Saving Seafood

Climate change could critically harm $253 billion US fishing industry, experts tell senators

January 25, 2024 — Climate change has caused ocean temperatures to steadily rise, which, experts warned senators Wednesday, could significantly harm the fishing industry.

Andrea Dutton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said burning fossil fuels primarily drives climate change, which could cause widespread economic and environmental problems.

Fossil fuels generate high levels of carbon dioxide, which, in oceans, could cause heat waves and create acidic seawater that could harm anything living in the ecosystem.

Rashid Sumaila, a University Killam professor and research chair at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, said fisheries catch about 120 million tons of fish annually, generating about $240 billion in worldwide revenue.

Read the full article at The Hill

Seafood industry well-positioned to meet challenges of climate change

January 25, 2024 — Climate change is undeniably having an impact on where certain seafood species are located, and its exact effects are still being researched.

Research being done in how stocks are shifting varies. Some NOAA studies have predicted high-value groundfish species will migrate toward deeper offshore waters on the west coast of the U.S., while others are pointing out the risks it poses to global blue food production. Despite those risks, a panel covering seafood sourcing amid climate change at the Global Seafood Market Conference – which ran from 23 to 25 January in Orlando, Florida, U.S.A. – said the seafood industry can meet the challenges and even weather them better than other protein industries.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Marine heat waves found to trigger shift in hatch dates and early growth of Pacific cod

January 24, 2024 — Marine heat waves appear to trigger earlier reproduction, high mortality in early life stages and fewer surviving juvenile Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska, a new study from Oregon State University shows.

These changes in the hatch cycle and early growth patterns persisted in years following the , which could have implications for the future of Gulf of Alaska Pacific cod, an economically and culturally significant species, said Jessica Miller of OSU’s Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport and the study’s senior author.

“We found that the  were hatching two to three weeks earlier. To see that dramatic of a shift in hatch dates of a species due to a one- or two-year event is pretty remarkable,” Miller said. “That those changes continue to persist suggests that marine  might be having long-lasting impacts that also influence the likely trajectory of the species under .”

Read the full article at PHYS.org

MAINE: How the Maine coast will be reshaped by a rising Gulf of Maine

January 23, 2024 — Extreme weather made more frequent and ferocious by climate change has walloped Maine in the last year, and the coastal devastation wrought by recent storms is causing many Mainers to realize that climate change is happening right now.

From Kittery to Eastport, climate change came to life. Mainers could do little but watch as storms rushed in on seas elevated by climate change, buckling roads, scouring beaches and washing away our working waterfronts.

“People aren’t just waking up to climate change, but these storms have made theory into a pretty scary reality,” said Hannah Pingree, co-chair of the Maine Climate Council. “People thought we’d have more time to change, to prepare. This was our wake-up call. We’re running out of time.”

Between the two storms that hit the coast on Jan. 10 and 13, and the Dec. 18 storm that wreaked at least $20 million in damage to 10 Maine counties, there’s almost no way a Mainer could have missed the impact of this extreme weather, which can be traced back to climate change.

Read the full article at the Portland Press Herald

Too little, too late: the desperate search for cod babies

January 23, 2024 — Guðrún Bjarnadóttir Bech sings to herself while she sorts through baby fish with a pair of tweezers. “Ding! Ding! Ding!” she suddenly bursts out. “That’s a plaice,” she says – her reaction testament to how few she sees.

It is 2021 and Bech is working onboard the Jákup Sverri, a Faroese marine research ship that’s trawling for juvenile fish around the Faroe Islands in the north Atlantic to assess the state of populations including haddock, sand eel and Norwegian pout.

But there is one juvenile the scientists onboard are desperate to find: cod. The babies are minute, each measuring between 2mm and 25mm (0.08in to 1in). The smaller the individual, the more difficult it is to distinguish between different species. But as cod grow, their eyes and heads get bigger, and their skin, though still quite transparent, turns grey-green.

Read the full article at The Guardian

Q&A: Growth rings in fish give clues about fluctuations in climate over decades

January 21, 2024 –A giant tree in your backyard can reveal stories about Earth’s past climate. The concentric rings in the trunk, besides indicating the age of the tree, also shed light on the corresponding weather conditions during each year of the tree’s life.

But  are not exclusive to trees. Similar rings found in the tiny ear bones of  provide clues about the effects of climate change on both land and sea.

Bryan Black, an associate professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, has been applying the tree-ring dating techniques to so-called “fish rings” to understand how environmental variability is affecting fish growth and productivity over decades.

In this Q&A, Black discusses the techniques he uses to study growth increments in the ear bones, or otoliths, of fish; the correlation between otoliths and climate change; and how the fish-ring dating technique is comparable to tree-ring dating.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

Trawling Boats Are Hauling Up Ancient Carbon From the Ocean Depths

January 18, 2024 — The fillet of flounder sitting on your plate comes with a severe environmental cost. To catch it, a ship running on fossil fuels spewed greenhouse gases as it dragged a trawl net across the seafloor, devastating the ecosystems in its path. Obvious enough. But new research shows that the consequences extend even further: Trawl nets are hauling up both food and a huge amount of carbon that’s supposed to be sequestered in the murky depths.

In a paper publishing in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers have tallied up an estimate of how much seafloor carbon the bottom-trawling industry stirs into the water and how much of that is released into the air as CO2 each year, exacerbating global warming. It turns out to be double the annual fossil fuel emissions produced by the entire world’s 4 million–vessel fishing fleet.

“At least 55 to 60 percent of the CO2 created by trawling—scraping the seafloor—is going to come into the atmosphere within nine years,” says lead author and ecosystem ecologist Trisha Atwood, who focuses on carbon cycling at Utah State University and National Geographic’s Pristine Seas program. “It now suggests that countries should be looking at this industry, and that their carbon footprint goes a lot further than maybe they were thinking, just in terms of the amount of gas that they burned to get out to their fishing grounds.”

Read the full article at Wired

ALASKA: Conservation group petitions for Alaska king salmon to be listed as an endangered species

January 13, 2024 — A Washington-based conservation group filed a petition with federal regulators Wednesday, requesting that they list Alaska king salmon as an endangered species.

The Wild Fish Conservancy argued in its 67-page petition that king, or chinook, salmon numbers have declined to the point where the species is at risk of extinction in Alaska. The group cites state data indicating that the decline has been predominately caused by climate change, habit destruction and hatchery salmon competing for food with wild fish.

The group is asking that the National Marine Fisheries Service formally review king salmon numbers across the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and Southeast Alaska before considering stricter protections. Those could include critical habit protections and expanding ways to protect king salmon smolt — among other measures the group lists.

The petition is a first step in a process that could take years to be resolved with court challenges possible. But legal experts say there could be broad implications if the request is approved to list Alaska king salmon as threatened or endangered under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Researchers poised to study the joint effects of climate change and offshore wind energy development on U.S. West Coast fisheries

December 21, 2023 — Offshore wind energy is just around the corner for the United States’ West Coast, in an effort to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy generation. As the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) begins to issue leases for several offshore wind energy projects off the West Coast within the next decade, potential conflicts arise. How will offshore wind development affect the fishers who use the same stretch of the Pacific? How will climate change affect these uses?

These are the questions before researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Environmental Markets Lab (emLab), who work to align environmental objectives and economic incentives in support of sustainable livelihoods and a resilient planet. The installation of floating wind turbines is expected to generate complex issues of space and safety between all users of the offshore region. In previous research, emLab scientists investigated the potential effects of offshore wind infrastructure on West Coast fish stocks and fishers. Armed with a new $1.1 million grant from BOEM, emLab is ready to add climate change to the mix, incorporating climate model projections of ocean warming along the U.S. West Coast.

Read the full article at UC SANTA BARBARA

Climate Change is Further Reducing Fish Stocks With Worrisome Implications for Global Food Supplies

December 19, 2023 —  The health benefits of eating seafood are appreciated in many cultures which rely upon it to provide critical nutrients vital to our physical and mental development and health. Eating fish and shellfish provides significant benefits to neurological development and functioning and provides protection against the risks of coronary heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Read the full article at Seafoodnews.com