Saving Seafood

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

Lessons from the front line — Florida’s fight with sea level rise

March 26, 2020 — In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, many people are dreaming of Florida as a retreat from long days of self-isolation. Hundreds of miles of beautiful beaches, azure skies, shimmering oceans, teeming wilderness including barrier reefs and the Everglades, and strands of picturesque keys and islets. But this paradise is staring down a menace of its own — a rising sea level — and it’s time for a paradigm shift to help us save the Sunshine State. How that battle plays out will have huge implications for other coastal regions across the rest of the United States.

Floridians are experiencing the undeniable impacts of sea level rise firsthand on a daily basis. For Florida’s environment, the signs of danger and damage are everywhere. Saltwater is inundating the Florida Bay, exacerbating an already hyper saline ecosystem and negatively impacting fish stocks and sea grass.

Mangroves, which are estuarine trees that thrive in salty habitats, are creeping northward into the Everglades and taking over critical freshwater habitat that serves as important rookeries for birds and as nurseries for freshwater fish and reptiles such as alligators. In South Florida, rising seas stand to upset the balance between the fresh water and salt water environments, possibly reshaping the bays, wetlands and waterways of the greater Everglades ecosystem.

Read the full story at The Hill

Why marine protected areas are often not where they should be

March 26, 2020 — There’s no denying the grandeur and allure of a nature reserve or marine protected area. The concept is easy to understand: limit human activity there and marine ecosystems will thrive.

But while the number of marine protected areas is increasing, so too is the number of threatened , and the health of  is in decline.

Why? Our research shows it’s because marine protected areas are often placed where there’s already low , rather than in places with high biodiversity that need it most.

Not where they should be

Many parts of the world’s protected areas, in both terrestrial and , are placed in locations with no form of manageable human activity or development occurring, such as fishing or infrastructure. These places are often remote, such as in the centres of oceans.

And where marine protected areas have been increasing, they’re placed where pressures cannot be managed, such as areas where there is increased ocean acidification or dispersed pollution.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Understanding Ocean Changes and Climate Just Got Harder

March 24, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

A new study shows that two important indicators for understanding and predicting the effects of climate variability on eastern North Pacific marine ecosystems are less reliable than they were historically. This finding has important implications for fisheries and ecosystem management from Alaska to California.

Until recently, oceanographers and fishery biologists summarized and understood complex and
long-term relationships between regional fish stock productivity and ocean climate patterns using the Pacific Decadal Oscillation index (PDO) and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO).

The PDO accurately described the climate pattern north of 38 degrees N, and the NPGO described the pattern S of 38 degrees N. These two indices captured climate patterns that dominated North Pacific ecosystems for much of the 20th century.

“We were able use these indices to describe changes in collective environmental features including sea surface temperature, sea surface height, sea level pressure, salinity, chlorophyll-a, and ocean nutrients. They also helped us understand and predict changes in the productivity of species like plankton and fish that are sensitive to long-term weather patterns without having to understand specific relationships between individual species and their environment,” said Mike Litzow, NOAA fisheries oceanographer and study lead. “We could count on these indices as reliable tools to summarize this broad suite of climate-biology-relationships.”

Read the full release here

Warmest Oceans Ever Force Tuna Titan to Start Protecting Fish

March 24, 2020 — Helping the canned tuna industry cope with climate change tops an already lengthy to-do list for Darian McBain, chief sustainability officer at the Thailand company that owns the Chicken of the Sea and John West brands.

In a business long accused by activists of abusing workers and killing dolphins, McBain’s responsibilities at Thai Union Group Pcl typically focused on improving labor rights in the supply chain and reducing the abandoned fishing gear on the high seas.

“Climate change hasn’t been the No. 1 topic,” she said. “Now, the climate emergency has to be a lot stronger part of the dialogue.”

The industry hasn’t yet confronted the magnitude of the problem, McBain said.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

NOAA Fisheries Part of International Team to Study Salmon in Gulf of Alaska Under Continuing Warm Conditions

March 13, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries scientists are part of an international team that set sail on April 11. They are studying the impacts of continued warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska on Pacific salmon survival.  It has been estimated that one-third of all Pacific salmon spend the winter in the Gulf of Alaska. While reduced in size compared to previous years, the current marine heatwave affecting the Gulf remains one of the top five largest heatwaves on record in the North Pacific in the last 40 years.

“Salmon affect more people culturally, economically, and recreationally than any other fish in the world,” said Doug Mecum, Deputy Regional Administrator for NOAA Fisheries Alaska Region. “This International Year of the Salmon expedition in the Gulf of Alaska expands international salmon research on the high seas to build understanding of how a changing climate may influence salmon ocean habitats, distributions, and productivity.”

Scientists suspect young salmon that can find sufficient food and experience enhanced early marine growth are those that best survive their first winter at sea. The survival of these fish largely determines the size of subsequent adult salmon populations. So, scientists think that environmental conditions have the greatest influence on salmon survival during their first year at sea.

“We know that ocean and climate conditions play a major role in regulating salmon abundances,” said Wess Strasburger, who will serve as chief scientist on the first leg of the survey. “But we don’t have a good understanding of the mechanisms regulating salmon abundances in the ocean.”

Read the full release here

Is Climate Change Causing Sharks To Bite Humans? The D.C. Metro Thinks So

March 11, 2020 — Can taking Metro prevent shark bites? That’s the contention of an ad in stations and trains throughout the region. It’s part of a Metro public relations campaign to highlight the effects of climate change and how taking public transit can help. If you’ve seen the shark bite ads and wondered about them — you’re in good company.

“As someone who studies sharks and shark conservation, and in fact who has been involved in studies of climate change and sharks, this caught my attention,” says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist. The ad caught his attention, he says, “because it’s nonsense.”

The ad shows a black shark fin on an orange zig-zag background. It reads: “More CO2 could lead to increased shark bites. Keep the sharks at bay. Take Metro.”

Metro’s other climate change ads are on pretty solid scientific ground. There’s one about arctic ice melting and one about extreme weather — both well known consequences of climate change. Other ads focus on more obscure impacts — how climate change is affecting wine and beer producers. Still, says Shiffman, “The agricultural consequences are fairly well documented and not controversial.”

Read the full story at WAMU