July 23, 2019 — A decline in Hawaii’s deep-set longline bigeye tuna fishery may be “inevitable” with climate change, according to a study by researchers in Hawaii and Australia.
Changes to bigeye tuna’s food supply, via changes to the plankton community, and temperature, will reduce yields because it will affect tuna’s fitness. This will impact tuna’s aerobic scope and ability to successfully forage, researchers from Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, and the Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania said.
Proactive fisheries management could be an effective tool for mitigating climate change, either by balancing or outweighing climate effects. “However, modeling these [climatic] stressors jointly shows that even large management changes cannot completely offset climate effects.”