Saving Seafood

Earth’s oceans are hotter than ever — and getting warmer faster

January 14, 2020 — The world’s oceans hit their warmest level in recorded history in 2019, according to a study published Monday that provides more evidence that Earth is warming at an accelerated pace.

The analysis, which also found that ocean temperatures in the last decade have been the warmest on record, shows the impact of human-caused warming on the planet’s oceans and suggests that sea-level rise, ocean acidification and extreme weather events could worsen as the oceans continue to absorb so much heat.

“The pace of warming has increased about 500 percent since the late 1980s,” said one of the study’s authors, John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. “The findings, to be honest, were not unexpected. Warming is continuing, it has accelerated, and it is unabated. Unless we do something significant and quickly, it’s really dire news.”

Abraham and his colleagues found that the rate of ocean warming accelerated from 1987 to 2019 to nearly 4½ times the rate of warming from 1955 to 1986.

Read the full story at NBC News

MAINE: Lobstermen say 2019 catch came late, but good prices made a profitable year

January 13, 2020 — Maine’s 2019 lobster catch was down from recent years, but after worries of a big drop-off, fishermen say most of them still made money. That’s important to the fishing industry and to coastal businesses, many of which depend on income from Lobstermen to make their own profits.

For much of last year, the lobsters just weren’t showing up, and that had a lot of fishermen worried. After several record and near-record years, there was concern that predictions of a big drop in the catch had come true.

By late September, many parts of the coast were reporting the catch down 40 percent, and even the Commissioner of Marine Resources shared that number at a meeting of New England fisheries leaders. But then came November and December, and fishermen say the lobsters finally showed up.

Read the full story at News Center Maine

Drop in Maine lobster catch might not be as bad as feared

January 10, 2020 — The state with the largest fishing industry for lobster likely experienced a drop in catch last year, but the dip in harvest was probably not as dramatic as initially feared.

Patrick Keliher, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, told Maine Public that initial reports show a harvest of about 100 million pounds of lobster. That would be a drop of nearly 20 million pounds from last year, but still a much higher number than the industry was used to in the 1990s and 2000.

The season initially looked like it could produce a substantial drop in catch, but Maine’s lobstermen finished strong, Keliher said. The price for Maine lobster was also strong, he said.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

To Save Endangered Sharks, You Sometimes Need to Kill a Few

January 9, 2020 — Sharks are some of the most fascinating, most misunderstood and most threatened animals in the world. Many scientists of my generation chose to study these amazing animals explicitly because they’re threatened, and because science can help; this was a major motivation for my choice to pursue a career as a marine conservation biologist, and a major influence in similar decisions by other shark researchers whom I surveyed. As we progress through our education, some of us are surprised to learn that effectively protecting entire species of sharks sometimes requires killing individual sharks—and many non-expert shark enthusiasts are outright shocked to learn this.

Every once in a while, this conflict between the goals of animal welfare and the goals of species-level conservation spill out into the world of social media, when non-expert shark enthusiasts discover that sometimes scientists work with fishermen to gather research samples from the sharks those fishermen have (legally) killed. This happened again recently, when just such a partnership was criticized on twitter by some non-experts.

The truth behind this ‘controversy’ is simple: many of the most important types of scientific data that we need to effectively monitor and conserve shark populations require lethal sampling. To quote a  2010 essay on this topic, “Although lethal sampling comes at a cost to a population, especially for threatened species, the conservation benefits from well‐designed studies provide essential data that cannot be collected currently in any other way.”

Nonlethal methods are being developed and should be encouraged (note: this paper about developing of nonlethal alternatives linked to above is co-written by my PhD supervisor and an Arizona State University colleague)., but they’re a long way from being ready for widespread deployment.

Read the full story at Scientific American

Scientists Work to Save World’s Smallest Sea Turtle

January 9, 2020 — The combination of the curving shape of Cape Cod, the region’s strong winds and currents, and the rapid cooling of the ocean in October and November make for a deadly threat to the rarest and smallest sea turtle on Earth.

That’s the problem being addressed by a series of research projects conducted by an oceanographer at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass., and a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island. The scientists used satellite-tracked oceanographic instruments called drifters to determine where Kemp’s ridley turtles that are late to return south in the fall are most likely to float ashore near death along the Cape Cod shoreline.

The critically endangered turtles lay their eggs on beaches on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in a mass nesting event called an arribada. After spending their first few years far offshore in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda, many of the young turtles visit the waters of the Gulf of Maine to feed on crabs and other small marine creatures that live on the seafloor.

“There are little warm water bridges from the Gulf Stream that come up here, and we think some of the turtles are riding those into the area,” URI student Felicia Page said. “The problem comes when those little bridges close off and the water in Cape Cod Bay and the Gulf of Maine stay warm, which keeps the turtles here longer than they should instead of heading south in September.”

