Saving Seafood

MAINE: Researchers seek statewide changes to save clam fishery from climate-driven collapse

January 30, 2023 — The Harraseeket River recedes slowly but steadily around Chad Coffin’s metal skiff, until the boat is beached on a partly exposed mudflat. Coffin and his daughter, Bailey Pennell, are already out of the skiff, rakes in hand and rubber boots sinking deep into the gray-brown muck.

They begin to dig — but not for soft-shell clams, also known as steamers, belly clams or Ipswich clams, a prized Maine commodity that Coffin has harvested here in Freeport for decades. Instead, he and Pennell are scrounging for quahogs, or hard clams. They fetch a lower price, but the part of these flats where any soft-shells might be found is closed to harvest after a recent rain.

“This used to be all clams when I started clamming,” Coffin said. “I would have been able to dig right there, where the mud’s showing already. And now we can’t. There’s nothing there.”

This is becoming a typical struggle for some Maine clammers. Though the soft-shell fishery is typically Maine’s second-most valuable after lobster, statewide landings for the clams are near all-time lows — down from close to 40 million pounds a year in the 1970s to fewer than 10 million pounds a year for most of the past decade.

Coffin and some researchers are confident they know the main reason: green crabs. This invasive species eats clams voraciously, and warming waters are causing the crabs’ population to explode.

“Climate change is just that piece of dynamite that’s been thrown into that room,” said Brian Beal, a professor of ecology and longtime clam researcher with the University of Maine at Machias. “That has just changed everything.”

Beal and Coffin are among the clammers, scientists and other observers who believe the problems facing the fishery are clear. But the solutions they’re calling for have been slow to gain traction at the state level.

Read the full article at The Maine Monitor

Transition into El Nino could lead to record heat around globe

January 30, 2023 — When the world’s largest and deepest ocean basin warms, satellites will be busy over the Pacific Ocean detecting analogous water temperatures but also, if history repeats itself, landmasses across the globe will have to deal with heat that could be record-breaking.

Since reliable technology started keeping track of world temperatures in the 1950s, the warmest year of any decade were periods dominated by an El Niño event, and the coldest were from La Niñas.

“During El Niño, unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the central/eastern tropical Pacific lead to increased evaporation and cooling of the ocean. At the same time, the increased cloudiness blocks more sunlight from entering the ocean. When water vapor condenses and forms clouds, heat is released into the atmosphere. So, during El Niño, there is less heating of the ocean and more heating of the atmosphere than normal,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts wrote in a 2022 ENSO blog.

Read the full article at Fox Weather

Climate modelers add ocean biogeochemistry and fisheries to forecasts of future upwelling

January 27, 2023 — A handful of hyper-productive fisheries provide sustenance to a billion people and employ tens of millions. These fisheries occur on the eastern edges of the world’s oceans—off the West Coast of the U.S., the Canary Islands, Peru, Chile, and Benguela. There, a process called upwelling brings cold water and nutrients to the surface, which in turn supports large numbers of larger sea creatures that humans depend on for sustenance.

A new project led by researchers at Texas A&M University is seeking to understand how changes to the climate and oceans will impact fisheries in the U.S. and around the world.

“We’re interested in how is going to alter upwelling and how the sustainability of the future fisheries will be impacted,” said Ping Chang, Louis & Elizabeth Scherck Chair in Oceanography at Texas A&M University (TAMU). “It turns out that when we increase the resolution of our , we find that the upwelling simulation becomes much closer to reality.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project aims to develop medium to long-term fishery forecasts, driven by some of the highest-resolution coupled climate forecasts ever run. It is one of the 16 Convergence Accelerator Phase 1 projects that address the ‘Blue Economy’—the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth. Convergence projects integrate scholars from different science disciplines.

Read the full story at Phys.org

Loss of tiny organisms hurts ocean, fishing, scientists say

January 23, 2023 — The warming of the waters off the East Coast has come at an invisible, but very steep cost — the loss of microscopic organisms that make up the base of the ocean’s food chain.

The growing warmth and saltiness of the Gulf of Maine off New England is causing a dramatic decrease in the production of phytoplankton, according to Maine-based scientists who recently reported results of a yearslong, NASA-funded study. Phytoplankton, sometimes described as an “invisible forest,” are tiny plant-like organisms that serve as food for marine life.

The scientists found that phytoplankton are about 65% less productive in the Gulf of Maine, part of the Atlantic Ocean bounded by New England and Canada, than they were two decades ago. The Gulf of Maine has emerged as one of the fastest warming sections of the world’s oceans.

Potential loss of phytoplankton has emerged as a serious concern in recent years in other places, such as the Bering Sea off Alaska. The loss of the tiny organisms has the ability to disrupt valuable fishing industries for species such as lobsters and scallops, and it could further jeopardize imperiled animals such as North Atlantic right whales and Atlantic puffins, scientists said.

Read the full article at The Associated Press

ALASKA: A warming climate is changing how drought plays out in Southeast Alaska

January 23, 2023 — The fall of 2016 ushered in a historic drought for Southeast Alaska. Hot, dry summers wreaked havoc on subsistence crops like wild berries. Warmer waters disrupted salmon hatcheries in Juneau. And in 2018, about twice as many fires burned in the Tongass as what’s typical.

By 2019, the U.S. Drought Monitor had declared an extreme drought across the region. Rick Thoman, a climate scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says dry spells are not abnormal, even in a temperate rainforest. But the drought from 2016 to 2019 was unique.

“This was a warm, dry drought. And that is very different,” he said. “Droughts from the ’50s, from the ’70s, even into the early ’80s — they were cold, dry droughts. And that matters a lot.”

Though there have been warmer droughts and drier droughts in the past, the region’s longest droughts on record have often been accompanied by below-average temperatures. With 2016, Southeast’s warmest year on record, that changed.

Read the full article at KTOO

Inflation crippling wind energy despite Biden climate law, turbine giant says

January 17, 2023 — A leading wind turbine maker is imploring Washington and state governments for more policy support only months after Congress passed hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for green energy, arguing the new law alone is insufficient to help the industry reckon with high inflation.

The ask from Spanish manufacturer Siemens Gamesa illustrates how the persistence of inflation poses a threat to the decarbonization goals of President Joe Biden, who is now ill-equipped to pass new policy to supplement the new Democratic climate law with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives.

Siemens Gamesa said the Inflation Reduction Act, which the unified Democratic government passed in August, provided strong incentives and sends positive signals to the industry but is not a “silver bullet” due to the lasting and limiting effects that inflation is having on new investment.

Read the full article at the Washington Examiner

Oceans surged to another record-high temperature in 2022

January 13, 2023 — The amount of excess heat buried in the planet’s oceans, a strong marker of climate change, reached a record high in 2022, reflecting more stored heat energy than in any year since reliable measurements were available in the late 1950s, a group of scientists reported Wednesday.

That eclipses the ocean heat record set in 2021 — which eclipsed the record set in 2020, which eclipsed the one set in 2019. And it helps to explain a seemingly ever-escalating pattern of extreme weather events of late, many of which are drawing extra fuel from the energy they pull from the oceans.

“If we keep breaking records, it’s kind of like a broken record,” said John Abraham, a climate researcher at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and one of the authors of the new research published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

Read the full article at the Washington Post

CALIFORNIA: California moves ahead with plans for floating wind turbines miles off its coastline

January 10, 2023 — The following transcript is from an NPR interview:

California is charging ahead with plans for floating wind turbines miles off its coastline. A federal lease auction took place last month, a first for the state. The future turbines will generate enough wind to power 1.5 million homes. From member station KQED, Kevin Stark reports.

KEVIN STARK, BYLINE: California’s coast – rocky bluffs running into green-black water and a completely empty horizon.

(SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)

STARK: In the coming years, about 20 miles off the coast, state plans for two clusters of wind turbines on floating platforms. For the Biden administration, it’s a cornerstone of its ambitious climate plan. For Jeff Hunerlach, it means jobs for his members.

Read the full transcript at Knau

High temps linked to vanishing snow crabs in Bering Sea

January 9, 2023 — An increase in temperature changes in the Bering Sea is linked to the decline of snow crabs, according to ongoing studies from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Snow crabs are highly stenothermic — only equipped to survive across a narrow range of cold water temperatures. According to NOAA, the species thrive best in waters of temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius and below.

From 2018 to 2019, the administration recorded Bering Sea temperatures at over 3 degrees Celsius. The water temperature spiked from 1.52 degrees in 2017 to 3.5 degrees in 2018. The following year, the warm waters remained with an average temperature of 3.33 degrees, roughly two degrees higher than the recorded average seen over the past two decades.

“In those two years, 2018 and 2019, the Bering Sea was very warm,” Ben Daly, with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said.

Read the full article at Alaska News Source

Fishermen facing climate change: crab crashes and wind power threats

January 9, 2023 — Five thousand miles apart on their own oceans, New England trawlers and Alaska crabbers say they are up against twin threats from climate change: warming waters changing the marine environment, and hasty, risk-filled decisions in response from U.S. policy makers.

“I’m not sure which is going to get me first, climate change or the solution to it,” said Chris Brown, a Point Judith, R.I., captain, president of the Seafood Harvesters of America and a 2022 National Fisherman Highliner.

Brown expressed a general consensus among panelists during a Jan. 5 online webinar hosted by Fishery Friendly Climate Action, an initiative campaign that is organizing fishermen and industry groups to “advocate for robust climate solutions that work for U.S. fisheries and not at their expense,” as coordinator Sarah Schumann says.

“These issues are moving so fast,” said Schumann. “We as an industry have to improve our game.”

A series of winter webinars organized by Schumann aims to bring in fishermen from all U.S. regions to work together on climate issues. The collapse of Alaska’s Bering Sea snow and king crab fisheries –  a potential $500 million loss to the industry and dependent communities –  has snapped the issue into sharp focus.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman