Saving Seafood

Trump’s Budget May Target Climate Programs. Here’s What Still Survives.

April 2, 2026 — President Trump has tried to cut funding for virtually every federal program that addresses climate change. But Congress has been pushing back, sometimes with surprising bipartisan support.

This year, lawmakers quietly saved funding for the government’s popular Energy Star program, which ranks appliances based on energy conservation and cost savings. Bipartisan majorities also salvaged weather forecasting, fisheries and climate research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and even some international environmental aid.

Mr. Trump’s new proposed budget is expected to be made public on Friday, and climate advocates said they were bracing for steep new cuts to environmental programs. The White House declined to comment on the budget but noted that Mr. Trump had already eliminated his top targets, like federal support for wind, solar and other renewable energy.

Advocates for climate action said their modest success last time had given them some hope of again retaining popular programs in next year’s budget.

Read the full article at The New York Times

In New England, Catching Climate Data Along With Fish

April 1, 2026 — When Bob Hersey Jr., a Maine lobsterman, pulls up his traps, he gets more than tasty crustaceans. He’s collecting vital details about the changing ocean environment.

Mr. Hersey, who also dives for sea urchins, is among nearly 150 fishermen who have installed temperature sensors on their traps or trawl nets from Maine to North Carolina as part of a program run by a nonprofit organization with help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The soda-can-size sensors are dragged along the seafloor, giving fishermen and scientists a three-dimensional map of the ocean rather than just conditions on the surface, which can be checked using satellites or thermometers on boats. The data is continuously collected and fed into regional weather and climate models.

“The fishing industry can collect data that nobody else can get to,” said George Maynard, a marine resource management specialist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of NOAA. “It’s a cheap way to collect a lot of oceanographic data to improve those models.”

The sensors record water temperature and oxygen levels and soon they will also record salinity, an important indicator of large-scale changes in ocean currents that influence weather patterns.

While the data is valuable to researchers, it’s also helping Mr. Hersey and others decide the best places to fish.

“I’m trying to figure out how to be more efficient,” said Mr. Hersey, 55, who has deployed four sensors on his 600 lobster traps and has been studying the temperature changes in relation to the size of his catches. “I’m trying to establish a pattern of where they are with a certain temperature.”

Read the full article at The New York Times

ALASKA: As waters around Alaska warm, algal toxins are turning up in new places in the food web

March 27, 2026 — Over the past two summers, a pair of remote and treeless volcanic islands in the eastern Bering Sea broadcast signals of climate change danger in the marine ecosystem that feeds Alaska residents and supports much of the state’s economy.

Tribal employees monitoring St. Paul Island’s beaches came across 10 dead but seemingly well-fed northern fur seals in August of 2024, their bodies lying amid piles of dead fish and birds.

Testing revealed that the seals had been killed by an algal toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning. It was the first ever conclusive case of marine mammals killed by saxitoxin, the algal toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.

The people living on St. Paul, numbering about 400, most of them Unangax, are highly dependent on the marine environment for their food. They are aware of the algal toxins that pose risks of paralytic shellfish poisoning in faraway Southeast Alaska. But seal deaths from algal toxin poisoning on their own island came as a big surprise to local people, said Aaron Lestenkof, who is part of the tribe’s Indigenous Sentinels Network.

“It never occurred to us that it may happen to our marine mammals here,” Lestenkof said. “I guess it was just a matter of time.”

The St. Paul die-off was not a one-time incident. In August of 2025, tribal residents found 21 dead fur seals on a beach at St. George Island, a sister island of St. Paul. Along with the seals were two dead fin whales, a dead sea lion and several dead seabirds.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

MAINE: Maine lobster industry hit by harsh winter, falling catch and rising costs

March 26, 2026 — Maine’s lobster industry is facing mounting pressure after a harsh winter reduced fishing activity, slowed catches and added to rising costs across the sector.

A key driver was fewer days on the water. Maine lobster harvesters took more than 21,000 fewer fishing trips in 2025 than in 2024, the agency said. Total landings fell to just over 78 million pounds, the lowest level since 2008.

“It started in December, and in December you usually get to fish a lot of days, and we didn’t get to fish,” said lobsterman Greg Turner.

Turner, who has worked on a boat since childhood, said crews were only able to fish about half as many days as normal during peak winter months.

“If it’s zero out, and it’s blowing negative 25, you can’t go because it’s just – if something happened – you’d be done. You’d die out there, probably,” said Turner.

Read the full article at Fox Business 

What is a ‘super El Niño’? Scientists predict record-breaking climate event this year

March 24, 2026 — The ever-shifting, interconnected system of global air and ocean currents dictates the weather we experience daily.

This year, however, scientists are warning that a particularly potent version of one of Earth’s most infamous climate phenomena, El Niño, could dramatically alter these patterns.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain recently posted on X (formerly Twitter), stating: “Whew. All signs are increasingly pointing to a significant, if not strong to very strong, El Niño event.”

This sentiment was echoed by Washington Post meteorologist Ben Noll, who cautioned that “changes in location, intensity and frequency of droughts, floods, heat waves and hurricanes are all likely.”

Read the full article at the Independent

Industry puts forth guidance on a “fishery sensitive” approach to marine carbon dioxide removal

March 23, 2026 — With the launch of a set of guidance memos last week, the fishing industry established its leadership in a set of novel ocean-based climate interventions that could someday become one of the largest human activities in the ocean: marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR).

mCDR techniques are currently experimental; their effectiveness and environmental safety are yet to be firmly established. But against a backdrop of rising global temperatures and backpedaling on international climate commitments, these potential climate solutions are attracting increased attention. In just the last year, several field trials to test these methods at sea have been completed or planned.

The new guidance memos position the fishing industry at the center of mCDR planning from the very start, hoping to establish the industry’s standing as a must-consult constituency and showing that fishermen have indispensable knowledge for making sure this new field advances responsibly.

“As mCDR research moves from the laboratory into the ocean, it is essential that coastal communities—including fishermen and their representatives—be included in the planning process,” said Fiona Hogan of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which led the project. “Too often, stakeholders are not admitted early enough into offshore development processes to have meaningful influence over how projects are structured.”

Based on ideas put forth during a set of virtual roundtables by commercial fishermen and fishing industry association staff across Alaska, the West Coast, and the Northeast, the memos outline critical first steps for involving the fishing community in mCDR technology development, project governance and permitting, and collaboratively designed research. Acknowledging the potential for serious missteps that could harm ocean ecosystems and their dependent communities, the memos offer a hopeful-but-fragile path forward for “fishery sensitive” approaches to mCDR. Key to making this vision possible will be a firm commitment by mCDR funders, project leaders, and relevant policy makers to include fishing industry expertise and priorities from the earliest stages. “Fishermen have unique knowledge about the functioning of complex ocean ecosystems gained through decades or generations on the water,” said Darcy Dugan from the Alaska Ocean Acidification Network, one of three coastal and ocean acidification networks that participated in the memos’ creation. “Bringing fishermen into mCDR research and planning efforts creates real opportunities to be partners in co-designing this new ocean-based climate solution alongside scientists and engineers.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Severe U.S. drought undermined Gulf fisheries, raising food security concerns

March 18, 2026 — A severe and prolonged U.S. drought in the late 1980s played a central role in one of the largest fisheries declines ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

The research, led by scientists at the University of Haifa and co-authored by Ben Kirtman, a climate scientist and dean of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, found that drought-driven reductions in Mississippi River flow sharply limited nutrient delivery to coastal waters.

“Our findings show that the fisheries collapse was not driven by fishing pressure alone,” said Igal Berenshtein, head of the Marine Ecology and Ocean Health Laboratory at the University of Haifa, and the study’s lead author. “The prolonged drought reduced river discharge and nutrient input to the Gulf, weakening phytoplankton production and primary productivity at the base of the food web. That disruption cascaded through the ecosystem, ultimately reducing fish biomass and fisheries yields.”

The study documented a roughly 42 percent drop in total fish biomass and a 34 percent decline in fisheries catch following the drought period. Nearly 90 percent of species groups examined showed decreases in biomass.

Read the full article at The University of Miami

UConn Helps Sea Scallop Communities Adapt to Ocean Warming

March 17, 2026 — A combination of conservation measures has helped the industry weather the effects of overfishing. Now, warming and acidifying oceans are posing new threats and prompting new solutions.

A team of researchers co-led by UConn Associate Professor of Marine Sciences Samantha Siedlecki, Shannon Meseck, of NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and Robert “Bobby” Murphy, a social scientist with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, is exploring how environmental data can be used to develop a new management approach adapted for and responsive to a changing ocean. With the support of a three-year grant of just over $1 million from NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program (OAP), the project will integrate oceanographic modeling, industry engagement, and socioeconomic research to create actionable strategies for industry and management. The project is one of six announced by OAP in November aimed at helping U.S. coastal communities adapt to ocean acidification.

“This is one of the earliest attempts to forecast optimal regions for Atlantic sea scallop growth, based on both carbon content and ocean temperature,” says Siedlecki.

Ocean acidification occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) sent into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity is absorbed by the oceans. Like sponges, the oceans of the world soak up about one-third of the CO2 generated by humans. Once dissolved in seawater, the CO2 forms carbonic acid, which increases acidity and reduces the carbonate ions that shell-building sea life, like sea scallops, need to form shells and skeletons.

Read the full article at UConn Today

Fish stocks are on the line: Climate change impacts global fishing yields

March 16, 2026 — As the saying goes, there are plenty more fish in the sea—but climate change is rapidly challenging that notion, with fish stocks around the world under threat. New modeling from Monash University predicts how climate change will alter fishing yields in many regions, threatening food security, livelihoods and the future of marine life as a sustainable food source.

Existing prediction models have looked at how fish species respond to warming temperatures in the absence of evolutionary change. However, the research published in Science now looks at how fish will evolve in response to future climates.

Fisheries provide billions of people with animal protein, for which the demand is predicted to increase. But as oceans warm and weather patterns shift, fish are evolving, breeding less or disappearing from waters entirely.

Read the full article at phys.org

Warming Waters Threaten Seafood Supply

March 13, 2026 — In the world’s waters, fish are making a quiet, biological retreat. The once simple rules of the ocean—grow larger than potential predators—are being rewritten as temperatures reach record highs. Desperate to survive, fish are hitting the fast-forward button on life in a biological shift that will soon impact what ends up on dinner tables globally.

Fish are getting smaller and dying at higher rates as they adapt to warming waters, researchers warn in a report released Thursday in the journal Science. This evolutionary change will reduce global fish yields by one-fifth under current warming predictions, and up to 30 percent in high-emissions scenarios.

This will trigger potentially irreversible evolutionary processes, shaking up entire ecosystems and food webs, with consequences for the billions of people who rely on seafood for protein—a demand expected to increase.

“What I found frightening about this work was that it was difficult to identify winners and losers—there are simply no real winners here,” said Craig White, the study’s co-author and an evolutionary physiologist at Monash University in Australia. “The combination of warming and evolution was always bad for fisheries.”

Read the full article at Inside Climate News