Saving Seafood

DANA CONNORS: Does aquaculture fit with Maine’s economic, environmental future? A thorough review will find out.

August 27, 2021 — Sustainability is a word we hear a lot in Maine’s business community. Whether in regards to economic, environmental or corporate practices, our companies are striving to meet the needs of the present, while charting their long-term growth. Ultimately, those that prioritize and meet this responsibility will be best positioned to grow our economy and move our State forward.

In light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, this work takes on a new urgency. The headline alone stating that “Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying” should be enough to make us all step up to the plate and reimagine our future.

Combating climate change will require citizens, government and business to work together. Maine businesses play a vital role in creating innovative solutions to protect our planet. A challenge of this magnitude requires collaboration, not confrontation, to advance the best ideas and policies. Together, we can forge solutions that improve our environment and grow our economy — leaving the world better for generations to come.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News

‘No easy answers’ WHOI building project designed for sea-level rise

August 26, 2021 — The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is one of the leading organizations focused on ocean research, exploration and education. Its vessels roam the world’s oceans, their researchers explore the deepest oceanic canyons and the shallows of a salt marsh.

For an institution that has experienced, researched and documented the impacts of climate change on the ocean, it follows that when it contemplated building a new $100 million dock and waterfront support facilities, WHOI would incorporate sea-level rise into their planning.

“This is critical infrastructure to what we do,” said Rob Munier, WHOI vice president for marine facilities and operations. “Others can contemplate alternatives, including retreat (from the waterfront), but we have to be there. It’s part of our ability to do our mission.”

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Fishery agencies seeking stakeholder input on climate change impacts and concerns

August 26, 2021 — In 2020, a Cape Cod Canal fisherman wrote a letter about the need for federal laws to address shifting fish stocks and maintain sustainable levels amid climate change.

In 2019, a researcher concluded that climate variation and warming waters in the Gulf of Maine contributed to a decline in New England fishing jobs from 1996 to 2017.

In 2021, a Massachusetts fisheries analyst and consultant said researchers are seeing changes they haven’t seen before and are trying to determine the exact causation as it relates to climate change. Over the years, the analyst said they have seen a change in the distribution, productivity, spawning and mortality of fish species.

Such concerns are about to be closely considered under a new federal initiative that will draw representatives of every coastal state from Maine to Florida to strategically plan for future fisheries management amid climate change. The East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Initiative is a multiyear effort that will culminate in the creation of a few likely scenarios that will inform future decision-making by regional fishery councils.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fishers Struggle as Fish Head for the Poles

August 26, 2021 — As climate change raises the ocean’s temperature, some fish species are moving poleward to cooler waters. In the United States, as elsewhere, commercial fishers are trying to adapt. But as a new study of trawler communities along the US east coast documents, fishers’ efforts to adjust are being constrained by a regulatory environment that isn’t adapting with them.

The research, led by Eva Papaioannou, a marine ecologist with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, looked at trawl fishing communities in 10 ports from North Carolina to Maine, where rising water temperatures have been especially pronounced.

Papaioannou and her colleagues dug into government records and vessel trip reports, examining decades of data about vessel activity patterns, distributions of fish stocks, and fish landings. They compared two periods, 1996 to 2000 and 2011 to 2015, and confirmed that the fish these communities are primarily targeting, fluke and hake, had shifted northward by up to 200 kilometers.

The scientists also interviewed members of these communities to find out how they were responding to their changing fishing grounds. “Fishers are on the water every day, so they see these changes, and they’re incredibly adept at dealing with variability,” says Becca Selden, a biologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and a study co-lead.

The team found that the majority of fishers remained in their traditional grounds, but switched to targeting different, more abundant species. “Most prior work assumed that there wouldn’t actually be species switching,” says Selden. “But this was one of the dominant strategies that we observed.” As the scientists wrote in their study, this desire for “spatial stability” of fishing grounds was both the preferred strategy among all fisher communities surveyed, but also the most sustainable practice for local fish stocks.

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

NOAA Open Invitation: Public Listening Sessions on Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful

August 25, 2021 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:

NOAA invites you to a stakeholder listening session in response to Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful. This preliminary report, released by the White House in May, provides recommendations on how the United States should achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030, as directed by President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crises at Home and Abroad.

NOAA wants to hear from the public at large and all interested stakeholders on how best to achieve the 30-percent goal, based on the principles and recommendations in the report. Below are meeting details for two upcoming listening sessions. You are welcome to share this announcement broadly.

Thursday, August 26: Stakeholder Listening Session
Time: 3:00-5:00 PM ET
Dial in: 888-323-9726, Passcode: 890-4233
Webinar: Join Here on the day of the meeting (Conference number: PWXW2317057, Audience passcode: 8904233)

Monday, September 13: Stakeholder Listening Session
Time: 3:00-5:00 PM ET
Dial in: 800-857-5743, Passcode: 727-5932
Webinar: Join Here on the day of the meeting (Conference number: PWXW2317058, Audience passcode: 7275932)

These calls will be recorded. The webinar is view only—all participants must dial in to the phone number above for audio. If you have any issues accessing the WebEx platform or would like to review the slides before/after the session, you can find the presentation and other resources on NOAA’s webpage for Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful.

MAINE: As gulf waters warm, could quahogs be the next big shellfish product?

August 20, 2021 — A new research project is trying to determine whether a species of hard-shell clam, quahogs, can thrive in enough abundance off Maine’s coast to make for a new business opportunity.

The Brunswick office of Manomet, an environmental research nonprofit headquartered in Plymouth, Mass., is partnering with the University of Maine and the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay to study the presence of quahog DNA in the water column.

Determining the level of DNA is considered useful to understanding to what extent the clams are making themselves at home in the gulf.

The study of DNA in this context is called “eDNA” or “environmental DNA,” Marissa McMahan, a senior fisheries scientist with the Brunswick branch of Manomet, told Mainebiz.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Robotic Floats Provide New Look at Ocean Health and Global Carbon Cycle

August 18, 2021 — Microscopic marine life plays a fundamental role in the health of the ocean and, ultimately, the planet. Just like plants on land, tiny phytoplankton use photosynthesis to consume carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter and oxygen. This biological transformation is known as marine primary productivity.

In a new study in Nature Geoscience this week, MBARI Senior Scientist Ken Johnson and former MBARI postdoctoral fellow Mariana Bif demonstrated how a fleet of robotic floats could revolutionize our understanding of primary productivity in the ocean on a global scale.

Data collected by these floats will allow scientists to more accurately estimate how carbon flows from the atmosphere to the ocean and shed new light on the global carbon cycle. Changes in phytoplankton productivity can have profound consequences, like affecting the ocean’s ability to store carbon and altering ocean food webs. In the face of a changing climate, understanding the ocean’s role in taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it for long periods of time is imperative.

“Based on imperfect computer models, we’ve predicted primary production by marine phytoplankton will decrease in a warmer ocean, but we didn’t have a way to make global-scale measurements to verify models. Now we do,” said MBARI Senior Scientist Ken Johnson.

By converting carbon dioxide into organic matter, phytoplankton not only support oceanic food webs, they are the first step in the ocean’s biological carbon pump.

Phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to build their bodies. Marine organisms eat those phytoplankton, die, and then sink to the deep seafloor. This organic carbon is gradually respired by bacteria into carbon dioxide. Since a lot of this happens at great depths, carbon is kept away from the atmosphere for long periods of time. This process sequesters carbon in deep-sea water masses and sediments and is a crucial component in modeling Earth’s climate now and in the future.

Read the full story at Eco Magazine

Fish councils prepare for climate change

August 16, 2021 — The New England Fishery Management Council is joining other East Coast marine management councils to plan for a future marked by the continuing detrimental impacts of climate change.

The project, called East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning, is a response to the accelerating and debilitating impacts on fish stocks and marine habitats caused by the effects of climate change.

“No one knows for sure what the future holds, but a continuation or acceleration of climate change has the potential to strain our existing fishery management system and alter the way fishermen, scientists, and the public interact with the marine environment,” the NFMC stated. “Scenario planning is a way of exploring how fishery management may need to evolve over the next few decades as climate change becomes a bigger issue.”

The other organizations participating in the initiative are the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, NOAA Fisheries’ Gloucester-based Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

The Northeast Regional Coordinating Council, which consists of leadership from the MAFMC, NEFMC, ASMFC, GARFO, and NEFSC, will be the primary decision-making body for the initiative, with the addition of South Atlantic representatives.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Record Salmon in One Place. Barely Any in Another. Alarm All Around.

August 16, 2021 — This summer, fishers in the world’s largest wild salmon habitat pulled a record-breaking 65 million sockeye salmon from Alaska’s Bristol Bay, beating the 2018 record by more than three million fish.

But on the Yukon River, about 500 miles to the north, salmon were alarmingly absent. This summer’s chum run was the lowest on record, with only 153,000 fish counted in the river at the Pilot Station sonar — a stark contrast to the 1.7 million chum running in year’s past. The king salmon runs were also critically low this summer — the third lowest on record. The Yukon’s fall run is also shaping up to be sparse.

The disparity between the fisheries is concerning — a possible bellwether for the chaotic consequences of climate change; competition between wild and hatchery fish; and commercial fishing bycatch.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Sabrina Garcia, a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “I think that we’re starting to see changes due to climate change, and I think that we’re going to continue to see more changes, but we need more years of data.”

The low runs have had ripple effects for communities along the Yukon River and its tributaries — the Andreafski, Innoko, Anvik, Porcupine, Tanana and Koyukuk Rivers — resulting in a devastating blow to the people relying on salmon as a food staple, as feed for sled dogs and as an integral and enriching cultural tradition spanning millenniums.

Read the full story at The New York Times

East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Webinars

August 12, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

In order to help fishing communities and fishery managers prepare for an era of climate change, numerous fisheries management bodies along the Atlantic seaboard have teamed up to launch the East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning project.

The project is being organized by a core team of representatives from the New England, Mid-Atlantic, and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, and NOAA Fisheries.

The team has lined up three kick-off webinars to introduce stakeholders to climate change scenario planning, explain the benefits of participating in the process, outline additional ways to become involved, and begin collecting stakeholder input.

Webinar dates and times are listed below and advance registration is strongly encouraged.

  • East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Kick-Off Webinar #1
    Aug 30, 2021 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM Register for Webinar #1
  • East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Kick-Off Webinar #2
    Sep 1, 2021 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM Register for Webinar #2
  • East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Kick-Off Webinar #3
    Sep 2, 2021 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM Register for Webinar #3