Saving Seafood

Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs Is a Climate Solution

May 16, 2023 — On a recent spring evening at Crave Fishbar in New York City, the oysters resting on beds of ice hailed from Long Island, Virginia, Washington, Cape Cod, and British Columbia. But once they’d been slurped, all of their shells went to a single place­: New York Harbor.

As a participant in the Billion Oyster Project, Crave Fishbar is in its eighth year of collecting shells to help restore the oyster reefs in New York Harbor. The restaurant’s servers, who include many aspiring actors, tell the origin stories of the daily array of oyster options—the better the story, the greater the popularity of that brand, said Jeremy Benson, general manager of the Upper West Side location.

But the best story the team tells is that of the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit founded in 2014 that has organized 15,000 volunteers and 60 restaurants to restore oysters at 15 reef sites across New York’s five boroughs.

The effort seeks to bring back the harbor’s oyster population—which was destroyed by overharvesting and pollution in less than 100 years—by collecting used shells, installing them in critical locations, and “seeding” baby oysters on top to form reefs.

In addition to donating shells, Crave Fishbar employees have learned about the bivalve’s ability to clean the water and make shorelines more resilient to climate change. Every year, they join other volunteers who remove plastic forks from shell piles, clean cured shell, and load cages destined for the harbor, a body of water that The New York Times has described as “once an open sewer.”

Read the full article at Civil Eats

Carbon Is Robbing Crabs of Their Senses

May 14, 2023 — Pacific populations of sweet-tasting Dungeness crabs are on the decline, and researchers from the University of Toronto say they’ve found a potential culprit: acidic ocean water related to climate change. The acidic water affects how molecules bind to the crabs’ smell-detecting antennae, which they use to scavenge for food on the sea floor.

For the Dungeness, as with most crabs, its sense of smell is critical to its survival, as it has poor vision and relies on short antennae for finding food, mating and avoiding predators. The antennae “flick” through the water, allowing scent molecules to collide with nerve cells on the appendages, which transmit to the crab’s brain.

“Losing their sense of smell seems to be climate related, so this might partially explain some of the decline in their numbers,” says Cosima Porteus, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, in a press release.

Read the full article at Discover Magazine

Panel: Climate change, not wind prep, is threat to whales

April 25, 2023 — Climate change, spurred by the burning of fossil fuels, is the biggest danger to marine life including whales, a panel of Democratic officials and environmental groups said Monday.

The gathering, held in an oceanfront conference room as a half-dozen dolphins frolicked in the ocean behind them, also strongly criticized a bill in the House of Representatives containing numerous incentives for oil and gas companies, and which eliminates several environmental protections currently in effect.

It also was a retort to opponents of offshore wind development, who claim that preparation for wind farms off New Jersey and New York are killing whales along the U.S. East Coast. Numerous federal and state agencies say there is no evidence that the deaths are related to offshore wind survey work.

The event came a week after U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. and other New Jersey Congressional Democrats wrote to the White House Council on Environmental Quality “demanding real solutions in response to the death of marine mammals off New Jersey’s coast.”

Read the full article at the Associated Press 

Biden admin is rushing to industrialize US oceans to stop climate change: ‘Environmental wrecking ball’

April 25, 2023 — The Biden administration is pushing full steam ahead to massively expand offshore wind development across millions of acres of federal waters, actions that critics warn would have dire ecological and economic impacts.

Days after taking office, President Biden issued an executive action ordering his administration to expand opportunities for the offshore wind industry as part of his aggressive climate agenda to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stop global warming. Months later, he outlined goals to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, the most ambitious goal of its kind worldwide.

“Two years ago, President Biden issued a bold challenge to move America towards a clean energy future,” Deb Haaland, the secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), said earlier this month. “The Interior Department answered that call and is moving rapidly to create a robust and sustainable clean energy economy with good-paying union jobs.”

In May 2021, the DOI’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project 12 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, marking the first ever large-scale offshore wind approval. Then, in November 2021, the agency approved the 130-megawatt Southfork Wind project off the coast of Long Island, New York, the second commercial-scale offshore project.

Read the full article at Fox News

El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals

April 18, 2023 — It’s coming. Winds are weakening along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Heat is building beneath the ocean surface. By July, most forecast models agree that the climate system’s biggest player – El Niño – will return for the first time in nearly four years.

El Niño is one side of the climatic coin called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

Read the full article at The Conversation

El Niño watch issued by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center

April 16, 2023 — El Niño, a recurring climate pattern that periodically disrupts entire ecosystems of marine life and can influence weather events in the United States and across the globe, will “likely develop” again this summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Thursday.

The agency’s climate prediction center had earlier issued an El Niño Watch as part of its latest weather outlook assessment for April 2023, which forecasted the upcoming shift in ENSO, the acronym scientists use to describe an alternating system of contrasting climate phenomena called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. This kind of advisory is issued when weather conditions favor the development of El Niño within the next six months, according to NOAA.

Weather conditions are currently considered neutral, as they have been since a particularly lengthy term of La Niña — El Niño’s converse, which is often associated with worsening drought and more severe hurricanes — ended at the beginning of March. At the time, climate scientists said there was an estimated 60% chance that El Niño would emerge by the fall season.

Read the full article at CBS News

Aquaculture is crucial in fight against climate change, but lack of public awareness is a major hurdle

April 5, 2023 — For thousands of years, humans have used aquaculture to raise aquatic animals and plants—and now, research has shown that the practice can help increase the worldwide food supply with low greenhouse gas emissions.

Oral histories date aquaculture to 4000 B.C., according to a lesson from North Carolina State University’s Sea Grant program. The first known written record of aquaculture dates back to the fifth century B.C., with the practice likely originating in China.

The practice has existed in what is today the United States for thousands of years, Peter Kareiva, president and CEO of the Aquarium of Pacific, noted.

“Native Americans had clam gardens, where they terraced the coast, and native Hawaiians had special fish ponds,” he said. “It’s an old technology, but more recently with modernization, it’s the fastest growing food sector in the world.”

Modern fisheries raise various species in large enclosures in bodies of water, Kareiva said. Other operations farm algae and shellfish—mostly clams, mussels and oysters, which require less equipment and work because they remain stationary and do not require feeding by the farmers.

For decades there has been a stigma associated with seafood farming, Kareiva said, including diseased fish escaping and infecting wild fish as well as concerns about efficiency.

“Often they were being fed fishmeal,” Kareiva said. “So you’re catching fish to feed fish, and the amount you had to feed them to get new fish meat was not that efficient.”

Advances in the industry, however, have made aquaculture much more sustainable and efficient, Kareiva said, which is important because in the fight against climate change, it should play a major role due to its resistance to unusual weather phenomena on land and the massive amounts of emissions generated by land-based food production. But a lack of public eduction continues to shroud seafarming in outdated misconceptions.

Read the full article at Long Beach Post

Pacific Territories Are Getting Millions To Address Climate Change. Is It Enough?

April 5, 2023 — In American Samoa, the oceans are rising and the land is sinking.

Even the territory’s largest private employer — the StarKist tuna cannery that provides nearly 80% of all private employment — sits along the water’s edge.

That makes recent federal investments in island infrastructure all the more important, especially when it comes to climate resiliency.

But a lingering question is whether it will be enough.

Earlier this year, representatives from the U.S. Government Accountability Office traveled to American Samoa to meet with members of the territory’s newly formed climate resilience commission, chaired by Lt. Gov. Talauega Eleasalo Vaalele Ale.

They discussed, among other things, the challenges American Samoa and other Pacific Island territories face when it comes to competing against states for federal funding.

“As a small island in the middle of the ocean, we feel the effects of climate change every day,” Talauega told GAO officials. “We see it in the rising tides and we feel it in the increased heat in the day. We are mindful of the constant change and have refocused our efforts through this commission.”

Read the full article at Civil Beat

Report on growing specter of climate change warns of threats to StarKist and regional economy

April 4, 2023 — A report on Climate Change in the Western Pacific recently released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council drills down on the effects of climate change on American Samoa and warns that the loss of StarKist and the tuna industry due to the implications of climate change would be devastating not only to American Samoa but also to other Pacific communities it supports — particularly Samoa, Niue, Tokelau and Tonga.

In the report, the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant, says American Samoa’s sea level rise of 2.6­4.6 feet by 2100 would severely impact coastal infrastructure.

As reported earlier by Samoa News, infrastructure in American Samoa is extremely vulnerable to sea level and was worsened by the rapid sinking of the islands, triggered by the 2009 Samoa earthquake and predicted to last for decades. This subsidence is estimated to lead to roughly twice as much sea level rise by 2060 as what was already predicted from climate change alone.

“As sea level continues to rise, the future of businesses like the StarKist Samoa cannery, located at sea level in Pago Pago Harbor, are in question,” stated the report.

“Loss of this industry due to the implications of climate change would be devastating to American Samoa and the communities it supports.”

Tuna exports from American Samoa are valued at approximately $353 million per year, with canned tuna from StarKist American Samoa comprising 99.5% of the total, the report details.

Read the full article at Samoa News