Saving Seafood

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

Are Gulf sharks really an ‘overwhelming problem’? It’s complicated, experts say

August 12, 2025 — Florida anglers say sharks are snatching their catches at unprecedented rates, calling it an “overwhelming problem” and blaming a boom in Gulf shark numbers.

But scientific research paints a more complicated picture.

Scientists who study sharks acknowledge that depredation — the act of fish being eaten by an underwater predator while on a fisherman’s line — is a growing concern in some areas, especially Florida. They cite several potential drivers of increased shark-human conflict, including climate change-related shifts in shark behavior and rebounding populations of some species.

But they note that changes in human behavior — such as more people fishing and heightened awareness of shark encounters through social media — may also play a role.

Now, researchers are working to learn when and why these encounters happen and how to prevent them.

Matt Ajemian, an associate research professor studying the issue at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, cautions against calling shark depredation a crisis, noting that historical accounts show similar encounters have long occurred.

“I don’t call it a problem,” he said. “I try to call it a challenge.”

Read the full article at the Bradenton Herald

The world’s longest marine heat wave upended ocean life across the Pacific

August 8, 2025 — More than a decade since the start of the longest ocean warming event ever recorded, scientists are still working to understand the extent of its impacts. This unprecedented heat wave, nicknamed “The Blob,” stretched thousands of kilometres over North America’s western coastal waters, affecting everything from the smallest plankton to the largest marine mammals.

Between 2014 and 2016, when this heat wave occurred, water temperatures soared between two to six degrees C above average.

One would be forgiven for thinking this is no big deal. After all, temperatures fluctuate more than this on land most days. But not so in the ocean, where temperatures are normally much more stable because of the enormous amount of energy it takes to change them.

Although the duration of this multi-year warming event made it the first of its kind, it offers a glimpse into a future with climate change, where heat waves like this will be more frequent.

Read the full article at the Conversation

Gulf of Maine sees rising pH, defying expectations of increasing ocean acidity

July 31, 2025 — The Gulf of Maine—home to commercial fisheries for oysters, clams and mussels—has unexpectedly avoided an increase in seawater acidity, helping to preserve the health of its fisheries.

“Contrary to expectation,” a team of scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, we … find that pH has increased (+ 0.2 pH units) over the past 40 years, despite concurrent rising atmospheric CO2.” (Determining the decades-long trend required measurements of boron isotopes within annual skeletal bands built by crustose coralline algae. More about that later.)

The Gulf’s acidity levels are unexpected because atmospheric levels of  continue to climb. And because carbon dioxide is absorbed faster and easier into , the frigid waters of the Gulf would be expected to take in more carbon. More carbon in water generally lowers pH and increases acidity.

“One goes down and the other goes up,” said Alan Wanamaker, an Iowa State University professor of earth, atmosphere, and climate and a paper co-author. “That’s what we’ve seen in the .”

Read the full article at PHYS.org

A record catch of krill near Antarctica could trigger an unprecedented end to fishing season

July 29, 2025 — Trawling near Antarctica for krill — a crustacean central to the diet of whales and a critical buffer to global warming — has surged to a record and is fast approaching a never before reached seasonal catch limit that would trigger the unprecedented early closure of the remote fishery, The Associated Press has learned.

The fishing boom follows the failure last year of the U.S., Russia, China and two dozen other governments to approve a new management plan that would have mandated spreading out the area in which krill can be caught and creating a California-sized reserve along the environmentally sensitive Antarctic Peninsula.

In the first seven months of the 2024-25 season, krill fishing in Antarctica reached 518,568 tons, about 84% of the 620,000-ton limit that, once reached, will force the fishery to automatically close. In one hot spot, the catch through June 30 was nearly 60% higher than all of last year’s haul, according to a report from the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CCAMLR, the international organization that manages the world’s southernmost fishery.

Read the full article at Associated Press