Saving Seafood

Feared return of ‘The Blob’ fizzles as storms churn, chill Pacific Ocean

February 20, 2020 — It looked big. It looked bad. But the marine heat wave that threatened much of the West Coast in the fall of 2019 has mostly dissipated, at least at the surface.

The Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019, or NEP19, lasted 225 days and at its peak covered about 3.2 million square miles. It was the second longest-lasting and second-largest such event ever recorded in the northern Pacific Ocean over the past 39 years, according to a blog post by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The disturbance decreased below the agency’s classification threshold for a heat wave as of Jan. 5, said Chris Harvey, a fisheries biologist at the agency’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, on Tuesday.

But while NEP19 is mostly gone, it’s not forgotten: Scientists caution that it is not clear the heat wave is entirely dissipated, or that it will not return. The deep ocean is still retaining significant amounts of heat. Monitoring of sea surface temperature readings from multiple platforms, including satellites, ships and buoys will continue.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

Can You Eat Fish and Still Care About the Planet? We Talked to an Expert to Find Out.

February 20, 2020 — As someone who works on environmental policy issues for a living, I’m often asked by my friends and family what they can do that’s “better” for the planet. Drive an electric vehicle? Buy a reusable coffee mug? Bike to work? Eat veggie burgers? Recycle?

Most of the time, I don’t have a satisfactory answer; the answers I have aren’t always that straightforward, helpful, or even desired. If you care about climate change, eating more plants is great, but we also need a comprehensive and aggressive federal climate policy. If you care about plastic pollution, reusable mugs can cut down on single-use plastic, but they need to be used for a long time (several years) to make up for the energy used to make them.

One area that I have no reservations about, however, is seafood. It’s delicious; it’s a great source of micronutrients and omega-3s; and if you know how to shop for it, it can indeed be an environmentally responsible choice for dinner.

Make no mistake: The ocean is in dire need of protection. Overfishing, climate change, and pollution are major threats to the ocean and its ability to sustain human life.

The good news is that there are organizations working to turn those threats around — and you can help by voting with your dollars and choosing sustainable seafood at the grocery store. For example, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international nonprofit organization that has developed a science-based standard for environmentally sustainable fishing. If a wild-capture fishery meets those standards, its seafood products can be packaged with the MSC blue fish label.

Read the full story at Kitchn

Climate Change Is Reshaping Atlantic Fisheries and Sending This Fluke Fight to Court

February 19, 2020 — By his own account, Anthony DiLernia is a guy who can make friends with any angler. For 45 years he’s run a fishing charter boat out of New York Harbor, and he’s served as a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishing Council on and off for almost as long.

But get DiLernia on the subject of Paralichthys dentatus, aka summer flounder, aka fluke, and his voice gets territorial in a harbor kind of a way. What steams him are the wide variances in the amount the fish the federal government permits each state to catch. The uneven allocations are the reason that Southern fishermen routinely travel hundreds of miles to the waters off Long Island to trawl for fluke that local fishermen are forbidden to catch.

These state quotas, which are meant to prevent a species from being fished out of existence, are based on patterns of where the fish were brought in to docks in the 1980s. Back then summer flounder were clustered off Cape Hatteras, which explains, in part, how Virginia and North Carolina together get more than 50% of the annual quota, whereas New York gets only a little more than 7%.

But anyone who spends any time with a net knows warming waters have been pushing fluke steadily north. “You know all those critters who used to live down South? Guess what? They’ve moved to the Bronx,” DiLernia said.

“Our guys will be fishing right along their guys 80 miles off Long Island,” he said with indignation rising in his voice. “We catch more than a couple hundred pounds, and we have to throw the rest back—which is a total waste. Meanwhile, they are filling their freezer and driving back to North Carolina. With diesel fuel. What do you think that does to the environment?”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Study: Ocean fish farming in tropics and sub-tropics most impacted by climate change

February 13, 2020 — Diners may soon find more farmed oysters and fewer Atlantic salmon on their plates as climate change warms Canada’s Pacific coast.

In a study published in Global Change Biology, researchers at the University of British Columbia looked at how  could impact 85  of fish and mollusks that are most commonly farmed in seawater. They found that certain species like Atlantic salmon, European seabass and cobia, and certain areas like the tropics and the Arctic, could be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Take Canada’s Pacific coast: by the mid-21st century, the region is projected to lose between 60 to 84 percent of area currently suitable for Atlantic salmon farming under a strong mitigation, low greenhouse gas emissions, and no mitigation, high emissions scenarios, respectively.

In contrast, the region would gain 46 percent more area for Pacific cupped oyster farming under the high emissions scenario by the 2050s, while Norway and Sweden could respectively see gains between 48 and 100 percent in areas suitable for Atlantic salmon farming.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

ALLEN SUSSER: Strong fisheries management will keep seafood on Florida’s dinner tables

February 11, 2020 — The options for eating seafood are plentiful in Miami, from beach shacks to fine-dining establishments and everything in between. Equally plentiful is the seafood caught by U.S. fishermen that I and other Florida chefs are proud to serve and promote.

The United States boasts some of the best managed fisheries in the world, making American seafood a preferred choice for sustainability advocates like myself and, increasingly, for consumers.

But this wasn’t always the case. Until the mid-1990s, many U.S. fish stocks were being caught at an unsustainable rate — depleting the ocean of many of the species we love to eat.

Fortunately, a wide range of stakeholders committed to sustaining U.S. fisheries and fishermen worked with Congress to make key changes to a federal law known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA). As a result of those changes, more than 45 of our country’s fish populations have recovered from perilously low levels, and the law ensures that they are now fished sustainably. For chefs in Florida, with more than 8,000 miles of coastline along the Atlantic and the Gulf, that means we have access to sustainable seafood on a regular basis.

Read the full story at the Miami Herald

MAX MOSSLER: The truth behind seafood sustainability?

January 31, 2020 — People care about the impact of their diet. According to Nielson1, consumers are more likely than ever to acknowledge the environmental impact of global food production and make choices to reduce their individual footprint – usually willing to pay more for lower-impact foods. So why is seafood not flying off the shelves? It is, by far, the lowest impact animal protein2 and, according to a recent global analysis3, fish populations around the world are healthy in places that manage their fisheries well.

The problem is that people’s perception of ocean conservation and subsequent seafood sustainability is often misinformed. For example, when people are asked4 to rank ocean threats, pollution (like plastic) and overfishing are consistently listed as the top two despite expert consensus that climate change is the most pressing threat. The seafood industry has a largely negative5 reputation among everyday consumers and are increasingly blamed6 for plastic pollution.

Why does the negative perception of seafood persist?

Overfishing throughout the 1980s and 1990s earned the seafood industry its infamous label. High-profile media stories about overfishing coupled with the formation of several international ocean advocacy groups vilified the industry – a reputation the industry cannot seem to shake, despite important policy reforms and strong data that many global fisheries are firmly on a path to sustainability.

Read the full story at New Food

Researchers are now fighting marine poaching with GPS-equipped sea birds

January 31, 2020 — Illegal fishing is one of the biggest threats to oceans today, responsible for roughly 20 percent of the global seafood catch, according to estimates by Pew Charitable Trusts. It devastates marine ecosystems and causes billions in economic damage, injuring and killing untold dolphins, sea birds and turtles, and pushing some species to near-extinction.

Marine poaching is so widespread, in part, because it’s fiendishly difficult to locate illegal vessels in the vast expanses of sea. But a team of researchers from France, New Zealand and the United Kingdom recently discovered a novel way for pinpointing the exact locations of such ships. And in a bit of poetic justice, the method relies on one of the animals at the greatest risk of harm from illegal fishing: the albatross.

Every year, thousands of albatross are inadvertently killed by legal and illegal fishing vessels. The massive birds are particularly vulnerable to longline fishing, which involves dragging thousands of baited hooks behind a boat. Albatross and other birds attempt to eat the bait and get caught on the hook and dragged underwater, drowning in the process.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Climate Change Doesn’t Have To Be Dire For Seafood, Researchers Say

January 29, 2020 — The increasingly worrisome impacts of climate change may not mean the end of seafood on our plates, a new study suggests. In a new paper entitled The Future Of Food From The Sea, researchers found that the ocean could supply over six times the amount of food that it does today—that’s 364 metric tons of protein—but only if we change the way we govern, manage and consume the world’s fish supply. To put it bluntly—if a little too simply—if you’re ready to eat less wild Atlantic salmon and more sustainably farmed seaweed and mussels, keep on reading.

“We’re all used to headlines in the newspaper about the demise of the oceans,” lamented Christopher Costello, PhD, an economist and one of the lead authors of the study who presented the findings on January 16 at the Washington, D.C. offices of the World Resources Institute. “It’s easy to come away from those headlines, many of which I think are quite accurate, thinking a sustainable future ocean will provide less food,” he added. But this shrinking ocean-based food supply isn’t a given, urged Costello. Just the opposite could be true, in fact.

“Food from the sea is uniquely poised to contribute to food security,” Costello explained, because it has a low carbon footprint, is highly nutritious and is far more environmentally efficient to produce as compared to other animal proteins.

Read the full story at Forbes

Gov. Murphy just unveiled N.J.’s master plan for energy and made a big pledge to fight climate change

January 28, 2020 — New Jersey will become the first state in the nation to require builders to consider the impact of climate change if they want their projects approved, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Monday as he unveiled the final version of the state’s new energy master plan.

The Democratic governor outlined the plan in a speech at Stockton University in Galloway, calling the 290-page document “ground zero” for “weaning the state off its century-old addiction to fossil fuels.”

The document lays out the Murphy administration’s vision for how to ensure the state reaches its lofty green energy goals: 50% clean energy by 2030, and 100% clean energy by 2050.

The plan is intended to slash the Garden State’s greenhouse gas emissions, reducing New Jersey’s contribution to climate change.

Murphy warned Monday that climate change is direct threat to New Jersey. He citied a recent Rutgers University report that said sea levels along New Jersey’s coast are expected to rise more than one foot by 2030 and two feet by 2050.

Read the full story at NJ.com

The Pacific Ocean is so acidic that it’s dissolving Dungeness crabs’ shells

January 28, 2020 — The Pacific Ocean is becoming more acidic, and the cash-crabs that live in its coastal waters are some of its first inhabitants to feel its effects.

The Dungeness crab is vital to commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, but lower pH levels in its habitat are dissolving parts of its shell and damaging its sensory organs, a new study found.

Their injuries could impact coastal economies and forebode the obstacles in a changing sea. And while the results aren’t unexpected, the study’s authors said the damage to the crabs is premature: The acidity wasn’t predicted to damage the crabs this quickly.

“If the crabs are affected already, we really need to make sure we pay much more attention to various components of the food chain before it is too late,” said study lead author Nina Bednarsek, a senior scientist with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project.

The findings were published this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency studies ocean acidification and how changing pH levels are impacting coasts.

Read the full story at CNN