Saving Seafood

Can dogfish save Cape Cod fisheries?

August 21, 2018 –Low clouds hang over the pier as fishing boats line up to drop off their catch for the day. Fishermen in orange suspendered waders and rugged boots perch on the edges of their boats. The fishermen, with weathered faces and hands toughened by their work, ignore the tourists gawking and snapping photos from a viewing platform overhead.

Then, the fog descends, giving the scene a sense of timelessness. But this scene has changed from decades past. For 400 years, fishermen across Cape Cod caught boatloads of, well, cod. The fish was so plentiful and valuable that fishermen bought houses and new boats off cod profits alone. But today, there’s a different fish filling the piers: spiny dogfish.

Cape Cod has nearly lost its namesake fish, due to overfishing and climate change. So fishermen have switched to dogfish, skates, and other more plentiful options. This move could help revive the Massachusetts fishing industry, and might even help the cod rebound, researchers say. But getting Americans to bite may not be as easy.

“This is the fish we could feed the United States with,” says Chatham fisherman Doug Feeney. “We have people that are hungry. We have prison systems. We have vets. We have homeless people. There’s just so much that can be done with this product.”

For a long time, fishermen saw dogfish as an annoyance. They were a “trash fish” with little value that often ended up clogging their nets. The large spines on their fins especially made them a pain to throw back, and they eat pretty much everything smaller than them – including juvenile codfish.

Read the full story at The Christian-Science Monitor

Climate Change Is Cooking The Oceans

August 16, 2018 — Heat waves aren’t just for land lubbers. Climate change has turned the oceans into cauldrons of scalding water, upending marine ecosystems around the world.

A new paper in Nature shows how marine heat waves have become more common and intense in recent decades, largely due to climate change. What’s worse, it shows that even if the world manages to limit warming to two degrees Celsius, the trend will continue and humans will ultimately be the main driving force for virtually every marine heat wave. If we let the world warm past that mark, the results could be catastrophic for the high seas.

The results point to the need to get marine life ready for a world of extreme heat and also take a greater focus on protecting the ocean wilderness we have left.

The role of human-caused climate change in intensifying land-based heat waves is now well-established. But less research has focused on the ocean, where extreme heat events in recent years have wiped out portions of the Great Barrier Reef, caused bull sharks to migrate further north, and left scientists scrambling to find ways to save coral. Individual events like the 2016 heat wave in the Great Barrier Reef have been tied to climate change (it made the heat wave 175 times more likely), but there hasn’t been a big picture look at the topic featuring projections into the future.

That’s what led a team of Swiss researchers used a mix of models and satellite measurements to get a handle on how marine heat waves have already changed and what the future holds for the globe. The satellite record, which runs from 1982-2016, helped ground truth the models they used to create a pre-industrial baseline—what the oceans looked like without all the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. They then used the models to understand how climate change is affecting the extent, duration, and intensity of marine heat waves as well as project future changes.

The findings show the number of marine heat wave days doubled between 1982 and 2016, while heat waves also increased in extent and intensity. Moreover, they show that 87 percent of marine heat waves can be attributed to climate change, meaning they would not have occurred without it.

Read the full story at Gizmodo

Why sharks are thriving near the North Carolina coast

August 15, 2018 — Climate change is negatively impacting our relationship with our state’s coast. Our famous beaches are taking a heavy hit from rising sea levels. Meanwhile, loss of property, loss of natural coastal habitats, and changes to our fisheries threaten our economic well being.

Sea levels are rising especially fast in the southeast, bringing potentially devastating losses to property values and real estate. Hurricane damage and chronic flooding due to rising seas a huge concerns. By 2045, more than 15,000 homes are at risk of being flooded on more than 26 days every year.

In addition to the property losses, so much sand is being eroded from beaches at Nag’s Head that the state spent $36 million to pump new sand from the sea floor onto beaches in 2014 and will spend $48 million in 2018. This brings total state spending on beach nourishment since 1990 to $640 million. The rising costs of beach nourishment impacts our state’s coastal tourism economy, which brought in an estimated $3 billion in 2013 according to N.C. Department of Commerce. With sea level predicted to rise at least 1 foot and by as many as 8 feet by 2100, there is much at risk.

Sea-level rise is not our only problem. Pamlico Sound had changed from an occasional feeding ground to a shark nursery as a direct result of climate change. Pamlico Sound already had many of the features of a good bull shark nursery: ocean access, proper salinity, and plenty of prey fish. The only missing piece was warmer water temperature. While adult bull sharks have been occasionally encountered in the sound for a long time, the sudden appearance and consistent presence of juveniles after 2011 signaled a change that has been correlated with rising water temperatures, particularly during late spring and early summer when bull sharks give birth.

Read the full story at The News & Observer

Warming waters and migrating fish stocks could cause political conflict

August 8, 2018 — Climate change is driving fish species to migrate to new areas, and in the process they’re crossing political boundaries – potentially setting up future conflicts as some countries lose access to fish and others gain it, according to a recent study published in the journal Science.

Already, fish and other marine animals have shifted toward the poles at an average rate of 70 kilometers per decade. That rate is projected to continue or even accelerate as the planet warms.

When fish cross into new territory, it might prompt competitive harvesting between countries scrambling to exploit disappearing resources.

“Conflict leads to overfishing, which reduces food, profit, and jobs that fisheries can provide, and can also fracture international relations in other, non-fishery sectors,” Malin Pinsky, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of biology at Rutgers University, told SeafoodSource.

The study looked at the distribution of nearly 900 commercially important marine fish and invertebrates, examining how their movements intersect with 261 of the world’s Exclusive Economic Zones. By 2100, more than 70 countries will see new fish stocks in their waters if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rates.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions could reduce the scale and number of these migrations by half or more, Pinsky said.

Conflict over shifting fish stocks is not unheard of. In the 2000s, migrating mackerel in the northeast Atlantic caused such a rift between Iceland and other nations that it played a role in derailing attempts to join the European Union. In the eastern Pacific, a bout of warm ocean temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s shifted salmon spawning patterns, prompting a scuffle between U.S. and Canada.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

CALIFORNIA: Threat of El Niño has Pacific squid fleet on edge

August 7, 2018 –All eyes and ears were on water temperatures and foreign trade tariffs as seiners hit their strides in the West Coast squid season. Cooler ocean temperatures last fall fostered hopes that the environmental pendulum had begun swinging in favor of squid production. But as the summer of 2018 ensued, the threat that El Niño conditions may be returning set fishermen and processors on edge.

“We’re watching the inklings of an El Niño,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, in Buellton. “It’s an interesting season. It started well, and it’s still going… better than when we were in the throes of El Nino.”

In late June, Oregon had posted healthy landings, and Pleschner-Steele said harvest numbers had begun picking up in California. The commercial squid season runs from April 1 to March 31 of the following year, and seiners fish on a quota of 118,000 short tons. Pleschner-Steele says the fleet hasn’t caught the quota in recent years, given oceanic conditions and other factors, and that the set quota is an optimal harvest number.

As of June 28, the seiners had landed 9,931 tons of squid.

On July 3, Pleschner-Steele said it was unlikely the fleet would catch the quota this year. The pending shortage in the harvest might be a good thing, in terms of curbing volumes headed to troubled markets in China.

The recent trade fracas between China and the United States predicated a stiff tariff on U.S. squid products shipped to China, one of the West Coast industry’s primary markets.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Warming seas are robbing some fish of their vital sense of smell

August 6, 2018 — There have been numerous wake-up calls about the effects of climate change on marine life. As ocean waters heat up, they are bleaching corals. Growing levels of carbon dioxide are acidifying seawater, which is degrading the shells and skeletons of sea organisms. The rising temperatures are prompting fish to migrate to colder waters, even causing them to shrink.

Now climate change is starting to affect their sense of smell, a phenomenon that will worsen in the coming years if global warming continues unabated, according to new research. A sense of smell is indispensable to fish. They use it to find food, detect imminent danger and elude predators, to find safe environments and spawning areas, even to recognize one another.

To lose it could threaten their very survival. If this happens, it also would mean big trouble for the fishing industry, tourism and, most importantly, global nutrition, since many of the world’s people — including its poorest — depend on fish for food.

“Future levels of carbon dioxide can have large negative effects on the sense of smell of fish, which can affect fish population numbers and entire ecosystems,” said Cosima Porteus, a researcher at the University of Exeter and author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“This can be prevented, but we must reduce carbon emissions now before it’s too late,” Porteus says.

Carbon dioxide combines with seawater to produce carbonic acid, which makes the water more acidic. Since the Industrial Revolution, oceanic CO2 has risen by 43 percent and is projected to be two and a half times current levels by the end of this century, according to the scientists.

Read the full story at Popular Science

Gloucester Times: So, be nice to your oceans

August 1, 2018 — This is why we can’t have nice things. Because we’re human and we tend, over time, to spoil most of the wondrous things we touch. You need only look at big league baseball, which, despite the historic season unfolding for the local nine, has become a soulless slog through the barren desert of analytics, home runs, strikeouts and pitching changes.

And then there are the oceans. We’ve really left our smudgy fingerprints all over them.

According to a new study that offers the most exhaustive mapping of the Earth’s ocean wilds, there is virtually no corner of the planet’s oceans that has not suffered human disruptions or the ill effects of human-created climate change.

“Nowhere is safe,” James Watson, an author on the study published in the journal, Current Biology, told The Washington Post via a video abstract of the study.

Perhaps more alarming, the study calculates that only 13 percent of the planet’s oceans could still be classified as “wilderness” because of the unceasing onslaught of humans trekking around the planet.

Read the full editorial at the Gloucester Times

 

ALASKA: The Big Thaw: Fishermen in Kodiak cope with record low cod numbers

July 25, 2018 — A hint of optimism creeps into Darius Kasprzak’s voice as he pilots his boat, the Marona, out of the harbor in Kodiak on a calm day in early May.

“We’re in the morning, we’re at the start of the flood tide,” Kasprzak said. “This is where you want to be.”

On the screen of Kasprzak’s echo sounder he sees a dense cluster of dots on the ocean bottom.

“Let’s drop on it,” Kasprzak said. “That looks pretty darn good.”

Kasprzak kills the engine, leaps onto the deck and lowers one of his fishing lines into the water.

And then… nothing.

For years, Alaska fishermen like Kasprzak have worried that climate change would threaten their livelihoods. Now, it has. The cod population in the Gulf of Alaska is at its lowest level on record. The culprit is a warm water mass called “the blob“ that churned in the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2017.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Front line of climate change: Black sea bass surge off R.I.

July 16, 2018 — Scientists tell us that some fish will be winners and others losers as oceans warm.

In Rhode Island, count lobster, silver hake and winter flounder among the losers, their numbers plummeting as climate change drives water temperatures higher. On the list of winners so far are squid, summer flounder, butterfish.

And black sea bass. The population of the dusky-colored fish with striking blue accents has historically been strongest off the mid-Atlantic Coast, but over the past decade or so its numbers have spiked off New England and it is becoming a more important catch for the region’s fishermen.

In a telling sign of black sea bass’s surge in Rhode Island, the state Department of Environmental Management last month loosened regulations governing the recreational fishery for the species, extending the season by 31 days and increasing the fall possession limit to seven fish per person per day, from five.

Read the full story at The Providence Journal

Shifting fish giving New Jersey an early global warming challenge

July 13, 2018 — The slow warming of the Earth someday will require difficult adaptations in many sectors of society, for example farming, energy and insurance.

One challenge already is here — fish. They are voting with their fins, moving northward out of warming ocean waters and into cooler temperatures they prefer. And that is disrupting fisheries management and quotas, which only recently had achieved stability and acceptance.

Earlier this year, a study led by a Rutgers University marine biologist predicted two-thirds of the 700 ocean species it analyzed would be forced to migrate — some more than 600 miles — in the worst warming scenarios.

A 2016 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study found half of the Northeast’s fish and shellfish were highly vulnerable to climate change. It warned that fisheries dependent on a single valuable species, such as New Jersey is on scallops, are at particular risk.

And global warming might shrink fish as well. A pair of University of British Columbia scientists last year reported the size of fish is likely to decrease by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature, as their metabolisms speed up and the oxygen content of the water diminishes.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City