Saving Seafood

Impacts of ocean heat wave found off SF Bay Area coast

July 12, 2024 — The ocean is no place to escape a heat wave. According to a recent condition report from the Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuaries, the effects of a 2014 to 2016 marine heat wave had a cascading effect with impacts that echoed from deep sea krill to shoreline restaurants.

The domino effect began with the tiny shrimp-like critters that feed the biggest animals on earth, blue whales. Looking at data collected between 2010 and 2022, scientists with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration found that the heat wave caused a notable decline in nutritious krill, and a proportional increase in less nutritious, gelatinous zooplankton in the sanctuaries off the Northern California coast.

Read the full article at Chesapeake Bay Magazine 

Indian Ocean heading toward near-permanent marine heat wave, report warns

July 12, 2024 — By 2050, marine heat waves are likely to last between 220 and 250 days per year in the Indian Ocean, a new study has warned.

The study, titled “Future Projections for the Tropical Indian Ocean” and released in April of this year, emphasized the impacts of a near-permanent marine heat wave that are placing highly populated areas in such countries as India directly in danger.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Scientists plan climate engineering experiment in ocean off Cape Cod

July 11, 2024 — Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are seeking a federal permit to experiment in the waters off Cape Cod and see if tweaking the ocean’s chemistry could help slow climate change.

If the project moves forward, it will likely be the first ocean field test of this technology in the U.S. But the plan faces resistance from both environmentalists and the commercial fishing industry.

The scientists want to disperse 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide — a strong base — into the ocean about 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. The process, called ocean alkalinity enhancement or OAE, should temporarily increase that patch of water’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. This first phase of the project, targeted for early fall, will test chemical changes to the seawater, diffusion of the chemical and effects on the ecosystem.

If successful, the team plans to conduct a larger trial next year in the Gulf of Maine.

Dan McCorkle, co-principal investigator of the project and a recently retired Woods Hole researcher, said the team chose a part of ocean that would minimize impact on marine life, and that they will stop the release of sodium hydroxide if marine mammals are present. The chemical will likely be detectable in an area a couple miles in diameter and should dissipate within five days.

Read the full article at wbur

Study projects major changes in North Atlantic and Arctic marine ecosystems due to climate change

July 10, 2024 — New research predicts significant shifts in marine fish communities in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans as a result of climate warming.

The Nord University-led study projects a change in key  biomass and suggests that Arctic demersal fish will be at risk of local extinction by the end of the century if no  refugia is available at eastern latitudes.

The international team of experts, involving Newcastle University experts, analyzed data from 16,345 fishery-independent trawls conducted between 2004 and 2022, focusing on 107 marine fish  in the northeast Atlantic, including the Barents Sea. They used advanced modeling techniques to project changes in species distribution and biomass under three future climate scenarios for the years 2050 and 2100.

Read the full article at phys.org

Massachusetts Cold-stunned Sea Turtles: A Sign of Climate Change?

June 19, 2024 — Four species of sea turtles—Kemp’s ridley, loggerhead, green, and leatherback—are seasonal residents of New England. They arrive in May and June, feeding in our coastal waters through the summer and early fall. When temperatures drop in mid-fall, these reptiles need to migrate south into warmer waters for the winter. However, sometimes their migration is affected by geographic barriers: The hook shape of Cape Cod can trap them within Cape Cod Bay for weeks to months. This puts turtles at risk of being exposed to waters that are too cold for them.

Cold-stunned Turtles Need Rescue

Since they are cold-blooded, sea turtles’ body temperatures mirror those of surrounding waters. When turtles have a low body temperature, they stop feeding; their body systems slow down; their immune systems become suppressed. This is all part of a condition called cold stunning. When cold-stunned turtles wash up on local beaches, they need immediate rescue or they will not survive. Luckily,the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network collects sick, injured, and cold-stunned turtles from beaches and brings them to rehabilitation facilities for medical care.

In Massachusetts, Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary rescues cold-stunned sea turtles off Cape Cod beaches. They bring live turtles to two Massachusetts rehabilitation facilities: the New England Aquarium and the National Marine Life Center. There, turtles are slowly warmed up, given medical care, reintroduced to swimming and feeding, and stabilized. It can take weeks to months for these debilitated turtles to be healthy enough to be released again into the ocean.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

How a microscopic coastal creature may become deadlier in our changing climate

June 18, 2024 — Between 2014 and 2015, a “blob” of record-breaking warm water traversed the west coast of the U.S., gaining media attention as the warm temperatures wreaked havoc on the bottom of the food chain, causing fisheries like sockeye, pink, and coho salmon to collapse and thousands of sea lions and sea birds to starve.

However, amid this devastation, one microscopic creature thrived or “bloomed”—a neurotoxin-producing diatom called Pseudo-nitzschia—causing devastating multi-million dollar losses for many West Coast commercial and tribal crab and shellfish fisheries that had to shut down due to the risk of toxin-contaminated seafood.

The toxin produced by Pseudo-nitzschia, domoic acid, can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning in humans, with symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, headache, loss of short-term memory, motor weakness, seizures, and irregular heart rhythms.

Beyond the clear ecological and economic devastation, this 2015 blob-associated harmful algal bloom also left the scientific community in shock. The prevailing understanding was that toxic Pseudo-nitzschia blooms were associated with nutrient-rich, cold-water pulses of water seasonally brought up or “upwelled” from the depths along the Pacific west coast.

With the massive hot blob of water hovering over the coastline in 2015, there was little to no upwelling. So how did a toxic bloom occur during this massive heat wave?

Read the full article at PHYS.org

Climate change is causing low-oxygen levels in Pacific Northwest ocean, report says

June 17, 2024 — A recent report out of Oregon State University paints a picture of how ocean oxygen levels have decreased in the Pacific Northwest over the years.

The report found near-bottom levels of dissolved oxygen in the waters off of Washington, Oregon and Northern California in 2021. JPR’s Roman Battaglia talked to Jack Barth, professor of oceanography at OSU, about his report and what these low oxygen levels mean for marine life.

Roman Battaglia: One thing I noticed in this study was that the levels seem pretty different in different parts of the coast. For example, in northern California and the southern Oregon coast, the oxygen levels seem much higher than they are in southern Washington and the northern Oregon coast. But why is there so much variability?

Jack Barth: That was the second big outcome of the paper, is that there really are regional differences. And importantly, we can explain them by oceanographic processes. So that higher oxygen level off southern Oregon, that’s because the continental shelf is relatively narrow. So it can flush water on and off pretty effectively from the deep ocean and flush out that low oxygen water so it stays high. And it looks like a pretty good area for fisheries. As you get into the wider continental shelves off central Oregon and Washington, the water sticks around longer; it doesn’t get flushed off as effectively. So that keeps those low oxygen waters near the bottom on those wider shelves.

Read the full transcript at OPB

The warming ocean is leaving coastal economies in hot water

June 12, 2024 — Ocean-related tourism and recreation supports more than 320,000 jobs and $13.5 billion in goods and services in Florida. But a swim in the ocean became much less attractive in the summer of 2023, when the water temperatures off Miami reached as high as 101 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).

The future of some jobs and businesses across the ocean economy have also become less secure as the ocean warms and damage from storms, sea-level rise, and marine heat waves increases.

Ocean temperatures have been heating up over the past century, and hitting record highs for much of the past year, driven primarily by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Scientists estimate that more than 90 percent of the excess heat produced by human activities has been taken up by the ocean.

That warming, hidden for years in data of interest only to oceanographers, is now having profound consequences for coastal economies around the world.

Understanding the role of the ocean in the economy is something I have been working on for more than 40 years, currently at the Center for the Blue Economy of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Mostly, I study the positive contributions of the ocean, but this has begun to change, sometimes dramatically. Climate change has made the ocean a threat to the economy in multiple ways.

Read the full article at the New Hampshire Bulletin

ALASKA: Climate change disruptions to Alaska marine fisheries scrutinized at Kodiak workshop

June 12, 2024 — In the marine waters off Alaska’s coast, climate change is triggering disruptions that can be dramatic and sudden. For fishery officials, that presents a quandary: How can that be suitably addressed by a fishery management system that is legally required to be cautious and deliberate and for which policy changes can take several years to carry out?

That was the question presented at a two-day climate scenarios workshop held Wednesday and Thursday in Kodiak by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. The workshop was in conjunction with the council’s June meeting.

There were repeated calls among workshop participants — fishers, fishery managers, scientists and others involved in the Alaska seafood industry — for more extensive and frequent federal data collection. But there were also calls for the way data is collected to change.

Surveys used to set seafood harvests in the federal waters of the Bering Sea, around the Aleutiansand in theGulf of Alaska are conducted by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries service.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

PNW coast suffers from low oxygen, study finds. It’s becoming the norm

June 12, 2024 — About half of the water near the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest coast experienced low-oxygen conditions in 2021, according to a new study.

And those hypoxic conditions, which are expected to become common with global warming, threaten the food web, the study found.

The study from Oregon State University, published in Nature Scientific Reports, used data from 2021 to map out oxygen levels across the bottom 32 feet of the Pacific Northwest continental shelf.

The research illuminates how the planet’s warming has fundamentally changed the ocean’s annual cycles and ecosystems, endangering culturally and economically valuable species like the Dungeness crab, which was worth an annual average of $45 million from 2014 and 2019.

Read the full article at The Seattle Times