Saving Seafood

Why Is the Gulf of Maine Warming Faster Than 99% of the Ocean?

November 13, 2018 — Late last month, four endangered sea turtles washed ashore in northern Cape Cod, marking an early onset to what has now become a yearly event: the sea turtle stranding season.

These turtles—in last month’s case, Kemp’s ridley sea turtles—venture into the Gulf of Maine during warm months, but they can become hypothermic and slow moving when colder winter waters abruptly arrive, making it hard to escape.

“They are enjoying the warm water, and then all of a sudden the cold comes, and they can’t get out fast enough,” said Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine.

Thanks to record-breaking summer water temperatures that quickly transition to cooler conditions, an expanded sea turtle stranding season is just one facet of a new normal for the Gulf of Maine, Pershing explained. And this new normal is a striking contrast to prior conditions.

This year, the Gulf of Maine has experienced only 45 days with what have not been considered heat wave temperatures. Such persistent warmth, scientists warn, can set off a series of other cascading effects on the marine life and fisheries that have historically defined the culture and economy of this region’s coastline.

Read the full story at Earth & Space Science News

Defenders of endangered right whales pursue limits on aquaculture

October 4, 2018 — Right whale defenders are now taking aim at aquaculture as they try to protect the highly endangered species from deadly fishing gear entanglements.

Advocates usually focus on the lobster industry, which is estimated to account for a million surface-to-seabed trap lines in East Coast waters, when talking about entanglement risks faced by the North Atlantic right whale, whose numbers have now dwindled to fewer than 450. But animal rights groups asking for federal intervention to avoid extinction of the whales are now asking regulators to reduce the threat of aquaculture entanglement, too.

Researchers from Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a U.K.-based nonprofit that advocates for marine animals, want regulators to reduce surface-to-seabed lines in all Gulf of Maine fisheries, not just lobstering. They name aquaculture and gill net as rope-based fishing methods that are known to entrap, injure and kill both humpback and right whales. They say it’s not fair for regulators, who are meeting next week, to seek rope reduction from lobstermen while issuing permits for other fisheries that use similar rope.

The proposal does not say how to implement this aquaculture reduction, or if it should apply to in-shore, near-shore or offshore operations. Maine has a small but rapidly growing aquaculture industry, accounting for about a quarter of Maine’s documented $6.5 million-a-year shellfish harvest. But consultants believe the value of Maine’s farmed oysters, mussels and scallops will more than quadruple in value over 15 years.

A market analysis prepared for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in 2016 predicts Maine’s shellfish aquaculture industry will grow to $30 million by 2030.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Researchers Studying What Climate Change Could Mean for Fisheries in the Northeast

September 25, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Researchers with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center are studying warming ocean waters in an effort to understand what climate change could mean for “future stock conditions and the fisheries that depend on them.”

Congress recently provided the Northeast Fisheries Science Center with funding for a fisheries climate action plan that they released in 2016. Thanks to the funding, the Science Center now has 10 projects underway to “improve stock assessments through new modeling, better surveys, and more work to understand the vulnerabilities of coastal communities to climate change.”

The Science Center is working with fishermen, along with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, State University of New York Stony Brook, Rutgers University Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Research, Gulf of Maine Research Institute and Delaware Sea Grant.

A list of the stock assessment projects, survey projects, modeling projects and social science projects can be found here.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Waters off New England in midst of record year for warmth

August 31, 2018 — The waters off of New England are already warming faster than most of the world’s oceans, and they are nearing the end of one of the hottest summers in their history.

That is the takeaway from an analysis of summer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine by a marine scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. The average sea surface temperature in the gulf was nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average during one 10-day stretch in August, said the scientist, Andy Pershing, who released the work Thursday.

Aug. 8 was the second warmest day in recorded history in the gulf, and there were other sustained stretches this summer that were a few degrees higher than the average from 1982 to 2011, Pershing said. He characterized this year as “especially warm” even for a body of water that he and other scientists previously identified as warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Fisheries and Climate Change: What’s Going On in New England?

August 28, 2018 — From cod to lobster, it’s no secret that New England’s fisheries are suffering at the hands of rising water temperatures and ecological shifts related to climate change. But, sometimes, it smacks you in the face.

This past week alone, a new assessment found no improvement in the Gulf of Maine shrimp fishery, which has been closed for five years. And another study linked rising water temperatures to the spread of a shell disease that has hit lobsters in southern New England hard in recent years.

Andrew Pershing, the chief scientific officer for Gulf of Maine Research Institute shared his thoughts on what’s happening in the New England fisheries, and while it’s not great, it’s not all bad news.

“You have to really put lobster in Maine and New Hampshire and north-of-Cape-Cod in the winner category, where the warming over the last 30 years has been a real boon to that population and it’s helped them achieve the record catches that people in Maine have had over the last three or four years,” Pershing said.

But in southern New England, those warming waters have been the cause of a decline. They’re essentially making it too hot for baby lobsters to thrive, and now it also seems to be contributing to the spread of a lobster shell disease.

Read the full story at WCAI

Climate Change Is Cooking The Oceans

August 16, 2018 — Heat waves aren’t just for land lubbers. Climate change has turned the oceans into cauldrons of scalding water, upending marine ecosystems around the world.

A new paper in Nature shows how marine heat waves have become more common and intense in recent decades, largely due to climate change. What’s worse, it shows that even if the world manages to limit warming to two degrees Celsius, the trend will continue and humans will ultimately be the main driving force for virtually every marine heat wave. If we let the world warm past that mark, the results could be catastrophic for the high seas.

The results point to the need to get marine life ready for a world of extreme heat and also take a greater focus on protecting the ocean wilderness we have left.

The role of human-caused climate change in intensifying land-based heat waves is now well-established. But less research has focused on the ocean, where extreme heat events in recent years have wiped out portions of the Great Barrier Reef, caused bull sharks to migrate further north, and left scientists scrambling to find ways to save coral. Individual events like the 2016 heat wave in the Great Barrier Reef have been tied to climate change (it made the heat wave 175 times more likely), but there hasn’t been a big picture look at the topic featuring projections into the future.

That’s what led a team of Swiss researchers used a mix of models and satellite measurements to get a handle on how marine heat waves have already changed and what the future holds for the globe. The satellite record, which runs from 1982-2016, helped ground truth the models they used to create a pre-industrial baseline—what the oceans looked like without all the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. They then used the models to understand how climate change is affecting the extent, duration, and intensity of marine heat waves as well as project future changes.

The findings show the number of marine heat wave days doubled between 1982 and 2016, while heat waves also increased in extent and intensity. Moreover, they show that 87 percent of marine heat waves can be attributed to climate change, meaning they would not have occurred without it.

Read the full story at Gizmodo

Scientists struggle to measure change in the natural world

August 6, 2018 –We face a paradoxical bind, needing simultaneously to look backward and move forward. It’s dangerous, warn the editors of “Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries,” to “ignore historical change and accept the present as natural.”

First coined in 1995 by marine ecologist Daniel Pauly, the term “shifting baselines” describes a widespread tendency to assess change using too recent a reference point – typically how conditions appeared early in a researcher’s life or career. When that pattern extends across generations, it can lead to a persistent ratcheting down of expectations – coming to accept as “normal” simplified food webs with less diversity and resilience.

Shifting baselines can, for example, prompt us to celebrate a population rebound that looks impressive in the context of a 30-year time span but pales in comparison to the population and range of that species 300 – or 3,000 – years ago.

Lisa Kerr, a fisheries ecologist at Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in Portland, acknowledges how hard it can be for marine researchers to find appropriate reference points against which to measure change in fish stocks. Fisheries managers, she says, typically rely on data from 1980 onward. A longer historical context would be valuable, but is not always possible due to limited data.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Those lobster license plates are supporting $340,000 in research on vital industry

July 18, 2018 — The Maine Department of Marine Resources is using $340,000 from the sale of specialty license plates to bankroll lobster research.

The state agency is using lobster license plate profits to fund six research projects, including five run by the University of Maine and one by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, and give $5,000 mini-grants to four other researchers. Project data will be shared through a research collaborative created to address the impact of a changing ocean environment on Maine’s lobster industry.

“Maine’s lobster industry is our most valuable and is a critical piece of the economy of nearly every community along the coast,” Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “We know that change is happening in the Gulf of Maine and we want to be positioned with improved science to adapt to those changes.”

The agency in charge of regulating the state’s $1.5 billion industry is trying to up its own scientific efforts with these grants, which will be shared and shaped by a research collaborative made up of state officials, scientists and industry leaders. At the centerpiece of the new emphasis is research to support Maine’s most valuable fishery. The plan was to fund $500,000 in lobster science projects.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine: Benchmark study of lobsters begins

February 13, 2018 — In 2015, data collected in a benchmark assessment of New England lobster stocks showed record-high abundance for the combined stocks of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank and record lows for the lobster stock of southern New England.

Now, about three years later, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is beginning preparations for the next American lobster benchmark assessment that is expected to be completed around March 2020.

“We’re in the very early stages right now,” said Jeff Kipp, senior stock assessment scientist at the Arlington, Virginia-based ASMFC that regulates the Northeast lobster fishery. “The process will be mostly data-driven.”

Nothing is certain in the periodic assessments of various seafood species. But if some recent projections hold, the 2020 assessment could sketch a different picture from the 2015 assessment, possibly reflecting the declining abundance predicted by a recent Gulf of Maine Research Institute study.

The study, compiled with the University of Maine and NOAA Fisheries, forecast a 30-year decline in the Gulf of Maine lobster boom that began around 2010. The culprit? Increasingly warmer temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, which scientists have said is warming faster than 99.9 percent of the rest of the world’s ocean waters.

“In the Gulf of Maine, the lobster fishery is vulnerable to future temperature increases,” the authors of the study wrote. “The researchers’ population projections suggest that lobster productivity will decrease as temperatures continue to warm, but continued conservation efforts can mitigate the impacts of future warming.”

The findings of the GMRI study were strongly disputed by some Maine lobster dealers and the state’s Department of Marine Resources. The Maine DMR criticized the GMRI computer model used to arrive at the study’s conclusions, calling it “an unreliable tool on which to base management decisions.”

The benchmark assessment of the region’s lobster populations — which will include data on lobster landings, lobster growth and prevalent diseases among the population — could go a long way toward determining exactly what is happening to the region’s American lobster stocks.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Portland Press Herald: Time for Maine to look past lobster boom years

February 2, 2018 — There is an economic principle that’s usually attributed to Herbert Stein, who worked for the Nixon administration and The Wall Street Journal.

Stein’s law: If something can’t keep going forever, it won’t.

Maine’s lobster industry is near the peak of a historic boom, making it the state’s most lucrative fishery. In the last 30 years, lobster landings have increased from 20 million pounds a year to 130 million. No one expects the catch to keep growing forever. The question is not whether it will decline, but when.

Scientists from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have applied computer modeling to that question and have proposed an answer. In a report issued last month, they identified 2014 as the peak of the lobster population and predicted a long, slow decline of 40 to 62 percent by 2030, with the catch returning to levels in line with what was seen in the 1990s.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources has disputed the study and questioned the value of its computer models. Since no one was able to predict the historic rise in the lobster population, Commissioner Patrick Keliher said, he doubts the ability of scientists to accurately predict their decline.

He’s right, but there is plenty of reason to take this report seriously and use it as a planning tool. There’s a lot we can’t know about the future, but what we know about what’s happening in the present supports the report’s predictions.

Read the full editorial at the Portland Press Herald