Saving Seafood

Maine business owners explore challenges, opportunities of climate change

October 30, 2015 — SOUTH PORTLAND — Several Maine business owners said Friday that adapting to climate change doesn’t have to be costly and, in many cases, can help a company’s finances as well as the environment.

Climate change presents considerable challenges but also potential opportunities to Maine businesses and communities, many of which are witnessing the impacts of a changing ocean environment before their counterparts elsewhere around the country. That was a key theme of a forum co-sponsored Friday by the South Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“Ultimately, this has to make economic sense,” U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said via Skype because early-morning budget votes in Washington prevented his return to Maine. “We can’t depend on everybody simply being good guys or nice men and women. It has to work in terms of a return on investment.”

Laying out the challenges facing Maine due to a changing climate, King and Gulf of Maine Research Institute President and CEO Don Perkins discussed how lobster and other fish species are already changing their habits as the Gulf of Maine warms. A recent six-part Portland Press Herald series explored the ecological and economic implications of the fact that the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than almost every part of the oceans around the globe during the past decade.

“It’s real and it has very sobering implications for our fishing industry, obviously,” said Perkins, whose staff at GMRI recently co-authored a scientific study showing cod populations were not recovering because of warming Gulf of Maine waters. “Once you get over agonizing about that – and it is cause for agony – the fact is that we’re dealing with that problem a decade or a few decades earlier than many other ocean regions. And as a result, there is a huge opportunity in this state to figure out how to understand a changing system.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

Fishermen get face-to-face meeting with NOAA official

October 29, 2015 — HAMPTON, N.H. – Fishermen had a rare meeting Saturday with the federal administrator whose agency has put what Granite State fishermen call backbreaking regulations on their industry.

While no promises for action were made by the official — Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association — those who met with her said they appreciated the hour and a half sit-down she gave them at the Ashworth by the Sea Hotel.

Sullivan took notes, asked questions and heard right from the mouths of the fishermen their fears that recent regulations will make New Hampshire the first state to have its groundfishing industry completely wiped out.

“I said (to Sullivan) I felt that I’m very patriotic, I love my country, but I feel my government has completely failed us in New Hampshire and in the fishing industry, and the public process has been non-existent,” said Ellen Goethel, Hampton marine biologist and wife of commercial fisherman David Goethel. Both met with Sullivan, as well as Portsmouth commercial fisherman Erik Anderson, Fish and Game’s Marine Fishery Division Chief Doug Grout, state Sen. Nancy Stiles (R-Hampton) and state Rep. Renny Cushing (D-Hampton).

U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., organized the 4 p.m. meeting. Shaheen contacted the NOAA administrator when she learned Sullivan would be attending a summit at the Ashworth Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24 and 25.

Ellen Goethel said it was important for Sullivan to hear about the economic impact the regulations have had on the fisheries in New Hampshire, supported by information gathered by Grout.

Grout said the gross income for New Hampshire’s groundfishermen was reduced roughly 69 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to analysis provided by NOAA. That’s a bigger impact on groundfishermen income than in any other state, the analysis showed.

Also discussed was the core of the problem for struggling fishermen in New Hampshire – whether the science behind the strict regulations is accurate.

Grout told Sullivan there was an apparent disconnect between what NOAA’s scientists were reporting for cod stock levels and what fishermen are seeing on the water.

Read the full story at Portsmouth Herald

Climate change hurting New England cod population, study says

October 29, 2015 — The rapid warming of the waters off New England has contributed to the historic collapse of the region’s cod population and has hampered its ability to rebound, according to a study that for the first time links climate change to the iconic species’ plummeting numbers.

Between 2004 and 2013, the mean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine — extending from Cape Cod to Cape Sable in Nova Scotia — rose a remarkable 4 degrees, which the researchers attributed to shifts in the ocean currents caused by global warming.

The study, which was released Thursday by the journal Science, offers the latest evidence of climate change — this time, affecting a species once so plentiful that fishermen used to joke that they could walk across the Atlantic on the backs of cod.

Fisheries management officials have sharply limited cod fishing in hopes of protecting the species, but they estimate the number of cod remain at as little as 3 percent of what would sustain a healthy population. The limits, in turn, have hurt fishermen.

