Climate change Archives - Saving Seafood

Tropical fish off the Massachusetts coast? Warming ocean temperatures changing the catch.

November 5, 2026 — When you think of tropical fish, Massachusetts probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind. But fishermen are finding some unexpected species in New England waters, and warming ocean temperatures may be playing a role.

Max Harvey has spent decades on the water, and he’s noticed some unusual catches.

“There was a cubera snapper caught on Nantucket like last week. And it’s happened before, but it’s very uncommon,” Harvey said.

The cubera snapper is typically associated with warmer waters farther south. But it’s not the only surprising fish to turn up off the Massachusetts coast.

“Four or five years ago there was a rush of king mackerel in Vineyard Sound. And you could go out and actually realistically catch one,” Harvey said.

Warm water species have occasionally made their way into New England waters for decades. Harvey says the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water north along the East Coast, has been getting closer to shore, allowing pockets of warmer water to break off and bring different species into the region.

Read the full article at CBS News

How El Niño could threaten your favorite seafood for years to come

October 29, 2026 — Squid are shifting to cooler water, young salmon are struggling to find food sources, and concern is growing for Oregon’s $100 million Dungeness crab harvest as a powerful El Niño weather pattern heats up coastal ocean temperatures from California to the Pacific Northwest. Scientists expect the phenomenon to last for several months, leaving fishermen such as Phil Fogle scrambling.

Fogle, who owns two squid fishing boats based in the port of Anacortes, in Washington state, normally would keep fishing until foul weather sets in — his boats operate from Eureka, California, to Kodiak, Alaska. Instead, Fogle tied up his boats last week and furloughed his seven employees. The squid that normally inhabit coastal water have fled offshore for colder, deeper water that are harder to reach for smaller boats.

“Those little buggers are really affected by water temperature,” Fogle said about the squid. “It has been devastating to us.”

He said he’s losing about $50,000 a month.

Fogle said he’s waiting for the El Niño conditions to pass and hoping to get on the water again early next year.

This year’s El Niño, the strongest on record, has led temperatures off the Pacific Northwest coast to jump 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the average from 1991 to 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. El Niño’s warmth has arrived on top of an existing marine heat wave in the Gulf of Alaska, according to Steven Bograd, senior climatologist at NOAA.

Read the full article at The Washington Post

ALASKA: Alaska Fisheries Science Center attributes hybrid snow-Tanner crab boom to marine heatwave, decreased competition and predation

October 29, 2026 — Scientists at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Kodiak Laboratory recently completed research on how certain hybrid crab populations have increased in Alaska’s Bering Sea following a marine heatwave and subsequent mass die-off events from 2018 to 2019.

“These results are unprecedented,” study lead Erin Fedewa said in a NOAA release. “We were shocked by the magnitude of the hybrid surge while analyzing data from the 2025 Eastern Bering Sea bottom trawl survey. It immediately became clear that this ecological response would ripple through to fisheries management.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

OREGON: Oregon looking at new rules for 3-mile-wide ribbon of ocean along the coast

October 28, 2026 — Oregon is taking a look at the three-nautical-mile-wide ribbon of ocean that runs along the length of the coast.

This offshore ribbon is managed under Oregon’s Territorial Sea Plan and covers issues as varied as undersea cables, fishing and renewable energies. But the plan is more than 30 years old and doesn’t consider emerging issues like climate change and ocean acidification.

“It’s high time to take a look at the foundational chapters of the Territorial Sea Plan and update them,” said Joe Liebezeit, the chair of the Ocean Policy Advisory Council.

So the Oregon Department of State Lands has asked the Ocean Policy Advisory Council to review the sea plan in an effort to strengthen protections for Oregon’s marine ecosystem and ensure Oregonians get fair compensation for the use of the seafloor.

Read the full article at OPB

Nearly all the world’s coral reefs are at risk of collapse within 50 years, IUCN warns

October 23, 2026 — Nearly every shallow-water coral reef ecosystem on Earth is at high risk of ecological collapse by 2075, according to the first coral reef assessment of the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE). The RLE is a scientific framework for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse.

