Saving Seafood

ALASKA: NPFMC adopts new management plan for quickly-changing Bering Sea

December 19, 2018 — The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council has adopted a new ecosystem-based plan to manage Alaska’s Bering Sea, where climate change is affecting coastal communities and commercial fisheries.

The Bering Sea is among the world’s most productive regions for seafood, but warming water temperatures and a lack of sea ice over recent years have forced the NPFMC to consider new approaches to its management of the sea’s fisheries.

The result is the Bering Sea Fisheries Ecosystem Plan(FEP), a 150-page document adopted by the NPFMC this month intended to provide a more agile and inclusive framework for the quickly changing ecosystem.

“One of the things that was very important to the council was making sure that we have the tools in place to be able to respond to changing climate conditions by some of our modules that look at evaluating the resiliency of the management framework and different tools that are available to address the bigger-picture more holistic questions,” said Diana Evans, the council’s primary staff lead for the FEP.

Evans and her colleagues worked for four years to develop the new plan, taking in extensive input from stakeholders and local and traditional communities who live on the coastal Bering Sea – the latter a primary focus of the FEP.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Salmon to lose sense of smell as CO2 levels rise

December 19, 2018 — As atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide will be absorbed into the ocean. New research suggests rising CO2 levels in the ocean could disrupt the olfactory abilities of coho salmon.

Salmon rely on their sense of smell to track prey, find mates and navigate their way back upstream to spawn. According to the new study, published this week in the journal Global Change Biology, a compromised sense of smell would pose a serious threat to the health of salmon populations.

Lab experiments showed rising acidity levels caused by elevated CO2 levels inhibits salmon’s already vulnerable sensory-neural system.

“Our studies and research from other groups have shown that exposure to pollutants can also interfere with sense of smell for salmon,” Evan Gallagher, a professor of toxicology at the University of Washington, said in a news release. “Now, salmon are potentially facing a one-two punch from exposure to pollutants and the added burden of rising CO2. These have implications for the long-term survival of our salmon.”

Read the full story at UPI

JACK PAYNE: Endangered species science is itself endangered

December 19, 2018 — Catching chinook salmon today requires gear, technique, experience and luck. Catching salmon a year or a decade from now requires science.

That means local science. The recent National Climate Assessment notes that Alaska’s temperature has been warming at twice the global rate. To get at what this means for Alaskans, we need University of Alaska scientists.

Alaskans are getting a better handle on what a warming world does to salmon runs through the work of a federally funded corps of local fisheries researchers based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Known as the Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, its researchers address climate questions from an Alaska perspective.

For example, they research how melting glaciers can increase or diminish salmon numbers and for how many years. They consider how the increasing frequency of wildfires plays out on salmon streams. They compare how the same conditions can have different effects on sockeye, coho and chinook salmon.

It’s not the gloom and doom of a planet in peril. In some ways, climate change appears to have boosted some salmon counts, at least temporarily.

An accurate salmon count depends in part on a good scientist count. Here, the news is not good. Until I hired Alaska assistant unit leader Abby Powell to come run the University of Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit three years ago, the Alaska unit had five faculty members. It’s down to two.

Slowly starving for lack of federal funding, Alaska’s fish and wildlife species science is itself becoming an endangered species.

The national Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (CRU) program was established in 1935 on the premise that science, not politics, should guide management of national treasures such as eagles, bison, and moose. An administration proposal to de-fund it does away with that premise.

Read the full opinion piece at Anchorage Daily News

As climate change sends fish to colder waters, some boats follow

December 14, 2018 — Flipping through his captain’s log, Larry Colangelo looks at the water temperatures off Atlantic City’s coast this past summer. Unusually warm 70- and 80-degree days are jotted down inside the record-keeping book he’s had for nearly two decades.

For $800 a day, he takes tourists and professional anglers alike onto his 31-foot ship. But in recent years, he said, certain fish have become more challenging to catch and keep.

Climate change and outdated regulations are partially to blame, researchers say, and it’s affecting some local fishermen in drastic ways.

“I only know what I see, and what I see is that the water definitely seems to be warmer… We have to work a little harder now,” said Colangelo, who owns a charter boat docked at Kammerman’s Marina in Atlantic City.

A November report in the ICES Journal of Marine Science looked at how fishermen are reacting to the migration of fish north as the ocean’s temperature gradually increases. It reports dramatic shifts in the distances large, commercial Atlantic Coast fishing operations have been traveling over the past 20 years.

