Climate change Archives - Page 135 of 138

Cod Could Recover in Warming Waters

October 28, 2015 — The first clue came in 2008, recalled George Rose, a marine biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, when he saw the cod aggregating in large numbers offshore during the spawning season. It was a sight he had sorely missed in 15 years. In the early 1990s, cod fisheries suffered such a dramatic collapse that they emerged as an aquatic poster child for fisheries mismanagement, according to Rose.

In a paper published yesterday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Rose and his colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, document the comeback of the Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade. The fact that they have shown that the cod stock there is on the way to recovery is good news, Rose said, as “it shows that it is not all gloom and doom.”

Their study attributed the recovery to improved environmental conditions, better fish management and the availability of an important food source, capelin, whose populations also fell drastically in the early 1990s and have recently bounced back, too. The rebound of Atlantic cod in this region contrasts with their rapidly declining populations off the northeastern coast of the United States, where until last year the stocks remained significantly below sustainable levels. Previous research has associated this persistent population slump with the pressures of overfishing and also warming waters. The warming temperatures, however, seem to be favoring a cod fishery revival in Newfoundland and Labrador, or at least not hampering its recovery.

Read the full story at Scientific American

Invasive species exploit a warming Gulf of Maine, sometimes with destructive results

October 28, 2015 — Until two years ago, if you had walked down to the shore of Maquoit Bay at low tide, you would have seen a meadow of eelgrass stretching nearly as far as the eye could see across the exposed seafloor. Here near the head of the bay, the sea grass stretched for two miles to the opposite shore, creating a vast nursery for the shellfish and forage species of Casco Bay, of which Maquoit is a part.

Now there’s only mud.

Green crabs took over the bay in the late fall of 2012 and the spring and summer of 2013, tearing up the eelgrass in their pursuit of prey and devouring almost every clam and mussel from here to Yarmouth. Fueled by record high water temperatures in 2012 and a mild winter in 2013, the green crab population grew so huge that the mudflats of Casco Bay became cratered with their burrowing, and much of the Maquoit and adjacent Middle Bay bottom turned into a lunar landscape.

Eelgrass coverage in Maquoit Bay fell by 83 percent. With nothing rooted to the bottom, the seawater turned far muddier, making life hard on any plants or baby clams that tried to recolonize the bay.

“We were astounded,” says Hilary Neckles of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, who linked the destruction to the green crabs. “The ecological ramifications really reverberate throughout the ecosystem, because sea grass is the preferred habitat of so many fish and shellfish species.”

Over the past decade, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, allowing warm-water intruders to gain a toehold and earlier invaders such as the green crab to take over. Coupled with declines of the cold-loving species that have dominated the gulf for thousands of years, the ecological effects of even more gradual long-term warming are expected to be serious, even as precise forecasting remains beyond the state of scientific knowledge.

Scientists say the 2012 “ocean heat wave” was an unusual event, and that the 10-year accelerated warming trend is likely part of an oceanographic cycle and unlikely to continue. But the gulf has been consistently warming for more than 30 years, and long-term forecasts project average sea surface temperatures in our region could reach 2012-like levels by mid-century. The events of 2012 and the nearly as warm year that followed likely provide a preview of things to come, of a gulf radically transformed, with major implications for life on the Maine coast.

Genevieve MacDonald, who fishes for lobster out of Stonington, was standing on the dock at Isle au Haut one morning that summer, looked in the water, and couldn’t believe her eyes. There, swimming around the harbor like mackerel, were dozens and dozens of longfin squid, temperate creatures rarely seen in the chill waters of eastern Maine. “If you had a cast net you could have brought in a whole basket full of squid,” she recalls.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Climate Change a Pervasive Reality on Cape Cod

October 27, 2015 — What if climate change isn’t something that is going to happen in the distant future, somewhere far away? What if it’s happening right here, right now? That’s the question the Cape Cod Times is asking – and answering – all week in a special series on the local impacts of climate change, from shrinking beaches and disappearing lobsters to more aggressive storms.

Cape Cod Times reporter Doug Fraser has been covering Cape Cod since 1993, and photographer Steve Heaslip has been on the beat for thirty four years. Both say they’ve witnessed climate change with their own eyes, and relish every opportunity to shine a spotlight on the issue.

But the picture isn’t a pretty one. Consider:

Air temperatures have been rising rapidly. Changes in winter temperatures have been particularly dramatic, increasing an average of 1.3 degrees F per decade between 1970 and 2000. Summer temperatures have risen just half a degree per decade during that same time. Still, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, Massachusetts could see between 3 and 28 days over 100 degrees F by the year 2100; we currently see fewer than two such days.

Read the full story at WCAI

Harmful algal blooms and climate change: Preparing to forecast the future

October 26, 2015 — Marine scientists attending an international workshop warned that the future may bring more harmful algal blooms (HABs) that threaten wildlife and the economy, and called for changes in research priorities to better forecast these long-term trends.

The findings of the international workshop on HABs and climate Change were published Friday in the journal Harmful Algae. The workshop was organized under the auspices of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) and the Global Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (GEOHAB) and endorsed by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). The central findings were that while there are reasons to expect HABs to increase with climate change, poor scientific understanding seriously limits forecasts, and current research strategies will not likely improve this capacity.

Empirical observations suggest cause for grave concern. Northward expansion of phytoplankton species, wider seasonal windows for HAB development, and an increasing prevalence of HABs worldwide all indicate a future with greater problems.

The impacts of algal blooms are extensive. Although phytoplankton blooms normally fuel productive ecosystems, some blooms create very low oxygen concentrations in bottom waters, killing or driving out marine fish or benthic organisms. Others produce potent neurotoxins that threaten ecosystems and human health.

Read the full story at EurekAlert

Gulf of Maine’s cold-craving species forced to retreat to deeper waters

October 27, 2015 — For 178 years, dams stood across the Penobscot River here, obstructing salmon and other river-run fish from reaching the watershed’s vast spawning grounds, which extend all the way to the Quebec border.

Now, two years after the dam’s removal, the salmon’s proponents fear the fish face a more fearsome threat: a warming sea.

In recent years, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, and climate change models project average sea surface temperatures here to increase by another 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2065, a development that could extirpate Atlantic salmon and other cold-loving species, many of which already find Maine at the southern edge of their ranges.

“We’re all for taking down the dams and all the things that are going on to restore habitat, but how much are they looking at the evidence?” asks Gerhard Pohle of the Huntsman Marine Science Center in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, co-author of a study predicting how the changes are likely to affect 33 commercial species over the next 75 years. “Distribution of salmon in the Gulf of Maine would be such that there wouldn’t be many left at all.”

The warming gulf is already presenting challenges to many of its cold-loving denizens. Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Services, or NMFS, have recorded the steady retreat of a range of commercially or ecologically important fish species away from the Maine coast and into deep water in the southwestern part of the gulf, where bottom water temperatures are cooler.

The retreat, which intensified over the past decade, includes cod, pollock, plaice, and winter and yellowtail flounder. Other native species that once ranged south of Long Island – lobster, sand lance and red hake – have stopped doing so, presumably because the water there is now too warm.

“You can imagine that when you have species at the southern end of their ranges, they will be really sensitive to these changes,” says Michael Fogarty, chief of the Ecosystem Assessment Program at the NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “They will either shift distribution or their survival rates might change.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

NOAA Fisheries Accepts Petition to List Thorny Skate under ESA

October 26, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

In response to a petition from Defenders of Wildlife and Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) to list thorny skate (Amblyraja radiata) under the Endangered Species Act, we have prepared a 90-day finding. We accept the petition and are initiating a review of the status of the species.

The petition, which we received in May 2015, requested that we list a “Northwest Atlantic Distinct Population Segment” or a “United States Distinct Population Segment” of thorny skate as threatened or endangered. The petition also requested a designation of critical habitat for thorny skate.

The petitioners claim that the species numbers have been declining since the 1970s, and that the species is threatened by illegal landings, bycatch and discard mortality, inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms (related to fishing), global climate change and hypoxia, and natural stochastic events.

We will now start a review of the status of the species to determine if listing the species or any potential distinct population segments is warranted. We are asking for public input through the Federal Register notice published today.

You may submit information or data on this document by either any of the following methods:

Online: Submit information and data via the Federal eRulemaking Portal. Click the “Comment Now” icon, complete the required fields, and enter or attach your comments.
Mail: Submit information and data to Julie Crocker, NMFS Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, Protected Resources Division, 55 Great Republic Drive, Gloucester, MA 01930, USA.

The deadline for submissions is December 28.

Our determination will be published as a notice in the Federal Register within 12 months.

Questions? Contact Jennifer Goebel, Regional Office, at 978-281-9175 or Jennifer.Goebel@noaa.gov.

Thorny skate. Credit: NOAA/Tobey Curtis

MAINE: Big changes are occurring in one of the fastest-warming spots on Earth

October 25, 2015 — Sandwiched on a narrow sandbar between Yarmouth’s harbor and the open Gulf of Maine, the fishermen of Yarmouth Bar have long struggled to keep the sea at bay.

Nineteenth-century storms threatened to sweep the whole place away, leaving Yarmouth proper’s harbor more open to the elements, prompting the province to build a granite cribwork across the quarter-mile bar, behind which the hamlet’s fishing fleet docks. Global warming has brought rising seas, a two-story-high rock wall to fight them and the hamlet’s designation as one of the communities in the province most threatened by climate change.

Now, snaking around the snout of Nova Scotia and into the Gulf of Maine is a new, unseen threat to Yarmouth Bar and hundreds of coastal communities in Maine, eastern New England and the Maritimes: currents fueling the rapid warming of the sea.

The Gulf of Maine – which extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and includes the Bay of Fundy, the offshore fishing banks, and the entire coast of Maine – has been warming rapidly as the deep-water currents that feed it have shifted. Since 2004 the gulf has warmed faster than anyplace else on the planet, except for an area northeast of Japan, and during the “Northwest Atlantic Ocean heat wave” of 2012 average water temperatures hit the highest level in the 150 years that humans have been recording them.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Canadian government hinders scientists from talking about climate change

October 25, 2015 — Half of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem lies in Canada, where much of the water feeding the gulf and affecting its temperature comes from.

Getting information about scientific research relevant to the future of the ecosystem isn’t easy, however, because of the outgoing Canadian government’s controversial policies that have prevented government scientists from speaking freely with journalists, and sometimes from speaking at all.

While researching this six-part series on climate change in the gulf, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram was repeatedly blocked from speaking to Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientists by communications officers based in Halifax.

Multiple attempts to speak with a researcher based at the St. Andrews Biological Station here about temperature-driven changes in marine species distribution were blocked, even though scientific colleagues both inside and outside the institution said his work was relevant to the questions at hand. “Nobody is willing to talk about this topic at this time,” a DFO spokesman said in a voice-mail message.

Multiple requests to speak to John Loder, director of DFO’s Centre for Ocean Model Development and Application at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography near Halifax, about new sea surface temperature forecasts for the gulf were also denied by department spokespeople, who would only provide written answers to written questions about earlier results from 2013.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

NASA commits $6.5M to Gulf of Maine Research Institute for climate change education

October 21, 2015 — The Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland is receiving a $6.5 million grant from NASA to create a new educational program focused on science knowledge and problem-solving related to climate change.

The grant will allow the nonprofit organization to upgrade the technical infrastructure at its Sam L. Cohen Center for Interactive Learning in Portland to deliver the new educational content to the 10,000 Maine 5th and 6th graders who visit each year, GMRI announced Tuesday. The organization will also making the educational programing web-accessible to visitors in other science centers and classrooms in Maine and nationwide.

Through customization of the new content from GMRI’s educational program, LabVenture!, the programming will allow students to investigate how climate change is affecting their local region and the rest of the world. The five-year grant, which will begin Nov. 1, will be shared with national science education partners.

Work at GMRI will begin immediately, and new programming content is expected to be available for the 2018-2019 school year.

Read the full story at Maine Biz

Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program Telephone Town Hall Oct 22

October 20, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program Telephone Town Hall Meeting on October 22

Interested in applying for a Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant?

To find out how, follow the directions below to join us this Thursday, October 22, at 4 pm (Eastern Standard Time). We are hosting this Webinar/Telephone Town Hall to provide an overview of the application process and to answer questions from anyone interested in applying for funding through this grant opportunity.The solicitation for this grant opportunity is open until November 2.

To join this online meeting, you will need a computer and a phone. Follow these instructions:

1. Go to Webinar page

2. If requested, enter your name and email address

3. Provide the event password: Meeting123

4. Click “Join”

5. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen

Note: This webinar does not have audio so you will need to call in with the info below

Dial In: 866-647-1746

Participant Code: 6042534

Background:

On September 4, NOAA Fisheries announced approximately $10 million available to support fisheries projects through the competition.

The goal of the Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program is to fund projects that address the needs of fishing communities, optimize economic benefits by building and maintaining sustainable fisheries, and increase other opportunities to keep working waterfronts viable. The 2016 solicitation seeks applications that fall into seven priority areas:

Aquaculture
Fishery data collection
Techniques for reducing bycatch and other adverse impacts
Adapting to climate change and other long term ecosystem change
Promotion, development, and marketing
Socio-economic research
Science coming from within the U.S. territories

If you have a project in mind, join us on Thursday so we can help you navigate the application process.

Credit: NOAA