More than 250 experts assessed shallow water coral reef ecosystems across 127 tropical and subtropical ecoregions worldwide including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia.

The Oct. 22 report concluded that 24% of coral reefs are already critically endangered. When scientist include projected heat stress from climate change, they found 96% will be critically endangered in the next 50 years.

One coral reef ecosystem, the Western Galapagos Islands, has collapsed already, the assessment found.

Read the full article at Mongabay

ALASKA: Trollers help track what’s driving Southeast Alaska’s catch

October 22, 2026 — Twenty Southeast Alaska commercial troll vessels will help researchers investigate how changing ocean conditions influence where salmon and other fish are found as part of a new nearly $600,000 research project.

According to the Juneau Empire, the Sitka-based Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust announced the project Oct. 1 after receiving a $293,600 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Combined with $300,000 in matching funds, the project is valued at $593,600.

The effort will recruit 20 commercial troll vessels for the 2028 and 2029 fishing seasons, pairing fishermen’s catch information with measurements of underwater temperature and depth.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Rise of hybrid crabs raises questions for Bering Sea management

October 22, 2026 — A surge in hybrid crabs in the Bering Sea is raising new questions about how federal regulators count crab populations and set harvest limits, according to new Kodiak-based research.

The study, “A Bering Sea marine heatwave triggers unprecedented crab hybridization, challenging fisheries management,” was authored by Erin Fedewa, Emily Ryznar, Connor Cleary and Mike Litzow at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center Kodiak Lab, and published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Read the full article at the Kodiak Daily Mirror

MARYLAND: The Chesapeake Bay’s young rockfish are still struggling. It may be the ‘new normal.’

October 20, 2026 — For the eighth straight year, Maryland scientists found well below average numbers of young rockfish in the Chesapeake Bay.

This summer’s survey, released Monday, showed the best results since 2018, the last time that surveyors counted an above-average quantity of juvenile striped bass, or rockfish. But with “young of the year” index of 5.5 this year — compared to a historical average of 10.8 — Maryland scientists aren’t really celebrating.

“The important piece of information is that it is still below average, and it is now the eighth year of low abundance,” said Carrie Kennedy, the Tidal and Coastal Monitoring and Assessment Division director for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Virginia scientists also released their results Monday, showing a slightly better picture. The state’s index was 9.52, a bit above its historical average of 7.77.

In Maryland, it’s possible that these continued low numbers of rockfish at or below 3 inches in length are “the new normal,” Kennedy said. Fisheries scientists believe that changing environmental conditions, including water temperature, could be altering the species’ reproduction in some way. Maryland’s survey has been running since 1954, making it one of the longest-running fish surveys in the nation, according to the DNR.

Read the full article at Maryland Matter

The El Niño stars are aligning in record-breaking ways. Here’s how the high tides stack up

October 16, 2026 — With homes nearly toppling into the ocean and back-to-back floods and hurricanes amplifying our sense of dread, keeping track of all things El Niño can be overwhelming.

So I called up Patrick Barnard, who spent years leading the U.S. Geological Survey’s renowned coastal hazards team in California and now helms key climate adaptation research at UC Santa Cruz. A maestro at bringing together all manner of data, Barnard broke down the numbers in no-nonsense terms — explaining why the coming weeks and months might bring extreme flooding like we’ve never seen before.

“All the stars are aligning for a pretty dramatic winter,” said Barnard, as he pored over the El Niño tea leaves, so to speak, and rattled off every high tide phenomenon on track to converge by the holidays. “If you start stacking all these things up, the flood risk just goes up exponentially.”

Ocean Visions publishes mCDR platform to aid in research collaboration

October 15, 2026 — Washington, D.C., U.S.A.-based nonprofit Ocean Visions recently launched a new knowledge platform on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) that’s publicly available and aimed to give researchers, innovators, funders, policymakers, journalists, and stakeholders a hub to refer back to when working on mCDR-related projects.

The launch of the platform follows the July publication of Ocean Visions’ mCDR digital roadmap, which aims to identify trends and industry connections for utilizing already occurring resources in decarbonization efforts.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource