Saving Seafood

Aquaculture cited as strong tool for climate resilience

December 26, 2024 — A new aquaculture report released by NOAA Fisheries on Dec. 17 cites aquaculture as increasingly important in the nation’s commitment to food security, climate resilience and protection of threatened and endangered marine and freshwater species.

The updated National Aquaculture Development Plan credits aquaculture as one of the most environmentally sustainable ways to produce healthy food and also cites aquaculture for its important role in fisheries restoration.

Hatchery-reared fish are released into the wild to help boost populations of wild marine species.

According to NOAA Fisheries, aquaculture has helped more than 70 endangered or threatened species – including Pacific salmon, white abalone, and queen conch – and has also helped restore habitats and mitigate impacts of climate change.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times

Federal hostility could delay offshore wind projects, derailing state climate goals

December 16, 2024 — Numerous East Coast states are counting on offshore wind projects to power tens of millions of homes and to help them transition to cleaner energy.

But putting wind turbines at sea requires the cooperation of a powerful landlord: the federal government. Soon, that government will be led by President-elect Donald Trump, who has frequently disparaged offshore wind and said he will “make sure that ends on Day 1.”

In the eight states that have passed legal mandates to reach certain amounts of offshore wind power, Trump’s second term threatens those timelines.

“This is absolutely going to create problems for how we’re going to meet our emissions goals and the energy needs for the state,” said Massachusetts state Sen. Jamie Eldridge, a Democrat who serves as vice chair on the legislative Joint Committee on Environment and Natural Resources.

Read the full article at Stateline

Small fish size linked to poorer runs of chinook in Alaska’s biggest rivers

December 9, 2024 — The shrinking size of Alaska salmon, a decades-long trend linked in part to warming conditions in the ocean, is hampering the ability of chinook in Alaska’s two biggest rivers to produce new generations needed to maintain healthy populations, a new study shows.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks-led study shows how the body conditions of chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, combined with extreme heat and cold in the ocean and freshwater environments, have converged in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems to depress what is termed “productivity” — the successful reproduction that results in adult spawners returning to the same area.

The study examines 26 different populations of chinook in those two river systems in areas from Western Alaska to the Yukon River uplands in Canada. Chinook runs in those rivers have faltered in recent years, and the situation has been so dire on the Canadian part of the Yukon that U.S. and Canadian officials earlier this year suspended all harvests of Canadian-origin chinook for seven years.

The analysis of multiple factors and conditions revealed that fish size was a major factor that determined productivity, defined as adult salmon returning to spawning grounds successfully producing a next generation of adults to come back to the same spawning area.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Scientists make stunning breakthrough that could solve major problem plaguing our oceans — and the solution lies in whale feces

December 6, 2024 — A small team of environmental and ocean scientists in Australia, known as Whale X, may have discovered a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere efficiently, Hakai Magazine reported. The key to their solution is replicating whale poo.

Whale feces are high in essential nutrients that support the growth of phytoplanktons — a microscopic marine algae that feeds the rest of the ocean food chain.

Phytoplanktons also efficiently capture carbon dioxide, as land plants do, clearing the atmosphere of planet-warming gases. Per Hakai, phytoplanktons absorb “roughly 22 megatonnes (22,000,000 tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year — the amount emitted by about 4.8 million vehicles.”

To put this all into perspective, the most efficient carbon-absorbing tree species — the oak tree — captures only 12 tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the United States National Marine Fisheries Service.

Read the full story at The Cool Down

$2M Grant to Fishermen’s Alliance Means More Boats Gathering Ocean Data

December 5, 2024 — Strange things have been happening in recent years in the Gulf of Maine, the 36,000 square miles of relatively enclosed ocean stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia. Low-oxygen zones have become annual occurrences, a large brown algae bloom in summer 2023 grew from Maine to northern Massachusetts, and looming over it all is the accelerating warming of surface waters. The Gulf of Maine is warming three times faster than the global average, according to the Maine Climate Council, which is faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans.

Understanding these phenomena and their effects on fisheries is difficult, said Owen Nichols, Director of Marine Fisheries Research at the Center for Coastal Studies, because of the lack of data available on the ocean water below the surface — at the depths where most fish live.

There is one group of people, however, who regularly put equipment deep in the ocean: fishermen. And many of them are already working with scientists to gather data on the water.

But on Oct. 31, Gov. Healey’s administration announced a nearly $2 million grant to the Chatham-based Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance that will significantly expand fishing vessel-based measurements. The grant is from the quasi-public Mass. Technology Collaborative.

Since 2001, a Northeast Fisheries Science Center project has partnered with local fishermen to try to fix the lack of data about the depths. The project, called eMOLT (Environmental Monitoring on Lobster Traps and Large Trawlers), has so far installed sensors on about 100 fishermen’s gear to gather data on stratification of water temperature, dissolved oxygen levels, and other parameters.

Read the full story at The Provincetown Independent

UAF study links declining salmon to extreme climate, smaller size

December 4, 2024 — A new University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) study published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology, says extreme climate and smaller body size have led to declining Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers’ King Salmon populations.

Over the last decade, the lower number of certain salmon species making it to rural Alaska villages, along the two tributaries, has led the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to impose catching restrictions.

UAF researcher Erik Schoen said the study began in 2020, and examined 26 different spawning areas across the two river basins.

“Across the board, there were a few big drivers that affected all of these populations. Some of those were out in the ocean. So ocean climate, extreme conditions like really cold winters and really hot summers in the ocean had big negative effects,” Schoen said.

Read the full story at Alaska’s News Source

Biden announces USD 148 million for climate-ready fisheries

December 3, 2024 — The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has dedicated USD 148 million (EUR 141 million) to improving NOAA’s data collection and analysis to support “climate-ready fisheries.”

The money will be used to modernize the agency’s science enterprise, providing the tools and information necessary to help the nation’s fisheries adapt to rapidly changing marine ecosystems.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

A Warning From a California Marine Heat Wave

December 2, 2024 — They call it “the Blob.”

A decade ago, sea surface temperatures in the Pacific shot up to 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal. A high pressure system parked over the ocean, and winds that churn cold, nutrient-rich water from the depths to the surface died down. Stagnant, warm water spread across the Northeast Pacific, in a marine heat wave that lasted for three years.

Under the surface, the food web broke down and ecosystems convulsed, at first unseen to humans on shore. But soon, clues washed up.

Dead Cassin’s auklets — small, dark gray seabirds — piled up on West Coast beaches. The auklets were followed by common murres, a slightly bigger black-and-white seabird. The carcasses were knee-deep in places, impossible to miss.

Researchers are still untangling the threads of what happened, and they caution against drawing universal conclusions from a single regional event. But the Blob fundamentally changed many scientists’ understanding of what climate change could do to life in the ocean; 10 years later, the disaster is one of our richest sources of information on what happens to marine life as the temperature rises.

And it is more relevant than ever. Last year, multiple “super-marine heat waves” blanketed parts of the ocean. Averaged together, global sea surface temperatures broke records, often by wide margins, for months in 2023 and 2024. As the climate warms, scientists expect extreme marine heat waves to become more frequent.

The Blob “was a window into what we might see in the future,” said Julia Parrish, a marine ecologist at the University of Washington who runs the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, a network of volunteers who survey beaches from Northern California to Alaska.

In a study published last year, Dr. Parrish and her colleagues estimate that the Blob eventually killed millions of seabirds, in waves of starvation.

Read the full story at the New York Times

NOAA gets $147M to help create ‘climate-ready fisheries’

November 29, 2024 — The Biden administration will spend an additional $147.5 million to modernize NOAA’s scientific programs aimed at fostering “climate-ready fisheries,” the agency announced Wednesday.

The Inflation Reduction Act funding, delivered in the final weeks of the Biden presidency, comes on top of $1.2 billion NOAA Fisheries received in June 2023 to advance the agency’s knowledge of how climate change is affecting marine life, including commercial and recreational fish stocks and endangered marine mammals like whales.

NOAA Fisheries will use $107.5 million to enhance science and data collection to account for the effects of climate change and improve fish and marine mammal stock assessments, while $40 million will go to the agency’s Climate, Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative, which seeks to create a “nationwide decision support system” to help fishermen, fisheries managers, coastal communities and ocean-based industries to reduce climate impacts and improve resilience to changing ocean conditions.

Read the full article at E&E News

Scientists at the University of Maine developing new tools to adapt to warming Gulf of Maine

November 25, 2024 — Scientists say the Gulf of Maine is now warming faster than almost anywhere else in the world. What does that mean for the state’s billion-dollar fishing industry?

Researchers at the University of Maine are developing new tools to ensure the sustainability of Maine’s commercial fisheries.

For years, scientists have been tracking how less cold water enters the Gulf of Maine while the hotter Gulf Stream is shifting north and adding warmer water to the region. This is impacting populations of different species, including Atlantic cod.

Read the full article at News Center Maine