Saving Seafood

In a tiny explosion of birth, coral scientists see hope for endangered reefs

April 23, 2020 — Keri O’Neil almost missed the tiny grains expelled by the ridge cactus coral that she studies at the Florida Aquarium’s Center for Conservation.

The small pellets, measuring just one-eighth of an inch long, were easy to miss against the colorful backdrop of knobby ridges and creases of the unusual species.

“That first day, we weren’t even sure what we were looking at,” said O’Neil, a senior coral scientist at the aquarium.

What O’Neil and her colleagues had witnessed was a ridged cactus coral giving birth.

The scientists say it’s the first time this type of coral — which can look vaguely like a cross between a head of lettuce and a human brain — has reproduced naturally in a lab. The successful births offer hope for conservationists who are racing to save Florida’s endangered coral reefs.

Read the full story at NBC News

The Extinction Crisis Devastating San Francisco Bay

April 22, 2020 — Larry Collins is a big, gregarious man with tobacco-stained teeth, a salty tongue, and the commanding presence of a sea captain. For 40 years he has earned his living as a commercial fisherman, slinging wild-caught seafood from a bustling warehouse on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Collins loves his profession; it has put enough money in his pocket to raise kids, buy a home, and save up for retirement in one of the most expensive cities in America. Sitting in his cramped office, with the smell of fresh fish wafting in from the docks, he talked about the days when more than 4,000 boats would head out from California’s ports each season and ply the waters of the Pacific Coast, trapping crabs and netting huge runs of Chinook salmon.

“I will give you the best salmon year in my whole career. It was 1988. We caught 1.4 million salmon in California, and another 800,000 escaped up the river,” he said with obvious nostalgia.

That era, though, is long gone. These days, the local fishing industry is a withered remnant of its former self. In 2018 “we caught maybe 175,000 salmon, and 80,000 went up the river,” Collins told me. “Fifty-three boats delivered 50 percent of what was caught.” While some salmon seasons have been much better than others, such as the robust 2019 season, “the fishery has probably been reduced to 5 or 10 percent of what it used to be.” Cut off from their ancestral breeding grounds by enormous dams, preyed on by invasive species, and deprived of the freshwater flows that are crucial to sustaining their populations, the salmon have suffered long-term decline and face an increasingly grim future.

Read the full story at The Nation

Return of ‘the Blob’ could intensify climate change impacts on Northeast Pacific fisheries

April 22, 2020 — A large marine heatwave would double the rate of the climate change impacts on fisheries species in the northeast Pacific by 2050, says a recently released study by researchers from the University of British Columbia and University of Bern.

In 2013, a large marine heatwave, nicknamed the ‘Blob’, occurred in the northeast Pacific Ocean. From the coast of Alaska to Baja California, the Blob had a significant impact on the  and fisheries in this region; an impact that lasted for several years.

The new study, released in the journal Scientific Reports, combined the latest , ocean and fish modelling approaches to quantify the future impacts of marine heatwaves like the Blob on fish stocks along the west coast of Canada and USA. The resulting models showed that future ‘blobs’ would exacerbate climate change impacts on these important fish stocks, causing them to decrease in biomass and generating shifts in their distribution, which, in turn, would impact the fisheries sectors in this region.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

West Coast fishing communities’ vulnerability to climate change assessed in new study

April 17, 2020 — Climate change is warping the West Coast marine ecosystem. Warm waters are driving species north. Acidification and deoxygenation are threatening coastal species.

Fishermen are intimately familiar with these impacts. When the marine heat wave of 2014 and 2015 – dubbed “the Blob” – raised water temperatures for months on end, fishermen saw landing revenues of salmon and hake drop. That heat wave foreshadowed the increased and more severe heat waves that are likely to come.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Hope for the oceans in a time of COVID-19

April 14, 2020 — The following was released by the Environmental Defense Fund:

The global COVID-19 pandemic gives us all pause about what the future holds. Our focus and attention are on all those hurt by this terrible disease. But for many of us, this is also a time of deep reflection about society and the world we’ll inhabit when this scourge is over. So for me, it’s also a moment to reflect on the prospects for the ocean, one of the planet’s fundamental life-support systems — making it vital to human health and well-being.

A just-released article in Nature, by Professor Carlos Duarte of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and colleagues, argues that the global ocean can once again return to abundance, rebounding from overfishing and pollution by 2050, if humanity puts its shoulder to the wheel and redoubles efforts across all types of threats. We emphatically agree.

Here, we dive into what such lofty ambitions might require, through one of the key lenses that Duarte and company identify: sustainable fishing.

First, peer-reviewed research shows very clearly that sustainable fisheries management works.  That should come as no surprise. Our own work with University of California, Santa Barbara and others (Costello et al., 2016) modelling the world’s fisheries showed that the “upside” of informed and effective management rapidly outweighs the downside of unsustainable fishing (which would otherwise deplete more than 85% of fish populations). Our modelling shows that such management approaches would allow full rebuilding of most stocks (and total global fish abundance) in less than a decade — restoring fish as a valuable asset both for nature and human needs. This exciting finding was recently underscored by a deep and systemic analysis (Hilborn et al., 2020) showing that, in fact, when good management is put in place, fish and fisheries respond impressively.

