Saving Seafood

‘Ticking time bomb’: Ocean acidity crosses vital threshold, study finds

June 10, 2025 — The deep oceans have crossed a crucial boundary that threatens their ability to provide the surface with food and oxygen, a new study finds.

Nearly two-thirds of the ocean below 200 meters, or 656 feet, as well as nearly half of that above, have breached “safe” levels of acidity, according to findings published on Monday in Global Change Biology.

The fall in ocean pH is “a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” Steve Widdicombe, director of science at the United Kingdom’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), said in a statement.

The study was funded in part by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency that has been targeted for steep cuts by the Trump White House, in large part because of its role in investigating climate change.

Some of the biggest changes in deep water are happening off the coast of western North America, home to extensive crab and salmon fisheries, the study found.

Read the full article at The Hill

See How Marine Heat Waves Are Spreading Across the Globe

June 9, 2025 — Unusual heat waves have occurred in all of the major ocean basins around the planet in recent years. And some of these events have become so intense that scientists have coined a new term: super marine heat waves.

“The marine ecosystems where the super marine heat waves occur have never experienced such a high sea surface temperature in the past,” said Boyin Huang, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in an email.

The seas off the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland experienced an unusually intense marine heat wave, one of the longest on record, starting in April and the temperature rise happened much earlier in the year than usual. Australia and its iconic coral reefs were recently struck by heat waves on two coasts.

Scientists define marine heat waves in different ways. But it’s clear that as the planet’s climate changes, the oceans are being fundamentally altered as they absorb excess heat trapped in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases, which are emitted when fossil fuels are burned.

Hotter oceans are causing drastic changes to marine life, sea levels and weather patterns.

Some of the most visible casualties of ocean warming have been coral reefs. When ocean temperatures rise too much, corals can bleach and die. About 84 percent of reefs worldwide experienced bleaching-level heat stress at some point between January 2023 and March 2025, according to a recent report.

Last year, the warmest on record, sea levels rose faster than scientists expected. Research showed that most of that rise in sea levels came from ocean water expanding as it warms, which is known as thermal expansion, not from melting glaciers and ice sheets, which in past years were the biggest contributors to rising seas.

Excess heat in the oceans can also affect weather patterns, making hurricanes more likely to rapidly intensify and become more destructive. In the southwest Pacific, last year’s ocean heat contributed to a record-breaking streak of tropical cyclones hitting the Philippines.

“If we understand how global warming is affecting extreme events, that is essential information to try to anticipate what’s going on, what’s next,” said Marta Marcos, a physicist at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.

Dr. Marcos was the lead author of a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found that climate change has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of marine heat waves in recent decades.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Experts issue warning after observing dramatic shift in key fish species: ‘They might get flushed out’

June 5, 2025 — Some fish stay in the same cozy bodies of water all year long. Others, like the alewife, a fish found in the waters of the Northern Atlantic Ocean, migrate between different areas to spawn and live. But changing weather patterns are affecting alewife migration, potentially harming their entire lifecycle, reported WMTW News 8 Portland.

What’s happening?

Alewives are anadromous fish; they spawn in freshwater but live the rest of their lives in saltwater. They’re commonly found in the Gulf of Maine, where they live and feed for a few years before returning to the freshwater areas they spawned in to start a new lifecycle.

Zach Whitener, research associate at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, told WMTW News 8 Portland that the changing climate, namely, changing precipitation patterns, is affecting alewives and other migrating fish species.

“If we haven’t had enough rain and the lake level isn’t high enough, they can’t physically get out of their lakes when they want to,” said Whitener. “Conversely, if there is a very big storm, they might get flushed out of their lake when they didn’t want to.”

Read the full article at TCD

Cooler waters ahead for Gulf of Maine

June 3, 2025 –A new seasonal forecast developed by NOAA scientists predicts cooler bottom-water temperatures across the Gulf of Maine this spring and summer, making a notable shift for one of the fastest-warming ocean regions in the world.