“Managers [of the fishery] kept reducing quotas, but the cod population kept declining,” said Andrew Pershing, the study’s lead author and chief scientific officer of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. “It turns out that warming waters were making the Gulf of Maine less hospitable for cod, and the management response was too slow to keep up with the changes.”

The institute had reported last year that the rise in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine exceeded those found in 99 percent of the world’s other large bodies of saltwater. The authors of Thursday’s study link the rapid warming to a northward shift in the Gulf Stream and changes to other major currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

They say the warmer water coursing into the Gulf of Maine has reduced the number of new cod and led to fewer fish surviving into adulthood. Cod prefer cold water, which is why they have thrived for centuries off New England.

The precise causes for the reduced spawning are unclear, the researchers said, but they’re likely to include a decline in the availability of food for young cod, increased stress, and more hospitable conditions for predators. Cod larvae are View Story eaten by many species, including dogfish and herring; larger cod are preyed upon by seals, whose numbers have increased markedly in the region.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Directed Atlantic Herring Fishery Closure for Management Area 1A Effective 1200 Hours-Noon on November 2, 2015

October 30, 2015 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC):

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) projected 92% of the total allowable catch (TAC) allocated to Management Area 1A (inshore Gulf of Maine) for Trimester 3 (October-December) will be harvested by November 2, 2015. The Area 1A directed fishery will close effective 1200 hours-Noon on November 2, 2015 and remain closed until further notice. Vessels that have entered port before 1200 hours-Noon on November 2, 2015, may land and sell, from that trip, more than 2,000 pounds of herring from Area 1A.

Vessels participating in the herring Research Set-Aside (RSA) Program may continue to fish in Area 1A for the remainder of the fishing year, and land, subject to state landing restrictions, greater than 2,000 pounds of Atlantic herring provided they are on a declared herring RSA trip.

States are reminded that in accordance with Amendment 2 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Herring, once a closure has been announced by the Greater Atlantic Regional Office Regional Administrator, states must prohibit the landing of herring from a closed area and prohibit directed fishing for Atlantic herring in state waters of a closed area. During a closure, vessels participating in other fisheries may retain and land an incidental catch of herring that does not exceed 2,000 pounds per trip or calendar day. In addition, all vessels traveling through Area 1A must have all fishing gear stowed.

For more information, please contact Ashton Harp, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at aharp@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.

Read a PDF version of the release

Maine isn’t doing enough to protect the Gulf from the effects of climate change

October 30, 2015 — When the Maine Legislature’s commission on ocean acidification reported its findings – that the state’s fisheries and aquaculture industries were threatened by this baleful byproduct of global warming – officials here were not exactly spurred to action.

Acidification, driven by increased carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and freshwater runoff from extreme rainfall in river basins, has been implicated in failures at oyster hatcheries and mussel farms, and has been shown to weaken clams and other shell-building animals vital to Maine’s fishing and aquaculture industries. But bills introduced in the last session – one each by a Democratic marine scientist and a Republican lobsterman – to implement many of the panel’s findings were withdrawn, one for lack of resources, the other for lack of support from Gov. Paul LePage’s administration.

“I could see the bill wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the governor was going to veto it,” Rep. Mick Devin, a Democrat from Newcastle, says of legislation he sponsored to allow the commission to continue its work for another three years.

Patricia Aho, who was the commissioner of environmental protection until she resigned in August, opposed Devin’s bill, saying the status quo was sufficient. “Since the issues of climate change and ocean acidification are inextricably linked, we think it will be more efficient to consider this issue in the broader context of climate change and adaptation programs,” she said in written testimony to legislators.

Devin’s bill and another one sponsored by Rep. Wayne Parry, a Republican from Arundel, were carried over to the next legislative session. Parry’s bill would have put a bond issue on the ballot that would borrow $3 million to fund several of the expert committee’s recommendations: collecting data, monitoring waterways, and performing tests in coastal waters to better assess the impact of acidification on wildlife and commercial fish species. It was withdrawn after failing to make it to the top of an informal list of bonding priorities drawn up by legislative leaders.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

NEFMC: Response to Study on Rising Water Temps in the Gulf of Maine

October 29, 2015  — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The Gulf of Maine, located off northern New England and Canada, has hosted important commercial and recreational marine fisheries for centuries. In addition to existing threats from land-based pollution, marine discharges, energy development, and disturbances to habitat, a more recent problem, temperature rise, has emerged. The just-published paper in Science —Slow Adaptation in the Face of Rapid Warming Leads to the Collapse of Atlantic Cod in the Gulf of Maine — adds to the increasing body of work on this topic.

As an organization responsible for the management of fisheries in federal waters that encompass the Gulf of Maine, the New England Fishery Management Council (Council), along with partners, NOAA Fisheries and the New England states, offers comments on this paper.

  • Most importantly, climate change is a very real issue that affects fisheries in ways we are just beginning to understand and is one the Council and others must confront.
  • This particular paper presents interesting research, but as is generally the case, it is rare that any one scientific study provides “The Answer.” This one will almost certainly generate more discussion and further consideration of how fisheries management bodies might respond.
  • NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center is actively investigating climate change that could help develop possible responses. The Science paper will likely become part of the larger discussion on how to adapt and respond to climate change. During that process, it will be the subject of careful review, including testing of its assumptions and conclusions. Should they stand up to this scrutiny, the work may influence future quota-setting
  • Work is underway by the Council to look more broadly at fisheries through ecosystem-based fisheries management; those efforts may illuminate the way in which we consider this pressing threat to the productivity of fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere.
  • More critically, the Science paper appears to presume that the Council should have anticipated the unusual temperature rise in 2012, without any explanation of how that could have been done. The current quota for Gulf of Maine cod is the lowest on record, and will almost certainly remain so in the foreseeable future. The goal at this time is to allow sustainable levels of fishing on healthy stocks, such as haddock, redfish, and pollock to continue, while creating the opportunity for cod to recover.

After reviewing the paper, Council Executive Director Tom Nies summarized his reaction to the challenges raised in the Science paper. “Fishery managers will need to adapt to the host of significant changes caused by the rapid rise in water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine; specifically, the New England Council will continue its close partnership with the scientific community in order to mount an effective response to this circumstance.”

View a PDF of the release here

Scientists: Warming Ocean Factor in Collapse of Cod Fishery

October 29, 2015 — PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The rapid warming of waters off New England is a key factor in the collapse of the region’s cod fishery, and changes to the species’ management are needed to save one of America’s oldest industries, according to a report published Thursday in Science magazine.

Fishery managers say cod spawning in the Gulf of Maine — a key fishing area between Cape Cod and Canada that touches Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire — is only about 3 percent of sustainable levels, and participants in the fishery that dates to the Colonial era face dramatic quota cuts as a result.

The scientists behind the Science report say the warming of the Gulf of Maine, which accelerated from 2004 to 2013, reduced cod’s capacity to rebound from fishing pressure. The report gives credence to the idea — supported by advocacy groups, fishing managers and even some fishermen — that climate change has played a role in cod’s collapse.

The lead author of the study, Andrew Pershing of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, said the gulf is warming at a rate 99 percent faster than anywhere else in the world, and as a result, too many of the fish aren’t living past age 4 or 5. Cod can live to be older than 20.

“Every animal has a temperature range that they prefer. The Gulf of Maine, for cod, is really at the warm end of that,” Pershing said. “If you warm it, you push it somewhere that’s really uncomfortable.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Invasive species exploit a warming Gulf of Maine, sometimes with destructive results

October 28, 2015 — Until two years ago, if you had walked down to the shore of Maquoit Bay at low tide, you would have seen a meadow of eelgrass stretching nearly as far as the eye could see across the exposed seafloor. Here near the head of the bay, the sea grass stretched for two miles to the opposite shore, creating a vast nursery for the shellfish and forage species of Casco Bay, of which Maquoit is a part.

Now there’s only mud.

Green crabs took over the bay in the late fall of 2012 and the spring and summer of 2013, tearing up the eelgrass in their pursuit of prey and devouring almost every clam and mussel from here to Yarmouth. Fueled by record high water temperatures in 2012 and a mild winter in 2013, the green crab population grew so huge that the mudflats of Casco Bay became cratered with their burrowing, and much of the Maquoit and adjacent Middle Bay bottom turned into a lunar landscape.

Eelgrass coverage in Maquoit Bay fell by 83 percent. With nothing rooted to the bottom, the seawater turned far muddier, making life hard on any plants or baby clams that tried to recolonize the bay.

“We were astounded,” says Hilary Neckles of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, who linked the destruction to the green crabs. “The ecological ramifications really reverberate throughout the ecosystem, because sea grass is the preferred habitat of so many fish and shellfish species.”

Over the past decade, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, allowing warm-water intruders to gain a toehold and earlier invaders such as the green crab to take over. Coupled with declines of the cold-loving species that have dominated the gulf for thousands of years, the ecological effects of even more gradual long-term warming are expected to be serious, even as precise forecasting remains beyond the state of scientific knowledge.

Scientists say the 2012 “ocean heat wave” was an unusual event, and that the 10-year accelerated warming trend is likely part of an oceanographic cycle and unlikely to continue. But the gulf has been consistently warming for more than 30 years, and long-term forecasts project average sea surface temperatures in our region could reach 2012-like levels by mid-century. The events of 2012 and the nearly as warm year that followed likely provide a preview of things to come, of a gulf radically transformed, with major implications for life on the Maine coast.

Genevieve MacDonald, who fishes for lobster out of Stonington, was standing on the dock at Isle au Haut one morning that summer, looked in the water, and couldn’t believe her eyes. There, swimming around the harbor like mackerel, were dozens and dozens of longfin squid, temperate creatures rarely seen in the chill waters of eastern Maine. “If you had a cast net you could have brought in a whole basket full of squid,” she recalls.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

Gulf of Maine’s cold-craving species forced to retreat to deeper waters

October 27, 2015 — For 178 years, dams stood across the Penobscot River here, obstructing salmon and other river-run fish from reaching the watershed’s vast spawning grounds, which extend all the way to the Quebec border.

Now, two years after the dam’s removal, the salmon’s proponents fear the fish face a more fearsome threat: a warming sea.

In recent years, the Gulf of Maine has been one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans, and climate change models project average sea surface temperatures here to increase by another 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2065, a development that could extirpate Atlantic salmon and other cold-loving species, many of which already find Maine at the southern edge of their ranges.

“We’re all for taking down the dams and all the things that are going on to restore habitat, but how much are they looking at the evidence?” asks Gerhard Pohle of the Huntsman Marine Science Center in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, co-author of a study predicting how the changes are likely to affect 33 commercial species over the next 75 years. “Distribution of salmon in the Gulf of Maine would be such that there wouldn’t be many left at all.”

The warming gulf is already presenting challenges to many of its cold-loving denizens. Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Services, or NMFS, have recorded the steady retreat of a range of commercially or ecologically important fish species away from the Maine coast and into deep water in the southwestern part of the gulf, where bottom water temperatures are cooler.

The retreat, which intensified over the past decade, includes cod, pollock, plaice, and winter and yellowtail flounder. Other native species that once ranged south of Long Island – lobster, sand lance and red hake – have stopped doing so, presumably because the water there is now too warm.

“You can imagine that when you have species at the southern end of their ranges, they will be really sensitive to these changes,” says Michael Fogarty, chief of the Ecosystem Assessment Program at the NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “They will either shift distribution or their survival rates might change.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Big changes are occurring in one of the fastest-warming spots on Earth

October 25, 2015 — Sandwiched on a narrow sandbar between Yarmouth’s harbor and the open Gulf of Maine, the fishermen of Yarmouth Bar have long struggled to keep the sea at bay.

Nineteenth-century storms threatened to sweep the whole place away, leaving Yarmouth proper’s harbor more open to the elements, prompting the province to build a granite cribwork across the quarter-mile bar, behind which the hamlet’s fishing fleet docks. Global warming has brought rising seas, a two-story-high rock wall to fight them and the hamlet’s designation as one of the communities in the province most threatened by climate change.

Now, snaking around the snout of Nova Scotia and into the Gulf of Maine is a new, unseen threat to Yarmouth Bar and hundreds of coastal communities in Maine, eastern New England and the Maritimes: currents fueling the rapid warming of the sea.

The Gulf of Maine – which extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and includes the Bay of Fundy, the offshore fishing banks, and the entire coast of Maine – has been warming rapidly as the deep-water currents that feed it have shifted. Since 2004 the gulf has warmed faster than anyplace else on the planet, except for an area northeast of Japan, and during the “Northwest Atlantic Ocean heat wave” of 2012 average water temperatures hit the highest level in the 150 years that humans have been recording them.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald