Saving Seafood

How is Climate Change Affecting New Jersey

June 10, 2019 — Climate change is real. It’s here. It’s caused by humans. That’s the conclusion of no less than three major scientific reports in as many months that warn the world is failing to make sufficient progress to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Dr. Robert Kopp, the director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, uses computer modeling to demonstrate how sea levels would rise if humans kept pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

At 9 feet — the sea levels reached in Superstorm Sandy — Port Newark, the airport and much of Jersey City would be submerged. It would set off a cascade that could wash out homes and businesses, impede power lines, and cut off the supply lines for goods coming into harbor.

“Ten feet would nearly be a doomsday scenario. And it’s hard to get to, right? It requires that we have unchecked fossil-fuel emissions growth globally and that we’re unlucky in Antarctica,” Kopp said.

Kopp is also a lead author of volume one of the Fourth National Climate Assessment— the basis for the newly released climate report that warns of potential devastation to our coasts, economy and health. Devastation increases with each ton of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere.

Read the full story at NJ Spotlight

As fish move north, ‘things are getting weird out there’

June 4, 2019 — Here in one of New England’s oldest fishing communities, there’s a longing for the old days, long before climate change and the federal government’s quota system got so complicated.

Convinced that Congress and NOAA will never allow them larger quotas, many fishermen want to take their grievances straight to the White House, hoping the commander in chief will intervene and allow them to catch more fish.

At his fish wholesaling business, Mike Gambardella reached for his iPhone to find one of his prized photographs: a picture showing him wearing a white T-shirt bearing the message, “President Trump: Make Commercial Fishing Great Again!”

Bobby Guzzo, Gambardella’s friend, who’s been fishing here for more than 50 years, has the same sign on a bumper sticker plastered on the back window of his pickup.

“It used to be you’d go catch fish, come in and sell them,” Guzzo said. But now the system is needlessly complicated, he said, with too much bookwork and a quota system that’s hard to decipher, adding, “Now you’ve got to be a lawyer.”

“If you get ahold of the president, tell him to come see us,” Gambardella tells a visitor.

Read the full story at E&E News

Warmed waters linked to diminished food for right whales

June 4, 2019 — Overheated waters pouring into the Gulf of Maine from deep ocean reserves along the Atlantic coast appear to be diminishing the food supply on which North Atlantic right whales rely.

A new report from Oceanography says warming temperatures in the gulf are impacting densities of zooplankton, which the whales rely on for food.

The rapid pace of change near the Bay of Fundy, in particular, now indicates that traditional methods of protecting the whales, including protecting their decadeslong feeding areas, may need to be refined.

“Climate change is outdating many of our conservation and management efforts,” said the report’s lead author, Nicholas Record, a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Facing predictions of dangerous floodwaters decades in the future, this coastal Maine town is acting now

June 3, 2019 — When Kathleen Billings was a kid, she could count on high tide falling several feet short of topping the causeway between Deer and Little Deer islands.

Today, high tide goes almost level with the road and, with heavy storms or especially strong winds, salt water covers at least some portion of the road, said the 56-year-old Billings, who has been Stonington’s town manager since 2007.

“When you go over it, you can really notice a lot more water that is level with your car. It makes you look like you are driving across the tide,” Billings said Friday. “You don’t worry about it when it’s at low tide, but when the water looks like it’s right alongside you, it’s a different story.”

That rising sea level, and predictions of bigger problems decades from now, are among the reasons why Billings’ town is paying for an engineering study aimed at safeguarding Stonington’s vital assets, she said.

The engineering study, which will cost $95,222, will target areas that are most susceptible to flooding within the next 100 years and provide suggestions on how to prevent or mitigate the flooding’s impact, according to the town’s grant proposal.

The funding package includes a $60,000 grant from the 2019 Coastal Communities Grant Program of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, plus $20,000 in cash and $10,722 in labor from the town. Another $4,500 in labor and cash will come from the Stonington Sanitary District, the proposal states.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

RAY HILBORN: Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

June 3, 2019 — This week, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) is convening Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington, D.C. Additionally, President Trump has declared the month of June “National Ocean Month” in recognition of the importance of the ocean to the economy, national security, and environment of the United States.

For the duration of Ocean Week, Saving Seafood will share materials related to the sustainable and economically vital U.S. commercial fishing and seafood industries, including information tied directly to events being organized as part of the NMSF conference.

To kick off the week, Saving Seafood is sharing the following article on the importance of eating fish to global food security and the environment. It was written by renowned fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn and published by the Oxford University Press Blog last week:

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

Read the full opinion piece at the Oxford University Press (OUP) Blog

Ocean biodiversity in peril due to overfishing and climate change

May 31, 2019 — The biodiversity of the world’s oceans is declining in a manner unlike any time in human history.

A recent report from the United Nations paints a dire picture for wildlife around the globe, in both land-based and marine environments. About two-thirds of the marine environment has been significantly altered by human actions and climate change has the potential to make the situation much worse, the report said.

