), grønngylt (Symphodus melops, villfanget) og bergnebb (Ctenolabrus rupestris, villfanget). Leppefisk vil normalt ha lavere aktivitet...

Comment Cite this article: Key B et al. 2017 Problems with equating thermal preference with 'emotional fever' and sentience: comment on 'Fish can show emotional fever: stress-induced hyperthermia in zebrafish' by Rey et al. (2015).

There is now a large literature on ecosystem-based management (EBM; also known as the ecosystem approach). Our sense is that EBM is moving - albeit slowly - from the "what's, why's and when's" to the "how's" of operationalization and implementation; as such it seemed timely to develop this article theme set (TS). Our objectives were to ascertain th...

Both attraction and repulsion from linearly polarized light have been observed in zooplankton. A dichotomous choice experiment, consisting of plankton light traps deployed in natural waters at a depth of 30 m that projected either polarized or unpolarized light of the same intensity, was used to test the hypothesis that the North Atlantic copepod,...

Barron and Klein (1) propose that insects have the capacity for subjective experience. This hypothesis is based on two questionable premises: first, that the vertebrate midbrain is sufficient for subjective experience and, second, that this structure integrates multiple sensory inputs and produces a neural representation that is used to drive behav...

The capacity to observe, retrieve, and model the physiographical and hydrographical features of the sea (i.e. seascapes) has surpassed our ability to integrate this information into the assessment and stewardship of marine ecosystems. However, current marine policy that mandates integrated ecosystem assessments demands temporally intensive and spat...

Elwood & Adams [[1][1]] exposed Carcinus maenas to electric shocks. They reported that 6/20 unshocked crabs did not move but all (20/20) shocked crabs did move. No control crabs showed ‘extreme responses’ [1, p. 2] but 4/20 shocked crabs did. Most crabs walked (14 control and 16 shocked). When

As the world's oceans continue to absorb anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere, the carbonate chemistry of seawater will change. This process, termed ocean acidification, may affect the physiology of marine organisms. Arctic seas are expected to experience the greatest decreases in pH in the future, as changing sea ice dynamics and naturally cold,...

“Ocean acidification” (OA), a change in seawater chemistry driven by increased uptake of atmospheric CO2 by the oceans, has probably been the most-studied single topic in marine science in recent times. The majority of the literature on OA report negative effects of CO2 on organisms and conclude that OA will be detrimental to marine ecosystems. As...

The Subarctic copepod, Calanus finmarchicus, is an ecologically critical foundation species throughout the North Atlantic Ocean. Any change in the abundance and distribution of C. finmarchicus would have profound effects on North Atlantic pelagic ecosystems and the services that they support, particularly on the coastal shelves located at the south...

The vertical distribution of copepods, and the factors determining it, has been studied extensively. Some copepods appear to maintain their vertical position in the water column with high precision, even against downwelling and upwelling currents. The adaptive benefits of this behavior are unknown. We hypothesized that changes in hydrostatic pressu...

As the world's oceans continue to absorb anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere, the carbonate chemistry of seawater will change. This process, termed ocean acidification, may affect the physiology of marine organisms. Arctic seas are expected to experience the greatest decreases in pH in the future, as changing sea ice dynamics and naturally cold,...

We used bibliometric indicators to characterize recent (2010–2013) research activity in fisheries science with the objective of garnering insights into how this increased effort has been directed. Specifically, we provide an overview of the primary literature on fisheries research, including which countries are the largest contributors (USA, China,...

Ultraviolet (UV)-B levels are still increasing at high and polar latitudes where ozone depletion continues. Changes in the quality of algae at the base of the food web can have a cascading effect on higher trophic levels. We examined whether UV radiation altered the synthesis of fatty acids (FA) and mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs), as well as t...

Published more than 60 years ago in this Journal, the article in which Sverdrup proposed the concept of critical depth to explain the initiation of the spring bloom in the North Atlantic has accrued an exceptionally large number of citations and continues to be cited more than 50 times per year. The framework provided by Sverdrup has now been appli...