Saving Seafood

Fish are shrinking around the world. Here’s why scientists are worried.

May 6, 2024 — There’s something fishy going on in the water. Across Earth’s oceans, fish are shrinking — and no one can agree why.

It’s happening with salmon near the Arctic Circle and skate in the Atlantic. Nearly three-fourths of marine fish populations sampled worldwide have seen their average body size dwindle between 1960 and 2020, according to a recent analysis.

Overfishing and human-caused climate change are decreasing the size of adult fish, threatening the food supply of more than 3 billion people who rely on seafood as a significant source of protein.

As fish get smaller, there is less meat to cook per catch. So scientists are working to piece together why exactly fish respond to rising ocean temperatures by getting smaller.

“This is a pretty fundamental question,” said Lisa Komoroske, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “But we still don’t understand why.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Mussel shells are changing as the ocean warms, study finds

May 3, 2024 — In Massachusetts, common blue mussels may not have the star power of Wellfleet oysters or the charisma of quahogs. But like all shellfish they play an important role in marine ecosystems. Mussels are filter feeders that clean water as they eat; and they clump into reefs that create habitat for other critters and buffer coasts from storms.

But mussels are threatened by the warming waters and ocean acidification arriving with climate change. New research shows that mussels from several East Coast locations, though not yet Massachusetts, have shells speckled with tiny holes — far more than the mussels of yesteryear.

This increased porosity is not enough to weaken the shells, yet, “but if we continue down this route, they might get there,” said study author Leanne Melbourne, a postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, who used historic mussel shells from museum’s collections for the study.

Melbourne, who studies the impact of climate change on marine organisms, said that ocean warming is the “most likely driver” of the increased porosity.

Read the full story at WBUR

 

Sea off New England had one of its hottest years in 2023, part of a worldwide trend

April 29, 2024 — The sea off New England, already warming faster than most of the world’s oceans, had one of its hottest years on record in 2023.

The Gulf of Maine, which abuts New England and Canada, had an annual sea surface temperature nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit above normal last year, scientists with the Portland, Maine-based Gulf of Maine Research Institute said Monday. The institute said it was the fifth-warmest year on record for the Gulf of Maine, a body of water critical to commercial fishing and other maritime industries.

The Gulf of Maine has emerged as a case study for the warming of the world’s oceans in the last 10 years, and the research institute said in a statement that last year’s warming was “consistent with the long-term trend of increasingly warm conditions driven primarily by” climate change.

The early portion of the year was especially warm, said Dave Reidmiller, director of the Climate Center at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

New Study Confirms Warming Ocean’s Impact on Ocean Quahog

April 24, 2024 — The following was released by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries:

A new study examining the fossil record of ocean quahog, one of the longest-lived species in the ocean, further confirms that climate change is impacting the distribution and growth of shellfish across the Atlantic. Building on previous work examining regional ocean quahog populations, the study, funded by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries, expands our understanding on how shellfish species are reacting to warmer waters and changing habitats.

Ocean quahogs are an extremely long-lived species; some of the oldest ocean quahogs living today are over 200 years old, with some of them having lived long enough to pre-date the Industrial Revolution. Like using a tree’s rings to learn its life cycle, studying ocean quahog shells can tell us both about the growth and history of an ocean quahog, and about past climate conditions. This study, published in Continental Shelf Research, analyzes the historical growth rate of ocean quahogs off the Delmarva peninsula compared to modern populations, identifies the historical distribution of optimal conditions for ocean quahog growth, and how current warming trends are impacting the species.

Specifically, the study looks at ocean quahog growth rates and compares those rates of growth with known climate conditions, such as historic cold periods like the Little Ice Age and a warmer period known as the Medieval Warm Period. It finds that ocean quahogs once were found well inshore of their present distribution when climates were much colder than today, and that during these times they grew as fast or faster than today, helped by a likely combination of optimal temperatures and abundant food supply.

Ocean quahogs today are also growing at a much slower rate in some regions than similar ocean quahogs in the period from 1740-1940, with the evidence indicating that current temperatures in these areas are above the historical, optimal range that encourages ocean quahog growth.

“This study is further confirmation that ocean temperatures are continuing to move away from the conditions where ocean quahog thrive, which has long-term implications for both the species and the fisheries that depend on them,” said Alyssa LeClaire, a Coastal Ecologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Beaufort Lab, the lead author of the study. “This is just the beginning of studying the future of climate impacts on this species, and hopefully further research will continue to explore the relationship between ocean quahog and climate.”

In a related finding, the study also concluded that, as waters begin to warm, the range of ocean quahogs will begin to slowly retract long before a population is completely gone from an area. Because ocean quahogs are so long-lived, this is a slow process, taking a hundred years or more from the first signs of decrease to be completely gone from an area.

Similar to earlier SCEMFIS-funded studies on ocean quahog, this study relies on an extensive dataset of quahog shells, collected in previous surveys, this time from the Delmarva region of the Atlantic. Previous studies funded by the Center have focused on ocean quahog populations off New Jersey, Long Island and Georges Bank. Together, they draw from one of the largest and most representative sample collections of ocean quahog available, an archive that has potential to aid in future climate research.

“Ocean quahog shells have the potential to be a valuable resource in reconstructing historical climate data,” said LeClaire. “Because the species is sensitive to changes in temperature, they can tell us about changes in climate over the decades of a quahog’s life cycle, which can help us in modeling future changes.”

Warming Waters Heat Summer’s Feast Well Before It Gets To The Kitchen

April 23, 2024 — Robust agricultural harvests of delicious fruits and vegetables dazzle every summer menu, but, in New England, seafood wears the crown and the premier gem is the lobster. Like everything on planet earth however, rising temperatures threaten the abundance of these resources, just as lobstering season is a couple of weeks away from switching into full gear.

An ever-warming planet is playing havoc with the intricately interconnected web of marine life. The Copernicus Climate Change Service whose climate research is supported by the European Union reports this month that “ocean temperatures have now been at unprecedented warm levels for over 12 months” and that for the month of March, the average temperature for the surface of oceans globally had hit a historic high of 21.07 degrees Centigrade, or 69.92 degrees Fahrenheit.

Just as climate has long stressed human populations and driven migration, marine populations are stressed and in search of survivable climates too. In New England, scientists and lobstermen alike are studying and living the impacts. The wide focus is on the Gulf of Maine, an area that extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Nova Scotia in Canada. David Reidmiller, Director of the Climate Center at the Gulf of Maine Research Center in Portland, Maine, has found that the rates of ocean warming in the Gulf of Maine are three times the global average, “faster than 95% of the world’s oceans.” In 2021, for the first time, the Gulf of Maine experienced a marine heat wave for the entire calendar year.

Read the full article at Forbes

Offshore wind turbines won’t reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is why

April 22, 2o24 — Offshore wind farms are touted as the energy wave of the future. As we venture further into the era of renewable energy, offshore wind farms have been celebrated as beacons of progress, promising to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and curb carbon emissions. This narrative, championed by government officials and wind farm companies alike, paints an effervescent picture of a sustainable future. Yet, the gap between this optimistic vision and the sobering reality is wider than many might expect. The reality is that offshore wind may increase the total amount of emissions, perhaps even exceeding current levels as the unpredictability of wind forces existing fossil fuel plants to work overtime.

Studies in the Netherlands, Ireland, Colorado, and Texas have all found that adding wind farms causes existing fossil fuel plants to produce more CO2.  As the amount of wind farms increases, the total CO2 released also increases, making emissions as high or even higher than they would have been with no wind farms. No study has contradicted this finding.

When discussing electricity, it is important to remember two fundamental characteristics. First, electricity cannot be stored at reasonable cost or in any significant amount. Second, the amount of electricity being produced must, at each instant, equal the amount being consumed, or the system will collapse. This means that the output of the fossil generating plants must vary their output to match the wind gusts and lulls.

Read the full article at northjersey.com

Annual ocean conference raises $11.3b in pledges for marine conservation

April 20, 2024 — From April 15-17, state delegates, organization representatives, academics and philanthropists met at the 9th Our Ocean Conference (OOC) in Athens to discuss the protection of the world’s oceans and pledge actions to safeguard their future.

As the OOC took place, news broke about the world’s coral reefs undergoing a mass bleaching event, which lent a sense of urgency to the conference. Experts say this global bleaching event is a result of the current El Niño climate pattern as well as the ongoing rise in global ocean temperatures due to human-induced climate change.

“Devastating but also predictable,” is how Melissa Wright, a senior member of the environment team at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which funds ocean conservation work, described the bleaching event at the conference’s opening press briefing. She urged leaders to take “decisive action” on climate change as well as other threats such as overfishing, pollution and development.

Read the full article at Mongabay

The world’s coral reefs are facing another mass bleaching event — maybe the biggest ever

April 16, 2024 — The world’s oceans are experiencing another global mass coral bleaching event because of unprecedented heat, scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed.

“This is the fourth time, on record, that coral bleaching has occurred simultaneously within all major ocean basins,” said Derek Manzello, ecologist and co-ordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch.

Bleaching — a ghostly discolouration, in stark contrast to vibrant colours found in reefs — can occur when corals are heat-stressed, expelling microscopic algae from within. The longer and hotter it gets, the more likely the corals will die, disrupting fragile ecosystems as well as the lives and livelihoods of people who depend on them.

But the full extent of damage is yet to come. Manzello is seeing an increase in affected reefs every week.

“If that trend continues, this will be the most spatially expansive, global bleaching event on record — in as little as a few weeks, potentially,” Manzello warned.

Read the full article at CBC

Species most vulnerable to climate change

April 14, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries’ two new assessments of climate vulnerability for fish species and invertebrates in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic were shared at the end of 2023. While all the species assessed are projected to face significant exposure to climate-driven changes, some are expected to be much more susceptible than others.

John Quinlan, the lead author of the Gulf of Mexico assessment, shared, “These areas are projected to become substantially warmer, saltier, more acidic, and less oxygenated. This means that multiple stressors could operate across the Southeast, and we’ll need to be aware as the system shifts.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Developing Alternative Fisheries Management Scenarios to Respond to Climate Change

April 8, 2024 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Seafood is a vitally important source of protein. Worldwide, more than 3 billion people rely on seafood as a significant part of their diets.

The amount that we can sustainably fish and farm is based on historical catches and trends that have been monitored for decades. We need to understand their breeding cycles and growth rates, along with cyclical patterns of ocean currents and climate—and the ecosystems they live in. This allows us to build models that inform sustainable management strategies for harvesting seafood. However, climate change continues to disrupt long-standing expectations, strategies, and the communities that depend on them.

Scientists at the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center are collaborating with communities, managers, and other government and academic scientists in the Bering Sea region. They authored a new paper that develops climate-informed management scenarios for fisheries in the eastern Bering Sea.

“Several years ago, we recognized that climate change was going to affect our fisheries in Alaska. So, in 2015, we started a new initiative, the Alaska Climate Integrated Modeling Project, or ACLIM, with the goal of creating climate informed models to help us adapt to a warming planet,” remarks Anne Hollowed, lead author and retired center scientist.

ACLIM is a collaboration among more than 50 interdisciplinary experts that projects and evaluates climate impacts and effective responses for social and ecological systems in and around the Bering Sea. It is also part of NOAA’s Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI) to build decision support systems for climate informed decision making in each region.

Kristin Holsman, co-author with the center and co-lead investigator on ACLIM, adds, “The climate change shifts and extreme events that have occurred over the past decade in the North Pacific and Bering Sea really underscore the need for climate innovation in fishery management. ACLIM lets us meaningfully connect cutting-edge science tools and information for fishing communities and resource managers to help prepare for and respond to climate change. The key in this is incorporating social and economic input in addition to biological and oceanographic information.”

The climate-related events that Holsman refers to are the 2015–2016 and 2018–2019 marine heat waves. They caused wide-scale declines in marine species such as snow crabs.

University of Washington scientist and co-author Andre Punt states, “The interdisciplinary nature of ACLIM is what makes it so valuable. Along with NOAA, we have representatives participating from our university, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, Native Alaskan communities, international organizations, among others—all dedicated to solving these important issues related to climate change.”