The report, from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity Ecosystem Services (IPBES), was written by nearly 150 expert authors from 50 countries who assessed global changes over the last five decades. Only the initial summary of the report has been released; the full report is expected to exceed 1,500 pages and will be released later this year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

5 Innovations In Aquaculture Worth Catching On To Now

May 30, 2019 — Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing forms of food production in the world and the fastest growing sector in the livestock industry. In a $140 billion market, startups in seafood and aquaculture technology raised $193 million in 2016, which marked a 271% increase from the two years prior combined. The latest group of innovations in agtech could very well come from the water, as something we could call “aquatech.”

Yet there are many areas in this industry that are in dire need of innovation. Today, I will focus on my top 5: disease prevention, vaccine delivery, fish meal replacement, sustainability solutions (including closed-loop farming) and supply chain management.

Tremendous opportunity exists right now for those interested in investing in the solutions to these issues. Let’s take a look at the five key areas mentioned, and how several forward-thinking companies are meeting them head on.

Disease prevention is a critical aspect of aquaculture. Changing ocean temperatures and water quality make animals and plants more stressed and susceptible to disease, yet innovation is lacking in prevention compared to land-based agriculture. Terrestrial food animal farmers can easily deploy dozens of vaccines and preventive solutions, while aquaculture has less choice and significant delivery challenges (more on this below). Vaccines are still administered by hand, and there simply aren’t good preventive measures for many infestations.

Read the full story at Forbes

It’s Time to Be Honest about Seafood

May 28, 2019 — Demand for seafood is increasing across the globe, and the United States is no exception. Aquaculture, or aquatic farming, is increasingly meeting this demand and now supplies just over 50 percent of all seafood globally. In fact, it has been one of the world’s fastest growing food sectors for years.

The U.S. is the largest importer of seafood in the world, and some of Americans’ favorites—including shrimp, salmon and tilapia—are predominantly farmed these days. Yet, we contribute less than 1 percent of the world’s total aquaculture production. This means we rely heavily on other countries to satisfy our appetites for seafood.

If the U.S. does not increase its domestic production of farmed shellfish, seaweed and finfish, the divergence between what we consume and what we contribute to the global seafood market will continue to widen. This gap may make it harder for our seafood diets to be sustainable. It also means the U.S. won’t have a hand in shaping the standards or economies that contribute to the seafood sector as a whole in the future.

A brand-new bill that proposes a moratorium on commercial permits for marine finfish aquaculture facilities in U.S. waters could serve to widen this gap, and it represents another divergence: between public wariness about domestic aquaculture operations and the science showing aquaculture’s potential for sustainable growth.

While wild-caught fisheries have hit “peak fish” domestically and globally, with limited potential for additional sustainable growth, there is mounting scientific evidence that the U.S. could dramatically increase domestic aquaculture production and do so sustainably, as we did with our fisheriesbefore they peaked. And this growth does not have to come at the cost of our wild-caught fisheries or other priorities for our oceans, especially under careful management and planning.

Read the full story at Scientific American

Two groups studying how to make fisheries more climate-resilient

May 28, 2019 — With a growing consensus that climate change is causing drastic transformations of marine ecosystems and fish stock dynamics, two recent studies have addressed the importance of taking a more adaptive and responsive approach to their management.

The first study, published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, shows that adjusting fishing levels when fish populations change is key to making global fisheries more climate-resilient. The result of making this shift would be healthier oceans and a more stable supply of fish for consumption, according to scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Their paper outlines the fact that many commercially important fish stocks are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and that managing those stocks sustainably in the future will be a large and growing challenge for fisheries scientists and managers. The paper recommends responsive harvest control rules (HCRs) that automatically reduce catch percentages when decreases in biomass are detected, and increases when biomass increases. By adopting HCRs, “inherent resilience” could be introduced into the system, reducing the adverse effects of climate change while longer-term solutions are sought to better address the negative impacts of global warming.

“Using the right harvest-control rule is like having adaptive cruise control for your fishery,” said Jake Kritzer, a senior director of Environmental Defense Fund’s Oceans program and lead author of the paper. “When you need to slow down, the system can automatically adjust to the right level. Then, when the road ahead is clear, it allows you to return to a higher level.”

Warmer waters caused by climate change are resulting in lower reproduction rates in fish and forcing them to migrate out of their natural ranges. The current system for managing fish catches is often not adaptive enough to respond to these dynamics, the report noted. In addition, current catch levels are being calculated on biomass that may be incorrect as a result of these large-scale changes, the report found.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Millions of Salmon in Norway Killed by Algae Bloom

May 24, 2019 — About eight million farmed salmon have suffocated in northern Norway over the past week as a result of persistent algae bloom, an industry body estimated on Thursday, a blight that some experts suggest has been aggravated by climate change.

Norway is a dominant producer of farmed salmon, and the economic impact of the bloom is significant.

A statement from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries estimated the amount of salmon lost at 11,600 metric tons, worth about 720 million kroner, or more than $82 million. An industry group, the Norwegian Seafood Council, suggested the total could be much higher.

“Preliminary numbers point to eight million dead fish — corresponding to 40,000 metric tons of salmon that won’t reach markets,” Dag Sorli, a spokesman for the council, said in an email on Thursday. He put the value of the losses at 2.2 billion kroner.

Read the full story at The New York Times