Saving Seafood

ALASKA: ‘Too hot’ for salmon: How climate change is contributing to the Yukon salmon collapse

September 27, 2023 — Scientists know one thing for sure about the collapse of Yukon River king and chum salmon: there’s more than one culprit.

“It’s really hard and probably unrealistic to just point your finger at one thing and say that’s what’s doing it,” said Jayde Ferguson, a fish pathologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Researchers have identified many threats facing Yukon king and chum salmon, and those threats pop up at each stage of the salmon life cycle — when salmon hatch in freshwater streams, as they swim down the Yukon to the ocean, where they spend most of their lives and on their arduous journey back upriver to spawn and die.

Scientists think many of these threats are connected to climate change. Ferguson studies one of them, a parasite named ichthyophonus, at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game lab in Anchorage.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Researchers build and test a framework for achieving climate resilience across diverse fisheries

September 27, 2023 — What makes for a successful climate-resilient fishery, one that sustainably produces resources for human benefit despite increasing climate stressors and human impacts? It’s a question that faces present and future fisheries, their practitioners and fishing communities as the world turns to the ocean to feed its growing population.

“For a fishery to be resilient it needs to be able to prepare for, resist, cope with, recover from, or adapt to any given impact,” said Jacob Eurich, who is a research associate at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, and a fisheries scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “In most cases a fishery will need to have a combination of these capacities to continue to produce food, income and well-being to the people who rely on them.”

It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation, according to Eurich, who led an international cohort of researchers for a paper published in the journal Fish and Fisheries. Because fisheries are complex marine ecosystems that face unique combinations of circumstances across the globe, achieving climate resilience will require equally diverse strategies, he said.

Fortunately, there are climate resilience success stories to draw lessons from. To gain these valuable insights, Eurich and colleagues examined 18 fisheries that expand our knowledge about how resilience operates across the world.

Read the full article at UC Santa Barbra

New Studies: Climate Change Causes Ocean Quahog to Grow Quicker, Mature Earlier

September 26, 2023 — Climate change has radically altered the life cycle of ocean quahog (Arctica islandica), one of the longest-lived species in the ocean. According to a new pair of studies funded by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS), the species is growing much faster and maturing much earlier as global temperatures have risen over the past 200 years, one of the clearest examples yet of how climate change is affecting marine life.

Because of the ocean quahog’s extreme longevity, they provide a unique record of climate change over the centuries. The oldest ocean quahogs are over 200 years old, and can provide us with insights into the ocean climate before widespread industrialization. The new papers, published in the journals Continental Shelf Research and Estuarine, Coastal, and Shelf Science, examine ocean quahog growth rates, and their changes over time, by examining the age and length data of a large, diverse sample set of ocean quahogs, and finds a clear pattern of biological change over time in response to climate conditions.

In 1800, the average ocean quahog reached full maturity between 18 and 26 years, and reached a commercially harvestable size (according to the standards of the modern fishery, developed in the 20th century) in anywhere from 63 to 119 years. By 2000, ocean quahogs were reaching maturity as early as 8 years, and had reached harvestable size between 26 and 29 years, over three times faster than 200 years ago.

Read the full article at Accesswire

As climate change and high costs plague Alaska’s fisheries, fewer young people take up the trade

September 26, 2023 — Lane Bolich first came to work in Alaska for the freedom and excitement that comes with being a fisher.

A self-described adrenaline junkie, Bolich moved from his hometown in rural Washington state because he loves being on the ocean even in cold winter weather and it gave him the chance to make more money than back home. After working as a deckhand for two years on a family friend’s boat, Harmony, he took the wheel as captain this year at just 20 years old.

Bolich is a rarity in an aging industry with high barriers to entry — equipment and access rights are costly — and increasing unpredictability as human-caused climate change alters marine habitats. As some fish populations dwindle and fewer people pursue the trade, fishers and conservation groups are actively working to bring in and retain the next generation of fishers through grants and training even as the industry continues to shrink in Alaska.

Read the full article at the Independent

NOAA Fisheries releases interactive climate vulnerability tool

September 23, 2023 — A new interactive tool from NOAA Fisheries allows users to access the agency’s data and see how vulnerable fish and their habitats are to climate change.

With data on roughly 400 marine species and habitats, the Climate Vulnerability Assessment Tool can create reports by drawing on the agency’s assessments of fish stocks, protected species, habitats, and fishing communities. NOAA Fisheries develops assessments based on the subject’s level of exposure to environmental changes and its sensitivity to those changes.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

When climate change throws the Pacific off balance, the world’s weather follows

September 20, 2023 — The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world.

