Saving Seafood

A Coveted Fish Is Now a ‘Climate Loser’

August 15, 2022 — In the 1980s, Rich Hittinger’s favorite rite of early spring was chasing winter flounder. On many March days, he anchored his six-meter boat, Ermala—named for his three children, Eric, Mark, and Lauren—in a sheltered cove in Narragansett Bay, the estuary off Rhode Island’s southeastern coast. He and the kids chummed the water with rabbit feed and lowered hooks baited with clam worms, then ducked into the boat’s cabin to warm their bellies with hot chocolate. “They’d put the rod in the holder, and by the time they’d come back, they’d have a fish on the other end,” says Hittinger, who is the vice president of the Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers Association. “They’d catch flounder one after the other.”

Fishermen around Rhode Island shared Hittinger’s passion. Winter flounder, so named because they spawn from December to April, were a valuable commercial species and a dinnertime staple; anglers said that Narragansett Bay was practically paved with the mottled flatfish. In the late 1980s, though, the species began to buckle beneath the weight of overfishing. Managers took the logical step of restricting harvest, but winter flounder never recovered. As of 2019, the southern New England population hovers at just 30 percent of government targets, and catches in Narragansett Bay are a measly one one-100th of their historical apex. “There’s so few of them that recreational fishing is basically closed,” Hittinger says.

For years, winter flounder’s stagnancy was something of a mystery. Today, however, a growing body of evidence implicates a familiar culprit: climate change. Coastal ecosystems along the New England seaboard have been upended by rising ocean temperatures, few more so than Narragansett Bay, where waters have warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius over the past century. This is a troubling realization, because the climate crisis, unlike overfishing, isn’t something that fisheries managers can rectify. It also forces us to confront a series of disturbing questions: What if winter flounder and other climate-stressed fisheries never bounce back? Do we keep trying to rebuild them, even if conditions make their recovery unlikely? Or do we lower our expectations—and perhaps even give up altogether?

“It’s not that we can’t get more winter flounder; it’s that we can’t get 1980 levels of winter flounder,” says Joe Langan, a fisheries oceanographer who conducted his doctoral research on winter flounder at the University of Rhode Island. “The climate of the 1970s is not our current climate. The rules of the game have changed.”

Read the full article at The Atlantic

Climate change and overfishing threaten once ‘endless’ Antarctic krill

August 12, 2022 — Tiny, filter-feeding crustaceans that live in the Southern Ocean — have long existed in mind-boggling numbers. A 2009 study estimated that the species has a biomass of between 300 million and 500 million metric tons, which is more than any other multicellular wild animal in the world. Not only are these teensy animals great in number, but they’re known to lock away large quantities of carbon through their feeding and excrement cycles. One study estimates that krill remove 23 million metric tons of carbon each year — about the amount of carbon produced by 35 million combustion-engine cars — while another suggests that krill take away 39 million metric tons each year. Krill are also a main food source for many animals for which Antarctica is famous: whales, seals, fish, penguins, and a range of other seabirds.

But Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) are not “limitless,” as they were once described in the 1960s; they’re a finite resource under an increasing amount of pressure due to overfishing, pollution, and climate change impacts like the loss of sea ice and ocean acidification. While krill are nowhere close to being threatened with extinction, the 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated that there’s a high likelihood that climate-induced stressors would present considerable risks for the global supply of krill.

“Warming that is occurring along the Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea has caused the krill stocks in those areas to shrink and the center of that population has moved southwards,” Kim Bernard, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, wrote to Mongabay via email while stationed in the Antarctic Peninsula. “This tells us already that krill numbers aren’t endless.”

Concerns are amassing around one place in particular: a krill hotspot and nursery at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula known as “Area 48,” which harbors about 60 million metric tons of krill. Not only has this area become a key foraging ground for many species that rely on krill, but it also attracts about a dozen industrial fishing vessels each year. The amount of krill they catch has been steadily increasing over the years. In 2007, vessels caught 104,728 metric tons in Area 48; in 2020, they caught 450,781 metric tons.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), the group responsible for protecting krill, has imposed rules to try and regulate krill fishing in the Southern Ocean, but many conservationists and scientists say the rules need to be updated to reflect the changing dynamics of the marine environment. That said, many experts argue that the Antarctic krill fishery can be sustainable if managed correctly.

Read the full article at Mongabay

Examining Marine Life Vulnerability to Climate Change

August 10, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The Pacific Islands Vulnerability Assessment project evaluated the susceptibility of 83 marine species in the Pacific Islands region to the impacts of climate change. We identified key attributes and factors that drive this vulnerability, as well as critical data gaps in understanding climate change impacts on marine life.

The most vulnerable to climate change were the invertebrate group; the least vulnerable were pelagic and coastal groups not associated with coral reefs. Sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, and oxygen concentration are the main drivers of vulnerability among all of the environmental stressors we examined.

The goal of the assessment was to answer key questions:

  • Which species are most vulnerable to climate change?
  • Are there aspects of their life cycle that should be of concern?
  • What are the critical stressors involved?
  • Where should science and management focus efforts to reduce these risks?

Dr. Don Kobayashi, assessment lead, shares, “The project is critically important to the NOAA mission because there are still too many unknowns about the impacts of climate change to our marine fisheries and ecosystems. This work gives us broad insights across many species and across many ecosystems spanning the entire Pacific Islands region. We simply do not have the time to answer pressing questions about climate change by the usual approach of exhaustively studying one or a few species in a single location at a single point in time and moving on. We need more work like this that provides a synoptic bigger picture view of climate change impacts across the board.”

Read the full release here

How the climate bill would shift offshore wind in 4 states

August 10, 2022 — The Democrats’ climate bill would erase former President Donald Trump’s 10-year moratorium on offshore wind in the U.S. Southeast, but few experts are betting on a regionwide surge in projects.

Signed by Trump in 2020, the moratorium banned new leasing for all types of energy off the coasts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. It went into effect last month (Energywire, Sept. 29, 2020).

The “Inflation Reduction Act” — which the Senate passed over the weekend and is expected to be taken up by the House soon — would strip away the ban on offshore wind lease sales, while leaving it in place for oil and gas drilling.

But wind power has not generally experienced warm welcomes in the Southeast. Just one onshore wind farm — the Avangrid-owned Amazon Wind Farm near Elizabeth City, N.C. — currently generates electrons across the four moratorium states. Interest in offshore wind also has been mixed.

Lifting the moratorium may not transform that reality, even if Democrats’ climate bill becomes law, some clean energy advocates and environmentalists acknowledge.

In places such as Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, state officials largely haven’t enacted measures to promote offshore wind. This is in stark contrast to the state guarantees to buy offshore wind power that were crucial to the industry’s emergence in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic.

North Carolina stands out as the region’s clear exception, taking concrete steps to embrace the industry. One of its major utilities, Duke Energy, won the right to generate power from federal lease areas for offshore wind in May, as did French oil and gas major TotalEnergies SE. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, also has laid out specific targets for the sector: 2.8 gigawatts by 2030, and 8 gigawatts a decade later.

Across other states, however, little groundwork has been done to establish offshore wind’s foothold as a future resource. And it remains unclear if, or how quickly, official indifference might transform into boosterism.

In South Carolina, for instance, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster recently signed a law calling for a first study of how offshore wind’s need for locally made parts and staging ports could benefit the state economically.

That could help convince South Carolinians that their state is well positioned to host the industry, said Hailey Deres, program associate at the Southeastern Wind Coalition.

Read the full article at E&E News

Climate change has reversed 900 years of cooling in the Gulf of Maine

August 9, 2022 — Nearly a millennium of cooling in the Gulf of Maine has been reversed over the past century.

That’s the finding of a new study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, led by Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, co-written by the University of Maine and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Scientists have long warned that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most of the world’s oceans — 2021 was yet another year of record warmth — but the lack of long-term records has made it difficult to compare the 20th and 21st centuries to warming or cooling trends for past periods.

The oldest records available come from a station in Boothbay Harbor, where surface water temperatures have been tracked since 1905.

Read the full article at the Bangor Daily News

VIRGINIA: Regulators OK Dominion’s planned wind farm off Virginia Beach’s coast

August 8, 2022 — State regulators on Friday approved an application from Dominion Energy Virginia to build an enormous offshore wind farm off the coast of Virginia Beach and recover the cost from ratepayers.

No parties to the monthslong proceeding had opposed the approval of the project, which will help the utility boost the proportion of its generation that comes from renewable resources. But many had raised concerns about affordability and possible risks to the utility’s captive ratepayers.

In its Friday order, the State Corporation Commission noted that the 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project will likely be the single largest project in Dominion’s history and said that because of its size, complexity and location, it faces an array of challenges. The commission included in its order three “consumer protections,” including a performance standard.

The commission’s order also approved facilities that will connect the wind farm to the existing transmission system.

Read the full article at 13 News Now

Sharing the Tools of Sustainable Fishery Management

August 5, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA:

They say it takes a village. But sometimes it takes a multi-agency, Pacific-wide collaboration.

With help from NOAA Fisheries, the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, and local partners, the U.S. territories of Guam and American Samoa are on their way to developing their first sustainable coral reef fishery management plans. Once completed, these plans will chart a path forward to ensure the islands’ marine resources are around for future generations to enjoy.

“The territories are taking a proactive approach in leading their efforts for sustainable coral reef fisheries management,” said Fatima Sauafea-Le’au, American Samoa coral reef fisheries liaison with NOAA Fisheries’ Pacific Islands Regional Office.

Importantly, added fisheries liaison Jonathan Brown, NOAA will have no ownership of the plans. “The resources that will be managed are within the local jurisdictions,” he said. “We are just in a support role, providing tools to help them develop the plans and helping them form partnerships with entities like The Nature Conservancy.”

One such tool is called FishPath. FishPath provides a suite of potential management options for a species based on answers to a lengthy questionnaire about the fishery. And it can be used in data-limited fisheries, like the coral reef fisheries in the Pacific Islands.

Brown and agency partners held a workshop for Guam’s management agencies in June 2022 to teach them how to use the tool to develop management options. These measures could then be incorporated into their sustainable fishery management plans.

Read the full release here

Sea life may downsize with ocean warming — bringing challenging impacts

August 4, 2022 — The future may be smaller for sea life, according to a new scientific model. Influenced by warming oceanic conditions, microbes and megafauna may not grow as large as they do now.

This shrinking effect, should it occur, could have wide repercussions: reduced food mass at the bottom of the food chain would affect fisheries, leaving less food for people, as well as mean less carbon sequestered in the sea, potentially making climate change worse.

Scientists say the ability to accurately predict these impacts could improve management of ocean resources. But researchers don’t agree on exactly why this sea life shrinkage is happening, and say a variety of factors may need to be considered to make accurate forecasts.

In the new study, researchers present a mathematical model that explains these size reductions as a response to lower oxygen levels in the ocean. Looking at rising temperature and reduced oxygen level forecasts for the next decades, researchers found that zooplankton and other microscopic species could be up to 30% smaller, with impacts reverberating higher up the food chain.

There is a “temperature-size rule,” that describes the tendency for ectotherms (animals whose body temperature regulation depends on external sources) to reach smaller adult sizes under warmer conditions. With climate change escalating, the implications for marine life — and humanity — could be dire.

But so far, direct experimental evidence for this rule mostly comes from organisms with a body mass of less than 1 gram, explained study lead author Curtis Deutsch, a climate scientist at Princeton University in the U.S.

“Our mechanistic model tries to quantify that effect and use it to understand how much smaller things might get in the future,” explained Deutsch, who collaborated with ocean biologists and a paleobiologist to formulate the model. The results “suggest that larger fish [further up the food chain] will also be subject to shrinkage.”

Read the full article at Mongabay

BOEM proposals to mitigate offshore wind fishing impact

August 4, 2022 — The federal Bureau of Offshore Energy Management is looking for fishermen’s comments until Aug. 22 on the agency’s latest ideas on how wind energy companies might mitigate the impacts from building offshore turbine arrays.

On June 23 BOEM released its draft guidance documents presenting the agency’s thinking on ensuring the new U.S. offshore wind industry can work with the nation’s long-established commercial and recreational fishing industries.

The guidance document focuses on four areas:

– Project siting, design, navigation, and access

– Safety

– Environmental monitoring

– Financial compensation

BOEM began soliciting input on mitigation policies in November 2021. That first call brought in 92 comments from individuals, state agencies, wind energy companies and, of course, fishing trade groups and associations.

In the ensuing draft document, financial compensation gets the most attention. Many fishermen, especially those who fish with towed mobile gear like trawl nets and dredges, insist they will be effectively shut out of areas after turbines are erected.

Just how big those future losses may be developed within a separate ‘Appendix A’ in the document that presents BOEM’s ideas for calculating “revenue exposure estimates. Such calculations could determine fair payments to fishermen because of income lost to wind projects.

Estimating fishing effort, catches and value that come from wind lease areas has been intensely debated for years. BOEM’s earliest attempts using federal and state landings reports were hotly disputed by fishing advocates, who collected vessel tracking records to show where proposed wind development sites included heavily used fishing areas.

Since then, BOEM has worked closely with the National Marine Fisheries Service to develop better systems, mapping out the most intensely used and valuable fishing grounds.

The mitigation strategy methodology is built around using federal fisheries catch and revenue data as a starting point. NMFS and its Northeast regional office are the primary source for revenue calculations in that region. The first U.S. wind projects are to be built there, and mitigation measures could be adapted to fisheries on the Southeast, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coasts.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

NOAA Fisheries’ new proposal: a ‘roadmap’ for use of ropeless gear

August 2, 2022 — NOAA Fisheries released its draft Ropeless Roadmap: A Strategy to Develop On-Demand Fishing, as it also announced proposed changes to vessel speed regulations to protect North Atlantic right whales.

The Roadmap now released is an important step in a series of actions NOAA Fisheries is taking to protect and conserve North Atlantic right whales. NOAA Fisheries and its partners are dedicated to conserving and rebuilding the North Atlantic right whale population and those efforts can be followed through the North Atlantic Right Whale Road to Recovery plan, which describes NOAA Fisheries’ actions to halt the current population decline and recover the species.

NOAA is now seeking input on the draft on ropeless roadmap to help protect the North Atlantic right whales.

According to NOAA Fisheries, “endangered North Atlantic right whales are approaching extinction. The latest preliminary estimate indicates there are fewer than 350 individuals remaining and less than 100 breeding females. Primary threats to the species are entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes.

“Climate change is also affecting every aspect of their survival—changing their ocean habitat, their migratory patterns, the location and availability of their prey, and even their risk of becoming entangled in fishing gear or struck by vessels.”

The proposed changes announced by NOAA Fisheries will introduce, as National Fisherman reported, new vessel speed regulations to further protect North Atlantic right whales from death and serious injuries resulting from collisions — part of a multifaceted approach to stabilize and recover this endangered population. The changes would expand the current mandatory seasonal speed restrictions of 10 knots or less and broaden the spatial boundaries and timing of the seasonal speed restriction areas along the East Coast of the United States, incorporating most vessels measuring 35 to 65 feet in length.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman