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Right whales stay in Cape Cod Bay longer, and later

June 16, 2022 — It isn’t high gas prices that changed the travel plans of right whales.

A new study in Global Change Biology by nine authors discovered that over the last couple of decades North Atlantic right whales are most active in Cape Cod Bay 18 days later than before.

That’s a shift — with a longer stay in the month of May — that could potentially bring the whales further into conflict with the region’s annual boating  and lobster season and require an extended season of protections.

“The state has a flexible rule in place — where they can extend fishing closures and small boat speed restrictions — that now is in place up the coast to New Hampshire,” the study’s lead author, Dan Pendleton of the New England Aquarium, said. “Massachusetts Bay has seen more right whales than it used to.”

“One of the problems with migratory animals is they can get into big trouble moving into shipping lanes so if we can move and adapt the protections as (whales) adapt to climate change, that would be ideal,” Pendleton said. “So much seems out of our control but one thing we can do is push for regulations that are responsive to the needs of an endangered species.”

Beth Casoni, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, hadn’t yet seen the study, which was published June 7. Casoni said, therefore, she couldn’t comment until she has been able to read it.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Warming water pushes endangered whale toward deadly boats

June 15, 2022 — North Atlantic right whales are some of the most endangered marine mammals on the planet. Threatened by shipping collisions and tangles with fishing nets, fewer than 400 individuals are thought to exist in the wild today.

Now, scientists are adding climate change to its list of dangers.

Recent studies suggest that warming ocean waters are shifting the tiny crustaceans that right whales like to eat, causing them to multiply at different times of the year and move into new parts of the ocean. As the whales follow their prey, they’re abandoning some of their old feeding grounds, migrating into some new ones and arriving in some places earlier or later than they would usually be expected.

As a result, scientists warn, they’re showing up in spots that don’t necessarily have adequate protections in place for them. That may increase their risk of running into ships or nets.

A new study, out last week in the journal Global Change Biology, is the latest to raise the alarm.

The research finds that right whales are changing the way they move through Cape Cod Bay, one of their preferred spring foraging grounds. They’re using the habitat more heavily than they did in the past and their peak numbers are shifting later in the season.

Read the full story at E&E News

New research shows climate change impacts on whale habitat use in the warming Gulf of Maine

June 10, 2022 — New research finds climate change is having an impact on how large whale species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, use habitats in the warming Gulf of Maine, showing that right whales’ use of Cape Cod Bay has shifted significantly over the last 20 years.

The study, led by the New England Aquarium and including researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the USGS Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, the Center for Coastal Studies, UCLA, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Canadian Whale Institute was published this month in the journal Global Change Biology. The authors set out to better understand the impacts of ocean climate change on phenology, or the timing of recurring biological events such as when plants flower each year. Using more than 20 years of data, the scientists measured shifts in whale habitat use in Cape Cod Bay, evaluating trends in peak use for North Atlantic right whales, humpback whales, and fin whales. The study found that peak use of Cape Cod Bay had shifted almost three weeks later for right whales and humpback whales. Changes in the timing of whale habitat use were related to when spring starts, which has been changing as a result of climate change. The study suggested that highly migratory marine mammals can and do adapt the timing of their habitat use in response to climate-driven changes in their environment, with results showing increased habitat use by right whales in Cape Cod Bay from February to May, with greatest increases in April and May.

“The time of year when we are most likely to see right and humpback whales in Cape Cod Bay has changed considerably, and right whales are using the habitat much more heavily than they did 20 years ago,” said lead author Dr. Dan Pendleton, Research Scientist in the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.

Read the full story at ScienceDaily

Climate change set to upend global fishery agreements, study warns

March 9, 2022 — Unlike boundaries on the land, the ocean is contiguous — fish move and transcend international waters as they please, without bothering about jurisdictions. As long as ocean temperatures remain generally stable, the fish remain in their known habitats and all is well. But as climate change heats up oceans rapidly, fish are on the move, upsetting fishing treaties between nations that stipulate who can catch how much fish in shared waters.

“Many of the fisheries management agreements made to regulate shared stocks were established in past decades, with rules that apply to a world situation that is not the same as today,” Juliano Palacios-Abrantes, a marine biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a press release.

In a recent study, Palacios-Abrantes and his colleagues from Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland predict that about half of the world’s commercial fish in shared waters will move from their known habitats by the end of the century. Published in the journal Global Change Biology, the study warns of a dramatic change in fish stocks by as early as 2030 that could lead to international disputes in exclusive economic zones, the area within 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) of a country’s coast where it has exclusive rights for fishing.

By 2030, according to the study, climate change will force 23% of shared fish stocks to move from their historical habitats and migration routes, if nothing is done to halt greenhouse gas emissions. By the end of the century, that number could rise to 45%.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Low oxygen is pushing fish into shallower water

September 21, 2021 — Fish can drown. They require oxygen to breathe, and use the oxygen dissolved in water rather than that in the air. When there’s too little oxygen in the water, they have to move or suffer ill effects.

Unfortunately, oxygen concentrations are dropping throughout the oceans. The new research, published in Global Change Biology, spans 15 years of surveys and measurements. The authors stress the importance of accounting for the findings in fishery management and conservation, or risk implementing strategies wildly out of step with conditions under the waves.

“This study finds that oxygen is declining at all the depths we surveyed: from 50 meters (164 feet) to 350 meters (1,148 feet),” says lead author Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, “and so fish seem to be moving up to shallower regions to get to an area where the oxygen is relatively higher.” Now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, Meyer-Gutbrod started this analysis as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Oxygen concentrations are decreasing for a number of reasons, including changes in ecology, seasons, and storms. But perhaps the most significant reason is that warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen.

Read the full story at Futurity

 

Fewer fish may reach breeding age as climate change skews timing of reproduction, food availability

July 25, 2019 — The following was released by the The Princeton Environmental Institute:

Phytoplankton forms the base of the food chain in marine environments, transforming solar energy into plant matter. Their blooms provide vital nourishment to animals further up the food chain, including the larval stages of many fish species.

The researchers recently reported in the journal Global Change Biology that as Earth’s climate continues to warm, the occurrence of phytoplankton blooms have shifted from historic timelines, occurring earlier than normal. Supported by the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), the scientists found that phytoplankton blooms could start approximately two to four weeks earlier in temperate and polar ecosystems under climate change. This could create hardships for developing fish as they struggle to find the phytoplankton they need to fuel their growth and survive into adulthood.

“Once fish larvae utilize all of the yolk that they received from their parents, they must learn how to hunt quickly — otherwise they risk starvation,” said first author Rebecca Asch, an assistant professor of biology at East Carolina University who began the work as a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

“Larvae that do not starve are slow to capture food and also likely to have lower survival because slower-growing fish are more likely to be eaten by predators,” explained Asch, who conducted the research with PEI associated faculty member Jorge Sarmiento, Princeton’s George J. Magee Professor of Geoscienceand Geological Engineering, Emeritus, and Charles Stock, a researcher at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory located on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus.

Fish develop in annual “classes,” with individuals reaching maturity and breeding age at roughly the same time. If enough larvae of a certain year class fail to make it to adulthood, that can affect the species’ future reproductive rates as there are fewer adults available to breed. Successive years of low adult populations could result in tighter fishing quotas that could create food shortages and economic hardship in communities that rely on fishing.

Read the full release here

Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish

A new study suggests warming sea temperatures could result in smaller fish sizes.

August 22, 2017 — Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes.

Because warmer seas speed up their metabolisms, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures will need to draw more oxygen from the ocean. At the same time, warming seas are already reducing the availability of oxygen in many parts of the sea.

A pair of University of British Columbia scientists argue that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“What we found was that the body size of fish decreases by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature,” says author William Cheung, director of science for the university’s Nippon Foundation—Nereus Program.

These changes, the scientists say, will have a profound impact on many marine food webs, upending predator-prey relationships in ways that are hard to predict.

“Lab experiments have shown that it’s always the large species that will become stressed first,” says lead author Daniel Pauly, a professor at the university’s Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, and principal investigator for the Sea Around Us. “Small species have an advantage, respiration-wise.”

Still, while many scientists applaud the discovery, not all agree that Pauly’s and Cheung’s work supports their dramatic findings. The study was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.

Read the full story at National Geographic

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