August 25, 2020 — First the coronavirus, now hurricanes. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council canceled the Aug. 24-28 Council meeting due to developing hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the Council said in a press release over the weekend.
The Question and Answer session scheduled for the afternoon of Wednesday, Aug. 26, also is canceled.
August 24, 2020 — Policy reforms and technological improvements could drive seafood production upward by as much as 75% over the next three decades, research by Oregon State University and an international collaboration suggests.
The findings, published recently in Nature, are important because by 2050 the Earth will have an estimated 9.8 billion human mouths to feed, a 2 billion increase in population from 2020. Seafood has the potential to meet much of the increased need for protein and nutrients, researchers say.
August 21, 2020 — Alaska’s highly prized salmon – a favorite of seafood lovers the world over – are getting smaller, and climate change is a suspected culprit, a new study reported, documenting a trend that may pose a risk to a valuable fishery, indigenous people and wildlife.
The study, led by University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF) scientists, found that four of Alaska’s five wild salmon species have shrunk in average fish size over the past six decades, with stunted growth becoming more pronounced since 2010.
Hardest hit is Alaska’s official state fish, the Chinook salmon, also known as king salmon.
Chinooks on average are 8 percent smaller than they were before 1990, according to the study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications. Also shrinking are Alaska’s sockeye, coho and chum salmon, the report said. The findings are based on data from 12.5 million samples collected over six decades.
August 19, 2020 — The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is a reminder of the devastation disease outbreaks can cause. But such disasters do not only affect humans. New research led by Claire Sanderson, a wildlife epidemiologist and immunologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, shows that disease outbreaks among marine mammals have quietly been on the rise. Between 1955 and 2018, a sixth of marine mammal species have suffered a mass die-off caused by an infectious disease.
Reports of disease-induced mass die-offs in marine mammals have been increasing since at least 1996. This could be due in part to increased surveillance. However, it’s also likely that scientists are still underestimating the true numbers of outbreaks in these populations. Marine mammals travel great distances in remote parts of the oceans, and often the only indication that something has gone wrong is when carcasses start washing up on shore.
Disease dynamics in marine systems are relatively unexplored compared to those on land. To address this, Sanderson combed through decades of published work documenting the occurrence of disease-driven mass deaths. The majority of outbreaks, she found, were caused by viruses such as influenza A and strains of Morbillivirus—viruses that cause pandemic flus and measles in humans, respectively.
Bacteria are the next most common causes of mass die-offs, but these die-offs tend to be less severe. On average, a viral outbreak causes roughly 7,000 marine mammal deaths, while a bacteria-induced mass mortality event causes 350 deaths. Compared with death tolls from the largest outbreaks in human populations these may appear small, but for already threatened animals such as Mediterranean sperm whales and pilot whales, even the loss of a few animals endangers the population’s long-term survival.
August 17, 2020 — In 2019, Alaska experienced its warmest month, summer, and year on record. This year, it recorded some of the hottest average May temperatures on the globe. America’s northernmost state is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the world—and much more rapidly than the continental U.S.
Warming oceans and melting sea ice also present opportunities for Alaskan fisheries and commercial shipping. Changing water temperatures may introduce new fish species into Alaskan waters; increased access for cargo and tanker ships, tour boats, and government vessels will boost sectors like tourism and shipping. The blue economy, which embraces the idea that sustainable economic growth and ecological conservation can coexist, provides a welcome roadmap for the management of new fisheries and increased shipping traffic.
Similar challenges arise in the fishing and shipping sectors. Although warming waters introduce new fish species, they adversely affect traditional species such as salmon and Pacific cod, which are Alaska food staples and export commodities. Warming waters may push some fish northward into international Arctic waters — raising the possibility of conflict over these resources. The U.S. must promote adherence to international law and preserve freedom of navigation.
August 17, 2020 — Mark Ring has been fishing the Stanley Thomas for nearly 30 years. With its red hull, the sturdy boat is the watercraft incarnation of Ring himself—a burly guy with permanently ruddy cheeks just above the hairline of his Vandyke beard. It is his second boat. It is also his last. Ring started lobstering when he was a teenager. Back then, he recalls, he didn’t have to go far from shore to set his traps. He’d head out and, barring thick morning fog, he could see the coastline and hundreds of lobster buoys bobbing in the waters before him. “You could drop your cages and hear them hit the bottom,” Ring says in a steep North Shore accent, leaning against the Stanley Thomas’s worn center console while remembering the old days. He’d haul his yellow traps up from the sea floor, the ropes slimy with algae, the cages bursting with lobsters aggressively clawing to get out. After a typical nine-hour day, Ring would return to the marina, hoist his traps onto the wet deck, and offload 2,000 lobsters.
That’s all changed now. The days are longer and the haul is harder won. When Ring motors out predawn from the backshore Gloucester marina where he’s docked the Stanley Thomas for years, he must power out farther to deeper, colder water. “The lobsters are just not settling in 6 feet of water like they did 15 years ago,” he says. “They want to find the optimum temperature. And that temperature is at 20 feet.” When Ring heads back in at the end of a long day, the lobsters in his traps have far too much legroom. He is netting less than half of what he used to.
In the face of climate change, throughout New England, the American lobster is vanishing, and the lobsters that remain are quickly heading farther out to sea in search of colder waters. Rising pH levels in the waters closer to shore have also contributed to weaker shells, which reduce the chances the lobsters will make it to market alive. More often than not, lobstermen are tossing this weak-shelled catch back into the ocean. Such factors help explain why lobstermen across New England are seeing the weight of their landings continue to dip; last year, Maine’s landings dropped by 21 million pounds, to about 100 million, the lowest in more than a decade.
That’s a steep decline, but it’s nothing compared to what will become of the industry if the self-coronated “Prince of Whales,” New Hampshire’s Richard “Max” Strahan, has his way. He has all but made it his mission to end lobster fishing in order to save the endangered North Atlantic right whale—and, as a result, the future of the beloved lobster roll as we know it is looking pretty bleak. His adversaries have a different nickname for him: Mad Max.
A career endangered-species activist, Strahan sports an overgrown mustache, a floppy fisherman’s hat, and a smug grin. He’s filed more lawsuits than he can practically count on behalf of the right whale, and never eats seafood. “I’ve ruined more than a few clambakes,” he says. “Just try to put a lobster in a pot in front of me!” He has been arrested multiple times, and his frequent outbursts have earned him a police escort at most meetings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, where he shows up to advocate for whales and also trade insults with lobstermen. For very good reasons, his only listed contact is a post office box.
August 14, 2020 — Last October, lobstermen fishing off the coast of southern New England noticed the lobsters getting more active. That’s fairly common, says Mark Sweitzer, a commercial fisherman out of Port Judith, Rhode Island.
“It’s not unusual for there to be a big pop of lobster in September or October,” says Sweitzer. “Fall’s our best fishing.”
But along with the lobster came something more unusual: a temperature spike on the seafloor, about 150-200 feet down. The temperature jumped from about 50 degrees to 60 — “a big, big change,” says Sweitzer — and stayed there for 38 days, from October 10 to November 15.
Sea surface temperature can change rapidly, rising or falling with strong winds or a storm. But at the bottom, temperature changes much more slowly. “So to get a temperature change that big on the bottom, that is major,” says Sweitzer. “Something caused that to happen. That wasn’t a few warm nights.”
August 11, 2020 — Overfishing, dams and pollution are among the factors that have steeply reduced the population of an ecologically important fish on the East Coast, regulators have said.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission recently completed an assessment of the population of American shad and found it to be “depleted,” the commission said. Changing ocean conditions and climate change have also likely played a role in reducing the fish’s population from historic levels, it said.
August 11, 2020 — When an intense heat wave strikes a patch of ocean, overheated marine animals may have to swim thousands of kilometers to find cooler waters, researchers report August 5 in Nature.
Such displacement, whether among fish, whales or turtles, can hinder both conservation efforts and fishery operations. “To properly manage those species, we need to understand where they are,” says Michael Jacox, a physical oceanographer with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration based in Monterey, Calif.
Marine heat waves — defined as at least five consecutive days of unusually hot water for a given patch of ocean — have become increasingly common over the past century (SN: 4/10/18). Climate change has amped up the intensity of some of the most famous marine heat waves of recent years, such as the Pacific Ocean Blob from 2015 to 2016 and scorching waters in the Tasman Sea in 2017 (SN: 12/14/17; SN: 12/11/18).
“We know that these marine heat waves are having lots of effects on the ecosystem,” Jacox says. For example, researchers have documented how the sweltering waters can bleach corals and wreak havoc on kelp forests. But the impacts on mobile species such as fish are only beginning to be studied (SN: 1/15/20).
August 5, 2020 — Today researchers announced the size of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, the official measurement NOAA uses to track its size year over year. This comes on the heels of bad news from another NOAA report indicating that the volume of Gulf shrimp landings in June 2020 was the lowest ever recorded.
Researchers found that the dead zone measured 5,048 square kilometers, slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island. This year’s dead zone is much smaller than predicted, not because nitrogen pollution flowing into the Gulf was lower, but because Hurricane Hanna dispersed it at the time it was measured.
Hurricanes have dispersed the dead zone in previous years, causing its size to be smaller than expected given data on nitrogen pollution flowing into the Gulf in the same year. In fact, earlier this year Louisiana University and NOAA researchers predicted, assuming no hurricane, that nitrogen loading levels in the Gulf would cause a dead zone that was 20,000 square kilometers, which is about the size of New Hampshire.
On its face, this may seem like a silver lining. But these hurricanes will likely make tracking the dead zone size even more challenging in the years ahead. And with climate change expected to increase hurricane size and intensity in the Gulf between now and the end of the century, it’s clear that there are long-term challenges to measuring the Gulf dead zone. To make matters worse hurricanes have a negative impact on Gulf fishing industries, too.