Saving Seafood

Climate Change Is Already Reshaping Commercial Fishing

March 26, 2019 — The ocean has been steadily warming over the past 100 years, absorbing most of the heat trapped by atmospheric greenhouse gases. Unless we swiftly and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the ocean could warm by as much as 4°C in the next 80 years. This puts fish and the people they feed and employ in hot water. Half of the planet relies on fish as a vital source of protein, and the fishing industry employs more than 56 million people worldwide.

Understanding where and why fisheries have been impacted by warming is necessary to ensure that the ocean remains a source of both nutrition and prosperity. In a study published in Science, I, along with colleagues from Rutgers University and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, show that ocean warming has already hurt fisheries’ ability to provide food and support livelihoods around the globe.

Fisheries are like a bank account, where we live off the interest. If fishing reduces the principal too much, the interest is lowered. Similarly, if the environment reduces the interest rate, the interest is also lowered. We combined maps of historical ocean temperature with estimates of historical fish abundance to see how warming has affected the interest rate and returns from the global fisheries bank account.

Fish don’t want their water too hot or too cold. As the ocean warms, they move poleward and into deeper water to follow their preferred temperatures. The impacts of these shifts are complicated; depending on the species, ocean warming and its knock-on effects can either increase or decrease the habitat available to fish. This can either increase or decrease the availability of important species in the food chain. Thus, ocean warming might benefit some fish populations while hurting others.

This is what we found in our research. Although warming has benefited some fisheries, it has hurt others. The losers outweighed the winners, resulting in a net 4% decline in sustainable catch potential over the last 80 years. Four percent might sound small, but it represents a loss of 1.4 million metric tons previously available for food and income.

Some regions have been hit especially hard. The North Sea, which supports large commercial fisheries for species like Atlantic cod, haddock, and herring, has experienced a 35% loss in sustainable catch potential since 1930. The waters of East Asia, neighbored by some of the fastest growing human populations in the world, have seen losses of 8% to 35% across three seas.

Read the full story at Baron’s

Warming oceans cast a chill over New England’s sea turtles

March 26, 2019 — If we ignore the dangerously shifting global climate system, there will be consequences: more extreme rainfall, more intense hurricanes, drier and longer wildfire seasons, and continued sea level rise all loom on the horizon. In fact, extreme weather changes are already being seen around the globe.

But one of the lesser known, already visible impacts of climate change is on sea turtles. A recent paper, led by UMass Amherst doctoral candidate Lucas Griffin, links a rapidly warming Gulf of Maine to increased sea turtle strandings on Cape Cod.

“We were surprised the results suggested this increase was linked with warmer sea surface temperatures,” Griffin says. The scientists originally thought the strandings might be associated with how many young sea turtles hatched. But turtles, it turns out, are just one of many Gulf of Maine species “exhibiting a similar shift in both habitat distribution and in phenology patterns.”

The Gulf of Maine is in crisis: The region is warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean. Fish stocks are moving north, key food web events like the spring plankton bloom are occurring earlier in the year, and regional waters are staying warmer for longer. Griffin’s team used both machine learning and Bayesian statistical methods—using existing data and probability to quantify uncertainty in inferences—to analyze the relationship between water temperatures and the number of cold-stunned turtles, the potentially lethal turtle equivalent of hypothermia. The innovative approach confirmed what local naturalists and wildlife biologists had been observing for years: Warmer waters in the region actually lead to an increased threat of cold-stunning.

Read the full story at Massive Science

Federal regulators scramble as SC fish start to range north for cooler seas

March 25, 2019 — Shrimp boats from North Carolina pulled up to the McClellanville dock last week, loaded down with catch.

They had been trawling unrestricted ocean waters along the North Carolina-Virginia state line — in other words, hauling in shrimp that spawned in the Chesapeake Bay.

Until a few years ago that was unheard of: The bay just didn’t produce shrimp. It’s too far north.

But fish species are shifting their range as seas warm — four times faster than land species, according to a recent study.

The concerns are for a lot more than shrimp. It’s deep-water finfish as well as surface roamers, species like wahoo, snapper, grouper and cobia. Those are among the most sought after game and seafood fish, and the rules for all of them are under review.

As the waters warm this spring, the near-shore shrimping grounds will open. More of the half-million licensed recreational anglers in South Carolina will crank up boat motors and head out. Commercial boats are out there already. While the pressure on species from overfishing is a long-recognized and long-regulated issue, now there is a new one: How long will this fish even be there?

Anxiety is starting to churn in fishing communities over what will happen to their livelihoods or hobbies. The value to South Carolina of its rich shrimp and finfish waters has been estimated at $44 billion per year for both recreational and commercial fishing combined.

Read the full story at The Post and Courier

Will Large Protected Areas Save the Oceans or Politicize Them?

March 25, 2019 — How can we save the oceans? They cover two-thirds of the planet, but none are safe from fishing fleets, minerals prospectors, or the insidious influences of global warming and ocean acidification.

In the past decade, there has been a push to create giant new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). They now cover nearly 9.7 million square miles, equivalent to more than the land area of North America. Cristiana Pașca Palmer, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, says the world is on course reach the convention’s target of having a tenth of the oceans protected by next year.

But questions are being raised. The growth has been driven by the formation of giant MPAs bigger than many countries, often in remote regions where the threat to biodiversity is lower. So, critics are asking, are countries creating big distant MPAs to distract attention from the harder task of protecting trashed coastal ecosystems closer to home? And is there a geopolitical game afoot, a stealth rush to control the oceans for political ends? And does that explain why half of the ocean waters covered by MPAs are in the hands of the United States and two former European colonial powers, Britain and France?

Most ocean scientists see the rush to create vast MPAs as a boon to marine conservation. They are cost-effective, connect different marine ecosystems, and encompass larger parts of the ranges of migrating species such as whales and tuna, protecting “corridors of connectivity among habitats in ways not afforded by smaller MPAs,” says Bethan O’Leary, a marine scientist at the University of York in England.

Read the full story at Yale Environment 360

Now we know how much global warming is reducing the world’s seafood harvest

March 14, 2019 — Among all the knotted problems in the global food supply, it’s hard to think of one that has received more focused attention than global fisheries and the challenges of overexploitation, ecological intricacy, regulatory responses, and failures.

And yet, after decades of international treaties and sustainability studies and harvest limits  — some of the latter volunteered by industry  — a majority of the world’s most important fishing stocks continue to decline.

Overfishing remains the key driver; other factors include pollution and habitat destruction. A typical status report will mention climate change, too, always as an afterthought, an emerging force whose impact cannot yet be calculated.

That changed at the end of February with publication in the journal Science of groundbreaking research that filtered out all other factors, then measured the influence of a warming ocean all on its own. Its unusual approach was to generate a “hindcast,” looking backward through nearly a century of data on seawater temperature and laying these against a standard measure of abundance for fish and shellfish  — maximum sustainable yield  — that has been in use since 1930.

Read the full story at MinnPost

Vanishing ice in the Bering Sea drops to lowest level since 1850

March 8, 2019 — For the second straight year, the Bering Sea — a turbulent and bountiful stretch of the northern Pacific Ocean — is virtually ice free at a time of year when it should be gaining ice.

Why it matters: The ice pack’s ebb and flow each year has far-reaching consequences for the broader Bering Sea ecosystem, including determining the reach and abundance of prized fish species such as Alaska pollock and Pacific cod. This is the richest fishing ground in the U.S., featured in the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch.”

The big picture: Scientists who keep close tabs on this region say the ice’s early melt is upending life in the Last Frontier. It also portends consequences for the Lower 48 states and beyond. In a new study published in Earth’s Future on Thursday, scientists warn that Arctic climate change is already reverberating far outside the region.

  • By the end of February, Bering Sea ice extent was lower than it has been since written records began in 1850.
  • The March 6 departure from the long-term average shows that an area of ice equivalent to California and Montana combined is missing from the Bering Sea.

Read the full story at Axios

Gulf of Maine Research Institute receives $790K grant to study impact of warming ocean on key species

March 6, 2019 — The National Science Foundation awarded the Gulf of Maine Research Institute a $789,659 grant to examine the impact of a warming climate on growth and population patterns in cod and lobster in the Gulf of Maine.

The study will also document marine habitat shifts across the northwest Atlantic caused by rising temperatures, according to a March 4 news release issued jointly by the offices of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Angus King, I-Maine.

The funding will aid the institute in its work to better understand and mitigate the impacts of changing ocean conditions on Maine communities, marine ecosystems and economy, King and Collins said in the release.

The grant was awarded through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

Read the full story at Mainebiz

 

Sen. Murkowski warns climate change ‘directly impacting’ Alaska

March 6, 2019 –Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on Tuesday said climate change is “directly impacting” her home state’s way of life.

“It’s impacting subsistence. It’s impacting food security. It’s certainly impacting our economy with our fisheries,” Murkowski, the chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said at the panel’s first hearing this year devoted to climate change.

“Clearly the effort here is to get a bipartisan conversation going,” she added. “I think that the rhetoric surrounding the issue of climate and climate change can be so heated and so animated and so, often times, just a very toxic discussion that you can’t get to focusing on the solutions.”

The Senate panel heard from experts on how climate change was impacting the electricity sector. Murkowski and the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), highlighted their energy-producing states in their remarks, though.

Murkowski said her state is seeing diminishing sea ice and a change in wildlife migration patterns. And she expressed concerns that rural communities throughout her state aren’t using green energy.

Read the full story at The Hill

 

As warming waters push fish north, fishing communities have little choice but to follow

March 1, 2019 — In 1997, large commercial fishing boats based in the coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina began shifting about 13 miles northward per year. By the end of 2014, they were harvesting off the coast of New Jersey. Although this was an unusual circumstance, it wasn’t singular. As it turns out, many large-scale fishing operations along the East Coast followed similar patterns of movement within that time frame. These shifts will persist or even intensify if climate change continues to warm up our oceans, according to new research published in the latest issue of ICES Journal of Marine Science.

In the past century, global warming has gradually raised the temperature of water along the Atlantic seaboard. Like moneyed New Yorkers taking to the Hamptons to escape city heat, fish close to the coastline are swimming away from their usual marine homes and toward cooler and more comfortable waters. As a result, fishing operations are getting disrupted. While the stories of fishers who have to travel longer and longer distances to secure their catch are well documented, the movements of fishing communities over time have not been mapped until now.

Talia Young, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, conducted the first-of-its-kind ICES study in part because she wanted to bridge what she felt was a disconnect between the empirical data of marine species migration and its impact on humans.

Read the full story at The New Food Economy