Saving Seafood

Past Fishing and Development Makes California Salmon More Vulnerable To Climate Change

Janaury 27, 2022 — California’s native salmon have been harmed by more than a century of mining, dam building, floodplain reclamation, fishing pressure, hatchery practices, and introduced predators. These stressors have undermined the resilience of California’s native salmon to the accelerating effects of climate change, new research shows.

Researchers from NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest and Southwest Fisheries Science Centers chronicled the loss of habitat and genetic diversity that once helped salmon withstand a changing climate.

“The eggs are in fewer baskets,” said Stuart Munsch, an ecosystem scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the new study published today in Global Change Biology. “The same landscape diversity in California that lets you go skiing and surfing in the same day used to support diverse salmon populations and a fishery well buffered against climate”.

“Now, that salmon diversity is mostly lost, and dams confine salmon to the hottest part of the watershed, where nonnative predators and a lack of rearing habitat reduce their survival. The result of all these stressors is that today’s salmon track climate more tightly than they used to in a warming landscape that routinely experiences drought.”

They said restoring degraded habitat and access to habitat above dams could help revive that diversity. By reopening and improving different areas, restoration can reclaim lost niches and adaptations that help spread the risk. In addition, other recovery actions such as increasing streamflow can make the restoration more effective.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

New study finds aquaculture could help counter drivers of climate change

January 27, 2022 — A joint study recently released by the University of Adelaide and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), titled “Climate-Friendly Seafood: The Potential for Emissions Reduction and Carbon Capture in Marine Aquaculture,” reveals aquaculture done right could actively reduce the drivers of climate change.

The study assessed greenhouse gas emissions for marine aquaculture of fed-finfish, macroalgae, and bivalves. According to the study, mariculture generates 37.5 percent of all aquaculture products and 97 percent of the world’s seafood harvest. Though mariculture already has a lower greenhouse gas emission footprint than terrestrial products, further low-emissions strategies must be implemented as production continues to scale up to meet future global demand.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Climate Change Scenario Planning: Upcoming Webinars to Focus on Oceanographic, Biological, Social/Economic Drivers

January 25, 2022 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

Over the past year, East Coast fishery management bodies have been collaborating on a climate change scenario planning initiative designed to prepare fishing communities and fishery managers for an era of climate change. The goals of this project are to assess how climate change might affect stock distribution and availability of East Coast marine fisheries over the next 20 years and to identify the implications for fishery management and governance.

Last summer and fall, many stakeholders participated in the Scoping phase of the project by attending introductory scoping webinars and providing input through an online questionnaire. A summary of the scoping process and input received is available here.

The next step in the scenario planning process is the Exploration phase. Building on the input gathered during scoping, this phase will include a series of three webinars that will focus on identifying and analyzing the major drivers of change in greater depth. Once again, stakeholder involvement is key, and the webinars are open to the public. The outcomes of these webinars will form the “building blocks” for a future scenario creation workshop to be held in Spring 2022.

Webinar Details: The webinars will contain a keynote address, a panel discussion, and a limited opportunity for comments, questions, and discussion. Three background documents are being developed with specific information to support each webinar. Once completed, these documents will be posted here. Participants are encouraged to review these backgrounders before the webinars begin and come prepared to share comments on the primary drivers of change for East Coast fisheries based on personal experiences.

Read the full release here

Bleached reefs still support nutritious fish, study finds

January 21, 2022 — Escalating ocean temperatures stemming from climate change are devastating the world’s tropical coral reefs. In response to the stress, corals, which are animals, sometimes unceremoniously jettison the algae that live within them. That expulsion drains the color from the reefs in what’s known as bleaching. In the severest cases, it can kill the coral, which need the algae to provide them with nutrients, oxygen and waste management.

At the same time, millions of people in the tropics eat fish that live on these reefs. And today, the widespread bleaching of tropical reefs, which is expected to continue as the Earth heats up, has thrown into question how those fisheries and the communities that depend on them for sustenance will respond.

Now, a new study published Jan. 6 in the journal One Earth has found that in certain circumstances, critical nutrients for human development found in reef fishes remain available even after mass bleaching has occurred.

“An important message here is that climate-impacted reefs can still provide some important ecosystem services, and therefore should still be considered in management plans and conservation,” said Camille Mellin, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who was not involved in the study.

Read the full story at Mongabay

 

Waters off New England hit record fall temperature in ’21

January 19, 2022 — A body of water off New England and Canada had its warmest fall surface temperatures on record last year, a Maine science center reported.

The Gulf of Maine has long been a focus of climate scientists because it is warming faster than most of the world’s oceans. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute said last week that average sea surface temperatures in the gulf reached 59.9 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius).

Read the full story from the Associated Press

Past heat waves and low sea ice continued to impact Alaska’s waters in 2021

January 18, 2022 — The so-called blob that brought warm surface water temperatures to the Gulf of Alaska between 2014 and 2016 has passed.

But the effects of that blob, and a subsequent heat wave in 2019, are not all in the rearview mirror. And researchers are bracing for more as climate change brings with it more ocean warming.

“For an area like the Gulf of Alaska, definitely this is a topic we need to understand better,” said Bridget Ferriss, a research fish biologist with NOAA Fisheries. She edited this year’s Ecosystems Status Report for the Gulf of Alaska, used by federal managers to inform fisheries policy in Alaska.

Last year, researchers continued to track the impacts of recent heat waves on Alaska’s marine species.

Ferriss said a heat wave happens when the sea surface temperature on a given day is warmer than 90% of the temperatures on record for that same day, for five days in a row.

Read the full story at KTOO

In hot water: Ocean warming hits another record high on climate change

January 18, 2022 — The ocean is now warmer than it’s ever been in recent history, according to a new study. And this isn’t the first time such a record has been set. For the past six years, ocean temperatures have exceeded each previous year in a trend one scientist calls “inexorable.”

Human-induced climate change is to blame, says John Abraham, co-author of the new study published Jan. 11 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

 “We should be very concerned,” Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, U.S, told Mongabay in a video interview. “But frankly, we should have been concerned years ago.”

The research team used a network of high-tech autonomous ocean buoys to measure global ocean temperatures, which they compared to data from the 1950s. They found that in 2021, the upper 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) in all of the oceans absorbed 14 zettajoules more of human-made energy than the previous year, equal to about 145 times the world’s electricity generation in 2020.

Abraham puts it another way: “It’s the equivalent of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonated every second of every day of every week of every month.

“The story we’ve been telling since 2018 is that every year it’s getting hotter and hotter,” he added. “And records are being broken as this inexorable, unrelenting rise of ocean temperatures occurs.”

Read the full story at Mongabay

 

Climate change could end Maine’s lobster boom, some fear

January 11, 2022 — Among the deep underwater valleys off Maine’s craggy, crooked coast crawls one of the must lucrative species in American waters — Homarus americanus, the American lobster.

For almost 20 years, record haul numbers padded the pockets of Maine lobstermen, but with landings declining for five straight years, many wonder how the industry will survive the impacts of climate change.

Last year, Maine’s commercial lobstermen landed $500 million worth, and many of the most successful lobstermen pocket upward of $500,000 each.

Data show the Gulf of Maine is rapidly warming, pushing lobsters farther north and into deeper waters, forcing lobstermen and researchers to grapple over exactly how long the boom times will last and whether they can be prolonged.

Read the full story at UPI

Warmer, oxygen-poor waters threaten world’s ‘most heavily exploited’ fish

January 7, 2022 — In 2008, a team of researchers boarded an expedition vessel and set sail for the anchovy-rich waters off the coast of Peru. They were searching for a place to extract a sediment sample that would unearth secrets about the ocean from 130,000 years ago, a time when the planet was experiencing its last interglacial period. About 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Lima, the researchers found an ideal spot; they bore into the seabed and drew out a 20-meter (66-foot) core sample.

Over the next 13 years, researcher Renato Salvatteci and a team of colleagues worked to date the core and measure fish debris. They were trying to figure out what fish were living along the Humboldt Current system off the coast of Peru during that interglacial period, when the ocean contained little oxygen and was about 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) warmer than the average temperature experienced in the current Holocene epoch — conditions that almost match what scientists project for 2100 as climate change rapidly transforms our modern world.

Today, the Humboldt Current contributes to more than 15% of the global annual fish catch, mainly due to its abundance of Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), a species in the anchovy family. It’s also what global conservation authority the IUCN calls “the most heavily exploited single-species fishery in world history.”

Every centimeter of the sediment held an astonishing amount of information — about 90 years’ worth, said Salvatteci, a fisheries engineer at Kiel University in Germany. What they found embedded in the ancient sediment wasn’t anchoveta, but the vertebrae of “considerably smaller” fish, such as mesopelagic and goby-like fish, that were able to cope with the low oxygen levels in the water. They published their findings in Science on Jan. 6.

Read the full story at Mongabay

New NOAA reports on Alaska’s oceans highlight disruptive warming trends

December 27, 2021 — The annual Ecosystem Status Reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collect a wide range of data to better assess maritime trends and help steer fisheries management.

Elizabeth Siddon, who edited a report on the eastern Bering Sea, called the annual documents “anthologies of the ecosystems as we know them” — collaborative efforts pulling information from scientists, community members and industry groups, among others. The reports released this week also cover the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian Islands.

If there’s any theme in this year’s detailed surveys of Alaska’s marine systems, it’s heat. The three areas assessed all involve “sustained warm conditions” that are affecting environment dynamics like sea ice and water columns, as well as the composition of animal stocks thriving and failing in recent years. The assessments factor into harvest policies set by the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and touch any Alaskans who depend on sea animals, whether for work or food.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News