Saving Seafood

The Lobster Industry’s Demise May Be Overstated

October 21, 2024 — Damian Brady spends a lot of his time in lobster boats, scooping up, counting, and measuring baby lobsters in the Gulf of Maine. Along with counts from scuba dives and fishing hauls, Brady’s data goes into the comprehensive Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System that helps managers regulate the fishery. Brady also looks at “lobster settlement” — under what water conditions do these baby lobsters decide to settle in? He has studied decades of lobster booms and busts, refining the models in search of a “crystal ball,” as he calls it, on lobster futures.

Climate change has course-adjusted the Gulf Stream northward, warming the waters of southern New England, and driving a northward movement of lobster populations. It feels like history repeating: Science suggests warming waters caused the Rhode Island lobster industry to collapse earlier, going from 22 million pounds in 1997 to just over 3 million pounds in 2013.

But in Maine, lobsters are still a vital industry. On a good year, 100 million pounds of lobster may cross the state’s docks, bringing in more than $400 million. Maine’s boon from the northward lobster migration was a record-breaking lobster haul in 2016. But then lobster counts began to decline consistently, year after year into 2023. The fishery’s worst fear echoed across the docks: A Rhode Island-style collapse was heading toward Maine.

But Brady, after years of careful study, is not seeing that future. What many announced as the beginning of the end, he calls a “regime shift.”

The shift drove a downsize in the Maine lobster fleet, particularly from southern Maine towns such as Portland.

“The center of lobstering has moved [north], from the center of Maine to Downeast Maine,” Brady said.

Above Portland on a map, “Downeast” is where Maine juts into the Atlantic Ocean by way of many small islands. There, the island fishing town of Stonington brings in the largest lobster catches. Its boats are able to reach the deep, federal-permit waters far offshore where lobsters are now settling.

“There was a particular boom in deep water settlement,” Brady said, reporting the most recent surveys, “places we haven’t really looked before, or looked at much.” To scientists, new habitats call for more data.

Read the full article at Ambrook Research

Biden administration races to shell out billions for clean energy as election nears

October 21, 2024 — The Biden administration is shelling out billions of dollars for clean energy and approving major offshore wind projects as officials race to secure major climate initiatives before President Joe Biden’s term comes to an end.

Biden wants to establish a legacy for climate action that includes locking in a trajectory for reducing the nation’s planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Former President Donald Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and health care bill and stop offshore wind development if he returns to the White House in January.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told The Associated Press on Friday it would be “political malpractice” to undo clean energy incentives that are benefiting all pockets of America, with most of the investments going to counties with below-average weekly wages and college graduation rates.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

MAINE: Invasive blob-like creatures are clogging Maine fishing gear

October 8, 2024 — Warming ocean temperatures are boosting the populations of small blob-like creatures in Maine’s coastal waters, causing problems for fishermen.

The small invertebrates, several species of which are invasive, are attaching themselves in large numbers to lobster traps and aquaculture equipment, at times creating a major hassle for harvesters as they try to tend to their gear.

“The month of September, they come on like gangbusters,” Hilton Turner, a lobsterman and chair of Stonington’s harbor committee, said about the tunicates, which are better known as sea squirts.

Read the full article at Fox 23

The Case for Seafood Self-Reliance

October 1, 2024 — Scan the seafood case at your local grocery store and you’re likely to see the same staples, no matter where you are: shrimp, salmon, tuna, tilapia, cod. Most of it crossed international borders to reach you.

The U.S. is the world’s second-largest seafood importer, despite the fact that U.S. fishers catch 8 billion pounds of seafood each year. Much of the fish landed here is eaten elsewhere. That conundrum makes it harder for American fishermen to sustain their operations and forces fish to be shipped thousands of miles before it reaches the dinner table. Climate change and global crises disrupting the international market only add to the complications.

Fisheries would be healthier and more sustainable if fish caught locally were consumed locally. But the discrepancy is by design, says Joshua Stoll, associate professor at the University of Maine and founder of Local Catch Network, a hub of seafood harvesters, businesses, researchers, and organizers that supports the growth of community-based seafood.

“We’ve built roads around the world that don’t have exit ramps to our local communities when it comes to seafood,” Stoll says.

A healthier system more reflective of the diversity of U.S. seafood is attainable, Stoll says, if we invest in connecting harvesters and consumers at the regional level. In a paper published in Nature in June, he and his colleagues found that seafood independence—the ability to meet the country’s consumption needs through its own production—is “within reach” for the U.S.

From 2012 through 2021, U.S. fishermen caught 76 percent of the country’s seafood needs on average, Stoll and his colleagues found. As recently as the 1990s, the average was 98 percent. Those numbers are based on the federal recommendation of eight ounces of seafood per week per adult, or 26 pounds annually; Americans currently eat about 20 pounds each per year.

Read the full article at the Civil Beats

UN chief warns of ‘rising tide of misery’ from swelling seas

September 26, 2024 — UN chief Antonio Guterres warned on Wednesday that surging sea levels are creating “a rising tide of misery,” as a coalition of small island nations declared that their sovereignty must be respected even if their lands are subsumed.

Nearly a billion people worldwide live in low-lying coastal areas, increasingly vulnerable to storm surges, coastal erosion and flooding — while Pacific islands face growing threats to their economic viability and even existence.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global mean sea level has risen faster than in any prior century over at least the past 3,000 years, a direct consequence of human-caused global warming triggering the melting of ice on land and the thermal expansion of seawater.

“Rising seas mean a rising tide of misery,” said Guterres, speaking at a summit that placed sea-level rise at the top of the international agenda at the UN General Assembly.

Over the past century, as global temperatures have risen about one degree Celsius (1.8F), sea levels have gone up 160 to 210 millimeters (six to eight inches) — with about half of that amount occurring since 1993, according to NASA.

Read the full article at KPVI

MAINE: Study reveals climate change toll on Maine’s kelp forests

September 26, 2024 — Parts of the warming Gulf of Maine have become inhospitable for kelp forests, according to new research from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay.

Between 2001 and 2018, a team led by senior research scientist Doug Rasher combined dive surveys of kelp population and data on ocean temperature to compile the first detailed census of Maine’s kelp forests in nearly 20 years.

The results were startling, Rasher said. Maine’s kelp forests were devoured by a green urchin overpopulation in the 1980s and 1990s, but rebounded around the turn of the century.

“We anticipated that with the rise and fall of the sea urchin fishery and the absence of sea urchins in the ecosystem, that kelp forests should have been widespread and pretty healthy across the coast of Maine,” Rasher said.

But that’s not what his team found, according to the results of their research published in the journal Ecology. Kelp forests persisted off Maine’s northern coast but south of Casco Bay they had almost disappeared.

Read the full article at Bangor Daily News

They’ve Got a Plan to Fight Global Warming. It Could Alter the Oceans.

September 23, 2024 — In a quiet patch of forest in Nova Scotia, a company is building a machine designed to help slow global warming by transforming Earth’s rivers and oceans into giant sponges that absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

When switched on later this year, the machine will grind up limestone inside a tall green silo and release the powder into the nearby West River Pictou, creating a chalky plume that should dissolve within minutes.

The effect could be potent, scientists say. Rivers contain carbon dioxide that is constantly escaping into the air, where it traps heat and warms the planet. But adding limestone converts some of that carbon dioxide into a stable molecule that instead stays underwater and washes into the sea, where it should remain trapped for thousands of years.

“The beauty of it is how simple the technology is,” said Eddie Halfyard, a freshwater ecologist and co-founder of CarbonRun, the start-up building the $400,000 limestone machine, with plans for many more. “We let the water do most of the work.”

With the dangers of climate change growing and greenhouse gas emissions soaring, scientists and entrepreneurs are increasingly exploring ways to deliberately intervene in climate systems to cool the Earth. Overwhelmingly, scientists say nations must sharply cut the pollution from burning fossil fuels that is driving up global temperatures. But many also believe that some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere must also be pulled out in order to preserve a livable planet.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Climate change heavily affecting fish stocks in Japan, resulting in historically low catch totals

September 18, 2024 — Japanese catch totals of important seafood species have fallen dramatically, and climate change is the suspected cause, according to new reports, with catches of Japanese flying squid and Pacific saury suffering in recent years compared to historical averages.

The Tokyo-based National Pacific Saury Stick Net Fishery Cooperative released countrywide catch data on saury through the end of 2023, showing a 36 percent increase from the record-low catch recorded in 2022. Nationwide landings went from 7,092 metric tons (MT) to 9,525 MT. However, this is still well behind the 350,000 MT landed in 2008 and the 225,000 MT caught in 2012.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Broken Blades, Angry Fishermen and Rising Costs Slow Offshore Wind

September 12, 2024 — The collapse of a giant wind turbine blade off the Massachusetts coast confirmed Peter Kaizer’s worst fears about the dangers a new clean energy business could pose to fishermen like him.

Jagged pieces of fiberglass and other materials from the shattered blade drifted with the tide, forcing officials to close beaches on Nantucket and leaving Mr. Kaizer worried about the threat the fragments might pose to his vessel and other fishing boats, especially at night when the debris would be harder to avoid.

“All these small boats could be subject to damage,” Mr. Kaizer said. “Everyone wants this green legacy, but at the cost of what?”

The blade, which was more than 300 feet long, failed in July, but the repercussions are still unfolding at the $4 billion project that it came from — Vineyard Wind 1. Developers had hoped to finish the project this summer, making it the first large-scale wind farm completed in U.S. waters, but now that goal will take a lot longer than expected.

The blade failure is the latest problem slowing the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry, which the Biden administration and East Coast states are counting on to deliver emission-free energy to millions of people from Virginia to Maine. President Biden and governors of those states had hoped to follow the examples of European countries like Britain and Denmark, which have plunked down thousands of wind turbines around the North Sea.

But the American offshore wind business has struggled to get going because of cost overruns, delays in issuing permits, and opposition from local residents and fishing groups. Several large projects were canceled or postponed even before the blade failure in Massachusetts because their costs increased sharply and developers did not anticipate supply chain problems and higher interest rates.

Read the full article at The New York Times

American lobster show resilience amid climate change

September 12, 2024 — Experiments conducted at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) have shown that female American lobsters groom their offspring, and the grooming behaviors appear to remain stable despite the temperature and acidity conditions projected for Maine’s coastal waters by the end of the century. A study by researchers at William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences shows that the species may be more resilient to the effects of climate change than previously thought.

The study examines how a changing climate may impact the reproductive success of species that brood or incubate and hatch their eggs. The findings were published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series and suggested that American lobsters can handle future ocean changes well, as their egg care and survival rates stayed stable under different conditions through the study’s tests.

Digging into the study

The study’s researchers partnered with the Maine Department of Marine Resources to obtain 24 lobsters from commercial operations for the study for five months. They secured female lobsters at market size with all legs intact, which are commonly lost in the wild.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman