Saving Seafood

El Niño could bring highest sea levels ever recorded to CA coast

August 11, 2026 — A strengthening El Niño could bring the highest sea levels ever recorded to the California coast this year, raising the risk of widespread and damaging flooding.

It’s the latest effect forecast for what’s expected to be an historically strong event, one forecasters warn could also lash Southern California with powerful rain and broil both land and sea with punishing heat waves.

“We’re expecting likely the highest sea levels ever recorded on the California coast associated with this event,” said Mark Merrifield, director of the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation.

During a recent online town hall, Merrifield presented a NASA satellite image showing sea levels already more than half a foot higher in the eastern Pacific Ocean compared to the reference state, and said by this fall and winter, “we should be seeing sea levels far above the average seasonal cycle.”

According to NASA, El Niño’s warmer ocean water displaces colder water close to the sea surface. Warmer water causes a rise in the sea surface height because water expands as temperature rises.

Data collected by scientists over the years also have shown how El Niños contribute to “enormously strong” waves, which can cause beaches to “erode and to narrow,” Merrifield said. “It’s well documented that during El Niño events, beaches across the entire state tend to move landward by about 30 meters [98 feet] or so.”

Read the full article at the Seattle Times

El Niño Alters Marine Life in the Pacific

August 11, 2026 — As of June 2026, El Niño has officially arrived. This naturally recurring phenomenon is characterized by warmer-than-normal water temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific along with changes to atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Its regional effects range from desert floods to delayed monsoons to shifts in where tropical cyclones are more likely to form.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center expects the current El Niño to continue to strengthen through the end of 2026, with a 97 percent chance of lasting through early Northern Hemisphere spring 2027. Even during El Niño’s early stages, satellites have observed characteristic changes along the equatorial Pacific, such as warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures and higher-than-normal sea surface height.

Among the first ecological downstream effects are changes to the marine food web. The maps above show chlorophyll-a concentrations—the pigment present in most phytoplankton—as observed by the OCI (Ocean Color Instrument) on NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite. In June 2025 (left), conditions were neutral, while in June 2026 (right), El Niño was strengthening.

Read the full article at NASA

Birds Are Dying. Clues Point to El Niño.

August 7, 2026 — Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful.

But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses.

“Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.”

In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined.

“It’s painful,” he said.

In July, they counted an additional 968.

It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy.

But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated.

This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms.

In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain.

But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Climate-driven disruption, constrained supply adding volatility to aquaculture markets in the back half of 2026

August 7, 2026 — Global aquaculture firms and the wider value chain entered the second half of 2026 facing a difficult combination of constrained supply, rising feed costs, climate uncertainty, and uneven consumer demand, according to Rabobank’s latest Global Aquaculture Update.

After weathering several major disruptions over the past decade, the industry has now entered a phase in which climate change, tightening feed ingredient supplies, and geopolitical uncertainty are reshaping global seafood markets, Rabobank Seafood Analyst Novel Sharma told SeafoodSource, explaining the industry should plan for continual uncertainty rather than treat each challenge as an isolated disruption.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

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

NOAA scientists set sail on landmark West Coast Ocean Acidification survey

July 21, 2026 — The following was released by the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

On July 20, 2026, researchers embarked on the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program’s West Coast Ocean Acidification mission (WCOA 2026). Departing from San Diego aboard the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (R/V) Sikuliaq, the team will travel north to Washington, adding important new observations to NOAA’s long-term monitoring of ocean acidification and its impacts on marine resources.

WCOA 2026 will couple ocean chemistry, biology, and physics to build a more comprehensive view of how extreme events impact biogeochemistry and ecosystems.

“Results from past WCOA cruises have provided novel insights into acidification rates and impacts in coastal and estuary habitats that provide our nation with rich fish and shellfish resources,” said Dr. Simone Alin, Supervisory Oceanographer, NOAA/PMEL. Resource managers and harvesters can use this information to inform fisheries management decisions.

