Saving Seafood

How a marine heatwave transformed life along the Pacific coast

July 24, 2025 — Between 2014 and 2016, something very unsettling happened off the west coast of North America. For over two years, ocean waters from California to Alaska were unusually warm – 3.6°F to 10.8°F hotter than normal.

This wasn’t a one-off fluke or a seasonal shift. It was the longest and most intense marine heatwave ever recorded in the region.

The heat lingered, spreading across thousands of miles of ocean. This event reshaped life in the water in devastating ways.

Kelp forests collapsed and entire food chains were thrown off balance. Animals appeared in places they had never been spotted before, and many of them died.

An ongoing coastal crisis

The warm water pushed marine life out of their comfort zones – literally. According to newly published research, 240 species were found far beyond their usual ranges during the heatwave, many of them showing up more than 600 miles farther north than normal.

Northern right whale dolphins and small sea slugs like Placida cremoniana were spotted well outside their typical territory. For some species, the shift was temporary. For others, it hinted at a more permanent change.

As ocean waters heat up, many organisms are following the temperature they’re adapted to – heading toward cooler, northern waters in a bid to survive. But during the historic heatwave in the Pacific, some animals could not move fast enough.

Read the full article at Earth.com

Del Mar Seafoods expanding operations with new facility

July 15, 2025 — Watsonville, California, U.S.A.-based Del Mar Seafoods has expanded its operations with the lease of a new facility.

Founded in 1988, Del Mar Seafoods is a vertically integrated seafood producer and processor in California that produces and supplies over 30 million pounds of squid, anchovies, and other wild-caught species per year. The company was a part of collaboration to obtain Marine Stewardship Council certification for the California squid fishery, which was ultimately granted in 2023.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Vitamin deficiency is killing salmon in California

July 1, 2025 –A vitamin deficiency linked to an enzyme found in anchovies that breaks down Vitamin B1, or thiamine, is threatening the survival of Chinook salmon in California and far beyond.

“An interesting piece of the puzzle is that we don’t have evidence for diminished sources of thiamine in the ocean food web,” said Nathan Mantua, a research scientist with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif. “Instead, we have evidence that anchovy carry an enzyme called thiaminase that destroys thiamine in the predator’s stomach when the anchovy is digested.”

Mantua is part of the team of 37 coauthors of a new research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that links Vitamin B1 deficiency to the anchovy-dominated diet that likely resulted in the death of nearly half of California’s wild winter-run Central Valley Chinook salmon fry in 2020-2021.

“It has been a fascinating five years of research working with an entirely new group of people for me in our ongoing investigations into thiamine deficiency in California’s salmon,” said Mantua.

The issue came to their attention just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in January of 2020, so they had to develop a research program at a time when there were lots of big changes happening to the way they worked in the office, on the ocean, and in rivers. In spite of all those hurdles, the group came together to rapidly develop a research network that worked together really well, he said.

A research summary released by NOAA Fisheries on June 25 notes that thiamine deficiency is linked to large-scale shifts in the ocean ecosystem, shifts that changed the prey adult salmon consume before returning to West Coast rivers to spawn. Longtime loss of habitat and water has already weakened many California salmon populations, and further declines from thiamine deficiency or other impacts may lead to their extinction, the report said.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

Feds must decide on protections for Chinook salmon

June 30, 2025 — In a move environmentalists are hailing as an important victory for Chinook salmon conservation, the federal government has agreed to decide this year whether the fish warrants federal protections.

By Nov. 3, the National Marine Fisheries Service must decide whether so-called Oregon Coast and Southern Oregon and Northern California Coastal varieties of Chinook salmon warrant protections under the Endangered Species Act.

By Jan. 2 of next year, feds must do the same for Washington Coast spring-run Chinook salmon, according to a settlement agreement from Thursday.

The Center for Biological Diversity — joined by the Native Fish Society, Umpqua Watersheds, and Pacific Rivers — in February sued the service and two top officials after the service failed to issue 12-month findings on the groups’ petitions to list the fish.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Anchovy Dominated Diets off the West Coast Pose New Dangers for Salmon

June 26, 2025 — A vitamin deficiency likely killed as many as half of newly hatched fry of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River in 2020 and 2021. These new findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The deficiency of thiamine, or Vitamin B1, is linked to large-scale shifts in the ocean ecosystem. These shifts changed the prey adult salmon consume before they return to West Coast rivers to spawn, scientists reported. They said the longtime loss of habitat and water has already weakened many California salmon populations. Further declines from thiamine deficiency or other impacts may lead to their extinction.

The deficiency syndrome can also affect salmon runs like the Central Valley’s fall-run that once supported valuable commercial fisheries across California. They have since dwindled to the point that commercial ocean salmon fishing in California has been closed for the last 3 years.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

CALIFORNIA: California closes Dungeness crab fishery to protect whales from entanglement

June 19, 2025 — The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has announced the closure of the Commercial Dungeness Crab Fishery in the Northern Management Area to protect whales from entanglement. This decision, assessed under the Risk Assessment Mitigation Program (RAMP), affects Fishing Zones 1 and 2, spanning from the California-Oregon border to the Sonoma-Mendocino County line.

Marine scientists at Oceana have highlighted the severe damage that entanglement can cause to whales.

“Whales, in particular Humpback Whales, are getting entangled in trap fisheries in that line gear, which then wrap around their flukes or around their fin and cause them injuries and reduced feeding and potentially reduced reproduction as well,” said Oceana’s Campaign Manager & Marine Scientist Caitlynn Birch.

Read the full article at KRCR

CALIFORNIA: California to close final sections of commercial Dungeness crab fishery

June 17, 2025 — The U.S. state of California is set to close the final two areas of its commercial Dungeness crab fishery following a confirmed case of a humpback whale becoming entangled in gear from the fishery.

“On 13 June 2025, I evaluated entanglement risk for the commercial Dungeness crab fisheries,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Director Charlton Bonham said in a memo. “Upon evaluation of the management considerations pursuant to [state law], I have determined that the management action listed below protects humpback whales based on the best available science.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

CALIFORNIA: California to shutter last open Dungeness crab fishing zones

June 16, 2025 — The remaining spots along California’s coast still open for commercial Dungeness crab fishing will close on June 20, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Friday.

The closure of the area between the California/Oregon border and the Sonoma/Mendocino county line stemmed from the entanglement of a humpback whale earlier this month. This area was the only one that remained open to commercial fisheries, as the area from the Sonoma/Mendocino line to the Mexico border closed in April.

Oceana, an ocean conservation group, said state and federal efforts to free the juvenile humpback haven’t yet worked.

“This unfortunate news of another humpback whale entangled in Dungeness crab gear dispels the narrative that whales don’t get entangled off Northern California,” said Caitlynn Birch, Oceana campaign manager and marine scientist, in a statement. “It is time to learn from these tragic entanglements, many of which could have been avoided.”

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

A data-driven model to help avoid ecosystem collapse

June 16, 2025 — Tipping points are the death of ecosystems. So scientists watch as warning signs gradually worsen until an ecosystem reaches the point of no return, when animal populations suddenly collapse. While tipping points can sometimes be predicted, what comes next is often shrouded in mystery, stymying efforts to prevent the impending disaster or prepare for what’s to come.

A new study by a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) introduces a method for modeling the murky future beyond a tipping point. The paper, published on June 13 in PNAS, demonstrates how this model can act as a “crystal ball” into the future of ecosystems—providing enough lead time to intervene before there’s nothing left to save.

“It gives us this fundamental insight into predicting what’s going to happen in the future,” said Eric Palkovacs, a senior author on the paper and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “That allows us to either do the things necessary to avoid that transition, or if we’re going to experience it, to plan for it and figure out the best ways to cope with it.”

Seeing the future

In healthy ecosystems, species populations fluctuate in predictable ways: Sea urchins feed on a kelp forest, otters then feed on the urchins, and the kelp regrows. But if the ecosystem loses equilibrium, disaster can suddenly strike. If warming waters drive sea urchins to kill off a kelp forest, the ecosystem suddenly crosses a tipping point that can doom all the species it supports. The result is a new regime of population fluctuations that can be hard to correct.

“You have many of these cases where the system can live in different states. You have a state with lots of kelp, and a state without kelp,” said Lucas Medeiros, the study’s lead author and a former postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Cruz.

Currently, researchers have some methods for predicting what lies beyond an ecosystem’s tipping point, but each approach has its tradeoffs. Some existing methods make predictions using machine-learning algorithms. However, these approaches require large datasets, which often don’t exist for research on ecosystems, where data might be collected yearly or even less frequently.

Read the full article at UC Santa Cruz

CALIFORNIA: California removes limits on sardine fishing after domoic acid concerns pass

June 16, 2025 — The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has removed limits on sardine fishing in Southern California, declaring the fish once again safe for human consumption.

The state had initially limited sardine fishing from Point Conception south to the Mexico border after the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the State Public Health Officer at the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) determined that elevated levels of domoic acid in sardines posed a risk to human health. Domoic acid, which is a naturally occurring neurotoxin emitted by marine algae, can accumulate in fish and cause several health issues, even proving fatal in some cases, for humans.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource