Saving Seafood

Kelp’s crisis is the fleet’s crisis

August 11, 2026 — Kelp forests in the United States are under threat and are facing the same stresses as the commercial fisheries that work around them. The Forest of the Sea by David Helvarg, published in May, tells the story of kelp, the importance of healthy kelp forests, and the challenges these habitats face. While this book is not about commercial fishing, it does include fishermen, and its insights are vital to those who make a living harvesting wild fish from a rapidly changing sea.

Kelp forests have evolved as the anchor habitat for nearshore ecosystems in the cold waters of temperate climes across the globe. Helvarg dives into the ecological and economic importance of kelp forests, and how they’re under threat as waters warm and other environmental stressors diminish their footprint, often drastically so.

As a commercial fisherman on the West Coast and as a journalist covering fisheries and oceans for more than 15 years, the health of fisheries and the health of kelp forests have mirrored each other from my vantage point. Since the Blob, the extreme marine heatwave that hit the West Coast from 2014-2016, whale entanglements ravaged the California Dungeness crab fishery while 90 percent of the Northern California kelp forests disappeared. This isn’t a situation where one affects the other, but parallel plot lines in the same story.

Helvarg, a veteran journalist who also serves as the executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean advocacy NGO, uses Fort Bragg, Calif., as an example of just this. The shoreline of the small city nearly 200 miles north of San Francisco has historically been dominated by thick kelp forests teeming with life. It has also been an important commercial fishing port for Dungeness crab, salmon, and groundfish.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

New tool could predict ocean acidity in Bering Sea

August 10, 2026 — Crab populations in the Bering Sea are struggling. And researchers say climate change is a big cause. A new tool described in a study published Aug. 3 in the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans will help researchers predict one of climate change’s biggest threats to crabs: ocean acidity. The study’s authors hope their work can help crabbers and fishery managers.

“I’m excited with this new model and study,” said Jamie Goen, the executive director of the nonprofit trade association Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. “It will help us better understand what could be happening and how that might impact fisheries.”

Darren Pilcher, the study’s lead author and an oceanographer at the University of Washington, said he started the study because of requests from fisheries stakeholders.

The ocean absorbs a quarter of our carbon emissions, which make the water more acidic when the two mix. Acidic conditions are harmful for many different animals. This is especially true for shellfish, like crabs.

“They can eat more, and that helps a little bit, only to a certain point,” Pilcher said. “In fact, in some of the previous experiments with red king crab, if you lower the pH to a value of 7.5, the crab just die.”

Scientists have pointed to factors from climate change, like ocean acidification, as the reason the number of Bristol Bay red king crabs has plummeted in recent years. Goen said that other species, like snow crab, have also tanked.

Read the full article at KMXT

Birds Are Dying. Clues Point to El Niño.

August 7, 2026 — Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful.

But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses.

“Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.”

In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined.

“It’s painful,” he said.

In July, they counted an additional 968.

It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy.

But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated.

This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms.

In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain.

But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Climate-driven disruption, constrained supply adding volatility to aquaculture markets in the back half of 2026

August 7, 2026 — Global aquaculture firms and the wider value chain entered the second half of 2026 facing a difficult combination of constrained supply, rising feed costs, climate uncertainty, and uneven consumer demand, according to Rabobank’s latest Global Aquaculture Update.

After weathering several major disruptions over the past decade, the industry has now entered a phase in which climate change, tightening feed ingredient supplies, and geopolitical uncertainty are reshaping global seafood markets, Rabobank Seafood Analyst Novel Sharma told SeafoodSource, explaining the industry should plan for continual uncertainty rather than treat each challenge as an isolated disruption.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MASSACHUSETTS: A challenging but ‘priceless’ life of a lobsterman

August 3, 2026 — A lot has changed since Tom O’Reilly threw his first lobster pot in the ocean more than four decades ago.

Back then he was using wooden traps which had to be laden with rocks so they would sink to the sea floor. Once the wood became waterlogged the rocks were no longer needed, but they were heavy even when empty. Each pot was hauled up one at a time using only muscle power, a slow and arduous task. And he worked year ‘round.

Now 65, O’Reilly – a big, affable man with short cropped white hair and piercing blue eyes – employs a “stern man,” currently 18-year-old Kyle Moyen, of Manomet. Wooden traps have been replaced by lighter, coated wire traps strung together in groups of 15, each separated from the others by 90 feet of rope. To get the traps up to the boat, Moyen uses a grappling hook to grab the rope just underneath each buoy and O’Reilly threads the rope onto a winch-like device mounted on the starboard rail. He calls it a hauler (brand name: Hydro Slave) and it does most the heavy lifting until each trap is brought alongside the boat where Moyen wrangles it onto the rail. As for lobster fishing year ‘round, that, to O’Reilly’s chagrin, has been reduced by state regulation to help save the endangered North Atlantic right whale, of which fewer than 400 remain.

When I moved to Plymouth in late 2024, I was surprised the following spring to see so many lobster buoys bobbing in Plymouth waters. It was widely reported that even Maine’s coastal waters were becoming too warm to sustain the lobster population, forcing them north into Canadian waters.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the waters of Cape Cod Bay and the Gulf of Maine, of which Cape Cod Bay is a part, are warming faster than most global marine environments. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute concludes climate change has caused average summertime water temperatures in the Bay to warm by more than 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s. That may not sound like a lot, but even a one-degree average rise can mean the difference between thriving and dying for some species. Local oystermen cite warming waters for a drastic reduction in the local mussel population, for example.

O’Reilly doesn’t dispute the data, but says over the past ten years the temperature has been stable.

“People may disagree with me on this,” O’Reilly says, “but I’ve monitored the water temperature every day for the past ten years, and I don’t see it rising.”

He points to one of the monitors on his boat, the 36-foot Karen M, built in Maine in 1991 and named for O’Reilly’s wife. The monitor shows the water temperature is 65 degrees. “Normally, this time of year, it should be about 70,” he says, “and the lobster population is stable.”

Read the full article at the Plymouth Independent 

El Niño’s ‘whole different ocean’ to send odd sea creatures to US

July 31, 2026 — An intensifying El Niño is forecast to make it “a sharky summer” off the California coast, with greater numbers of white sharks arriving with warmer waters from the south, but they are far from the only marine life expected to make surprise visits.

Strong El Niños can move several species of sharks, as well as rays, tropical fish, birds and even sea snakes northward into waters where they rarely appear.

“We expect to see all kinds of weird tropical things come up with this warm water,” said Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The strongest El Niños – and this one is forecast to be among the very strongest – can alter entire marine ecosystems, shifting both animals and the food they need to survive.

Its ripple effects in winds, rain and ocean currents can extend across the world’s oceans. Studies have linked El Niño and its cooler water counterpart – La Niña – to starving sea lions in Peru, changes in sea turtle behaviors in the Caribbean and fisheries successes in the Amazon and Congo rivers.

El Niño can trigger “a lot of animal movement,” said Nate Jaros, a vice president of animal care at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

This summer, juvenile sharks and other aquatic visitors are turning up early, thanks to the effects of an intense marine heat wave already in place before El Niño arrives, McCauley said.

“We’re already seeing Mahi mahi. You’ll see more bluefin tuna, and you see weird stuff, like we’ll see more sea turtles and sea snakes,” McCauley said.

Read the full article at USA TODAY

Baby sharks grow up in New Jersey’s back bays. Climate change could threaten the nurseries

July 31, 2026 — New Jersey’s back bays, those lush wetlands that sit between the barrier island beach towns and the mainland, are home to unknown numbers of baby sharks that feast on the American eel, crabs and small fish that thrive in the coastal salt marshes. Giving birth to litters in those food-rich shallow waters like Little Egg Harbor is just about all the maternal care given to the shark pups by their mothers, who swim back out to the Atlantic Ocean soon afterwards.

The tiger shark, the sandbar shark and the smooth dogfish return each summer to the Jersey coast to give birth between June and July, utilizing the safety of shallow waters that are free from predators that would devour their newborns. Although the smooth dogfish can grow to 3 feet long, the babies are no larger than 12 inches at birth and litters range in size from four to 20 pups. The dogfish are benthic feeders, meaning they forage along the bottom of the marsh.

“We all have our favorite shore towns,” said Adrianna Zito-Livingston, an ecologist who works as the climate adaptation project manager for the New Jersey Nature Conservancy. “We come back year after year. The sharks are doing the same thing.”

The Nature Conservancy is working with Monmouth University to research the health of the salt marshes that have become eroded due to the impacts of climate change. As part of that work, researchers like Zito-Livingston are tagging the sharks with acoustic trackers that are then monitored by listening stations placed along the Jersey coast. She said the sharks provide a good indication of the health of the salt marshes.

“In a lot of ways, sharks are a canary in the coal mine,” she said. “They’re top predators and healthy sharks with a good distribution are indicative of healthy, diverse ecosystems.”

Read the full article at WHYY

Chinook salmon in decline, worsened by Bering Sea heatwave a decade ago: study

July 30, 2026 — Yukon River Chinook salmon numbers have been in a decline for decades. Despite efforts to help the population recover, it has dropped nearly 90 per cent since the 1980s.

Now, a new study from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says a four-year heatwave in the Bering Sea that started about a decade ago has been connected to a more recent drop in population.

Curry Cunningham, one of the co-authors of the study and an associate professor with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said researchers have noticed two periods of decline in the Chinook salmon population between 2003 and 2023.

Cunningham said before 2013, the salmon experienced a short decline followed by a few years of recovery.

But by 2016, conditions started to change again.

“That’s led to this very depressed state we currently find ourselves in,” Cunningham said. “[It] seems to be associated in time, at least with the onset of this marine heat wave that we saw in the eastern Bering Sea.”

Read the full article at CBC News

NOAA Report Finds Gulf of Maine Warming Slowed for Now, but Ecosystem Remains Unstable

July 28, 2026 — Maine’s fishing ports are doing well for now, but climate change is destabilizing the Gulf of Maine, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest “State of the Ecosystem” report for New England waters. Federal scientists presented the report to the New England Fishery Management Council in April, and published it online last week.

They found that some Maine fishing ports are growing busier, likely driven by the high price of lobster. Stonington, Harpswell and Friendship all see more activity now than they did roughly 20 years ago.

And 2025, like 2024, offered slightly cooler water temperatures after more than a decade of rapid and record-breaking warming in the Gulf of Maine. But the scientists predict that temperatures will warm again this fall, and will continue to rise long-term as the burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

To weather these ongoing changes, fishermen and their communities need to diversify their businesses, experts say.

“Things don’t look particularly stable either in terms of the fishery or the ecosystem,” said Joseph Caracappa, a research biologist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center who edited the report. “We’re seeing big changes that are sweeping across the ecology of the system and fisheries. Even socially, culturally — how communities are structured, where people are fishing, who’s actually doing the fishing.”

This annual report includes contributions from more than 100 scientists across the Northeast. NOAA has had to make do with fewer resources as the federal government’s priorities have changed under the second Trump administration, but otherwise the report has been prepared and published as usual, Caracappa said. And in fact, this latest report debuted a new section dedicated to forecasting ocean conditions in the year ahead.

Read the full article at U.S. News

URI Studying Jonah Crabs to Learn about Offshore Wind Turbines’ Effect on Underwater Ecosystems

July 28, 2026 — Since the first offshore wind project was developed in Rhode Island in 2016, University of Rhode Island researchers have been attempting to understand their impacts on local marine ecosystems. That work is continuing with first-year URI Ph.D. student Emmanuel Oyewole’s study of the artificial reefs that are often found at the base of turbines.

It’s been established through research surrounding offshore wind that the base of turbines serves as a foundation for algae and coral, which acts as a base for a booming ecosystem

In an attempt to find the cause of this blossoming of aquatic activity, Oyewole is studying the movement and dietary habits of one special creature found at the base of offshore wind turbines: Jonah crabs. He’s working with his academic advisor, Kelton McMahon, an associate professor of oceanography.

“It’s really, really important for understanding the impact of these wind farms on biodiversity, on ecosystem structure and function, and on fisheries production,” McMahon said.

Jonah crabs were often overlooked by Rhode Island commercial fishermen and were thrown away when caught in lobster traps, according to Oyewole, but as the local lobster population has declined due to overfishing and warming waters, the Jonah crab population has become a viable source of income.

Oyewole said Jonah crabs have seen an increase in market value and about 70% to 85% of all Jonah crab stock is from the Rhode Island area. Jonah crab fishing doesn’t require new equipment or infrastructure; lobster boats can use the same lobster cages to catch the crabs. Although the market for Jonah crabs is new and growing, understanding the impacts of offshore wind is important in understanding the future of the market.

“If [the turbines] are aggregating different biomasses from different areas, that means that you’re having a lot of stock like Jonah crab stock coming from fishable areas to that particular area, which is less fishable,” Oyewole said.

Read the full article at ecoRI