The experimental outlook, released as part of NOAA Fisheries’ 2025 New England State of the Ecosystems Report, points to a southward movement of the eastern Gulf Stream and a potential influx of cooler Labrador Slope and Scotian Shelf waters as key drivers behind the recent trend. As a result, scientists expect bottom temperatures in the Gulf to be between 0.9 and 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than average.

“The cooling trend from the Labrador Shelf region is significant and could have important effects on local marine ecosystems and fisheries,” said Vincent Saba, a research fishery biologist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

NOAA predicts colder than normal deep-water temperatures for the Gulf of Maine

May 30, 2025 — The Gulf of Maine will again experience colder than normal bottom-water temperatures, according to a new forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA projects deep water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine will be cooler by 0.9 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, compared to the seasonal average. The outlook is based on new models developed by NOAA researchers that provide large-scale predictions of the ocean and regional ecosystem changes.

Read the full article at Maine Public

Marine carbon dioxide removal: How fishermen can have a voice

May 28, 2025 — This article is the second in a series for commercial fishermen about marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). mCDR is a set of experimental techniques that could someday play a major role in combating climate change by accelerating the ocean’s uptake and storage of heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere.

In this article, we survey contemporary field-wide planning initiatives focused on supporting mCDR research and decision making. Each of these initiatives represents a potential opportunity for the fishing community to strategically engage in shaping the future of mCDR. Then, we describe early efforts to consider interactions between fisheries and mCDR. Finally, we invite fishermen and their representatives to apply to serve on a newly formed Commercial Fishing Industry Thought Leadership Forum on mCDR.

Readers can learn more by attending a May 28 webinar on “Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal: What Fishermen Need to Know”,hosted by the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign, Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, and other partners.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MAINE: How climate change impacts alewives and other migrating fish in Maine

May 14, 2025 — If you have ever experienced an alewife migration, you know it is a true Maine experience that you must see to believe. As temperatures warm in Maine, alewives are beginning their remarkable migration into the Gulf of Maine. These small but mighty fish face new challenges as climate patterns shift.

“I love alewives, I think they are the most important fish in the sea and the river and the lake,” says Zach Whitener, Research Associate at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “When you see them scurrying up their brooks, they’ll swim on their side through half an inch of water. They are such determined to get where they want to go.”

Alewives join several species including blueback herring, American shad, and Atlantic salmon that migrate from ocean to freshwater. “These are anadromous fish, which means they live in the ocean as adults, but they spawn in freshwater,” Whitener explains. “In freshwater, the fish don’t have much competition as juveniles.”

After feeding in the ocean for three to four years, these fish return to their birthplace to spawn in the same lakes where they were hatched.

The Gulf of Maine serves as a “grocery store for most of the North Atlantic,” but climate change is creating complex challenges for migrating fish.

Read the full article at WMTW

US senator warns of warming, plastic threats to world’s oceans and fisheries

May 9, 2025 — U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) took to the Senate floor 7 May to warn his colleagues of the threat the warming climate and plastic pollution poses to the world’s oceans and fisheries.

“In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations’ worth of heat,” Whitehouse said. “That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world’s coral reefs are bleaching out – over 80 percent of the world’s reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Scientists warn coral restoration can’t keep pace with global reef collapse

April 30, 2025 — Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and published earlier this month in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts. Its results indicate most unsuccessful projects fail due to prohibitive costs, lack of global coordination, location unsuitability, and bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures, during which coral becomes white due to stress.

Despite “public perception and scientific enthusiasm” for coral restoration, we can’t restore our way out of this one, the study finds.

“Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay.

Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive, particularly when looking at the scale of the problem we are facing.”

“It is much more cost-efficient to prevent degradation of reefs in the first place than having to restore the damage afterwards,” Ferse said.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Ice all but disappeared from this Alaskan island. It changed everything.

April 28, 2025 — This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures — 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days — when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck.

It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground.

Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them.

Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last.

The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres — the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era — including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul’s largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant.

Read the full story at The Washington Post