Saving Seafood

Fish shrinking as ocean temperatures rise

October 4, 2017 — One of the most economically important fish is shrinking in body weight, length and overall physical size as ocean temperatures rise, according to new research by LSU Boyd Professor R. Eugene Turner published today. The average body size of Menhaden—a small, silver fish—caught off the coasts from Maine to Texas—has shrunk by about 15 percent over the past 65 years.

Menhaden make up about one-half of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico fish harvest and had a dockside value of about $129 million in 2013. They are coastal species that spawn offshore and move to estuaries where juveniles grow to one- and two-year old fish. The air and off the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico has steadily increased, especially in estuaries, where heat exchange occurs efficiently between air and sea. Adult menhaden return offshore where they are harvested with purse seine nets.

Read the full story at Phys.org

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘A new era’: UMass Dartmouth SMAST building to open

September 29, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — UMass Dartmouth’s new marine science building is finished, its laboratories gleaming with the promise of new research.

The $55 million School for Marine Science and Technology building, dubbed SMAST East, officially opens today in the South End of New Bedford. At 64,000 square feet, it nearly triples the physical size of SMAST, a graduate school and research center focusing on fisheries, coastal preservation, ocean modeling, and climate change.

The new building reunites the school’s programs in a campus-like setting. For several years, some have been housed in the AT&T building in Fairhaven for lack of space.

“Just to be back together was great,” said Steve Cadrin, a professor and chairman of the Department of Fisheries Oceanography. But more importantly, it’s a world-class facility, he said.

The building also helps cement the school’s relationship with the state Division of Marine Fisheries. The agency leased the third floor for its New Bedford office, and it will have a first-floor office for permitting.

The Division of Marine Fisheries works hand-in-hand with SMAST on research and sometimes hires its Ph.D. graduates. Recent hires have represented the agency on New England Fisheries Management Council committees, helped the state understand fish surveys, and studied algae blooms.

The agency’s director, David Pierce, is an adjunct professor.

“We are now in a far better position to collaborate,” he said.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

In the Pacific – oceans and climate change have compromised livelihoods

September 20, 2017 — The Chiefs of Falealupo village, on the island of Savaii noticed a disturbing trend in the last ten years in their lagoon. The presence of crown of thorns have increased in alarming numbers. “It is impossible to fish here now. They have ruined the coral and now what was previously a productive reef, has been rendered useless by them,” Chief Aeau Mareko Lamositele.

According to them, their families used to be able to rely on fish from the lagoon in front of their village. “Now we have to venture further out, we have to fish for longer to get anything back,” Aeau said.

The people of Falealupo are dependent on the ocean for their daily sustanence and for their livelihoods. Through susbsistence fishing activities they are able to feed their families and sell any surplus for other family needs.

“It’s actually quite new, we haven’t ever experienced this, even into adulthood we were always able to fish here without any problems, and always return with plenty for the family,” Aeau said.

Crown of Thorns

The decline in fisheries and habitat health on the reefs of Falealupo have been attributed to a variety of factors, with one of them being an influx in the number of crown of thorns.

The crown of thorns has been a growing problem in Samoa. Scientists have found that rising sea temperatures increase the survival rate of the coral-eating crown-of-thorn starfish. Reports from the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that a 2-degree increase in temperature improved their likely survival rate by 240 per cent, or more than tripling it.

Read the full story at HuffPost

Climate change challenges the survival of fish across the world

September 18, 2017 — Climate change will force many amphibians, mammals and birds to move to cooler areas outside their normal ranges, provided they can find space and a clear trajectory among our urban developments and growing cities.

But what are the chances for fish to survive as climate change continues to warm waters around the world?

University of Washington researchers are tackling this question in the first analysis of how vulnerable the world’s freshwater and marine fishes are to climate change. Their paper, appearing online Sept. 11 in Nature Climate Change, used physiological data to predict how nearly 3,000 fish species living in oceans and rivers will respond to warming water temperatures in different regions.

“Climate change is happening. We need tools to try to identify areas that are going to be the most at risk and try to develop plans to conserve these areas,” said lead author Lise Comte, a postdoctoral researcher in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “It’s important to look at the organisms themselves as we cannot just assume they will all be equally sensitive to these changes.”

The researchers compiled data from lab experiments involving nearly 500 fish species, conducted over the past 80 years by researchers around the world. These standardized experiments measure the highest temperatures fish are able to tolerate before they die. This analysis is the first time these disparate data from lab experiments have been combined and translated to predict how fish will respond in the wild.

Read the full story at Science Daily

Louisiana will use $20 million in BP fines to expand a coastal monitoring program

September 14, 2017 — Louisiana has received $19.5 million in fines from the 2010 BP oil spill to expand a system to collect data on the effect of coastal restoration projects.

The System-Wide Assessment and Monitoring Program, or SWAMP, monitors changes in Louisiana’s ecosystem over time.

Among other things, it evaluates how human factors like restoration projects and climate change affect the environment, including wildlife, fisheries and certain types of vegetation.

SWAMP will be used to understand changes in the ecosystem, evaluate responses to sea-level rise and protect communities from flooding and other natural disasters, said Syed Khalil, a geologist assistant administrator for the state Coastal Protection & Restoration Authority.

“Ecosystem restoration is very complex,” Khalil said. “What we are doing does not have any boilerplate template, so we need to monitor the results of restoration and then correct or modify our approach, if need be.”

Read the full story at The Lens

As glaciers melt, scientists try to figure out how fish will respond

As climate change puts fisheries, ecosystems on the line, scientists work to understand how marine life will respond

September 11, 2017 — Glaciers in Southeast and around the world are melting. This much scientists know.

About half of the water in the Gulf of Alaska comes from glacial melt, current estimates hold. In Southeast, about 30 percent of all the water flowing from land to sea is glacier melt water.

That percentage is expected to increase due to climate change. But scientists don’t yet know how all that melt water might affect the animals swimming through it.

With the help of a net and a small crew, that’s a problem ecologists Anne Beaudreau and Carolyn Bergstrom have been trying to solve by continuing five years of research this summer. The professors — Bergstrom from the University of Alaska Southeast and Beaudreau from the University of Alaska Fairbanks — have been studying marine biodiversity at the mouths of the Mendenhall, Cowee and Eagle rivers.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

Researchers find summer heat’s lasting longer in the Gulf of Maine

The warmer conditions endure two months longer than in the early 1980s, posing threats to the food chain and raising risks from more powerful hurricanes.

September 11, 2017 — New scientific research has revealed that summer temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, the second fastest warming part of the world’s oceans, are persisting two months longer than they were as recently as the early 1980s.

The findings, by a Maine-led team of scientists, have ramifications for marine life, fishermen and the strength of hurricanes, which appear in late summer and are fueled by warm water.

“What we found was quite astonishing in that almost all the warming is in the late summer and the winter is not contributing very much at all,” says the project’s lead scientist, University of Maine oceanographer Andrew Thomas. “You can think of impacts all across the food chain, from animals that have actual temperature tolerances to the distribution of species, their prey, and even their predators, not to mention the bacteria and viruses, which we have no idea how they will react.”

The researchers used daily satellite readings collected between 1982 and 2014 to map changes in sea surface temperatures along the Eastern Seaboard from North Carolina to Nova Scotia, breaking out the data by month to reveal seasonal differences in warming rates. They weren’t surprised to find the strongest warming in the Gulf of Maine and adjacent Scotia Shelf – team members had worked with Andrew Pershing of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland to demonstrate this in a 2015 study – but the profound seasonal differences were unexpected.

The satellite data show warming trends across the Gulf of Maine for every month and very sharp increases during July, August and September, especially off the Maine coast. While the Gulf of Maine warmed by an average of 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit per decade during the 33-year period, the warming rate was twice that in the months of July through September, or 1.44 degrees F per decade.

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald at Central Maine

A Bacteria That Thrives In Warmer Waters Keeps Mass. Oyster Fisheries On High Alert

August 31, 2017 — Massachusetts loves its local oysters from places like Wellfleet and Duxbury. The state’s bivalve business is booming along with increased consumer demand. These days there’s no shortage of $1 oyster specials and oyster-centric restaurants around here.

But the ways oysters are harvested and handled have become more involved and challenging since 2013. That’s when bacteria linked to warming waters appeared in our marshes for the first time.

The result was an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness caused by Vibrio Parahaemolyticus — Vp or Vibrio for short. (To be clear, this is different from norovirus, which led to a closure of shellfish beds in Wellfleet last year.)

In response to the Vp bacteria’s emergence in New England, the state implemented a Vibrio Control Plan. Here’s how those state efforts to control bacterial infection have been affecting people in the oyster industry.

‘The Waters Are Warmer Than They Used To Be’

At Select Oyster Bar in Boston, you can find a rotating selection of Massachusetts oysters on-the-half-shell — Moon Shoal petites from Kingston, Ichabods from Plymouth and Wellfleet Puffers.

For about a dozen years Select’s chef-owner Michael Serpa has been serving mollusks in Boston establishments, including the cult-favorite Neptune Oysters in the North End. “I’ve seen a lot of oysters,” he told me, smiling.

Read and listen to the full story at WBUR

Cooperation between fishermen, regulators not just a fluke

August 30, 2017 — NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — The following is excerpted from an article published today by the Providence Journal:

Fisheries management is only as good as the science that it’s based upon. The better the science, the more effective the management.

For the past three years, Point Judith fisherman Chris Roebuck has partnered with federal regulators to get a better handle on fish stocks, taking scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration out to sea on his 78-foot Western-rig stern trawler the Karen Elizabeth to help figure out where groundfish are and in what numbers.

This summer’s trip wrapped up this week when the team of five researchers led by John Manderson, a senior ecosystem field scientist with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and a four-man crew headed by Roebuck returned to port in Galilee with new information on summer flounder, red hake and other species.

Their research is more important than ever as regulators try to respond more nimbly to shifts in fish abundance and distribution caused by the changing climate.

The work depends on the collaboration between Roebuck and Manderson.

“I can’t do this research without him because I don’t know the ecosystem the way he does,” Manderson said. “I can work with him and quantify what he knows.”

Roebuck, 45, has been fishing his whole life. A second-generation fisherman, he was lobstering at 12 and has captained the Karen Elizabeth for the past two decades.

He fishes for squid from September to April and for sea scallops from April to June, trawling ocean waters from Delaware to the Canada border.

Working with the fisheries science center was a no-brainer for Roebuck, who believes that there are more fish in the sea than regulators are currently counting. Better data could end up benefiting him and other fishermen if they’re allowed to catch more.

“In the end, I’m just interested in making the science more accurate,” Roebuck said.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish

A new study suggests warming sea temperatures could result in smaller fish sizes.

August 22, 2017 — Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes.

Because warmer seas speed up their metabolisms, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures will need to draw more oxygen from the ocean. At the same time, warming seas are already reducing the availability of oxygen in many parts of the sea.

A pair of University of British Columbia scientists argue that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“What we found was that the body size of fish decreases by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature,” says author William Cheung, director of science for the university’s Nippon Foundation—Nereus Program.

These changes, the scientists say, will have a profound impact on many marine food webs, upending predator-prey relationships in ways that are hard to predict.

“Lab experiments have shown that it’s always the large species that will become stressed first,” says lead author Daniel Pauly, a professor at the university’s Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, and principal investigator for the Sea Around Us. “Small species have an advantage, respiration-wise.”

Still, while many scientists applaud the discovery, not all agree that Pauly’s and Cheung’s work supports their dramatic findings. The study was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.

Read the full story at National Geographic