Saving Seafood

‘Climate shocks’ reducing fish stocks in New England, and Atlantic Canada could be next

December 11, 2019 — A new study says “climate shocks” are reducing fish populations in the North Atlantic region, leading to fewer jobs and lower wages in New England’s fishing sector.

Fishing communities along the northeastern U.S. seaboard have long struggled with warming waters, dwindling fish stocks and rising unemployment.

The research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to directly link climate change with declining fishing jobs.

It found that climate fluctuations caused a 16 per cent drop in fisheries employment in New England from 1996 to 2017.

The findings suggest Atlantic Canada’s fisheries could also potentially experience increasing variability in fish stocks, revenue and employment due to climate change in the coming years.

Read the full story at The Chronicle Herald

Study shows psychological distress felt by US skippers after cod collapse

October 31, 2019 — Dramatic reductions in Atlantic cod catch limits in the US Gulf of Maine have taken a psychological toll as much as a financial one on New England’s fishing captains, reports a six-year study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a repeated cross-sectional survey, researchers at Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts, led by Steven Scyphers, an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences, said they found that 62% of the captains they studied self-reported “severe or moderate psychological distress one year after the crisis began and patterns that persisted for five years,” according to an abstract of the study, titled “Chronic social disruption following a systemic fishery failure”.

“Distress was most severe among individuals without income diversity and those with dependents in the household,” the researchers added.

It was in December of 2011, five days before Christmas, that cod fishermen in the Gulf of Maine received a letter from regulatory officials telling them that new assessments showed the New England cod stocks were not going to recover by 2014, as had previously been expected, recounts a university magazine article about the study. Catch limits were then decreased by more than 95% over the next four years.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Study examines how the Atlantic surfclam is successfully adapting to climate change

July 15, 2019 — Global climate change poses a severe threat to marine life, but scientists have found at least one species that appears to be successfully adapting to warmer ocean waters.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that, even without factoring in the impacts of fishing, global animal biomass in Earth’s oceans is expected to decrease by as much as 17 percent by 2100 under a “high emissions” scenario that leads to 3-4 degrees Celsius of warming. Even under a “low emissions” scenario, in which global warming is limited to just 2 degrees Celsius (the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement), the study found that marine life biomass would drop by 5 percent by 2100.

In addition to warmer waters, ocean acidification and oxygen depletion will take a toll on the wildlife that call Earth’s oceans home. On average, the research determined, we can expect a 5 percent decline in ocean life for every 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s average surface temperature.

However, a new study published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series shows that, as ocean temperatures rise, Atlantic surfclams, a large saltwater clam found mostly in the western Atlantic Ocean, are capably shifting their range into waters that would have previously been inhospitable to their survival.

According to the study’s authors, Jeremy Timbs and Eric Powell of the University of Southern Mississippi and Roger Mann of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, the number of larvae produced by Atlantic surfclams is the key to the species’ adaptability. The clams employ a strategy of producing a massive amount of larvae that are widely distributed throughout the ocean, allowing them to reproduce despite the deleterious effects of predators, lack of food, and inhospitable temperatures on surfclam larvae numbers.

Read the full story at Mongabay

More work, less fish: Amount of fish caught for effort expended has declined since 1950

July 3, 2019 — Global fishing fleets have exploded in size and power since the 1950s, even as it takes more and more effort to catch fewer fish, according to recent research.

And while reducing fishing effort overall could lead to greater catches that require less work, achieving that goal is no simple task.

Between 1950 and 2015, the number of vessels plying the world’s waters doubled from 1.7 million to 3.7 million, while the amount of collective engine power of all vessels surged from 25 GW to 145 GW, with the portion of the world’s vessels that are motorized drastically increasing.

But the amount of fish caught for the effort expended – the catch per unit effort – dropped for most countries to one-fifth of what it was in 1950, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And there could be one million additional motorized vessels by 2050 if current trends continue, according to the study.

“The stress we put on the oceans’ resources is rather large, and management needs to react – and we see some of that, but not yet globally,” Yannick Rousseau, a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania and the lead author on the study, told SeafoodSource.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Managing recreational fisheries alongside commercial fisheries

April 15, 2019 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Arlinghaus et al. 2019, an article in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, outlined a 5-step plan for integrating recreational fishing into commercial fishery management. In the paper, scientists called for reforms on both the commercial and recreational side to produce better overall sustainability.

Recognizing recreational fishers

I write a lot about fisheries as food. Essentially, the entire point of commercial fisheries is to provide food; but with the massive scale of industrial harvest, it’s easy to forget that fish provide other benefits (like leisure and recreation) that have important economic and social outcomes. Recreational fishing provides jobs and income for tens of thousands of people and enjoyment for millions. Around 10% of people in developed nations fish for pleasure, amounting to over 200 million people worldwide.

Recreational vs commercial fishing

Recreational fishers outnumber commercial fishers 5 to 1, yet commercial fishing brings in 8x the amount of fish. Naturally, this disparity creates resentment between the two sides and conflict is not unusual, e.g. Atlantic striped bass. Arlinghaus et al. 2019 proposes a 5-point framework for integrating recreational fishing into commercial management that will hopefully lead to conflict resolution and improved sustainability.

“Even countries with strong governance for fisheries fail to integrate angling into their fisheries and conservation management system effectively. We are convinced that fisheries management and conservation measures would be more effective if the interests of anglers were given equal consideration to those of commercial fishers and other stakeholders,” stated the lead author of the study, Robert Arlinghaus, explaining his expectations of the reform process.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Trump signs recreational fishery bill into law

January 4, 2019 — The Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act is now officially a law.

The White House announced on Monday, 31 December, that President Trump signed U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker’s bill, which the Mississippi Republican has said would improve conservation efforts and also help communities that rely on recreational fishing for their economies.

In a statement, Trump said the act strengthens regional fishery management councils. Namely, it requires the Government Accountability Office to review how councils presiding over the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic fishery regions allocate quotas in areas where both anglers and commercial fishermen have access.

The new law also urges councils to consider using alternative means for evaluating recreational fishery catch limits. Rather than using tonnage, councils could now use fishing mortality targets or extraction rates. The law also requires the National Academy of Sciences to review limited access privilege programs to make sure they treat recreational fishing interests fairly.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

9 countries and the EU protected the Arctic Ocean before the ice melts

October 12, 2018 —  It’s easy to miss the truly historic nature of the moment.

Last week, nine countries—the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, Greenland/Denmark, China, Japan, Iceland, South Korea, and the European Union (which includes 28 member states)—signed a treaty to hold off on commercial fishing in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years while scientists study the potential impacts on wildlife in the far north. It was an extraordinary act of conservation—the rare case where major governments around the world proceeded with caution before racing into a new frontier to haul up sea life with boats and nets. They set aside 1.1 million square miles of ocean, an area larger than the Mediterranean Sea.

But to really grasp the significance of this milestone, consider why such a step was even possible, and what that says about our world today. For more than 100,000 years the central Arctic Ocean has been so thoroughly covered in ice that the very idea of fishing would have seemed ludicrous.

That remained true as recently as 20 years ago. But as human fossil-fuel emissions warmed the globe, the top of the world has melted faster than almost everywhere else. Now, in some years, up to 40 percent of the central Arctic Ocean—the area outside each surrounding nation’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—is open water in summer. That hasn’t yet been enough to make fishing attractive. But it is enough that boats may be lured in soon.

So, for perhaps the first time in human history, the nations of the world set aside and protected fishing habitat that, for the moment, does not even yet exist. The foresight is certainly something to applaud. But it’s hard to escape the fact that the international accord is a tacit acknowledgment—including by the United States, which is moving to back out of the Paris climate accords—that we are headed, quite literally, into uncharted waters.

“The Arctic is in a transient state—it’s not stable,” Rafe Pomerance, a former State Department official who once worked on Arctic issues and now chairs a network of Arctic scientists from nongovernmental organizations and serves on the polar research board of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Jim Lovgren: A hard look at NOAA’s observer program

February 21, 2018 — With the Trump administration looking to reduce burdensome regulations and slash unnecessary bureaucratic jobs, it’s time for them to take a hard look at NOAA’s fishery observer program. This program has grown from a handful of employees just two decades ago, now to hundreds of them who swarm fishing docks each day looking for a ride. And if you dare refuse, you face possible fines, or NMFS enforcement will not allow you to go fishing.

I’m the owner of a 75-foot fishing vessel out of Point Pleasant, N.J. And in the last two years, I have seen my observer coverage double, despite my best efforts to avoid them. The coverage in the Mid-Atlantic has substantially increased because NMFS has put most New England fishermen out of business, so instead of reducing the workforce, they in true bureaucratic tradition increase coverage on those left — this despite the fact that the Mid-Atlantic fisheries have already had extensive coverage for more than 20 years. There is no new data to be gathered. It is simply an effort to enrich the observer provider companies and increase the workforce in the Northeast Fishery Science Center, which has to collate and analyze the data.

Since we have had such extensive fishery coverage over the years, why do we need to increase it? What exactly do they expect to find? In the summer flounder fishery in New Jersey, thousands of observed trips have been taken over the years. Do they expect to find something different?

