Saving Seafood

Ecological Forecasts Offer New Insight into Changing Conditions that Can Shift Fisheries, Drive Conflicts

December 6, 2023 — Weather forecasts only look out a few days to weeks. Two new research studies describe the increasing accuracy of specialized scientific models in forecasting changes in the ocean up to a year in advance.

The models have increasing value as climate change drives shifts in ocean temperatures and other conditions with new and unexpected outcomes. The changes can have ecological and economic repercussions. For example, warming ocean temperatures increase the overlap between fishing fleets and protected species like whales and sea turtles, which can trigger fishing closures. The research was conducted by scientists at NOAA Fisheries and University of California, Santa Cruz.

NOAA Fisheries is also pursuing development of “Climate-Ready Fisheries” that adjust to changing conditions, even over the course of a single fishing season. Some forecasts examined in the new studies could provide insight as much as a year in advance. This could highlight potential conflicts or opportunities in time for managers and fishermen to do something about them. This kind of proactive management was highlighted in the recent National Climate Assessment as an important approach to addressing the impacts of climate change.

“We can now look months or even a year out and ask, what is that part of the ocean going to look like, and what does that mean for the species and for the people and industries who use it?” said Stephanie Brodie, lead author of one of the new studies. “For fisheries, it gives managers a chance to evaluate the trade-offs in reducing human-wildlife conflict and supporting an economically viable fishery.”

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

Where Will the Whales Be? Ask the Climate Model.

December 5, 2023 — The opening of California’s commercial crab season, which normally starts in November, is delayed once again to protect humpback whales foraging for krill and anchovies along the coast.

This region of the Pacific has been under the grip of a marine heat wave since May. “The Blob,” as this mass of warm water has become known, is squeezing cooler water preferred by whales and their prey close to shore, where fishermen set their traps.

This crowding can lead to literal tangles between whales and fishing equipment, endangering the animals’ lives and requiring grueling rescue missions.

In a new study, scientists say they can now use global temperature models, commonly used in climate science, to predict up to a year in advance when hot ocean temperatures raise the risk of whale entanglements. This lead time could allow state regulators, fishermen, and other businesses that depend on the fishery — as well as Californians hoping for a Dungeness crab holiday meal — to plan ahead for potential fishing restrictions.

“It really just helps give a lot more information and reduce some of that uncertainty about the future,” said Steph Brodie, lead author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. Dr. Brodie is currently a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, but conducted this research while working at the University of California Santa Cruz and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Study points to concurrent marine heat waves as culprit in Western Alaska chum declines

December 5, 2023 — Successive marine heat waves appear to have doomed much of the chum salmon swimming in the ocean waters off Alaska in the past year and probably account for the scarcities that have strained communities along Western Alaska rivers in recent years, a newly published study found.

In the much-higher water temperatures that lingered in the 2014-19 period, juvenile chum salmon metabolism was super-charged, meaning they needed more food, said the study, by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But the food that was available was of low quality — things like jellyfish instead of the fat-packed krill and other prey they normally eat, the study said.

That means for the juvenile salmon trying to survive their first year at sea, “there’s not much gas in the tank,” said the study’s lead author, Ed Farley, manager of NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Ecosystem Monitoring and Assessment Program.

Juvenile chum salmon that swam from spawning areas in the rivers suffered what was essentially a double hit, said Farley, who works in the NOAA Fisheries Auke Bay Laboratories in Juneau. They encountered one extreme heat wave in their critical first summer when they were in the northern Bering Sea and then, when they entered their wintering grounds in the Gulf of Alaska, swam into the tail end of another extreme heat wave, he said.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

New England’s decades-old shrimp fishery, a victim of climate change, to remain closed indefinitely

December 4, 2023 — New England’s long-shuttered shrimp business, which fell victim to warming waters, will remain in a fishing moratorium indefinitely, fishery regulators ruled on Friday.

The shrimping business was based mostly in Maine and produced small, pink shrimp that were a winter delicacy in New England and across the country. The industry has been in a moratorium since 2013 in large part because environmental conditions off New England are unfavorable for the cold water-loving shrimp.

That moratorium will remain in effect with no firm end date, a board of the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted Friday. The board stopped short of calling the move a permanent moratorium because it included a provision to continue monitoring the shrimp population and consider reopening the fishery if the crustaceans approach a healthy level.

But it was clear board members saw little chance of a future for a fishery that once provided a beloved seafood item that appeared on restaurant menus and in seafood markets every year around Christmas.

Read the full story at News Center Maine

Response paper aims to debunk the theory that bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel

December 2, 2023 — Bottom trawling, a fishing method that entails towing a net along the ocean floor to capture target species, does not release as much carbon as air travel, according to a response paper that sought to debunk research published in 2021 and picked up by global media outlets, including The Guardian.

The response paper, “Quantifying the carbon benefits of ending bottom trawling,” released in May 2023, claims that Sala et al. – the authors of the original research – overestimated trawling’s carbon output by two to three orders of magnitude, or 100 to 1,000 times more than they should have, in the model they used, contending that the discrepancies are due to incorrect fundamental assumptions of the carbon cycle and flawed validation.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Biden’s clean energy agenda faces mounting headwinds

November 25, 2023 — Canceled offshore wind projects, imperiled solar factories, fading demand for electric vehicles.

A year after passage of the largest climate change legislation in U.S. history, meant to touch off a boom in American clean energy development, economic realities are fraying President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Soaring financing and materials costs, unreliable supply chains, delayed rulemaking in Washington and sluggish permitting have wrought havoc ranging from offshore wind developer Orsted’s (ORSTED.CO) project cancellations in the U.S. Northeast, to Tesla, Ford and GM’s scaled back EV manufacturing plans.

The darkening outlook for clean energy industries is tough news for Biden, whose pledge to deliver a net-zero economy by 2050 faces headwinds that the landmark Inflation Reduction Act’s billions in tax credits alone can’t resolve.

After walking into last year’s United Nations climate summit in Egypt touting the IRA as evidence of unprecedented progress in the fight against climate change, Biden is expected to skip this year’s event in Dubai amid dire warnings that the world is moving too slowly to avert the worst of global warming.

Read the full article at Reuters

Fish out of water: North American drought bakes salmon

November 23, 2023 — One after another, salmon leapt out of the water and hurtled themselves at the falls, propelled by instinct to move upriver. They, like all Pacific salmon, were born in freshwater, migrated to the ocean and were now returning as adults to their natal streams to spawn and die. But the Fraser River was running low after months of drought. At this stretch near the Bridge River Rapids in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, the water was so low in mid-October that the salmon couldn’t access their usual passage up the fish ladder. Instead, they were desperately trying to find another way over the rocks, but they couldn’t make it.

For these fish, help was at hand. For days, members and friends of the Xwísten, an Indigenous group that is part of the St’át’imc Nation and whose territory encompasses this traditional fishing spot, scooped up salmon with large dip nets, passed them hand to hand in a human chain up the rocks, and released them above the falls. In all, they moved more than 7,000 fish. Eventually machinery was brought in; an all-terrain excavator chiseled out rocks to ease the salmon’s transit over the falls, and a helicopter dropped sandbags to raise the water level near the fish ladder.

“The project to save the fish is important to not only our community but to the St’at’imc Nation and many other Nations along the Fraser River,” says Xwísten Chief Ina Williams via text. “There are many animals, four-legged and winged, that also rely on the fish.”

Read the full article at Mongabay

ALASKA: Scientists say warming seas helped cause Alaska’s snow crab crash

November 18, 2023 — When scientists estimated that more than 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the Eastern Bering Sea between 2018 and 2021, industry stakeholders and fisheries scientists had several ideas about where they’d gone.

Some thought bycatch, disease, cannibalism, or crab fishing, while others believed it could be predation from other sea animals like Pacific cod.

But now, scientists say they’ve distinguished the most likely cause for the disappearance. The culprit is a marine heatwave between 2018 and 2019, according to a new study authored by a group of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mike Litzow is a co-author of the study and the director for NOAA’s Kodiak lab. He said starvation mediated by increased temperatures caused the collapse.

“Really the crab were not able to get the food they needed,” Litzow said. “They were just outstripping the resources that were available to them.” 

According to Litzow and his fellow researchers, the crab faced a number of compounding factors: First, higher temperatures meant increased metabolism so they needed more food; on top of that, there was less space for the crab to forage that food; and finally, the crab were just smaller than usual.

Researchers took data from the many possible hypotheses for the disappearance and they examined it alongside the data they have on the collapse. They examined possible mortality from a range of sources, including directed fishing from the snow crab industry as well as bitter crab syndrome — a fatal disease among crustaceans caused by parasites — and trawl bycatch.

“The take-home message is really that none of those other proposed mechanisms explains the collapse with the data we have,” Litzow said.

He said it’s tough to know what the collapse from increased ocean temperatures could mean for other species, but it’s safe to say we’ll probably see more marine heatwaves like this, and they’re likely to be bigger and more frequent, as the world continues warming.

Read the full article at KYUK

From concrete gray to ‘tutu’ green, Mass. shows off the many colors of coastal resilience

November 18, 2023 — Hurricane Carol devastated the port of New Bedford in 1954, leaving millions of dollars of damage in its wake. The fishing community couldn’t risk another blow, so business leaders decided to construct a massive barrier at the mouth of the port.

The hurricane barrier is made of 900,000 tons of stone, 20 feet high and stretches 3.5 miles across New Bedford’s port. It can protect New Bedford, Fairhaven and Acushnet from a Category 3 hurricane.

When a storm comes and the water level stops rising behind the barrier, it is “such a feeling of security,” John Bullard, the former mayor of New Bedford and president of the board of the New Bedford Ocean Cluster, told Boston Public Radio on Thursday. Bullard was 15 when the barrier was built.

Yet there are only two hurricane barriers on the East Coast — the other is in Providence. And coastal cities are facing growing threats from sea level rise and storm surge connected to climate change.

In 30 years, sea levels may be as much as 1.5 feet higher than they were in 2000. And by 2070, they may be as much as 3 feet higher, according to predictions from NOAA and Climate Ready Boston.

Read the full article at GBH

New England’s wetter, warmer future is already here

November 16, 2023 — The warmer, wetter future that climate scientists have been predicting for New England is already here.

The fifth National Climate Assessment – issued by the White House on Tuesday – includes data showing the region is seeing extreme heat on land and at sea, especially in the Gulf of Maine, and more frequent heavy rainstorms than any other region of the country.

The assessment shines a spotlight on the links between extreme weather and inland flooding, said U.S. Forest Service scientist Erin Lane, one of the authors of the Northeast chapter. Data shows the number of days when at least 2 inches of rain fell is up, but the number of 5-inch days more than doubled.

These storms can have a big impact on local communities and ecosystems, but they can also spur action.

“The stress of extreme weather is motivating climate action,” Lane said on Tuesday. “In our region, we are seeing more adaptation to build resilience, as well as inclusion of nature-based solutions and carbon emission reduction strategies as communities work toward addressing these issues.”

Rising sea levels and heavy rains are leading to floods, driving up insurance rates, and forcing towns to repair or move roads, bridges and ferry landings. Extreme weather can sometimes mean droughts and floods in succession, wreaking havoc with the growing season, spring thaws and mud season.

Read the full article at the Portland Press Herald