Read the full release here

University of New England Shares NSF Grant on Lobsters and Climate Change

April 7, 2020 — A study on how warming ocean water impacts the early life stages of lobster will bring together two undergraduate colleges, a premier research institution, and a state agency.

The University of New England applied for the $860,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and intends to share it with Hood College in Maryland, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, and the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Warming Gulf of Maine waters may be stunting lobster growth

April 2, 2020 — The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99% of the world’s oceans. And the trend may be having an impact on Maine’s most valuable commercial fishery, if temperature affects lobster larvae and their success in growing to adulthood, scientists say.

The University of New England in Biddeford, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, the Maine Department of Marine Resources and Hood College in Frederick, Md., have received an $860,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study that impact.

“We’ll be studying how temperature influences how larvae settle, where they settle and how successfully they settle,” Markus Frederich, a UNE marine science professor helping to lead the project, said in a news release Tuesday. “The findings of this project will help us make more specific predictions of how many lobsters there will be in the Gulf of Maine in the future.”

Maine’s lobster catch was valued at $485.4 million last year, when Maine lobster harvesters landed 100.7 million pounds. It was a 17% decline compared with 2018, but landings still topped the 100-million-pound mark for the ninth year in a row.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Pollution Has Slowed Around The World. Scientists Wonder How That Will Affect Maine

April 2, 2020 — Atmospheric and oceanographic scientists are just as concerned as anyone about helping their friends and family, the nation and the world make it through the trials of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is also their job to pay attention to a kind of grand experiment that’s underway — an unprecedented hiatus in human pressure on global ecosystems and what that hiatus could mean on the ground, and on the water, for Maine.

Paul Mayewski is the director of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. He says that the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the pause button on pollution worldwide.

“Unfortunately, like 9/11, this is a situation in which there is a tremendous shutdown in activity, even more dramatically than 9/11 because it is happening all over the world,” he says.

For scientists such as Mayewski, it’s a chance to study phenomena that hearken back to the pre-industrial era and, some believe, could provide a snapshot of what a post-fossil future could look like.

Read the full story at Maine Public

New online maps show East Coast fish species shifts

April 1, 2020 — A new series of interactive maps graphically portray long-term shifts in fish populations off the East Coast, as changing ocean temperatures push species like black sea bass northward.

Published through the online on the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal, the maps chart major change since the 1970s that have affected commercially and recreationally important finfish species living along the East Coast.

Using the free public-access portal at portal.midatlanticocean.org users can automatically animate or toggle through hundreds of maps representing fish distributions during the spring or fall seasons from the 1970s through 2019. The portal maintains 5,000 map layers that can superimpose data for commercial fishing hot spots, marine life habitats, zones being examined for offshore wind development and other ocean activities.

Many of the maps confirm trends seen by fishermen and biologists of species moving to waters further north and further offshore since the 1970s. Black sea bass have become a well-known example; once straying into southern New England waters, black sea bass have over the decades moved past Cape Cod to become established in the Gulf of Maine.

“Our analysis and the maps make no assumptions as to the factors causing these shifts,” said Chris Bruce, Global Information Systems manager at The Nature Conservancy in Virginia and a member of the portal technical team, in a statement. “However, there is no shortage of scientific research to refer to on how factors like climate change and increasing water temperatures are impacting marine habitats.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Ocean Species Are Shifting toward the Poles

March 31, 2020 — For centuries, fishers in Narrangansett, R.I., have plied the waters of the northwestern Atlantic for herring—small, schooling fish that are also a staple for ocean predators. But as climate change warms the world’s seas, the herring these fishers rely on are vanishing at the southern end of their range and turning up more often at its northern edges. This situation is playing out in ocean waters the world over: concentrations of marine animal populations have been shifting away from the equator and toward the poles during the course of the past century, according to one of the most comprehensive analyses of marine species distributions to date. These movements could wreak havoc on food webs and endanger the livelihoods of people who depend on key fisheries, researchers say.

“These are changes that are actually taking place in established, local communities,” says study co-author Martin Genner, a fish ecologist at the University of Bristol in England. “It’s about changes in the species people know in their environment, in the abundance of the stuff that’s already there.”

The study, published Thursday in Current Biology, analyzed how the quantity of 304 marine species—including tiny phytoplankton, seagrass, algae, fish, reptiles, marine mammals, and seabirds—has changed over the past century. The researchers gathered data from 540 abundance measurements taken in oceans around the world since the late 1800s, from the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska and through the equator to the Southern Ocean off of Antarctica. They found that studies conducted nearer to the poles were more likely to show increases in a species’ population and that those conducted nearer the equator were more likely to show a decline.

Read the full story at Scientific American