This intensive 30-day coastal research cruise aboard the 261-foot research vessel offers scientists a unique opportunity of sampling during an El Niño that is on track to become one of the strongest on record. El Niño brings warmer water and can alter upwelling and precipitation patterns in the region. Phytoplankton and zooplankton communities will follow these warmer waters, which impacts food webs and fisheries as seen during past marine heatwaves.

Two days after the Sikuliaq departs, the PMEL SeaTrac will head south from Washington to collect added coastal measurements during peak ocean acidification and hypoxia season and pick up any El Niño signal that may have made to the northern California Current System this summer. These OA cruises provide critical high-quality data for the U.S. Coastal Large Marine Ecosystems, and are essential for modeling and forecasting changes in ocean acidification and hypoxia to better prepare for future impacts to valued fisheries and ecosystems.

Led by researchers at the University of Washington’s Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies and PMEL, researchers will collect high-quality ocean chemistry data, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and other observations. Scientists will also collect environmental DNA, which can reveal the diversity and abundance of ocean life in different ocean conditions.

Data collected during WCOA 2026 are essential for validating models and forecasts of ocean conditions like J-SCOPE. This short term (six to nine month) forecast is used for the California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment. High quality ocean carbon chemistry data is required to forecast the saturation state of calcium carbonate, the mineral building block used by shellfish like Dungeness crabs, clams, and oysters.

Other coordinated regular coastal fisheries surveys, including the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) enhance the impact of WCOA 2026. By conducting biological net tows at established stations, researchers will gain high-quality data on marine life.

Ultimately, the data collected through WCOA 2026 will serve as a foundational benchmark for monitoring, modeling and research in the region. These data will provide calibration information for sensor networks designed to fill measurement gaps between research cruises. With the potential for sampling to occur as ocean conditions change with El Niño, NOAA and our partners will be able to better understand how extreme conditions alter vital marine resources like Dungeness crabs, krill, plankton and other fisheries.

El Niño is here, and it’s already scrambling fisheries throughout the Pacific

July 8, 2026 — We’re not even one month into “super” El Niño, the natural Pacific weather pattern characterized by warmer than average sea surface temperatures, and fisheries around the world are already getting scrambled.

In Peru, government officials have effectively canceled the fishing season for anchovies, one of the country’s most important exports and a leading source of fish oil and animal feed globally. The Indian government is preparing for a season of smaller, less plentiful Indian mackerel. Meanwhile, in Southern California, recreational and commercial fishers have reported some of the most successful months of tuna fishing they’ve ever seen.

Read the full article at Grist

Warming seas and El Niño put West Coast sea lion pups at new risk

July 6, 2026 — A developing El Niño in the tropical Pacific is expected to strengthen later this year, adding to already unusually warm ocean waters off the West Coast and raising concerns for marine ecosystems still recovering from recent heat stress.

Scientists say the combined effects of a lingering marine heatwave and a strengthening El Niño could disrupt food supplies for key species in the California Current, even as coastal upwelling may offer some localized relief.

The overlap of two warming patterns — one regional and one climate-scale — could compound stress on marine food webs that have already been repeatedly disrupted over the past decade.

Read the full article at USA TODAY

The ‘Super’ El Niño Has Arrived. Here’s How It Might Affect the World’s Weather and Economy

June 17, 2026 —  The forecasted El Niño—a mysterious but well-documented climate phenomenon—has officially begun, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on June 11. Meteorologists expect it to evolve into one of the most powerful ones on record, and the event will likely bring about extreme weather worldwide and consequently affect the economy.

“We need to prepare for a potentially strong El Niño event, which will exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heatwaves both on land and in the ocean,” says Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement.

Here’s what you need to know about the El Niño and what it might do in the coming months.

What is El Niño?

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern characterized by warmer-than-average surface water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean’s tropical region, near the equator. In the United States, the events are usually declared when the temperature rises by more than 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit for at least five consecutive seasons, each lasting three months.

The balmier water leads to changes in the air pressure. That, in turn, causes trade winds that blow westward to weaken, allowing warmer water to spread farther east than normal and pool near northwestern South America.

Read the full article the Smithsonian Magazine