Saving Seafood

South Carolina congressman files fishery management bill tied to climate change

October 16, 2019 — A South Carolina congressman filed a bill on Tuesday, 15 October, that calls on the government to determine what actions fishery managers are taking to address climate change and provide recommendations for what else can be done to address it.

The bill, titled the Climate-Ready Fisheries Act of 2019, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-South Carolina) would require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to identify fishery managers’ actions, provide recommendations to managers, and address gaps in industrial knowledge or funding.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New national effort to predict, respond to algae blooms

October 16, 2019 — Harmful algae blooms that shut down fisheries and sicken people are the target of new research funding from NOAA across the nation.

NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science will spend $10.2 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.

About $8.4 million of that will cover the first year of new 3- to 5-year projects, and $1.78 million will go to 3-year projects already in process. Funded under existing NOAA programs, new projects will begin in Alaska, California, Chesapeake Bay, Florida, the Great Lakes, New England and the Pacific Northwest.

Florida is in line for $2.9 million of that funding, which could help state planners now scrambling to improve how monitor and manage algae outbreaks. The state was hit with severe events from 2017 to 2019 when Karenia brevis, also known as red tide, occurred throughout southwest Florida. The bloom killed fish, turtles, marine mammals, and birds. It caused cases of neurotoxic shellfish poisoning in people, and even respiratory irritation in beachgoers and waterfront residents exposed to the algae.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Tribes, First Nations declare salmon emergency

October 15, 2019 — Native tribes in the US Pacific Northwest and First Nations in Canada have jointly declared a state of emergency due to diminishing salmon stocks in watersheds that cross the US and Canadian border.

According to a press release from the Lummi Nation, indigenous groups from Alaska, Washington and British Columbia made the declaration due to “rapid rate of destructive resource extraction in the waters and lands these nations have called home for thousands of years”.

The groups have committed “to work together to protect, defend, and assert their human rights by protecting clean water and the health and habitat of the wild salmon stocks”.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

New tool enables Nova Scotia lobster fishery to address impacts of climate change

October 15, 2019 — U.S. and Canadian researchers have developed a tool that incorporates projected changes in ocean climate onto a geographic fishery management area. Now fishermen, resource managers, and policy-makers can use it to plan for the future sustainability of the lobster fishery in Nova Scotia and Canadian waters of the Gulf of Maine.

“Climate change has socio- on coastal communities and the seafood market, but integrating that information into planning and decision-making has been a challenge,” said Vincent Saba, a fishery biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and a co-author of the study. “Ocean warming is leading to an accelerated redistribution of marine species. Knowing how animals will shift distribution, and what to do about shifts across management borders both regional and international, will be critical to planning on how to adapt to those changes.”

American  is Canada’s most valuable fishery, contributing 44 percent of the total commercial value of all fisheries in Atlantic Canada in 2016. Lobster landings have been trending upward in recent decades, and many small rural communities in Atlantic Canada rely heavily on lobster for their economic well-being. Changing climate could have a significant impact on the fishery and on those communities.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Half the World’s Coral Reefs Already Have Been Killed by Climate Change

October 11, 2019 — The oceans have long been the biggest buffer for humankind’s dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions. Around a quarter of all the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the 1980s—from driving cars, running factories and churning out electricity with fossil fuels—has ended up sunk into the waters. As the planet has warmed from mounting emissions, the oceans warmed first and fastest, absorbing 90% of that excess heat. A report released last month by the UN-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the foremost scientific authority on the subject, warned that damage to the oceans is accelerating and may be at the point of irreversibility.

That makes delicate coral reefs around the world something of a leading indicator for the collapse of the ocean ecosystem. Half of all reef systems have already been destroyed, putting a quarter of marine life at risk. Even if global warming is limited to the 1.5 degree Celsius target outlined in the 2016 Paris Agreement—a longshot goal, at the current rate of emissions—the IPCC now concludes that “almost all warm-water coral reefs are projected to suffer significant losses of area and local extinctions.”

In a perverse consequence, lost reefs will leave nearby coastlines even more vulnerable to erosion and storms, as well as from accelerating sea-level rise, which could go up by as much as two feet this century as a result of glacier melt.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

ALASKA: There’s a new fight over Bering Sea black cod. Warming water may be to blame.

October 10, 2019 — Fish politics in Alaska usually get serious when there aren’t enough fish to go around. But a new fight is brewing over black cod because there are so many of them – possibly as a result of the ocean’s warming waters.

Record numbers of young black cod, also known as sablefish, are swimming off Alaska’s coast; scientists estimate that this group of fish, which had huge reproductive success in 2014, is twice the size of the next-largest on record, from 1977.

The small-boat fishermen who catch black cod, many of whom live in Southeast Alaska, are eagerly waiting for the young fish to grow larger and commercially valuable. But they’re getting frustrated seeing increasing numbers of black cod caught accidentally, as bycatch, by the Seattle-based trawlers that target lower-value species in the Bering Sea, like the pollock that go into McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.

“This recruitment event is what we’re counting on to keep the fishery going for the next 10 or 15 years,” said Tad Fujioka, a Sitka fisherman who decided to buy black cod fishing rights a few years ago, in part because of the boom in their numbers. “We need to save these fish for years to come.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Genetic Evidence Points to Rapid, Large-Scale Northward Shift of Pacific Cod During Recent Climate Changes

October 10, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

New genetic research suggests that unprecedented summer abundances of Pacific cod in the northern Bering Sea were due to escalating movement from their core habitat under recent warm conditions.

Until recently, Pacific cod were rarely encountered in the northern Bering Sea. Fishery surveys in the 1970s reported “trace amounts” of cod there. A 2010 Alaska Fisheries Science Center survey estimated that the entire northern population amounted to about 3% of the large southeastern Bering Sea stock that supported a valuable commercial fishery.

Then in 2017, the summer survey recorded dramatically higher abundances in the north: a 900-fold increase since 2010. In the same year, southeastern Bering Sea abundances were down 37% from 2016. Strikingly, the increase in the north nearly matched the decrease in the southeastern Bering Sea.

A 2018 survey revealed an even more remarkable shift: there were more cod in the northern than southeastern Bering Sea.

Read the full release here

URI researchers awarded multiple grants to study aspects of aquaculture industry

October 10, 2019 — Several scientists at the University of Rhode Island have been awarded grants to study oyster genetics, breeding and diseases as part of a region-wide effort to support the growing oyster aquaculture industry in the Northeast and assist efforts to restore wild oyster populations.

“Wild and farmed oysters are facing major threats from water quality and disease,” said Marta Gomez-Chiarri, a URI professor of animal science who has studied oyster diseases in Narragansett Bay for more than 20 years. “Even though local water quality has improved in Rhode Island, oysters across the United States face localized threats from pollution and eutrophication while at the same time dealing with multiple factors of global ocean change, like ocean acidification, as well as changes in salinity and dissolved oxygen. We are only beginning to understand the effects of these multiple stressors.”

Gomez-Chiarri — along with URI Assistant Professor Jonathan Puritz and U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Dina Proestou — have teamed with shellfish geneticists and breeders from 10 other East Coast universities to form the Eastern Oyster Genome Consortium to develop genetic tools to accelerate selective breeding efforts. The consortium, in a proposal led by Rutgers University, has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to accelerate the pace of identifying the genes responsible for desirable traits like disease resistance.

Read the full story at The Westerly Sun

Record low Gulf Coast supply could jolt oyster prices

October 10, 2019 — This spring’s record-shattering flooding from the Mississippi River has wreaked historic havoc on oyster production in the Gulf of Mexico, which could reverberate for years to come with scant supply and hard-to-digest prices.

Louisiana, which bore the worst of the damage from too-low salinity and smothering algae blooms and historically accounts for 75 percent of Gulf harvests and 34 percent of U.S. harvests, is all but out of commission for this fall’s oyster harvest season.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The next big California vs. Trump fight is over water and endangered species

October 7, 2019 — Just how far will California Gov. Gavin Newsom go in his high-profile fight with the Trump administration over environmental protections?

The next few months will provide an answer, as Newsom is forced to take a stand on Trump rollbacks in a long-contested battleground—the Northern California  that helps supply more than half the state’s population with drinking  and fills irrigation canals on millions of acres of farmland.

The battle lines are not nearly as clearly drawn as they are on climate change or air pollution, where the state is presenting a fairly unified front against Washington. When it comes to California water, there is no unity.

Some of the state’s biggest and most powerful water agencies are eager for the  to weaken endangered species protections that have cut their delta deliveries. And they want the Newsom administration to go along.

Read the full story at PHYS.org