Saving Seafood

Global Warming Is Already Destroying New England’s Fisheries

November 5, 2019 — To wake up in the Northeastern United States—as California blazes and Japan digs itself out of typhoon damage—is to experience an uneasy gratitude for all that is not burning, battered or underwater. Seven years out from Superstorm Sandy, we know not to get cocky, but there’s a relief in being able to worry about work and more pedestrian finances instead of evacuation plans, or ordering the right kind of smoke mask. It’s a small luxury in climate-didn’t-come-for-me-today compartmentalization.

But deep down, we know better. And if the national discussion hasn’t moved to climate change in the Northeast yet, it soon will. The effects are already profound—they just happen to be underwater.

Fourth-generation fisherman Al Cottone holds no illusions of being spared climate impacts in 2019.  He captains one of the 15 fishing boats still active in the waters around Gloucester, Massachusetts. Not a decade ago, there were 50. To fish in the Gulf of Maine—the ocean inlet spanning from Cape Cod up to the southern tip of Nova Scotia—is to navigate one of the fastest-warming bodies of water on the planet. “It’s not something you see with your naked eye,” Cottone told me. “But fish are definitely reacting differently, and I’m attributing it to climate change. We’re seeing them in deeper water—they’re trying to get the right temperature at depth.”

Read the full story at The New Republic

Rising sea level, flooding risk threaten Northeast ports

October 30, 2019 — Sea surface temperatures along the Northeast U.S. Atlantic coast have risen faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans since 2004, and the accompanying change in sea level rise is putting the region at increasing risk from tidal flooding and storms, according to a new report from climate researchers.

Released on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s Oct. 29, 2012 landfall, the report “New Jersey’s Rising Coastal Risk” by the Rhodium Group’s energy and climate team, with contributions from scientists at Rutgers University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

Sandy hit land as an post-tropical system after shedding some hurricane characteristics ­— its sustained windspeed at landfall did not even qualify as Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity — but it delivered a storm surge not seen since the great hurricane of 1821.

That surge, later estimated at 14.4 feet at Sandy Hook, N.J., inundated neighborhoods all around the New York Harbor complex, including the commercial fishing port of Belford, N.J. The port’s fleet survived the storm, but its infrastructure was heavily damaged, losing electrical and refrigeration equipment, and the Belford Seafood Cooperative’s restaurant.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

The New England Aquarium Wants To Monitor Whales From Space

October 28, 2019 — The New England Aquarium and Cambridge-based engineering company Draper have some big news: They’re working on technology that will allow them to monitor whales with satellites in space.

Leaving the planet to watch whales might sound a little silly, but the ability to do it could represent a giant leap forward in our ability to protect these animals and our oceans.

“Counting whales from space is really important to providing the scientific justification for [identifying] places in the ocean that are special and need protection,” says Kelly Kryc, director of conservation policy and leadership at the New England Aquarium. She adds that if we know where the whales are, and where they’re likely to go, we can try to limit human activity like fishing, shipping and energy exploration in those places.

Currently, when scientists look for whales and other large marine animals, they almost always do so from boats or planes. But these methods are weather-dependent, costly, sometimes dangerous, “and you can only go out infrequently, so you don’t get a very good sense of what’s happening at a high resolution in both time and space,” Kyrc says. If we could watch them from space, we could do a better job tracking them over longer periods of time, she adds.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio

In Mexico, gains from fishery management reforms could surpass losses from climate change

October 25, 2019 — Abalone along the Pacific coast in northern Mexico have declined dramatically in the last decade because of lower oxygen levels prompted by climate change. But despite that, the Pacific Federation of Fishing Cooperatives (Fedecoop) has been able to prevent overfishing by limiting the total catch, according to Laura Rodriguez, the associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Latin and South American Oceans Program.

It’s the type of proactive governance that Mexico and Latin America need more of as climate change grows more severe, warping ocean conditions from temperature to acidity, salinity to oxygen levels, all while altering the life histories, distribution, and productivity of marine species, according to Rodriguez.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NOAA backs new national effort to predict, respond to algae blooms

October 22, 2019 — Harmful algae blooms that shut down fisheries and sicken people are the target of new research funding from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) across the nation.

NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science will spend USD 10.2 million (EUR 9.2 million) in fiscal year 2019 to fund studies into harmful algae blooms – by now so common that they have their own shorthand name of HAB.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Climate warming promises more frequent extreme El Niño events

October 22, 2019 — El Niño events cause serious shifts in weather patterns across the globe, and an important question that scientists have sought to answer is: how will climate change affect the generation of strong El Niño events? A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team of international climate researchers led by Bin Wang of the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), has an answer to that question. Results show that since the late 1970’s, climate change effects have shifted the El Niño onset location from the eastern Pacific to the western Pacific and caused more frequent extreme El Niño events. Continued warming over the western Pacific warm pool promises conditions that will trigger more extreme events in the future.

The team examined details of 33 El Niño events from 1901 to 2017, evaluating for each event the onset location of the warming, its evolution, and its ultimate strength. By grouping the common developmental features of the events, the team was able to identify four types of El Niño, each with distinct onset and strengthening patterns. Looking across time, they found a decided shift in behavior since the late 1970’s: all events beginning in the eastern Pacific occurred prior to that time, while all events originating in the western-central Pacific happened since then. They also found that four of five identified extreme El Niño events formed after 1970.

Wang and his co-authors focused on the factors that seemed to be controlling these shifts, including increased  in the western Pacific warm pool and the easterly winds in the central Pacific, and found that with continued , those factors may lead to a continued increase in frequency in extreme El Niño events.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Latest SOLI workshop offers a sneak peak into the program’s future

October 22, 2019 — Climate change represents one of the biggest threats to the success of the seafood industry, but the complexity of its impact on fisheries is a difficult concept to grasp without a formal education on the subject. The Sustainable Oceans Leadership Institute (SOLI) hopes to change that.

Kicking off in 2020, the SOLI program aims to give attendees access to scientists and local stakeholders across the globe to learn more about what affects climate change is having on their communities and way of life.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

A New Marine Heat Wave Threatens Hawaii’s Reefs

October 21, 2019 — Parts of the Pacific Ocean are simmering, threatening coral reefs and livelihoods around Hawaii, and causing many to worry of worse to come.

“The ocean is very important to us,” said Ka’imi Kaupiko, who lives in Milolii, a community often called the last Hawaiian fishing village, on the Big Island. The way of life there depends on the fish provided by the reefs, reefs which are now becoming sick in the warming waters.

“It affects a lot of how we are going to survive,” Mr. Kaupiko said.

Researchers said the heat wave was reminiscent of 2014, when a hot spot that became known as the blob began forming in the Pacific. It expanded and lingered over much of the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska for years.

Both marine heat waves are “super unusual,” according to Andrew Leising, a research oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nearly every other marine heat wave NOAA has recorded in 40 years of satellite monitoring shrinks in comparison.

“The event in ’14-15 was maybe eight to 10 times the size of Alaska. And the current event we’re having is nearly that big,” Dr. Leising said. “And then, everything else is sort of an even further distant third or fourth.”

Read the full story at The New York Times

Florida GOP Congressmen Back Bill to Help Fisheries With Climate Change’s Impact

October 18, 2019 — This week, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., paired up with a South Carolina Democrat on a proposal to help local fisheries deal with the impact of climate change.

With Mast as the main cosponsor, U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, D-SC, introduced the “Climate-Ready Fisheries Act” on Tuesday.

“The Climate-Ready Fisheries Act of 2019 directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine what actions have already been taken by fishery managers to prepare for the impacts of climate change,” Mast’s office noted. “The bill also requires the GAO to identify whether any knowledge or funding gaps are hindering action and provide recommendations for how to better adapt fishery management in local communities. It also directs the GAO to offer recommendations for how Congress can enhance our nation’s science and management systems to better address climate change.”

Read the full story at Florida Daily

A fish mystery solved using genetic testing

October 17, 2019 — The population of cod in the Northern Bering Sea has increased immensely since 2010, and scientists are using fish DNA to find out why.

Think of it like a genetic ancestry test, but for fish.

Until recently, pacific cod were rarely found in the Northern Bering Sea. A 2010 survey showed cod made up only three percent of the entire fish population. That’s been changing, fast.

A survey in the summer of 2017 showed that number shot up 900 percent.

Ingrid Spies is a research fisheries biologist who led the way on this research to determine whether the population spike is evidence of a growing population or of an existing population migrating from elsewhere?

One thought was that cod could have migrated from Russia or the Gulf of Alaska, where they observed cod numbers decline significantly in 2017. Scientists were able to come to a conclusive answer to the question using genetic testing.

Read the full story at KTUU