Saving Seafood

California faces another bleak salmon-fishing season, a holdover from the drought

March 6, 2017 — California salmon anglers are looking at another bleak fishing season, despite the remarkably wet winter – a lingering impact from the state’s five-year drought.

This week, state and federal fisheries regulators released their estimates for the numbers of adult fall-run Chinook salmon swimming off California’s coast. The news was even more grim than the drought-weakened numbers of fish last year.

An estimated 54,200 adult fall-run Chinook salmon reared in the Klamath River are swimming off the Pacific Coast – among the lowest number on record and down from 142,000 in 2016. Of the adult fish reared in the Sacramento River and its tributaries, biologists estimate there are 230,700 in the Pacific Ocean – 70,000 fewer than last year.

The reason for the declines? The adult fish set to return to Central Valley rivers to spawn were hatched two to four years ago, during the peak of California’s record-breaking drought when river and ocean conditions were abysmal.

Salmon from the Sacramento and Klamath river systems account for the vast majority of salmon caught by anglers in California’s rivers and along the coast. They’re considered critical to the state’s commercial and recreational salmon industries, which account for an estimated $1.4 billion in annual economic activity.

Researchers: Where are all the right whales?

February 24, 2017 — MELBOURNE, Fla. — Maybe the right whales are all just in the wrong place at the wrong time this year.

Where spotters typically see 20 newborn North Atlantic right whales, this winter only three have been born, the lowest number of newborns since only one was born in 2000.

Three dozen or more adult and baby right whales usually pass through Florida and Georgia waters during the winter calving season, which runs mid-November to mid-April. This year, only seven whales have been documented.

“Not only is it the fewest number of calves, but it’s also the fewest number of individuals seen,” said Phil Hamilton, a research scientist at New England Aquarium, which monitors right whales.

Scientists suspect a warmer North Atlantic, driven in part by climate change, might be disrupting the density of animal plankton that the whales need to feed, increasing the time it takes for females to bulk up for pregnancy and forcing the whales to scatter in search of food.

“A lot of people are doing a lot of head scratching,” Julie Albert, who monitors right whales for the nonprofit Marine Resources Council, said of this winter’s whale migration.

Read the full story from Florida Today at NorthJersey.com

As seas rise, city mulls a massive sea barrier across Boston Harbor

February 21, 2017 — It would be a massive, highly controversial wall sure to cost billions of dollars. But this barrier would be much closer to home — and potentially more expensive — than the one President Trump has proposed along the Mexican border.

As rising sea levels pose a growing threat to Boston’s future, city officials are exploring the feasibility of building a vast sea barrier from Hull to Deer Island, forming a protective arc around Boston Harbor.

The idea, raised in a recent city report on the local risks of climate change, sounds like a pipe dream, a project that could rival the Big Dig in complexity and cost. It’s just one of several options, but the sea wall proposal is now under serious study by a team of some of the region’s top scientists and engineers, who recently received a major grant to pursue their research.

With forecasts indicating that Boston could experience routine flooding in the coming decades, threatening some 90,000 residents and $80 billion worth of real estate, city officials say it would be foolish not to consider aggressive action, no matter how daunting.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Maine’s coastal waters are unhealthy from carbon, acidity. Are seaweed gardens the answer?

February 6, 2017 — Seaweed cultivation has been promoted in recent years in Maine as a way to produce local nutritious food and to boost the coastal economy.

Now, seaweed harvesters say their industry provides yet another benefit: environmental protection, in the form of improving water quality.

A new study from Bigelow Laboratory for Marine Sciences in Boothbay indicates growing and harvesting seaweed may be an antidote for increasing carbon and acidity levels in the ocean, which is harming a variety of marine life.

Since January 2016, the lab has been studying the effect of kelp growth on surrounding carbon levels at the Ocean Approved seaweed farm off Great Chebeague Island in Casco Bay.

The early results indicate that sugar kelp absorbs carbon from the surrounding water as it grows. This is prompting the lab to expand its research on kelp and to conduct a separate study on the carbon-absorption abilities of wild-grown rockweed.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Trump’s administration causes concerns at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium

January 27, 2017 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Dozens of scientists are meeting this week in Anchorage to talk climate change, fisheries, marine mammals and more, during the annual Alaska Marine Science Symposium; however, this year the climate is a little bit different.

“There’s a palpable fear that scientists are concerned about the way that this administration views science in general,” said Sean McDonald, who is attending the conference from the University of Washington. “We think of science as important.”

During President Donald Trump’s first week in office, he has signed an executive order to shrink the federal workforce – a move that prospective scientists say could hamper their careers.

“Last week, I was actually looking at several federal jobs,” said Shea Steingass, a student at Oregon State University. “I’m planning to complete my Ph.D., in December. And with the hiring freeze, that completely shut that aspect down of my ability to apply for those.”

Read the full story at KTUU

Warming Signs: Climate Change Means A Sea Change for Fishermen and Scientists

January 23, 2017 — Lobsters used to lurk in the waters of Long Island. But these days, New York fisherman have trouble finding any—while their peers 500 miles away in Maine are seeing bumper crops. Instead, the lobstermen of Long Island now catch more crabs and other shellfish—which, in turn, leaves crabbers further down the East Coast worried about the future of their own livelihoods.

Last week I wrote about how climate change is prompting a fish migration that will directly affect what’s served—or not served—for dinner. But these rapid marine changes won’t just affect our appetites; they also represent a sea change for the fisherman and communities that depend on the sea for jobs and income.

Fishing Regulations Struggle to Catch Up

Of course, catching new fish in your usual fishing haunt is trickier than just changing your bait. Regulations guide what you may catch and how much of it, usually state by state—and they aren’t changing as fast as the environment is. John A. Manderson, a research biologist at the NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), noted that sea creatures are moving north 10 times faster than their land-based animals.

“Our ideas of property rights and laws are purely land-based,” Manderson told The New York Times. “But the ocean is all about flux and turbulence and movement.”

To get around these increasingly obsolete laws, some fishermen are catching fish further north and then traveling to areas where it is legal to bring large quantities to shore. Such slippery adherence to regulations sparked mackerel wars in the North Sea back in 2010, and the dispute wasn’t settled for four years.

Furthermore, such an expensive round-about the law is not an option for everyone, especially those with smaller fishing operations.

Read the full story at Paste Magazine

New England’s 1816 ‘Mackerel Year’ and climate change today

January 19, 2017 — Hundreds of articles have been written about the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, at Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora just over 200 years ago. But for a small group of New England-based researchers, one more Tambora story needed to be told, one related to its catastrophic effects in the Gulf of Maine that may carry lessons for intertwined human-natural systems facing climate change around the world today.

In the latest issue of Science Advances, first author and research fellow Karen Alexander at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 11 others including aquatic ecologists, climate scientists and environmental historians recount their many-layered, multidisciplinary investigation into the effects of Tambora on coastal fish and commercial fisheries.

Alexander says, “We approached our study as a forensic examination. We knew that Tambora’s extreme cold had afflicted New England, Europe, China and other places for as long as 17 months. But no one we knew of had investigated coastal ecosystems and fisheries. So, we looked for evidence close to home.”

In work that integrates the social and natural sciences, they used historical fish export data, weather readings,  and town growth chronologies and other sources to discover Tambora’s effects on the Gulf of Maine’s complex human and natural system.

The 1815 eruption caused a long-lasting, extreme climate event in 1816 known as the “year without a summer.” As volcanic winter settled on much of the Northern Hemisphere, crops failed, livestock died and famine swept over many lands. In New England, crop yields may have fallen by 90 percent. The researchers found that 1816 was also called “the mackerel year,” a clue to what they would find regarding fisheries.

Besides Tambora’s climate effects, the authors examined other system-wide influences to explain observed trends. These included historical events such as the War of 1812, human population growth, fish habitat obstruction due to dam building and changes in fishing gear that might have affected fisheries at the time. Employing historical methods in a Complex Adaptive Systems approach allowed them to group and order data at different scales of organization and to identify statistically significant processes that corresponded to known outcomes, Alexander says.

Read the full story at Phys.org

 

Sen. Whitehouse Mentions RI Fishermen During Pruitt Hearings

January 19, 2017 — WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse quizzed President-elect Trump’s nominee for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency about his support for Rhode Island fishermen.

During Senate hearins today, Whitehouse asked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt if “he would support the fishing and aquaculture industries in the face of climate change, and whether he would protect Rhode Islanders from out-of-state polluters.”

“As we discussed when you and I met, the oceans off our Ocean State are warming due to fossil fuel-driven climate change,” said Whitehouse. “It is crashing our fisheries, like lobster and winter flounder, and making earning a living harder for our fishermen. I see nothing in your career to give those fishermen any confidence that you will care one bit for their well-being, and not just the well-being of the fossil fuel industry.”

Read the full story at Patch Narragansett

RICHARD NELSON: Maine lobstermen know the threat posed by climate change. Now is the time to act.

December 13th, 2016 — I rose the other morning and began my preparations to head out on the water from Friendship Harbor to take up the my last load of lobster traps. My thoughts turned from from closing out my season to chuckling over my selection of boots for the day. My dear wife had made a special trip to the attic a month and a half ago to bring down my insulated winter boots, and I became aware of the fact that, with temperatures again climbing to the mid-40s, they would remain unworn this year.

Many of the thoughts and decisions fishermen make are based on conditions in the environment in which we work. This is certainly not something new. Maine’s lobster industry, which is dependent on a healthy ocean and an abundant resource of lobsters, has a long established heritage of conservation. Our good management decisions of the past include throwing back both the large breed stock lobsters and small lobsters, putting escape vents in traps and returning egg bearing female lobsters into the water, marking them to ensure they are protected through future molts. We saw the need to set trap limits and become a limited access fishery, all the while remaining a small-boat, owner-operated fleet.

Although these choices have helped create a fishery that is flourishing while others are not, we face environmental challenges that are beyond local control and more complex than our marine management system can address.

Read the full op-ed at the Bangor Daily News 

Ocean advocates hope Trump takes climate change seriously

December 9, 2016 — LONG BRANCH, N.J. — For Tom Fote, of Toms River, the decline of the lobster industry in New Jersey is proof that ocean warming is having big environmental and economic effects.

“I manage lobsters, and we saw what happened in the last 20 years. We had a huge population of lobster that grew in the Mid-Atlantic. Now it’s starting to collapse,” said Fote, who is one of three New Jersey commissioners on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

He told panelists at the 12th Annual Future of the Ocean Symposium, focused on priorities for the Trump administration and Congress at Monmouth University on Wednesday, that the water off New Jersey has become too warm for lobsters.

Fishermen need help dealing with the effects of climate change on their industry, he said.

Panelists at the symposium included former New Jersey Governor and federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Donald E. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge, Md.

“If I were to say one thing to the incoming administration and to the president-elect, it’s, ‘Listen to your daughter.’ Ivanka believes in climate change,” said Whitman of Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser. “It has real everyday implications to our lives, and to national safety. It is a national security issue.”

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City