The data will be the same. The coverage is redundant and a waste of taxpayer dollars. And soon it will be the death knell of the independent fisherman, as NMFS expects them to pay the $750 a day to the observer companies, which in many cases is more than the boat makes on a trip. Also the more data that gets gathered, the more employees at the science center need to analyze it. The pathetic performance of the science center in regard to stock assessments is legendary and documented by the National Academy of Sciences study of fishery management plans. More data will not help them until they fire the incompetent people who still are doing the same stock assessments.

Recently the newest boat at our dock, totally refurbished less than a year ago, was informed that an observer had gotten bed bugs from it. The problem here is that it was an observer who brought the bedbugs onto the boat in the first place. The boat in question had new mattresses and bedding, with the same crew since its arrival. What they also had was an army of observers rotating on their boat, observing scallop and other fisheries. These observers hop from boat to boat, carrying their bags and bedding with them. Many of them are stationed in a group home near large fishing ports, where they live with up to nine other observers in the same small rental, sharing beds and furniture. They have become modern-day Typhoid Marys with the ability to contaminate multiple boats and houses with bedbugs, lice, crabs and fleas, among other unsanitary conditions. Observers and their belongings and group homes should be required to undergo weekly health examinations, just as fishermen are required to have their safety equipment checked.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Study: Maine’s lobster population will drop but fishery ‘not doomed’

January 26, 2018 — The lobster population in the Gulf of Maine could decline by nearly two-thirds by 2050, according to a scientific study released this week.

As bad as that sounds, scientists and industry representatives say the demise of the most valuable single-species fishery in the country is unlikely.

“It doesn’t mean Maine’s lobster fishery is doomed,” said Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at Gulf of Maine Research Institute and a co-author of the study.

The predicted decline was included in the results of a study conducted by GMRI and other research groups about the effect of conservation measures on lobster fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and off the southern New England coast.

The lobster population could decline between 40 percent and 62 percent over the next 32 years, depending on how much waters continue to warm in the Gulf of Maine, researchers found. The total stock of lobster for the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank is in the neighborhood of 300 million lobsters, according to the most recent stock assessment by Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The study found that lobster conservation measures in Maine aimed at protecting reproductive females and oversize adult lobsters in general, which date back to the early 20th century, have helped amplify the temporary benefit of warming seas to the lobster population in the gulf, which is warming more quickly than 99.9 percent of the world’s oceans.

In comparison, the lack of similar measures in southern New England hurt the lobster population south of Cape Cod now that waters there have become too warm to help support the growth of juvenile lobsters.

“Maintaining measures to preserve large reproductive females can mitigate negative impacts of warming on the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery in future decades,” researchers wrote in the study, which was published Jan. 22 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If the gulf’s lobster population does drop by 40 or even 60 percent over the next 32 years, the decline will be more gradual than the boom that preceded it. At that decrease, the gulf’s average lobster populations would be “similar to those in the early 2000s,” GMRI officials said.

From 1997 through 2008, Maine’s annual harvests fluctuated between 47 million and 75 million pounds. It is only within the past 10 years, since Maine lobstermen harvested 64 million pounds in 2007, that statewide landings have doubled.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

Gulf of Maine lobster population past its peak, study says, and a big drop is due

January 23, 2018 — The Gulf of Maine lobster population will shrink 40 to 62 percent over the next 30 years because of rising ocean temperatures, according to a study published Monday.

As the water temperature rises – the northwest Atlantic ocean is warming at three times the global average rate – the number of lobster eggs that survive their first year of life will decrease, and the number of small-bodied lobster predators that eat those that remain will increase. Those effects will cause the lobster population to fall through 2050, according to a study by researchers at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

Looking ahead 30 years, the researchers predict a lobster population “rewind” to the harvests documented in the early 2000s. In 2002, 6,800 license holders landed 63 million pounds of lobster valued at $210.9 million. By comparison, 5,660 license holders harvested 131 million pounds valued at $533.1 million in 2016.

“In our model, the Gulf of Maine started to cross over the optimal water temperature for lobster sometime in 2010, and the lobster population peaked three or four years ago,” said Andrew Pershing, GMRI’s chief scientific officer and one of the authors of the study. “We’ve seen this huge increase in landings, a huge economic boom, but we are coming off of that peak now, returning to a more traditional fishery.”

Industry leaders have been girding themselves for a decline in landings ever since the recent boom began. While not everybody believes the decline will happen that fast or fall so much, most lobstermen admit the impact that warming water has had on their fishery, said Dave Cousens, the president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. It drove up landings by pushing lobsters into the Gulf of Maine, and over time it will drive lobsters out to colder offshore waters or the Canadian Maritimes, he said.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald