July 8 2022 — Scientists have known the Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly, but new research suggests it’s also getting saltier, more acidic and increasingly stratified — raising concerns for its fish stocks.
The dramatic shifts in the gulf’s biochemistry are raising questions about the future of a region that has historically produced some of the world’s richest fish stocks — from cod to lobsters — and has built billion-dollar industries around them.
“We found that primary productivity, the rate at which the phytoplankton is fixing carbon in the ocean, has dropped to about a third of what it was in the early 2000s,” Barney Balch, a biological oceanographer and senior researcher at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, told UPI. “That really raised alarm bells with us.”
According to Balch, decreases in primary productivity — the carbon fixing — may affect life in the gulf from phytoplankton all the way up the food chain, including fish that humans eat.
For more than 20 years, Balch and his research partners have been helping NASA calibrate and validate ocean surface temperature data collected by the agency’s polar-orbit satellites.
Many researchers have pointed to the Gulf of Maine as one of the world’s most rapidly warming bodies of water, but Balch’s paper, published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, is one of first to showcase the full scope of the gulf’s regime change.
While it’s not yet clear how these changes will impact the region’s ecosystems, data collected by Balch’s team suggest the base of the marine food web in the gulf is in the midst of a transformation.
Over the last 30 years, warming has mostly proven a boon to lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, especially in places, like the Penobscot Bay and the Bay of Fundy, that were historically on the chillier side of a lobster’s comfort zone.
And though Balch isn’t privy to the data being collected by Wahle and his research partners, he says it’s not a stretch to hypothesize that declines in diatoms, a primary source of nutrients for copepods, are likely to have ripple effects up the food chain — ripple effects that will ultimately impact the lobsters and some number of other fisheries.