Saving Seafood

Shrimpers hope industry lost to warm seas won’t be forgotten

February 19, 2019 — Glen Libby looks back fondly on his days as a Maine shrimp trawler, but he’s concerned about what seafood lovers will think if the shuttered fishery ever reopens.

“Shrimp? What are those?” he said. “There will be a market. But it depends how big of a market you’re talking about.”

Maine’s historic shrimp industry has been closed since 2013 due to a loss in population of shrimp off of New England that is tied in large part to warming oceans. And with a reopening likely several years away — if it ever happens at all — Libby and others who formerly worked in the business are grappling with how much of the industry they’ll be able to salvage if the time ever comes.

The state’s shrimp fishery was traditionally a winter industry, but it’s in the midst of its sixth straight season with no participation because of a government-imposed moratorium. Fishermen, wholesalers, distributors and others in the seafood business lament the industry wouldn’t be in a good position to return right away even if fishing for the little, sweet pink shrimp was allowed.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Idaho Statesman

Research forms complex picture of mercury pollution in a period of global change

February 15, 2019 — Climate change and the loss of wetlands may contribute to increased levels of mercury concentrations in coastal fish, according to a Dartmouth College study.

The finding implies that forces directly associated with global change — including increased precipitation and land use modifications — will raise levels of the toxic metal that enter the marine food chain.

Estuaries, including coastal wetlands, provide much of the seafood that is harvested for human consumption and also serve as important feeding grounds for larger marine fish.

The study, published in late December in the journal Environmental Pollution, adds to the mounting body of research that indicates a complex relationship between the environment and mercury pollution.

“Estuaries provide habitat for the fish that feed our families,” said Celia Chen, director of the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program. “It’s important to understand how mercury acts within our environment, particularly under increasing climate and land use pressures.”

The Dartmouth study concludes that higher levels of mercury, and its toxic form methylmercury, are associated with higher organic carbon in coastal waters. The study also finds that this results in higher levels of mercury occurring in fish that frequent these waters.

Read the full story at Science Daily

Can fish evolve to handle climate change? Scientists tested it on these oddball fish

February 14, 2019 — The grunion is a weird little fish.

Grunion are perhaps best known for washing up on California beaches — from Baja California all the way up to Monterey Bay — several times a year to spawn en masse for hours, starting on a night with a full or new moon, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The creatures travel as far up a beach as waves will carry them, and then females dig nests and lay thousands and thousands of eggs. Males come ashore, too, and fertilize the eggs — and then males and females alike return to the ocean, sometimes in less than a minute, the state fact page on the species says.

But it turns out those fish — bizarre as they might seem — can teach scientists something about sea creatures’ ability to adapt to climate change. That’s according to a new study from scientists at Long Beach State University in Southern California.

Read the full story at The State

Scientists hope DNA in water could be way to save rare Maine fish

February 11, 2019 — Scientists in Maine are using DNA to try to preserve the remaining populations of a fish that lives in 14 lakes and ponds in the state and nowhere else in the continental United States.

The scientists are turning their eye to the Arctic charr, which is a species of landlocked fish in Maine that has lived in the state for millennia and is prized by anglers. The charr face threats such as invasive predators and a warming climate. They are also notoriously elusive, making them difficult for researchers to track.

Michael Kinnison, a professor of evolutionary applications at University of Maine, and other scientists are working with the state to make sure the fish keep surviving. Kinnison is working on a project to collect “environmental DNA” from the water bodies where the fish live.

The project involves collecting water samples from the lakes and ponds where the fish are known to live, and studying DNA that they and other organisms shed, Kinnison said. It’ll provide vital information scientists can use to keep charr populations stable, he said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Boston.com

US House panel resumes focus on climate change, warming oceans

February 11, 2019 — Climate change is hitting the lobster industry in two ways, Beth Casoni, the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association’s executive director, told the US House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee’s Water, Oceans and Wildlife – or WOW — panel on Thursday.

The Gulf of Maine is warming at a faster pace than 99% of other bodies of water and, by 2050, could lose 62% of its lobsters as a result, she said. Meanwhile, ocean acidification is making it harder for juvenile lobsters to grow shells, leaving them open to predators and disease.

“These threats from climate change are intensified by the other challenges lobstermen are facing,” said Casoni, one of seven witnesses at the two-hour hearing. “We do not have the luxury of looking at any one of these impacts on its own – all of them collectively are causing declines in the resource, hurting our bottom line, and our communities.

The event on Thursay was the second hearing called by the Natural Resources Committee on climate change since Democrats took control of the lower chamber in the 2018 election. The day before representative Raul Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who now chairs the main committee, held a more general discussion.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

California has a weird new desert. It’s in the Pacific Ocean.

February 4, 2019 — Six years after it was stricken by a wasting disease off the northern California coast, the sunflower sea star — one of the most colorful starfish in the ocean — has all but vanished, and the domino effect threatens to unravel an entire marine ecosystem.

The cause of the sea star’s demise is a mystery, but it coincided with a warming event in the Pacific Ocean, possibly tied to the climate, that lasted for two years ending in 2015. It heated vast stretches of water in patches, and likely exacerbated the disease, according to a new study released Wednesday.

“I’ve never seen a decline of this magnitude of a species so important,” Drew Harvell, the lead author of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, that documented the sunflower sea star’s retreat into possible extinction off California and Oregon.

If the study had a purpose, she said, it was to call attention to the sea star’s demise so that federal officials would take action to list it as endangered and work to save it, possibly with a breeding program using sunflower stars that are surviving in parts of Washington, Alaska and Canada.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

VIMS: Antarctic krill declines as South Atlantic Ocean warms

February 4, 2019 — When biological oceanographer Deborah Steinberg bundles up and steps onto the deck of the Laurence M. Gould research vessel, this is what she sees: ice, ice and more ice.

“I see icebergs, I see sea ice, I see crabeater seals floating by on ice floes, the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula,” Steinberg said in a shipboard phone interview Friday. “It’s gorgeous.”

But it’s what she can’t see, what lies beneath the icy waters of the South Atlantic Ocean off northwestern Antarctica, that concerns Steinberg and an international team of marine researchers: krill.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Ocean heat waves like the Pacific’s deadly ‘Blob’ could become the new normal

February 1, 2019 — When marine biologist Steve Barbeaux first saw the data in late 2017, he thought it was the result of a computer glitch. How else could more than 100 million Pacific cod suddenly vanish from the waters off of southern Alaska?

Within hours, however, Barbeaux’s colleagues at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington, had confirmed the numbers. No glitch. The data, collected by research trawlers, indicated cod numbers had plunged by 70% in 2 years, essentially erasing a fishery worth $100 million annually. There was no evidence that the fish had simply moved elsewhere. And as the vast scale of the disappearance became clear, a prime suspect emerged: “The Blob.”

In late 2013, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water, roughly one-third the size of the contiguous United States, formed in the Gulf of Alaska and began to spread. A few months later, Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, dubbed it The Blob. The name, with its echo of a 1958 horror film about an alien life form that keeps growing as it consumes everything in its path, quickly caught on. By the summer of 2015, The Blob had more than doubled in size, stretching across more than 4 million square kilometers of ocean, from Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Water temperatures reached 2.5°C above normal in many places.

Read the full story at Science Magazine

The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, and it’s dramatically disrupting fishing patterns

February 1, 2019 — The continental United States is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was a century ago. Seas at the coasts are nine inches higher. The damage is mounting from these fundamental changes, and Americans are living it. These are their stories.

Since 1963, Greg Mataronas’s family has been making a living catching lobster off of Little Compton, R.I. But as water temperatures have risen rapidly along the coast, there are fewer lobster to be found, prompting a shift to other species, like whelk.

The state’s lobster haul peaked at over 8 million pounds in 1999. It hasn’t exceeded 3 million since 2005. And in 2017, it barely reached 2 million. As a result, a way of life is rapidly changing and, for some, ending.

To hold on, Rhode Island fishermen have agreed to a 50 percent cut in how many lobster traps they can set. Like the lobsters, they are adapting to a changing sea, buying out the licenses of competitors or diversifying what they catch.

Mataronas now fishes for whelk and sea bass and other fish, as well as lobster. To provide for his family, he couldn’t just fish like his father had.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

North Carolina blue crab stocks flourish, but Hurricane Florence wiped out infrastructure

January 24, 2019 — North Carolina’s blue crab season got off to a good start, but was slammed when Hurricane Florence hit in September and was expected to rebound as 2018 came to a close.

“Some crabbers lost everything, and several packing operations were completely destroyed. It’s been a very tough year for the industry in general,” said Glenn Skinner, executive director of the North Carolina Fisheries Association.

However, preliminary figures indicate the blue crab fishery came out better than expected.

“All in all, 2018 was a great crab year for us,” says Dylan Dunbar, manager of Paradise Shores Seafood in Pamlico County. “Around here, crabbing usually slacks off in early July, when Maryland and Virginia markets pick up, and the prices drop. Many pull their pots and wait for things to pick up after the new year.”

Not so for many crabbers to the south, where the devastation from Florence was more extensive and took a toll on the area’s fish houses.

The 2018 Semi-Annual Commercial Landings Bulletin (January-June) indicates a decrease in blue crab landings, down from 8 million pounds landed in 2017 to 5.8 million for the same period this year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman