Saving Seafood

How a marine heatwave transformed life along the Pacific coast

July 24, 2025 — Between 2014 and 2016, something very unsettling happened off the west coast of North America. For over two years, ocean waters from California to Alaska were unusually warm – 3.6°F to 10.8°F hotter than normal.

This wasn’t a one-off fluke or a seasonal shift. It was the longest and most intense marine heatwave ever recorded in the region.

The heat lingered, spreading across thousands of miles of ocean. This event reshaped life in the water in devastating ways.

Kelp forests collapsed and entire food chains were thrown off balance. Animals appeared in places they had never been spotted before, and many of them died.

An ongoing coastal crisis

The warm water pushed marine life out of their comfort zones – literally. According to newly published research, 240 species were found far beyond their usual ranges during the heatwave, many of them showing up more than 600 miles farther north than normal.

Northern right whale dolphins and small sea slugs like Placida cremoniana were spotted well outside their typical territory. For some species, the shift was temporary. For others, it hinted at a more permanent change.

As ocean waters heat up, many organisms are following the temperature they’re adapted to – heading toward cooler, northern waters in a bid to survive. But during the historic heatwave in the Pacific, some animals could not move fast enough.

Read the full article at Earth.com

NOAA designates critical habitat for Indo-Pacific coral species

July 22, 2025 — NOAA has placed new environmental restrictions on more than 58,000 acres of ocean bottom in the western Pacific to further protect endangered coral reefs whose habitats have been degraded by a warming climate and ocean acidification.

Critical habitat designations for five coral species will encompass parts of four marine national monuments and one marine sanctuary, according to NOAA. The areas include atolls off American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marinara Islands, northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the Pacific Remote Islands Area.

“The final designations support the recovery of these reef-building coral by protecting the areas containing the habitat characteristics the corals need to reproduce, spread, settle, and mature,” NOAA said of the habitat designations, which come 11 years after the corals received Endangered Species Act protection.

Read the full article at E&E News

Senate budget would shrink NOAA Fisheries’ budget slightly, despite Trump administration’s demand for steep cuts

July 21, 2025 — The Republican controlled U.S. Senate is set up to reject many of U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA Fisheries, proposing a slight decrease for the agency instead.

NOAA has been one of the agencies targeted by the Trump administration for cuts; during the first several months of Trump’s second term, the government has laid off hundreds of NOAA employees and rescinded much of the agency’s climate-related funding. Trump is seeking even deeper cuts, however, to NOAA Fisheries.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Protecting Coral Habitat May Prove Vital As Ocean Becomes More Acidic

July 18, 2025 — Concerning news for coral reefs came out this week in University of Hawaiʻi research, while on the same day long-awaited protections for critical habitats offered some hope.

A paper published Monday in the Journal of Geophysical Research found the oceans around Hawai’i will become significantly more acidic throughout the 21st century, based on climate modeling.

That could do enormous harm to ocean organisms that form hard shells and skeletons, such as shellfish and coral, adding another layer of stress for already struggling species. And the scenarios UH researchers used for their models show to what extent carbon emission-driven climate change will make matters worse.

“Until about 2050, it doesn’t matter which scenario we’re on; we are on a path that has been built up over the last 100-plus years,” said Brian Powell, one of the four UH physicists who worked on the paper.

After 2050, however, he said the global carbon output will determine which scenario becomes reality.

“We don’t have to be on the business-as-usual track,” Powell said. “We can try to do better.”

On Monday, the National Marine Fisheries Service also announced protections for habitats around the world critical to endangered coral species, including in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The announcement came over a decade after the islands’ initial endangered designation.

David Derrick, one of the lawyers with the Center for Biological Diversity who sued to provide those protections, said that the Endangered Species Act played a vital role in their work. According to him, the law “gives groups leverage to hold the (government’s) … feet to the fire.”

Read the full article at Civil Beat

MARYLAND: Maryland’s blue crabs — and its crabbers — are having a rough season

July 15, 2025 — In Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, two populations are under threat: the iconic blue crab and the crabbers whose livelihoods have depended on this fishery for hundreds of years.

This season, survey counts of the iconic crustaceans hit one of their lowest points on record. That has driven up costs at restaurants at a time when disposable income is scarce and inflation is driving up costs of food and other consumer goods.

Luke McFadden, 29, who has been crabbing since he was 18, says he’s seen a rough start to the season.

“We’re trying to offer them to the consumers as cheaply as possible, being able to cover our cost,” he said. “But I get it, you know, it’s tough out there.”

At the family-run crab house, Pit Boys, in Annapolis, a dozen crabs will cost customers between $75 and $140, depending on size, according to seafood manager Charlie George. That’s “a lot higher” than previous years, an effect he and others attributed to fewer crabs in the bay.

According to the 2025 blue crab advisory report, the total blue crab population has dropped to an estimated 238 million, down from 317 million last year. That’s the second-lowest level since the annual winter dredge survey began in 1990.

Trump’s NOAA pick stands by budget cuts, calls staffing ‘a top priority’

July 10, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told a panel of U.S. senators on Wednesday that he would make it “a top priority” to fill staffing shortages created by recent firings and buyouts across the National Weather Service, while also standing by the administration’s proposal to make drastic cuts to weather and climate research budgets.

In a confirmation hearing imbued with concern over how to prevent disasters like the deadly Texas floods, Neil Jacobs shared ideas such as using satellites to improve severe weather warnings and “modernizing” NOAA’s weather radios, which use radio signals to broadcast emergency information. Jacobs was not asked to weigh in on what may or may not have contributed to the disaster in Texas. But he stressed a desire to see the more than 120 Weather Service forecast offices across the country be fully staffed.

As Jacobs answered senators’ questions, he signaled a future in which the agency’s sprawling weather and climate research enterprise could be diminished and more closely tied to the process of weather forecasting. And he repeatedly hinted at opportunities for government scientists to collaborate with the private sector, something that Republican strategists emphasized in the policy plan known as Project 2025.

Read the full article at The Washington Post

These Cod Have Been Shrinking Dramatically for Decades. Now, Scientists Say They’ve Solved the Mystery

July 7, 2025 — A new study reveals that decades of overfishing have altered the evolution of cod in the eastern Baltic Sea.

The research, published in the journal Science Advances on June 25, aimed to answer a question that had puzzled scientists for decades: What’s behind the dramatic size change in eastern Baltic cod?

These fish used to be enormous. In 1996, the biggest Baltic cod grew more than three feet long. By 2019, however, their sizes had been cut in half, and the cod’s weight was but a fraction of its previous glory. Now, the average cod can sit in a person’s cupped hands.

For decades, fishers in the Baltic Sea caught cod relentlessly, using large nets. Smaller fish could escape more easily, presenting an external pressure to remain smaller. But directly connecting the population’s decrease in size to evolution—and not other environmental factors, such as pollution or temperature change—is notoriously difficult for scientists.

Regulators banned fishing of eastern Baltic cod in 2019 due to a population collapse, but their size still shows no signs of bouncing back. In the new study, scientists find that overfishing did not merely remove the biggest individuals—it changed the genetic composition of the cod population, predisposing them to remain small.

“Human harvesting elicits the strongest selection pressures in nature,” Thorsten Reusch, a marine ecologist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany and co-author of the paper, tells Emily Anthes of the New York Times. “It can be really fast that you see evolutionary change.”

Read the full article at The Smithsonian Magazine

Warming Gulf of Maine Buffers Ocean Acidification—For Now

July 7, 2025 — In the face of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Gulf of Maine is thought to be particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification. Its vulnerability has to do with temperature: The waters of the gulf are cold, and cold water dissolves carbon dioxide more easily than warmer water does. Increased carbon dioxide decreases the pH of the ocean (making it more acidic), a concern for the health of the region’s ecosystems as well as its lucrative shellfish industry.

But determining seawater chemistry is complicated. It requires advanced equipment and the assessment of complex physical, chemical, and biological processes. Until now, no long-term data existed to put individual measurements into context, so scientists did not know how acidity in the region’s waters was trending.

Using ocean chemistry recorded in algae, researchers have now constructed a nearly 100-year history of acidity (pH) in the region. The analysis, published in Scientific Reports, shows that ocean acidification, seen around the world, has been delayed in the gulf.

NOAA budget spells out plans to reduce spending and abandon climate research

July 2, 2025 — A new budget document from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spells out in detail what many scientists and researchers both in and out of the federal government have feared since a White House budget proposal in the spring.

If approved by Congress, it would reduce NOAA’s expenses by 30%, roughly $2 billion, and the 12,000-member staff by 18%.

It would eliminate the agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and zero out funding for its climate, weather and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes, which work to improve forecasting and better understand weather patterns and the ocean. That includes an office that helps support the pioneering carbon dioxide monitoring on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, and another that supports the National Sea Grant program and its aquaculture research. Sea Grant is a 50-year-old federal university partnership that assists coastal communities and local economies with understanding, conserving and using coastal resources.

Read the full article at USA TODAY

The ocean is changing colors, researchers say. Here’s what it means.

June 20, 2025 — Warming waters are causing the colors of the ocean to change — a trend that could impact humans if it were to continue, according to new research.

Satellite data shows that ocean waters are getting greener at the poles and bluer toward the equator, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

The change in hue is being caused by shifting concentrations of a green pigment called chlorophyll, which is produced by phytoplankton, Haipeng Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper, told ABC News.

Phytoplankton are photosynthetic marine organisms. As algae, phytoplankton has photosynthetic pigments, which reflect green light and cause the waters around it to appear primarily green, Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of the paper, told ABC News. Where phytoplankton are absent, the water appears blue.

Read the full article at ABC News