Saving Seafood

Cooler waters ahead for Gulf of Maine

June 3, 2025 –A new seasonal forecast developed by NOAA scientists predicts cooler bottom-water temperatures across the Gulf of Maine this spring and summer, making a notable shift for one of the fastest-warming ocean regions in the world.

The experimental outlook, released as part of NOAA Fisheries’ 2025 New England State of the Ecosystems Report, points to a southward movement of the eastern Gulf Stream and a potential influx of cooler Labrador Slope and Scotian Shelf waters as key drivers behind the recent trend. As a result, scientists expect bottom temperatures in the Gulf to be between 0.9 and 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than average.

“The cooling trend from the Labrador Shelf region is significant and could have important effects on local marine ecosystems and fisheries,” said Vincent Saba, a research fishery biologist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

NOAA predicts colder than normal deep-water temperatures for the Gulf of Maine

May 30, 2025 — The Gulf of Maine will again experience colder than normal bottom-water temperatures, according to a new forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA projects deep water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine will be cooler by 0.9 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, compared to the seasonal average. The outlook is based on new models developed by NOAA researchers that provide large-scale predictions of the ocean and regional ecosystem changes.

Read the full article at Maine Public

Marine carbon dioxide removal: How fishermen can have a voice

May 28, 2025 — This article is the second in a series for commercial fishermen about marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). mCDR is a set of experimental techniques that could someday play a major role in combating climate change by accelerating the ocean’s uptake and storage of heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere.

In this article, we survey contemporary field-wide planning initiatives focused on supporting mCDR research and decision making. Each of these initiatives represents a potential opportunity for the fishing community to strategically engage in shaping the future of mCDR. Then, we describe early efforts to consider interactions between fisheries and mCDR. Finally, we invite fishermen and their representatives to apply to serve on a newly formed Commercial Fishing Industry Thought Leadership Forum on mCDR.

Readers can learn more by attending a May 28 webinar on “Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal: What Fishermen Need to Know”,hosted by the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign, Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, and other partners.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MAINE: How climate change impacts alewives and other migrating fish in Maine

May 14, 2025 — If you have ever experienced an alewife migration, you know it is a true Maine experience that you must see to believe. As temperatures warm in Maine, alewives are beginning their remarkable migration into the Gulf of Maine. These small but mighty fish face new challenges as climate patterns shift.

“I love alewives, I think they are the most important fish in the sea and the river and the lake,” says Zach Whitener, Research Associate at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “When you see them scurrying up their brooks, they’ll swim on their side through half an inch of water. They are such determined to get where they want to go.”

Alewives join several species including blueback herring, American shad, and Atlantic salmon that migrate from ocean to freshwater. “These are anadromous fish, which means they live in the ocean as adults, but they spawn in freshwater,” Whitener explains. “In freshwater, the fish don’t have much competition as juveniles.”

After feeding in the ocean for three to four years, these fish return to their birthplace to spawn in the same lakes where they were hatched.

The Gulf of Maine serves as a “grocery store for most of the North Atlantic,” but climate change is creating complex challenges for migrating fish.

Read the full article at WMTW

US senator warns of warming, plastic threats to world’s oceans and fisheries

May 9, 2025 — U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) took to the Senate floor 7 May to warn his colleagues of the threat the warming climate and plastic pollution poses to the world’s oceans and fisheries.

“In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations’ worth of heat,” Whitehouse said. “That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world’s coral reefs are bleaching out – over 80 percent of the world’s reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Scientists warn coral restoration can’t keep pace with global reef collapse

April 30, 2025 — Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and published earlier this month in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts. Its results indicate most unsuccessful projects fail due to prohibitive costs, lack of global coordination, location unsuitability, and bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures, during which coral becomes white due to stress.

Despite “public perception and scientific enthusiasm” for coral restoration, we can’t restore our way out of this one, the study finds.

“Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay.

Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive, particularly when looking at the scale of the problem we are facing.”

“It is much more cost-efficient to prevent degradation of reefs in the first place than having to restore the damage afterwards,” Ferse said.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Ice all but disappeared from this Alaskan island. It changed everything.

April 28, 2025 — This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures — 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days — when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck.

It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground.

Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them.

Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last.

The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres — the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era — including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul’s largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Climate threat casts a shadow over Calif. commercial fisheries

April 24, 2025 — A new climate vulnerability study paints a sobering picture for California’s fishing industry, highlighting serious threats to the state’s most iconic and economically critical species, including Dungeness crab, red abalone, and Pacific herring.

The study, first reported by NBC Bay Area’s Joe Rosato Jr., resulted from a collaboration between federal and state scientists and researchers from UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. It evaluated 34 aquatic species for their sensitivity to projected climate change impacts, including warming seas, ocean acidification, and shifting upwelling patterns that drive productivity along the coast.

“The most striking thing that we found is among the species that were ranked as the most highly vulnerable happened to also be some of California’s economically valuable and culturally important species,” said Mikeala Provost, assistant professor of fisheries ecology at UC Davis and a co-author of the study.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

New study paints gloomy picture of climate change’s impact on commercial fishing

April 22, 2025 — A new study of some of California’s most commercially significant aquatic species paints a grim picture for the future of the state’s fishing industry under the growing threat of climate change.

The study, compiled by a host of researchers including federal and state scientists as well as researchers from UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, looked at 34 aquatic species in an attempt to gauge how each would fare under predicted climate change scenarios.

Among the species studied were Dungeness crab, red abalone, Pacific herring, Pismo clams, pink shrimp, Pacific bonito and California spiny lobster. The group ranked each by their level of vulnerability to changing environmental conditions.

“The most striking thing that we found is that among the species that were ranked as the most highly vulnerable happened to also be some of California’s economically valuable and culturally important species,” said Mikaela Provost, assistant professor of fisheries ecology at UC Davis and co-author of the study.

California’s oceans are highly productive due to seasonal upwelling which keeps water temperatures cool and filled with nutrients. But models of future conditions forecast disruption through rising temperatures, deoxygenation and potential changes in circulation.

Read the full story at NBC Bay Area

As New England waters warm, invasive sea squirts move in

April 22, 2025 — At a dock on Cape Cod’s Buzzards Bay, a group of researchers and marine biology students lie on their stomachs, peering over the wooden planks to examine what living things are stuck underneath.

Using fishing nets and kitchen spatulas, they scrape samples into plastic trays for a closer look. Kristin Osborne, a sea squirt expert and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, likes to use her bare hands.

“I said I wasn’t gonna get down here and do this, but I can’t help myself,” Osborne said with a laugh while reaching into the chilly ocean. She has a sea squirt tattoo on her left middle finger.

Sea squirts are a type of filter feeding marine invertebrate officially known as tunicates. These colorful blobs can squirt water when removed from their aquatic homes, earning them the nickname.

Read the full story at WBUR