Saving Seafood

El Niño’s ‘whole different ocean’ to send odd sea creatures to US

July 31, 2026 — An intensifying El Niño is forecast to make it “a sharky summer” off the California coast, with greater numbers of white sharks arriving with warmer waters from the south, but they are far from the only marine life expected to make surprise visits.

Strong El Niños can move several species of sharks, as well as rays, tropical fish, birds and even sea snakes northward into waters where they rarely appear.

“We expect to see all kinds of weird tropical things come up with this warm water,” said Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The strongest El Niños – and this one is forecast to be among the very strongest – can alter entire marine ecosystems, shifting both animals and the food they need to survive.

Its ripple effects in winds, rain and ocean currents can extend across the world’s oceans. Studies have linked El Niño and its cooler water counterpart – La Niña – to starving sea lions in Peru, changes in sea turtle behaviors in the Caribbean and fisheries successes in the Amazon and Congo rivers.

El Niño can trigger “a lot of animal movement,” said Nate Jaros, a vice president of animal care at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

This summer, juvenile sharks and other aquatic visitors are turning up early, thanks to the effects of an intense marine heat wave already in place before El Niño arrives, McCauley said.

“We’re already seeing Mahi mahi. You’ll see more bluefin tuna, and you see weird stuff, like we’ll see more sea turtles and sea snakes,” McCauley said.

Read the full article at USA TODAY

California sound system tries to keep whales and ships apart

August 19, 2019 — Scientists have installed an underwater sound system they hope will reduce collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel off Southern California.

A listening station on the channel floor is able to capture whale calls as far away as 30 miles (48 kilometers), the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. That device is connected by cable to a buoy floating above that transmits data by satellite to scientists on shore.

From there, captains can be alerted to slow their ships down or reroute.

It’s the latest attempt to prevent ships from running into whales in the channel, where cargo vessels in and out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach cross feeding grounds of endangered blue, fin and humpback whales.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

First ever high-seas conservation treaty would protect life in international waters

April 4, 2019 — No flag can claim the high seas, but many nations exploit them. As a result, life in the two-thirds of the oceans beyond any country’s territorial waters faces many threats that are largely unregulated, including overfishing and the emerging deep-sea mining industry.

Now, nations are negotiating the first-ever high-seas conservation treaty, which the United Nations expects to finalize next year. As delegates met this week at U.N. headquarters in New York City to hash out the details, marine scientists moved to influence the outcome. One research group unveiled the results of a global mapping effort that envisions expansive new marine reserves to protect key high-seas ecosystems. Other teams are working on maps of their own using powerful modeling tools to weigh a reserve’s potential for achieving key conservation goals, such as protecting important feeding grounds or helping sea life adapt to warming seas, against its economic costs.

“The policy opportunity this represents is much rarer than once in a lifetime,” says marine ecologist Douglas McCauley of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Nations are asking “how we should protect two-thirds of the world’s oceans, [and] it’s the first time in human history that this has ever been asked.”

Read the full story at Science Magazine

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than half of the oceans, study finds

February 23, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Scientists tag sharks to see where they roam in the high seas, but until now they couldn’t track the seas’ biggest eater: Humans. By using ships’ own emergency beacons, researchers got the first comprehensive snapshot of industrial fishing’s impacts around the globe. And it’s huge — bigger than scientists thought, according to a new study.

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than 55 percent of the oceans with the world’s fishing fleet traveling more than 285 million miles a year — three times the distance between Earth and the sun, according to research in Thursday’s journal Science.

Five countries — China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — were responsible for 85 percent of high seas fishing.

“The most mind-blowing thing is just how global an enterprise this is,” said study co-author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada. “It’s more like factories that are mass producing product for a global market and less like hunters that are stalking individual prey.”

China dominates global fishing. Of the 40 million hours that large ships fished in 2016, 17 million hours were by boats under a Chinese flag, according to another study co-author, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block.

The fishing patterns were gleaned from 22 billion automated ship safety signals beamed to satellites. Before this, scientists had to rely on a sampling of ships’ logs and observations, which were spotty.

Ships are obeying no-fishing zones and times, although they hover at the edges of marine-protected areas. Fishing tends to drop on holidays including Christmas, New Year’s and the Lunar New Year, researchers found.

“The maps of global fishing in this report are sobering,” Douglas McCauley, a University of California, Santa Barbara marine biologist who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CBS News