September 17, 2019 — The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the wildest rivers in the contiguous United States, is prime fish habitat. Cold, clear waters from melting snow tumble out of the Salmon River Mountains and into the boulder-strewn river, which is federally protected.
As Bering Sea ice melts, Alaskans, scientists and Seattle’s fishing fleet witness changes ‘on a massive scale’
September 16, 2019 — Derek Akeya hopes for calm waters and a lucrative catch when fishing from a skiff in the Bering Sea that surrounds his island village.
But on this windy late summer day, waves toss about the boat as Akeya stands in the bow, straining to pull up a line of herring-baited hooks from the rocky bottom.
Instead of bringing aboard halibut – worth more than $5 a pound back on shore – this string of gear yields four large but far less valuable Pacific cod, voracious bottom feeders whose numbers in recent years have exploded in these northern reaches.
“There’s a lot more of them now, and it’s more than a little bit irritating,” Akeya says.
The cod have surged here from the south amid climatic changes unfolding with stunning speed.
For two years, the Bering Sea has been largely without winter ice, a development scientists modeling the warming impacts of greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels once forecast would not occur until 2050.
MAINE: Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve gets grant for lobster research
September 13, 2019 — The Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve will receive about $250,000 over two years to study how warming coastal waters are affecting lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, the National Sea Grant Office has announced.
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most waters around the world.
Since lobsters thrive in cold water, this warming trend has raised concerns about the future of the Gulf’s lobster fishery. Southern New England has already seen dramatic declines in lobster counts and the fishery there is in jeopardy.
“Lobsters prefer cold water and will move to deeper, offshore areas to find it,” said Jason Goldstein, research director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. “We plan to discover how the inshore and offshore movements of female lobsters are affected by warming waters, and whether their young can settle and grow in shallow nursery habitats as coastal waters become warmer.”
Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world
September 12, 2019 — The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory.
It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a foot deep into the sand along a 13-mile stretch of beach near Barra del Chuy, just south of the Brazilian border. Agüero had been digging up these clams since childhood, a livelihood passed on for generations along these shores.
But on this day, Agüero returned to find a disastrous sight: the beach covered in dead clams.
“Kilometer after kilometer, as far as our eyes could see. All of them dead, rotten, opened up,” remembered Agüero, now 70. “They were all black, and had a fetid odor.”
He wept at the sight.
The clam die-off was an alarming marker of a new climate era, an early sign of this coastline’s transformation. Scientists now suspect the event was linked to a gigantic blob of warm water extending from the Uruguayan coast far into the South Atlantic, a blob that has only gotten warmer in the years since.
West Coast marine life endangered by ‘blob’ heatwave
September 12, 2019 — A “blob” of warm water in the Pacific Ocean could disrupt the marine ecosystem off the coast of California, similar to an event that occurred five years ago, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The patch, designated the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019 and also referred to as a “blob,” is the second-biggest such mass in four decades and, according to experts, is on a similar path to that of one that, from 2014 to 2016, caused toxic algae blooms and killed sea life ranging from sea lions to salmon en masse.
“I am surprised to see something like this develop again so soon after what looked like the end of the marine heatwave in 2016,” Nate Mantua, head of the Landscape Ecology Team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., told the newspaper.
September 20: Interactive Webinar on Identifying Priorities for Shifting Marine Species
September 12, 2019 — The following was released by the Lenfest Ocean Program:
The Lenfest Ocean Program will host an interactive webinar on Friday, September 20 from 12:30 pm-2 pm ET during which participants can share their perspectives on shifting marine species. The webinar is open to anyone interested in discussing this critical issue.
This webinar is a precursor to an Ideas Lab workshop that the Lenfest Ocean Program, in collaboration with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Biodiversity Funder’s Group, will host later this fall to discuss the future of U.S. fisheries in the face of climate change, generate research priorities, and kickstart the funding of key research projects. The application period for this workshop closed on August 22.
To facilitate planning around the webinar, which will include breakout discussion groups, please register by 12 pm ET on Thursday, September 19.
For background on the Ideas Lab, listen to the introductory webinar hosted by Lenfest on July 31.
Ocean warming is changing the relationship coastal communities have with the ocean
September 11, 2019 — Climate change has made record-breaking heatwaves all the more likely, both on land and beneath the ocean’s surface. As the world’s ocean sucks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—as well as most of the additional heat being trapped by global warming—it is undergoing some significant changes.
Marine heatwaves—prolonged periods of unusually warm ocean temperatures—are one of those changes. These extreme temperatures are increasing in frequency around the globe and wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems.
As an oceanographer, I study the many ways oceans change—from week-to-week, year-to-year and, of course, over decades and centuries—to better understand the changes that are underway and the far-reaching impacts they may have on marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.
Ocean heatwave known as ‘The Blob’ is warming up the West Coast – and endangering animals
September 11, 2019 — It could be the return of “The Blob” and scientists are worried.
A huge mass of extra warm water extending from Baja California in Mexico all the way to Alaska and the Bering Sea could result in death for many sea lions and salmon, as well as toxic algae blooms that can poison mussels, crabs and other sea life.
When it happened in 2014 it was dubbed “The Blob” and disrupted sea life between Southern California and Alaska. Now it’s back.
The ocean heatwave began to form in June.
“Temperatures are about as warm as have ever been observed in any of these locations. It developed in mid-June and it’s gotten really big really fast,” said Nate Mantua, head of the Landscape Ecology Team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California.
Climate redistribution of tuna may mean a loss of USD 60 million for Pacific by 2050
September 11, 2019 — Pacific island countries could lose an estimated USD 60 million (EUR 54.5 million) in revenue annually due to the impacts of climate change on the tuna population within the next 30 years, according to Conservation International (CI).
In a fact sheet produced by CI with the assistance of the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS), modeling indicates increases in ocean temperature due to climate change will cause skipjack and yellowfin tuna to shift to the east.
Hurricane Dorian lands a punch on Outer Banks
September 11, 2019 — Almost a year to the date after Hurricane Florence wreaked havoc in North Carolina’s fishing communities, Hurricane Dorian started its march toward the same target.
The week-long trek up the Southeast coastline had North Carolina’s fishermen pulling boats and removing gear from the waters. For most the effort paid off, with the aftermath proving to be little more than a cleanup and of course, precious time lost on the water.
Some were not as fortunate. Ocracoke Island, a barrier island on North Carolina’s Outer Banks near where Dorian made landfall Sept. 6, took the brunt and experienced catastrophic flooding with widespread destruction of property.
About 800 people, many commercial fishing families, rode out the storm on Ocracoke. Boats were lost, homes flooded, fish houses and waterfront restaurants destroyed.
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