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Read the full article at Popular Science

Biden’s offshore wind target slipping out of reach as projects struggle

September 17, 2023 — President Joe Biden’s goal to deploy 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind along U.S. coastlines this decade to fight climate change may be unattainable due to soaring costs and supply chain delays, according to forecasters and industry insiders.

The 2030 target, unveiled shortly after Biden took office, is central to Biden’s broader plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2050. It is also crucial to targets of Northeast states hoping wind will help them move away from fossil fuel-fired electricity.

“It doesn’t mean that there can’t still be excellent progress towards this technology that’s going to do great things for our nation,” said Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, an independent organization that provides guidance and research to the industry.

“It’s just not going to be that size by 2030. It’s pretty clear at this point.”

In recent months soaring materials costs, high interest rates and supply chain delays have led project developers including Orsted (ORSTED.CO), Equinor (EQNR.OL), BP (BP.L), Avangrid (AGR.N) and Shell (SHEL.L) to cancel or seek to renegotiate power contracts for the first commercial-scale U.S. wind farms with operating start dates between 2025 and 2028.

Read the full article at Reuters

Climate change takes habitat from big fish, the ocean’s key predators

September 14, 2023 — This year’s marine heat waves and spiking ocean temperatures foretell big changes in the future for some of the largest fish in the sea, such as sharks, tunas and swordfish.

The rising temperatures of the oceans are especially dangerous for these fish because warming makes their open-water habitats less suitable, scientists who study the species said. Loss of habitat could largely remove some of the most important predators — and some of the most commercially important seafood species — from the ocean.

One recent study, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, predicts that some large species could lose 70% of their habitat by 2100. It’s a sign that this year’s high temperatures aren’t an anomaly but a warning about what the ocean’s future could hold with climate change.

Species of large fish such as marlin and skipjack live in areas that are among the fastest warming ocean regions, projected to increase by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, said Camrin Braun, a marine scientist and an author of the Woods Hole study. That much warming would prompt widespread redistribution of the animals, potentially fundamentally changing sea ecosystems, Braun said.

“Across the board, with life histories so different, we see this consistent signal of loss of habitat,” Braun said. “For sure, their habitat will change. How they respond to that is an open question.”

Read the full article at Spectrum News

Opinion: Oceans are heating up. Who will protect the turtles, whales and fish crossing borders into cooler waters?

September 10, 2023 — It’s been a hot summer. The ocean has been hot too. Marine heat waves, or patches of warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures, are making headlines because we’ve never seen anything quite like what’s going on in the ocean right now.

These heat waves will cause marine species to disappear in some areas and appear in others. Previous scientific research found that mobile marine species — including tuna, penguins and sharks — will shift toward the poles during heat wave events. But a new study published this week shows a much more complicated story of how mobile animals respond to marine heat waves and the costs and responsibilities this movement will carry for countries receiving these species.

An influx of leatherback turtles into a country’s waters may require shutting down or relocating fisheries to avoid entanglement in fishing gear; an influx of blue whales could necessitate speed reductions for cargo vessels to avoid ships striking the animals. When valuable species such as tunas cross borders, the influx nation may need to increase processing plant capacity, while the outflow nation may need to compensate their fishermen for lost revenue.

Waters around the world are seeing these elevated temperatures. A record-breaking marine heat wave is occurring in the North Atlantic, producing the warmest waters seen in the last 170 years. In the Gulf of Mexico, water temperatures off the coast of Florida have surpassed 100 degrees; off Baja California, an unprecedentedly warm ocean generated the first tropical storm to hit Los Angeles in 84 years. Normally, around 10% of the ocean surface is expected to be in a marine heat wave state, but the latest forecast predicts that up to 50% of the ocean surface will experience marine heat wave conditions by this fall.

For the report, my colleagues and I studied the effect of four major marine heat waves from recent years on 14 mobile marine species in the Northeast Pacific (bounded by Alaska, Hawaii and the West Coast of North America). We found evidence of species shifting their habitats in all four cardinal directions.

Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times

Fleeing fish, upended lives

September 7, 2023 — Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” drifts from Karroll Tillett’s workshop, a wooden shed about half a mile from where he was born.

Tillett, known as “Frog” to everyone here, has lived most of his 75 years on the water, much of it chasing summer flounder. But the chasing got harder and harder, and now he spends his time making nets for other fishermen at his workshop, at the end of a dirt path next to his ex-wife’s house.

The house is on CB Daniels Sr. Road, one of several named after two of the fishing clans that have held sway for decades in this small coastal town. Besides CB Daniels Sr. Road, there’s ER Daniels Road and just plain Daniels Road. In Frog’s family, there’s Tink Tillett Road and Rondal Tillett Road.

Read the full article at Reuters