Saving Seafood

Ocean Warming Is Already Affecting Arctic Fish And Birds

September 13, 2016 — Up until a few years ago, mackerel were unknown in Greenland’s cold waters. The small oily fish typically spawned west of the British Isles and then migrated toward the northeast along the Norwegian current to feed for the summer. But in 2007, they began to show up in large numbers in the Irminger Current around Iceland. On the ocean highway, where they once turned right, they now turned left.

By 2011, the mackerel had found their way into Greenlandic waters, prompting the launch of a new fishery. Three years later, the mackerel fishery made up 23 percent of Greenland’s export earning, an “extreme example of how climate change can impact the economy of an entire nation,” Teunis Jansen, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a release.

The mackerel aren’t the only species being affected by warmer oceans. Soaring temperatures have pushed entire groups of species toward the poles, caused increases in disease in plants and animals and changed weather patterns, according to a report launched this week by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Marine species are moving northward at a rate roughly five times faster than the migration of land animals.

The report, released during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, highlights the impacts of ocean warming on marine life, from microorganisms to mammals. Eighty scientists from a dozen countries worked on the report, considered to be the most comprehensive collection of research on the planet’s warming oceans.

Truly Staggering

“We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report,” said Dan Laffoley, an IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors.

The world’s oceans have acted as a buffer against climate change. A “staggering 93 percent” of the heat produced by human activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans, Laffoley said. If the heat had entered the atmosphere instead of the oceans, the Earth would have warmed not by the 1C (1.8F) we have already experienced, but by 36C (64.8F). “Up to now, the ocean has shielded us from the worst impacts of climate change,” the report’s authors write.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Scientists, fishermen plot ways to prevent whale entanglements

May 25, 2016 — PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Nette Leverman was reading from a sheaf of papers she held in her hand, detailing the interactions between whales and fishermen in Greenland, where she is a population biologist.

Humpback, minke, fin and bowhead whales were getting caught in fishing line and nets in the waters off the country’s coast. It’s a familiar refrain, heard over and over Monday, the first day of a four-day international workshop on large whale entanglements.

“We’ve known for decades about this problem, yet solutions to it remain elusive,” said Tim Werner, a senior scientist at the New England Aquarium, and one of the workshop’s organizers.

Governments and fishermen around the world are feeling the strain from an increasing numbers of whales being snared in fishing gear as some whale species rebound and as the amount of gear in the water increases for fishing, aquaculture and other uses.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Saving Atlantic salmon will require Greenland’s help

March 13, 2016 (AP) — Preventing the long-imperiled Atlantic salmon from disappearing from American waters will require the U.S. to put pressure on Inuit fishermen in Greenland to stop harvesting a fish that has fed them for hundreds of years, federal officials say.

The salmon were once found from Long Island Sound to Canada, but their population has cratered in the face of river damming, warming ocean waters, competition for food with non-native fish and, officials say, continued Greenlandic fishing.

Now, federal officials have outlined an ambitious plan to try to save the Atlantic salmon that they say will require removing dams, creating fish passages and fostering cooperation with Inuit fishermen some 2,000 miles away from Maine, where most of America’s last wild Atlantic salmon spawn.

“We’ve tried everything possible to negotiate with Greenland to find alternatives to find out how they can lessen impacts on U.S. fish,” said Dan Kircheis, a fisheries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. “This is part of their culture, this is part of who they are, this is something they’ve always done. We are trying to work with them to realize the fish they are fishing for originate in Canada, in U.S. waters, in Europe, and these populations are in decline.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Portland Press Herald

Closing In on Where Eels Go to Connect

December 7, 2015 — Eels hold tight to their biological secrets, so much so that Aristotle mused that they must be sexless creatures spontaneously emerging from the “earth’s guts.” Now, at least one eel enigma is finally a step closer to being solved.

For the first time, scientists have tracked American eels migrating to their legendary spawning grounds in the Atlantic Ocean.

“For a very long time, circumstantial evidence has pointed to the Sargasso Sea as the breeding grounds of eels, but like crime novel detectives, scientists have wanted conclusive proof,” said David Cairns, a research scientist at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who was not involved in the work.

The search for that proof, he added, “has preoccupied eel scientists for more than a century.”

American eels spend their adult lives, which range from three to 20 years, in rivers and estuaries from Greenland to Venezuela, but those far-flung populations share a single reproductive site in the Sargasso Sea. Their migration to the sea is perhaps one of the most impressive animal journeys in the world, but no one has ever caught an adult in the open ocean — much less observed them reproducing.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Inuit Study Adds Twist to Omega-3 Fatty Acids’ Health Story

September 17, 2015 — A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit’s bodies, reducing their heights and weights.

Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the new study, said that the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said.

Food is a powerful force in evolution. The more nutrients an animal can get, the more likely it is to survive and reproduce. Humans are no exception. When we encounter a new kind of food, natural selection may well favor those of us with genetic mutations that help us thrive on it.

Some people, for example, are able to digest milk throughout their lives. This genetic adaptation arose in societies that domesticated cattle thousands of years ago, in such places as Northern Europe and East Africa. People who trace their ancestry to other regions, by contrast, tend to more often be lactose-intolerant.

Read the full story at the New York Times