But for some commercial fishers in South Jersey, it’s been business as usual.

Dotted with outdoor seafood restaurants, Cape May’s commercial fishing industry brought in $85 million in 2016. The city boasts one of the largest local fishing markets in the country.

Jeff Reichle, president of Lunds Fisheries in Cape May, said his 19-boat fleet has been buying permits off North Carolina and Virginia for decades.

In recent years, he said he’s noticed more summer flounder and sea bass near Connecticut and Massachusetts, but said his boats continue to travel along the entire coast both to maximize the number of fish caught and due to higher quotas in Virginia and North Carolina.

“You follow the fish where they go,” Reichle said. “This is why boats float and have propellers.”

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

 

Blob 2.0 is bad sign for Gulf of Alaska groundfish

December 11, 2018 — Fish heavily impacted by a three-year marine heatwave in the Gulf of Alaska may be headed for round two. Commonly referred to as the blob, warmer waters between 2014 and 2017 were blamed for a dramatic decline in Pacific cod and are thought to have negatively impacted other species such as pollock.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council set catch limits for several groundfish species in the Gulf of Alaska Thursday afternoon. Before members set those limits, Stephani Zador with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center updated the council on the latest trends in the Gulf.

“Importantly, starting in September, we are officially in another heatwave in the Gulf of Alaska,” she explained.

Pacific cod populations in the Gulf plummeted as their food source decreased during the blob, but after waters returned to somewhat normal temperatures in 2017, Zador said cod body conditions improved.

“All the groundfish in our survey that we sampled, except for cod, had poor body condition. So, they were skinnier per length than average,” Zador said. “That was a sign we saw consistently through the heatwave and indicates that cod were able to pop back up.”

The council slashed the total allowable catch by 80 percent last year and lowered it slightly again this year in order to allow the species to rebound. Pacific cod populations in the Gulf are expected to stabilize in the coming years, but another marine heatwave, or blob 2.0, could hamper any progress.

Pollock have also suffered poor recruitment in recent years, but Zador said larva abundance was above average in 2017. However, much like cod, another heatwave is not a good sign.

Read the full story at KBBI

JOHN BULLARD: Trump policies threaten New England fishermen

December 5, 2018 — The Trump Administration just approved dangerous seismic blasting to look for oil and gas in the Atlantic Ocean, a move that will threaten marine wildlife and fisheries. This announcement came on the heels of the National Climate Assessment, which the Trump Administration tried to downplay by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving. That’s right, Trump just sidestepped science — twice — to deliver a one-two punch to fishermen.

The scientific report on climate change offers a devastating look at the impact of climate change on the American economy — including fisheries in New England — if we fail to act fast. According to the report, the American economy will decline by up to 10 percent by the end of this century. Failure to reduce carbon emissions will continue to negatively impact the health of fish stocks, threatening the economic stability of our fishing industry and coastal communities.

None of this is news to New England fishermen, who already know the changes happening in their place of business: the ocean. They know warming waters have driven lobster out of southern New England towards Canada. They know that despite difficult quota cuts, cod is much harder to rebuild, and many flounder species don’t reproduce the way they used to.

Fishermen know that warming oceans have pummeled the Maine lobster industry, where revenues fell by $99 million in 2017. Some scientists warn that ocean acidification could make the scallop industry, a $500 million-dollar mainstay of New England’s fishing economy, the next to go. There’s no Plan B if this happens. And new oil and gas development could accelerate the decline of these and other species. Without action, the working waterfronts of New England could cease to work.

What was President Trump’s response when asked about the climate report from his own administration? “I don’t believe it.” Apparently his self-professed intellect is superior to more than 300 scientists from inside and outside the government who wrote the report. Because of his inability to accept the advice of his own scientists on what may be the issue of gravest importance to future generations, the president is putting our region’s fishing industry at risk.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times

West Coast fishermen are suing oil companies for climate change damages

December 5, 2018 — Fishermen are still waiting for permission to catch Dungeness crabs off California’s northernmost coast this season — and they want oil companies to pay for the delay.

State officials have postponed the start of the commercial Dungeness crab season because of high levels of a neurotoxin called domoic acid. Similar closures have wreaked economic havoc on the industry in recent years.

he neurotoxin’s presence in the prized crabs has been linked to warming ocean waters, one of the many effects of human-caused climate change. That’s why the West Coast’s largest organization of commercial fishermen is suing more than a dozen oil companies, arguing they have knowingly peddled a product that threatens ocean life and the people whose economic fortunes depend on it.

The oil companies “engaged in a coordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge of those threats, discredit the growing body of publicly available scientific evidence, and persistently create doubt,” the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns. said in its lawsuit, filed last month.

“Families and businesses that depend on the health and productivity of the Dungeness crab fishery to earn their livings suffer the consequences,” the federation said.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

Climate change report predicts drastic changes in US marine economy

November 30, 2018 — Increasing temperatures, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation are the outcomes from climate change that will cause the most damage the world’s marine economy, according to National Climate Assessment report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program on Friday, 23 November.

The federal program that released the report was mandated by Congress to coordinate federal research and investments in understanding the forces shaping the global environment and their impacts on society. Compiled by top scientists at 13 U.S. agencies, it paints a grim picture of the future of both U.S. and global fisheries as the effects of climate change continue to advance.

The report stated with “very high confidence” that the world stands to suffer “the loss of iconic and highly valued” habitats, and said intensifying ecosystem disruption as a result of ocean warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and other aspects of climate change will result in major changes in species composition and food web structure. In fact, these changes are already underway and have caused significant shifts in how the marine environment is functioning, especially in the warmest and coldest environments, and the report stated – also with very high confidence – these transformative impacts on ocean ecosystems cannot be avoided In the absence of significant reductions in carbon emissions.

Read the full story at Seafood Source 

Climate report warns of impact on coastal communities

November 29, 2018 — Rising temperatures and sea levels caused by climate change threaten a way of life along the New England coast, and the region’s tourism, agriculture and fishing industries are at risk from damaging storms and flooding, according to a new federal report.

The report, produced by 13 federal agencies and more than 300 climate scientists, concludes the planet is getting warmer, human activity is contributing to it, and we are approaching a point of no return in terms of the damage to the climate. The government report details how that will hurt regions of the country.

In the Northeast, the report projects temperatures to rise faster than the global average, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-Industrial Age levels, by 2035.

“This would be the largest increase in the contiguous United States and would occur as much as two decades before global average temperatures reach a similar milestone,” it said.

Rising seas and storms will inundate seaside communities, eroding sections of coast at rates of 3.3 feet a year in the next century, according to the report.

“These changes to the coastal landscape would threaten the sustainability of communities and their livelihoods,” the report stated. “Many fishing communities rely on small docks and other shoreside infrastructure for their fishing operations, increasing the risk of substantial disruption if they are lost to sea level rise and increasing storm frequency.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Maine fisheries and blueberries could be at stake due to climate change, report says

November 29, 2018 — Climate change has helped Maine’s lobster yield increase fourfold since the 1980s, as warming waters to the south have propelled lobsters north in search of colder waters. But if summer sea temperatures along Maine’s coast continue rising and cross a potentially perilous threshold, lobsters’ survival in a more temperate Gulf of Maine could be in doubt.

The Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, and the trend is expected to continue. The warming that has taken place so far, as well as the decline of cod, has proven favorable for Maine’s lobster yields in recent years, but if sea temperatures during the summer rise above 68 degrees Fahrenheit, lobster mortality will increase.

That’s one conclusion from a new report detailing the potential effects of climate change on Maine’s coast. The report, released earlier this month by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, took a close look at how climate change could affect fishing and agriculture. It imagines five climate change scenarios, how they would unfold over the next two decades and the impacts from each one.

The report by Paul Mayewski, the institute’s director, and Maine State Climatologist Sean Birkel predicts an overall trend of warmer, wetter weather with rising sea temperatures, shorter winters, longer summers and more frequent storms.

These predictions are in line with the National Climate Assessment that the Trump administration published the day after Thanksgiving and came a week after Mayewski and Birkel’s report. The national assessment predicts an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change, and major economic losses and heightened health risks as a result.

A global or national climate change assessment might not be applicable to all states or even regions within a state, however, which is why UMaine’s Climate Change Institute has focused on specific regions of Maine, Mayewski said. Mayewski and Birkel used past climate change data collected through Birkel’s Climate Reanalyzer tool to make predictions about coastal Maine’s climate future, and they plan to do the same for other regions in the state.

“Our goal through reports like this is to give people a better idea of how the climate has changed in the past few decades, and understanding what the plausible scenarios are for future climate and how this might impact, in this case, fisheries and blueberries,” Mayewski said.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News