Read the full story at EcoRI

Trump administration sued over endangered Florida sea turtle protection from climate change

January 9, 2020 — Several environmental groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming agencies in the Trump administration have failed to protect green sea turtle habitat as required by the Endangered Species Act.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, says the turtles’ nesting beaches in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as their ocean habitat, face threats from sea level rise brought on by climate change and plastic pollution, according to a news release from the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs.

Other plaintiffs are the Sea Turtle Oversight Protection and the Turtle Island Restoration Network.

Read the full story at the Treasure Coast Newspaper

Little Relief in the Deep for Heat-Stressed Corals

January 8, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

A team of NOAA scientists recently examined more than a thousand hot water events on coral reefs across the Pacific Ocean. Combining on-site monitoring with satellite records, they found that corals in deeper waters are just as exposed to marine heatwaves as those in shallower waters. They published these findings in Nature Scientific Reports.

This is bad news for coral reefs. These unique ecosystems have already experienced the devastating effects of three global coral bleaching events from hotter-than-normal water. Climate models project that temperatures will continue to rise.

“Scientists primarily use satellite-derived sea surface temperatures to understand heat stress and predict coral bleaching,” said Dr. Scott Heron, an associate professor at James Cook University and partner of NOAA. “It’s immediately available, it’s convenient and it has global coverage. However, because the measurement is only at the very surface of the ocean, there is some uncertainty about how well it reflects what is actually happening on deeper reefs.” In fact, the data might be underestimating the stress caused by these higher temperatures.

Read the full release here

Fishermen adapt to environmental change in varied ways, UMaine study finds

January 7, 2020 — A study published in Ecology and Society by University of Maine researchers Kara Pellowe and Heather Leslie found that regulations and financial resources that influence how people fish have as great an effect on how they deal with change as where and how they fish.

The ecologists, based at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, took a deep look at how fishermen adapt to environmental and economic change in Baja California Sur, Mexico.

The study includes research that Pellowe conducted as part of her UMaine Ph.D. dissertation in ecology and environmental science, which she completed in August.

Over the last six years, Pellowe has traveled from New England to Baja regularly, working closely with fishermen who harvest chocolate clams (Megapitaria squalida) near Loreto Bay National Park, on the gulf coast of the Baja peninsula.

“Alternatives matter,” says Pellowe. “Having different ways to respond to environmental and economic change is vital for individuals and communities to be able to thrive in changing conditions.”

Read the full story at the Boothbay Register

The Complicated Role of Iron in Ocean Health and Climate Change

January 6, 2020 — One brisk day in April 2013, as he drove with colleagues along the southern coast of Patagonia, Mike Kaplan spotted a geologist’s treasure trove—an active gravel pit with freshly exposed walls. He pulled over, grabbed the backpack full of digging tools stowed in the car trunk and walked into the large hole.

To Kaplan’s south lay the Southern Ocean, stretching toward Antarctica. Strewn around him was evidence of Earth’s most recent ice age: heaps of crushed rock and gravel released by one of the many glaciers that had once covered North and South America. Standing in the pit, Kaplan spotted what he was looking for: a layer of fine gray silt deposited by ice sheets roughly 20,000 years ago.

A geologist at Columbia University in New York, Kaplan has spent over a decade collecting the sediments that make dust, and studying how that dust, launched from earth to air to sea, influences Earth’s climate, past and present. Dozens of intriguing samples have made their way home with him, stowed in his suitcase or shipped in a duct-taped cardboard box. As he scraped the dark gray sediment into a plastic bag, he felt a rush of anticipation. Given the sample’s location, he thought that it might be just what he needed to test an aspect of a controversial idea known as the iron hypothesis.

Read the full story at the Smithsonian Magazine

Ocean acidification could cost the U.S. billions of dollars

January 6, 2020 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is warning that carbon dioxide emissions and ocean acidification are occurring at unprecedented rates and could cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars as fisheries from Alaska to Florida are threatened.

In a new report that draws on hundreds of studies detailing how NOAA will monitor the impact of ocean acidification on the U.S. over the next 10 years, the agency warns that it “will likely affect commercial, subsistence and recreational fishing, tourism and coral ecosystems.”

Ocean acidification has a significant impact on sea life crucial to thriving seafood industries, including Dungeness crab, Alaska king crab, New England Atlantic sea scallop and a myriad of other species including mussels, clams and oysters. It makes it difficult for organisms to build shells and skeletons.

The report says profitable commercial fisheries in California, Oregon and Washington are at risk, but U.S. regions particularly endangered are Alaska, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Read the full story at The Hill