Saving Seafood

Nations ratify world’s first treaty to protect marine biodiversity in international waters

September 22, 2025 — A major agreement to protect marine diversity in the high seas was struck Friday when Morocco became the 60th nation to sign on, paving the way for the treaty to take effect next year.

The High Seas Treaty is the first legal framework aimed at protecting biodiversity in international waters, those that lie beyond the jurisdiction of any single country. International waters account for nearly two-thirds of the ocean and nearly half of Earth’s surface and are vulnerable to threats including overfishing, climate change and deep-sea mining.

“The high seas are the world’s largest crime scene — they’re unmanaged, unenforced, and a regulatory legal structure is absolutely necessary,” said Johan Bergenas, senior vice president of oceans at the World Wildlife Fund.

Still, the pact’s strength is uncertain as some of the world’s biggest players — the U.S., China, Russia and Japan — have yet to ratify. The U.S. and China have signed, signaling intent to align with the treaty’s objectives without creating legal obligations, while Japan and Russia have been active in preparatory talks.

Ratification triggers a 120-day countdown for the treaty to take effect. But much more work remains to flesh out how it will be implemented, financed and enforced.

“You need bigger boats, more fuel, more training and a different regulatory system,” Bergenas said. “The treaty is foundational — now begins the hard work.”

Read the full article at PBS News

ALASKA: Drone photos suggest a 2014 marine heat wave is still stunting orca growth, reproduction in Alaska

September 16, 2025 — It’s well documented by now that the marine heatwave that hit the Pacific Ocean in 2014 had devastating effects on Alaska’s marine ecosystem and commercial fisheries.

Now, scientists are uncovering long-term impacts on Alaskan killer whales specifically – a harbinger as marine heat waves become more frequent and severe with climate change.

“We’ve learned that females that were growing during those heat wave years grew to smaller sizes,” said John Durban, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium in Boston who has been studying killer whales in the Gulf of Alaska for two decades.

“If you’re smaller as a whale, it means you don’t have as much fasting endurance, you can’t store as much blubber,” Durban added. “So if you go through lean times, you’re less likely to bring a successful pregnancy to term.”

Durban has been partnering with the Alaska-based nonprofit North Gulf Oceanic Society to monitor several hundred resident, salmon-eating killer whales in the Gulf of Alaska. He flies drones over the water, which capture images of the whales from more than 100 feet in the air.

Those images allow researchers to measure how individual whales are developing over time.

The North Gulf Oceanic Society has been monitoring killer whales in the Gulf for more than four decades. Durban said that work became particularly important in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which correlated with an “unprecedented” number of whale deaths among two pods that were exposed to the spill, according to NOAA.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

New England’s shrimp industry is struggling, with fishermen catching few in 2025

September 15, 2025 — There’s an effort underway to bring New England shrimp back to seafood customers — but fishermen have found few of the crustaceans, and the fishing industry that harvests them may face an even longer shutdown.

Fishermen have been under a moratorium on catching shrimp for more than a decade because of low population levels that scientists have attributed to climate change and warming oceans. The harvesters were allowed to catch a small number of shrimp this past winter as part of an industry-funded sampling and data collection program.

Read the full article at News Center Maine

An Annual Blast of Pacific Cold Water Did Not Occur, Alarming Scientists

September 12, 2025 — Each year between January and April, a blob of cold water rises from the depths of the Gulf of Panama to the surface, playing an essential role in supporting marine life in the region. But this year, it never arrived.

“It came as a surprise,” said Ralf Schiebel, a paleoceanographer at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry who studies the region. “We’ve never seen something like this before.”

The blob is as much as 10 degrees Celsius colder than the surface water. In Fahrenheit terms, the water would be 18 degrees colder than the surface water. That cold water is also rich in nutrients from decomposing matter that falls to the ocean floor, providing food for local fisheries and wildlife.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Fishermen shape the future of low-carbon policy

September 11, 2025 — In the push toward a low-carbon future, commercial fishermen aren’t just looking to keep pace; they want a seat at the table.

A report compiled by the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign gathered input from 148 fishing businesses across Alaska, the West Coast, and New England, offering a roadmap shaped by those who know best what it takes to work on the water.

The sixth volume in the six-part series, Fishermen’s Recommendations for New Programs and Policies, lays out a five-pronged strategy based on direct interviews with vessel owners and operators. These recommendations emphasize the need for practical solutions grounded in real-life experience, not just theory or top-down mandates.

“This report was lovingly crafted by and for members of the commercial fishing communities,” the authors noted, “rooted in trust, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to ensuring that this community remains in control of its own clean energy future.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Study reinforces climate change will cause challenges for managing shared fishing stocks

September 5, 2025 — A recently published study has reiterated the long-discussed issue of climate change causing changes in distribution of marine species – which is putting strain on managing shared fishing stocks.

The study, published in Science Advances, examined 347 different “straddling” fish stocks across 67 species that are present in multiple exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and the high seas. Those stocks are often managed via cooperation between multiple coastal states or between multiple regional fishery management organizations (RFMOs).

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Reef Madness: A Baseless Coral Panic

September 5, 2025 — You might have gotten the impression that the Great Barrier Reef—the aquatic wonder off Australia’s coast—is in grave peril. Last month, headlines shouted in unison: Great Barrier Reef suffers worst coral decline on record. Environmental journalists paint a picture of immense devastation driven by climate change.

The truth is much less alarming. Australian scientists have meticulously tracked the reef’s coral cover since 1986. For many years, they published an annual average coral cover figure. The data show that the reef was mostly stable until 2000, then began declining, and by 2012 it had shrunk to less than half its original cover.

But then the reef started growing. It rebounded spectacularly. The scientists stopped publishing their reef-wide average, perhaps because it didn’t further the climate-change narrative. But they continued publishing regional and sectorwide averages, making it possible for anyone to effectively recreate the reef-wide average.

Read the full article at Wall Street Journal 

Climate change is driving fish stocks from countries’ waters to the high seas: Study

September 2, 2025 — Fish and other marine organisms, though deeply affected by human activities, don’t respect human borders. The ranges of many commercially important species in fact straddle the borders of countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and international waters, known as the high seas. This arrangement, which makes fisheries management difficult, is set to get even more complicated as climate change continues to heat up the ocean, a new study says.

The study, published July 30 in the journal Science Advances, found that more than half of the world’s straddling stocks will shift across the maritime borders between EEZs and the high seas by 2050. Most of these shifts will be into the high seas, where fisheries management is much more challenging and stocks are more likely to be overexploited.

“It’s an important issue and an important paper that I think should make anyone concerned about fisheries or the seafood on their plate sit up and pay attention,” Malin Pinsky, an associate professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay.

“The shift towards the high seas that they document would have some really serious consequences, in part because fisheries management tends to be much less effective in the high seas,” added Pinsky, an expert on climate-driven fisheries distribution shifts. “Climate change is sending a whole bunch of fisheries out into the lion’s den because the high seas doesn’t have a great reputation for sustainable fisheries management.”

Among the most serious potential consequences is a loss of fisheries resources for many tropical countries that did little to create the climate crisis, Pinsky and other experts said.

Read the full article at Mongabay

VIRGINIA: Stone crabs are calling Virginia waters home — for the first time ever

August 28, 2025 — The Chesapeake Bay might have a new resident, thanks to warming waters and successful habitat restoration.

Blue crabs are the typical catch in local waters. But crabbers on the bay have reported adult stone crabs in their pots on Willoughby Spit, marking the first time the species has been spotted growing in Hampton Roads.

The find could mark an exciting addition to the crab industry in the Chesapeake Bay, according to Rom Lipcius, a researcher and professor at William & Mary’s Batten School at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Read the full article at The Virginian-Pilot

MAINE: Experts say multiple factors contributing to recent shark sightings off Maine coast

August 15, 2025 — The state says there’s more than one reason behind the recent shark sightings off Maine’s coast, and climate change is one of them.

On Monday, drone video captured a shark, believed to be a great white that was 10 to 12 feet long, near Richmond Island, Higgins Beach, and Scarborough Beach.

It was spotted again near Pine Point Beach on Tuesday.

Matt Davis, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, says shark sightings are becoming more common because people are more on the lookout and warming waters in Maine are something sharks are “warming up to.”

Read the full article at WGME