Saving Seafood

‘Very strong’ El Niño to bring warmer winter, with scorching ocean water for marine life

September 7, 2023 — A tropical weather system called El Niño is beginning its march up the coast of Oregon, bringing with it a warmer winter and inescapable heat for some marine life.

Oregonians on the coast could experience flooding from high tides and rising sea levels. In the mountains, areas hoping for snow are more likely to get rain, which could accentuate the drought plaguing the West. For aquatic species, warming ocean temperatures could spur a northern migration and could be deadly for plankton vital to salmon and other species up the food chain.

Spurred by a change in air pressure over the Pacific Ocean near the equator, El Niño last visited Oregon in the winter of 2018, and has occurred more than 20 times since 1950.

It is both an ocean and atmospheric weather pattern that touches all parts of the West.

The latest system, which recently reached the southern Oregon coast, is predicted to be among the fiercest in years, according to Oregon’s state climatologist, Larry O’Neill. There have only been three El Niños since 1970 that have reached the category of “very strong” as determined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The last one was in 1997.

“Generally the rule of thumb is that El Niño leads to drier, warmer weather,” he said. “In strong years, it’s led to warmer, wetter weather. We don’t know yet how robust those relationships are though.”

Read the full article at the Oregon Capital Chronicle 

ALASKA: Alaska fishers fear another bleak season as crab populations dwindle in warming waters

September 6, 2023 — Gabriel Prout worked four seasons on his father’s crab boat, the Silver Spray, before joining his two brothers in 2020 to buy a half-interest plus access rights for a snow crab fishery that’s typically the largest and richest in the Bering Sea. Then in 2021, disaster: an annual survey found crabs crashing to an all-time low. The red king crab fishery was closed; the snow crab fishery cut to a tenth of the previous year’s take.

After another bad survey last year, the red king crab fishery closed again and the snow crab fishery closed for the first time ever. Suddenly, Prout’s optimism about being his family’s third generation in crab fishing seemed misplaced.

“It’s very hard to find a way to keep going forward,” said Prout, 33. With almost all his expected income gone, he’s scrambled ever since to scratch out a living by working as a salmon tender — using his boat to supply other boats and offload their catch.

Read the full article at WPRI

World fisheries may be ‘resilient’ to impacts of heat waves

September 2, 2023 — Climate change drove ocean temperatures to record heights this summer.

But in a rare piece of good climate news, a study released Thursday suggests that the global fisheries that feed much of the world seem to have weathered heat waves well.

“While [fish populations] are changing in response to climate change, we don’t see evidence that marine heat waves are wiping out fisheries,” Alexa Fredston of Rutgers University, lead author of the study published in Nature, said in a statement.

There’s a big caveat: Fredston’s team looked at heat waves that happened between 1993 and 2019, so the study has little to say about the impact of rising temperatures since then.

And because the studies began back in the 1980s, the bulk of their samples come from a climate that is fundamentally cooler — and more stable — than the one projected for the rest of this century.

Read the full article at the Hill

 

Coastal fisheries show surprising resilience to marine heatwaves

August 31, 2023 — Prolonged periods of unusually warm ocean temperatures, known as marine heatwaves, can have devastating effects on marine ecosystems and have been linked to widespread coral bleaching, harmful algal blooms, and abrupt declines in commercially important fish species. A new study, however, has found that marine heatwaves in general have not had lasting effects on the fish communities that support many of the world’s largest and most productive fisheries.

The study, published August 30 in Nature, relied on data from long-term scientific trawl surveys of continental shelf ecosystems in North America and Europe from 1993 to 2019. The analysis included 248 marine heatwaves with extreme sea bottom temperatures during this period. Trawl surveys, done by towing a net above the seafloor, assess the abundance of bottom-dwelling species that include commercially important fish such as flounder, pollock, and rockfish.

The researchers looked for effects on fish biomass and community composition in the year following a marine heatwave. To their surprise, they did not find evidence that marine heatwaves in general have big effects on regional fish communities.

Read the full article at UC Santa Cruz

Experts fear American fishing industry, boating at risk as Biden prioritizes climate, green energy

August 29, 2023 — The Biden administration has prioritized green energy at the expense of endangered whales and the U.S. fishing industry with regulation that limits both commercial fishing and recreational boating, according to experts.

The Vessel Strike Reduction Rule is a new rule proposed by the Biden administration’s Commerce Department in partnership with The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that would limit the speed of all motorboats over 35 feet from Florida to Massachusetts to 10 knots, or 11.5 miles per hour, for up to seven months of the year. The rule is marketed as a way to protect the endangered right whale, but fishing experts and anglers say the move would have far-reaching implications for their industry.

Meghan Lapp, the fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd., the largest producer and trader of sea-frozen seafood on the U.S. East Coast, told Fox News Digital there are complexities behind fishing that require anglers to know where they can go and what they are allowed to do in that area.

“It’s funny because we joke like you need a law degree to go fishing, but that’s actually the level of regulation that us commercial fishermen are held to,” Lapp said.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, told Fox News Digital that the Biden administration has made fishing more difficult in “pretty much every way they can” under the guise of climate protections, such as the expansion of offshore wind energy infrastructure with marine protected areas at the expense of domestic commercial fishing.

Read the full article at Fox News

Are Alaska Fishing Communities and Fishermen Prepared for Climate Change?

August 28, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

In 2019, commercial fisheries off Alaska produced 5.7 billion pounds of seafood worth $2.0 billion—more than the rest of the United States. It’s the largest private sector employer in Alaska, and employs more than over 31,000 fishermen. Commercial fishing provides critical employment opportunities for isolated coastal communities throughout the state. It also provides food security, cultural transmission, and social connectivity.

Gulf of Alaska communities and boroughs, which are highly dependent on fishing to support their local economies. However, social scientists found that 16 of these communities were relatively unprepared to tackle climate change. In general, local planning that included climate adaptation measures to support fishing and support businesses was very limited.

“We found that several communities had identified some mitigation measures to reduce localized greenhouse gasses or address risks related to climate-driven stressors—floods, drought, coastal erosion, avalanches, and landslides. Yet, only five community plans directly address climate change through action strategies,” said Marysia Szymkowiak, lead author and social scientist from the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “Part of the problem is that federal and state support for community climate change planning is inconsistent. This leaves local communities with inadequate resources to fully execute comprehensive planning to address climate change impacts.”

New NSF-funded program will train future leaders in the face of rapidly changing oceans

August 26, 2023 — With Earth’s oceans facing rapid climate and ecological change, University of Maine faculty will use a $3 million award from the National Science Foundation to create a new training program for graduate students that will support the next generation of marine science and conservation professionals.

Over the next five years, Joshua Stoll, an associate professor of marine policy, and his colleagues will design and implement a new traineeship program for master’s and doctoral students focused on ecosystem science amid rapid ocean change. Their work will support members of coastal communities throughout the Gulf of Maine region, particularly those dependent on fishing and other natural resources, to adapt to climate change.

This new graduate education opportunity, which is funded through NSF’s Research Traineeship program, will support at least 45 master’s and doctoral students, including 23 NSF-funded trainees, in the fields of marine ecology, oceanography, genomics, computational and social sciences. The training will incorporate an emerging discipline called ecosystem-based management.

When will the next ocean heat wave strike? Scientists develop early warning systems

August 24, 2023 — When heat waves began to sweep the world’s oceans in June, Alistair Hobday was not surprised. The biological oceanographer had foreseen the coming temperature spikes in forecasting models he’d helped develop. The massive pool of hot water in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, the coral-killing warmth in the Caribbean Sea, and the sweltering sea in the north Pacific Ocean had all appeared months earlier as orange and red patches on his computer screen at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The forecasts, which weren’t widely disseminated beyond fisheries managers and those in the fishing and aquaculture industry, proved to be a prescient warning of what was to come.

As the global climate continues to warm, scientists around the world have been working to develop models that predict when and where marine heat waves are likely to hit. CSIRO, an early leader, began to produce “experimental” forecasts for Australian waters in 2020. A separate forecast for all of the world’s oceans by CSIRO and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology arrived last year. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled its first global marine heat wave forecast in June. And Chinese scientists are working to develop predictions for their coastal waters. “I think it won’t be more than a year before we’ve got five or six groups forecasting heat waves. This is moving really fast,” Hobday says.

Scientists hope that as the models are fine-tuned, their predictions will be robust enough to alert people 3 months in advance or more, informing decisions for fisheries, aquaculture, and marine conservation. An alarming forecast, for instance, might help a regulator decide to temporarily close fishing for a heat-sensitive species.

Read the full article at Science.org

More marine heat waves could spell disaster for ocean life

August 24, 2023 — Marine heat waves are becoming more frequent under global warming and this is having a significant impact on species’ ability to recover.

Since April, the world has seen record high ocean temperatures and that’s bad news for the plants and animals that call the ocean home.

Longer and more frequent bouts of extreme temperatures can cause the exodus of some species and the invasion of others, with potentially devastating impacts on the resident ecosystem.

Global warming manifests as a gradual increase in temperatures over time around the world, caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions.

However, scientists are finding that the most important impacts come from short-term spikes in temperature.

In the ocean, these discrete periods of extreme temperatures, lasting weeks to months, are called .

Marine heat waves can be generated by either the atmosphere or by ocean processes.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

Ocean off California’s Central Coast may be ‘thermal refuge’ from climate change, study says

August 23, 2023 — In an otherwise warming planet, new research shows that the ocean off California’s Central Coast may be a thermal refuge for marine wildlife.

Cal Poly associate professor Ryan Walter, who teaches physics, and fourth-year physics student Michael Dalsin analyzed temperature data gathered from 1978 through 2020 at a site just north of Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

They found that while other areas of the world see sharp rises in ocean temperatures and more frequent and more intense heatwaves, the Central Coast hasn’t seen such intense trends.

The region still experiences marine heatwaves and cold spells brought on by factors such as the ocean-wide climactic patterns of El Niño and La Niña, but cold current upwelling brought on by strong local winds helps maintain the marine ecosystem along the Central Coast, according to a study by Walter and Dalsin published on July 31.

Read the full story at the Merced Sun-Star