Saving Seafood

Acidic Ocean Leads to Warped Skeletons for Young Coral

February 19, 2016 — Rising emissions of carbon dioxide create twin threats for coral in oceans around the world: warmer temperatures, which can cause mass bleachings, and ocean acidification, which can hinder the animals’ ability to build reefs.

But a new study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances suggests that ocean acidification may be the bigger worry in some waters.

Studying a chain of remote Australian islands in the Indian Ocean, researchers found that more acidic waters (those that have absorbed more atmospheric carbon dioxide) cause serious skeletal deformities in juvenile coral in subtropical waters.

Using 3-D imaging techniques, they saw that young coral from the Houtman Abrolhos islands developed skeletons that were missing sections or had very porous and fragile surfaces.

Other studies have shown similar effects of ocean acidification, but the researchers also discovered something that had not been seen in earlier studies of tropical coral development — higher temperatures didn’t have a negative effect on coral skeleton formation.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Climate cycle could determine the reproductive success of menhaden

February 19, 2016 — Scientists have long puzzled over what drives the reproductive success of Atlantic menhaden, a tiny but critical East Coast fish.

A new study, published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science and supported by the Lenfest Ocean Program, provides a partial answer: An oceanic climate cycle known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO.

The finding is likely to be useful in improving the way scientists assess the species and the way managers set catch limits.

Menhaden is a small, oily fish that provides food for striped bass, bluefish, and several other species, as well as bait for fishermen.

It also is the target of the largest fishery on the East Coast, which is centred in Virginia and catches menhaden for use in nutritional supplements, animal feed, and fertilizer.

Setting catch limits has proved challenging, in part because no one has been able to say what drives recruitment—a technical term for how many young fish are produced. Recruitment largely determines how much fishing a population can sustain.

Tom Miller of the University of Maryland, and one of the authors of the study, explained that it is very difficult to understand and manage this stock.

To address this, the researchers used a statistical model designed for disorderly data like those on the abundance of young menhaden. They considered 16 factors that might be driving that abundance, including climatic cycles, intensity of fishing, temperature, salinity, and predator abundance.

Read the full story at FIS

ALASKA: Scientists draft fish management plan as Bering Sea changes

February 17, 2016 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council heard a draft plan for addressing climate change in the eastern Bering Sea earlier this month.

The plan was put together by scientists at the Seattle-based Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which is part of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Mike Sigler, program leader for the habitat and ecological processes research program at the science center, said the plan pulls together work scientists there are already doing, and research they’d like to undertake.

“We have a clear understanding of species like walleye Pollock, northern rock sole, red king crab, what will happen to them, and we can make quantitative forecasts of where they’re going. They’re not completely certain, but we have some good ideas of ecological processes,” Sigler said. “But then, we don’t have such good understanding for other species, like yellowfin sole, and we’re making a qualitative assessment of their vulnerability to climate.”

Eventually, the group wants to provide fisheries managers, like the North Pacific council, with a better look at what might be coming in 10 years – or even farther down the road. One of the first parts of the plan is just putting together that qualitative assessment for more than a dozen species, which he expects to happen this year.

Read the full story at KDLG

Warmer waters could change Cape Cod fisheries

February 15, 2016 — Hot water is fine for fish chowder and lobster bisque, but not so much for many fish in the sea.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has unveiled a study of 82 species of fish, mollusks and crustaceans, ranking each on how they might fare under a regime of warming waters in the Northeast.

The authors, and there are quite a few, selected important commercial species, various forage fish of little economic import such as sand lances that are ecological heavyweights, and endangered species.

The amount of available data varies widely species by species, but the authors made their best assessments based on the estimated vulnerability of each animal to shifting climate. They weighed environmental factors that would be altered by climate change (water and air temperature, salinity, acidity, precipitation, the variance of those factors, sea level and ocean currents) vs. the species’ resilience (prey and habitat specificity, sensitivity to temperature, acidity, stock size, population growth rate, spawning cycle and mobility).

The ocean has been heating up, if not steadily.

“It depends on what period you’re looking over,” reflected lead author John Hare, director of NOAA’s Narragansett Laboratory. “I tend to look over a long period, since the 1880s, it’s up about two degrees Fahrenheit. We took all the information we know now and try to look forward to 2050.”

Read the full story at The Cape Codder

 

Narragansett Bay temperature extremes signal trouble below

February 6, 2016 — Aboard the Cap’n Bert — A harbor seal pokes its mottled head out of the water, soulful eyes visible above a bristly mustache, before diving back down to snatch fish from the net being winched aboard the trawler.

“Gettin’ a free meal,” Captain Tom Puckett remarks with a shake of his head.

As the otter trawl net is hoisted up on the A-frame across the boat’s stern, it’s clear that it’s nowhere close to full. But it doesn’t matter. The Cap’n Bert is not a commercial fishing trawler. It’s a research vessel owned and operated by the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

The 53-foot stern trawler is out on Narragansett Bay on this winter day carrying out its weekly ritual of testing the water temperature and other indicators and taking samples of marine life.

Doctoral student Joe Langan pulls open the net, spilling fish and shellfish unceremoniously onto the deck. He sorts the catch, just as he has done every week since September and as others have done before him, stretching back more than five decades as part of one of the oldest continuous marine research projects in the world.

From the wet and writhing pile, he picks out sea robin and skate, silver hake and red hake, rock crabs, spider crabs and lobsters — all species that are normally found in the Bay this time of year.

But when Langan gets to the bottom, he carefully picks up a flat, light-brown fish and pauses to study it.

“A Gulf Stream flounder,” he finally says. “Which should not be here.”

The little flounder is a warm-water species that shows up in May but would usually be gone by the time the temperature drops in December.

It is of course only one fish, but its presence here in the waters off Whale Rock on this January morning is yet another sign that Narragansett Bay is changing.

“And we’re seeing it happen,” Langan says.

Read the full story at Providence Journal

Cleaner fuels for fishing boats could backfire on the climate

February 5, 2016 — Fish is better than pork and beef—not just for your body, but for the planet. That’s long been the thinking, anyway. But a new study has uncovered a hidden climate impact of the fishing industry—one that, ironically, will get worse as boats switch to cleaner fuels. In some cases, the effect could make fishing for tuna as hard on the climate as raising pork, and trawling for shrimp about half as bad as raising beef.

Hogs and cattle get a bad rap because they—and their manure—emit a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. But the fishing industry also contributes to climate change: mostly from the carbon dioxide (CO2) from burned diesel fuel that persists in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The boats produce other short-lived pollutants, such as sulfur oxides and black carbon, which have cooling and warming effects, respectively. But they have typically been neglected as unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

The new study may change that. Elliott Campbell and Brandi McKuin, environmental engineers at the University of California (UC), Merced, estimated fishing industry emissions by combining fisheries catch records with the amount of fuel typically needed to catch various species. Given the total burned fuel, they estimated the amounts of the pollutants, using information about engine types and fuel types. Black carbon, a form of soot that arises from incomplete combustion, has been underestimated by an order of magnitude in previous studies, the team reports in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Read the full story from Science Magazine

WHSTEP Meeting Topic Is Human Influence On Fisheries

February 5, 2016 — “Human Influence on Fisheries in New England: Then and Now” is the topic of the winter meeting of the Woods Hole Science and Technology Education Partnership (WHSTEP) on Wednesday, February 10, at 4 PM.

The meeting will be held at the Woods Hole Science Aquarium conference room and is free and open to the public.

Michael Fogarty of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center will present “At the Epicenter: Climate Change in the Western North Atlantic.” Robert Rocha of the New Bedford Whaling Museum will talk about “Whales: Yesterday, Today, and in the Classroom.”

Read the full story at The Enterprise

 

Maine lobster industry wary as warm waters suggest repeat of disastrous 2012 season

February 4, 2016 — For those in the lobster industry, any sign of a return to the conditions of 2012 is cause for high anxiety.

Researchers say the industry needs to be prepared for that possibility because warming trends are laying the groundwork for a potential repeat of the disastrous season of four years ago.

“We learned a hard lesson in 2012,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

Because of warm waters in the Gulf of Maine, peak harvesting started in May that year, weeks ahead of schedule. The catch jumped more than 20 percent, from 104 million pounds in 2011 to 127 million pounds in 2012. The shedding season, when lobsters lose their hard shells and grow new ones, typically happens in June and results in soft-shelled lobsters that are difficult to transport. In 2012, shedding began almost as soon as the lobstermen started pulling in traps, and extended into the fall.

As a result, prices paid to lobstermen fell to as low as $2 a pound.

Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, said Thursday that the stage is set for a possible repeat of 2012, at least weather-wise.

Pershing said five buoys that measure water temperatures around the gulf are all running above average, and three are at record highs.

“The average surface temperature across the entire Gulf of Maine is now slightly warmer than during the 2012 ocean heat wave,” Pershing said.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Climate change poses threat to fish stocks, study finds

February 3, 2016 — Over the coming decades, dozens of marine species from the Carolinas to New England will be threatened by the warming, changing currents and the increased acidity expected to alter the region’s waters, according to a new study by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Atlantic salmon, winter flounder, bay scallops, ocean quahogs, and other species may face the kind of trouble from climate change that has been linked in previous research to the decline of Atlantic cod, which has lost an estimated 90 percent of its population over the past three decades, the study found.

The authors of the study, released Wednesday by the journal Plos One, found that half of the 82 species they evaluated along the northeastern coast are “highly” or “very highly” vulnerable to the effects of climate change, meaning their populations and ability to reproduce are likely to decline.

“The results show that climate change presents significant challenges to the region’s fishery management and to its ability to sustain fishing communities,” said Jonathan Hare, a NOAA oceanographer who was the lead author of study.

The study also found that 80 percent of the species studied are likely to move beyond their normal habitats.

Read the full story from the Boston Globe

 

Maine to pay for research in effort to keep lobster fishery healthy

February 4, 2016 — Maine’s lobsters are about to get new scrutiny.

The Department of Marine Resources has put out a call for proposals to gauge the impact of warming Gulf of Maine waters on lobster biology, populations and susceptibility to disease. A separate study will attempt to measure the economic impact of Maine’s most valuable fishery beyond what lobstermen are paid for their catch.

The department has earmarked up to $700,000 to pay for the studies, with the money coming out of the Lobster Research, Education and Development Fund. The money in that fund comes from sales of the lobster license plate.

Research proposals are due Thursday. The department’s request for proposals suggests the contracts will be awarded by early March, but department spokesman Jeff Nichols said the timing depends on how many proposals are received and how quickly a panel is formed to review them.

The department said it needs the research to determine how to help maintain the industry’s remarkable health over the past 20 or 30 years. Lobster landed in Maine was valued at a record $465.9 million in 2014, up more than fourfold in the past two decades. The catch by 5,818 commercial license holders made up 78 percent of the value of commercial fishery landings in the state.

Carl Wilson, director of the department’s Bureau of Marine Science, said “there are sufficient questions” about what’s happening with climate change and its impact on the Gulf of Maine to warrant more study.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald