Saving Seafood

A data-driven model to help avoid ecosystem collapse

June 16, 2025 — Tipping points are the death of ecosystems. So scientists watch as warning signs gradually worsen until an ecosystem reaches the point of no return, when animal populations suddenly collapse. While tipping points can sometimes be predicted, what comes next is often shrouded in mystery, stymying efforts to prevent the impending disaster or prepare for what’s to come.

A new study by a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) introduces a method for modeling the murky future beyond a tipping point. The paper, published on June 13 in PNAS, demonstrates how this model can act as a “crystal ball” into the future of ecosystems—providing enough lead time to intervene before there’s nothing left to save.

“It gives us this fundamental insight into predicting what’s going to happen in the future,” said Eric Palkovacs, a senior author on the paper and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “That allows us to either do the things necessary to avoid that transition, or if we’re going to experience it, to plan for it and figure out the best ways to cope with it.”

Seeing the future

In healthy ecosystems, species populations fluctuate in predictable ways: Sea urchins feed on a kelp forest, otters then feed on the urchins, and the kelp regrows. But if the ecosystem loses equilibrium, disaster can suddenly strike. If warming waters drive sea urchins to kill off a kelp forest, the ecosystem suddenly crosses a tipping point that can doom all the species it supports. The result is a new regime of population fluctuations that can be hard to correct.

“You have many of these cases where the system can live in different states. You have a state with lots of kelp, and a state without kelp,” said Lucas Medeiros, the study’s lead author and a former postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Cruz.

Currently, researchers have some methods for predicting what lies beyond an ecosystem’s tipping point, but each approach has its tradeoffs. Some existing methods make predictions using machine-learning algorithms. However, these approaches require large datasets, which often don’t exist for research on ecosystems, where data might be collected yearly or even less frequently.

Read the full article at UC Santa Cruz

Trump’s NOAA cuts clash with seafood competitiveness goals

June 12, 2025 —  During a Republican-led hearing touting U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on restoring American seafood competitiveness, Democrats and assembled witnesses questioned whether the administration’s actions align with its stated purpose.

“I hope to work with the administration and my colleagues and the majority to achieve that goal, but I don’t see how the administration is going to succeed when it spent the last four months haphazardly cutting the funding and workers that our fisheries rely on,” U.S. Representative Val Hoyle (D-Oregon) said during a House Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee hearing title “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: NOAA firings and cuts will reduce services used to manage Alaska fisheries, officials say

June 11, 2025 — Trump administration job cuts in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will result in less scientific information that is needed to set and oversee Alaska seafood harvests, agency officials have warned fishery managers.

Since January, the Alaska regional office of NOAA Fisheries, also called the National Marine Fisheries Service, has lost 28 employees, about a quarter of its workforce, said Jon Kurland, the agency’s Alaska director.

“This, of course, reduces our capacity in a pretty dramatic fashion, including core fishery management functions such as regulatory analysis and development, fishery permitting and quota management, information technology, and operations to support sustainable fisheries,” Kurland told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council on Thursday.

NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which has labs in Juneau’s Auke Bay and Kodiak, among other sites, has lost 51 employees since January, affecting 6% to 30% of its operations, said director Robert Foy, the center’s director. That was on top of some job losses and other “resource limitations” prior to January, Foy said.

“It certainly puts us in a situation where it is clear that we must cancel some of our work,” he told the council.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, meeting in Newport, Oregon, sets harvest levels and rules for commercial seafood harvests carried out in federal waters off Alaska. The council relies on scientific information from NOAA Fisheries and other government agencies.

Read the full article at KTOO

Policymakers to Reauthorize the Young Fishermen’s Development Act

June 11, 2025 — Representatives Seth Moulton (D-MA), Nick Begich (R-AK), Jill Tokuda (D-HI), Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen (R-American Samoa), and Jared Golden (D-ME) have introduced a bill to reauthorize the Young Fishermen’s Development Act for an additional five years.

The Young Fishermen’s Development Act’s national competitive grant program supports the training and education of the nation’s next generation of commercial fishermen. The program authorizes grants of up to $200,000 per year (for up to three years per project) through NOAA’s Sea Grant Program to support new and established local and regional training, education, outreach, and technical assistance initiatives for young fishermen.

The program, which was signed into law in 2021, is currently authorized through 2026. Congressmen Moulton and Begich’s bipartisan bill would extend the authorization of the program for another five years, to 2031.

Read the full article at ECO Magazine

Final rule for Amendment 59 sets stricter red snapper limits

June 10, 2025 — NOAA Fisheries has finalized new regulations for the South Atlantic red snapper fishery through Amendment 59 to the Fishery Management Plan for Snapper-Grouper Fishery of the South Atlantic Region, tightening limits and restricting access for both commercial and recreational fishermen in the 2025 season.

According to NOAA Fisheries, the red snapper population in the South Atlantic is “undergoing overfishing, not overfished, but not yet rebuilt,” prompting the agency to revise catch limits and season dates through this final rule. The changes are based on the most recent update to the SEDAR 73 stock assessment, which includes data through 2023.

“NOAA Fisheries developed Amendment 59 on the Secretary’s behalf to comply with the Magnuson-Stevens Act and a court order,” the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) stated, “because the SAFMC failed to develop and submit, after a reasonable period of time, needed conservation and management measures to end and prevent overfishing of the South Atlantic red snapper population, as required by the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

NOAA reverses course on winter Florida groundfish ban

June 10, 2025 — In a victory for sport fishermen, NOAA has scrapped a proposed rule that would have banned fishing for 55 fish species off Florida’s Atlantic coast during the winter to aid the recovery of overfished red snapper, one of the region’s most prized sport species.

In a bulletin announcing a suite of changes to federal management of South Atlantic red snapper, NOAA said it had axed the three-month ban — called a “discard reduction season” — on dozens of species that share the same near-bottom habitat with snapper, citing heavy opposition from fishing interests.

Those species include black sea bass, red grouper, vermillion snapper, gag, scamp, greater amberjack and gray triggerfish.

Read the full article at E&E News

ALASKA: Trump’s cuts to fisheries science have industry and conservation groups sounding the alarm

June 10, 2025 — Alaska’s fishing industry and environmental groups don’t always agree. But this week, they were on the same side — both warning that recent cuts to federal fisheries science could jeopardize Alaska’s oceans.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which helps set fishing rules in federal waters, wraps up its meeting Tuesday in Oregon.

According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials attending the meeting, the Alaska Science Center has lost 51 employees since February — about a quarter of its staff.

“You can’t lose 51 people and not have that impact our ability to provide our products in a meaningful and timely way,” said Bob Foy, who directs NOAA’s science operations in Alaska. “It’s been a challenging process.”

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

‘Ticking time bomb’: Ocean acidity crosses vital threshold, study finds

June 10, 2025 — The deep oceans have crossed a crucial boundary that threatens their ability to provide the surface with food and oxygen, a new study finds.

Nearly two-thirds of the ocean below 200 meters, or 656 feet, as well as nearly half of that above, have breached “safe” levels of acidity, according to findings published on Monday in Global Change Biology.

The fall in ocean pH is “a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” Steve Widdicombe, director of science at the United Kingdom’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), said in a statement.

The study was funded in part by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency that has been targeted for steep cuts by the Trump White House, in large part because of its role in investigating climate change.

Some of the biggest changes in deep water are happening off the coast of western North America, home to extensive crab and salmon fisheries, the study found.

Read the full article at The Hill

See How Marine Heat Waves Are Spreading Across the Globe

June 9, 2025 — Unusual heat waves have occurred in all of the major ocean basins around the planet in recent years. And some of these events have become so intense that scientists have coined a new term: super marine heat waves.

“The marine ecosystems where the super marine heat waves occur have never experienced such a high sea surface temperature in the past,” said Boyin Huang, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in an email.

The seas off the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland experienced an unusually intense marine heat wave, one of the longest on record, starting in April and the temperature rise happened much earlier in the year than usual. Australia and its iconic coral reefs were recently struck by heat waves on two coasts.

Scientists define marine heat waves in different ways. But it’s clear that as the planet’s climate changes, the oceans are being fundamentally altered as they absorb excess heat trapped in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases, which are emitted when fossil fuels are burned.

Hotter oceans are causing drastic changes to marine life, sea levels and weather patterns.

Some of the most visible casualties of ocean warming have been coral reefs. When ocean temperatures rise too much, corals can bleach and die. About 84 percent of reefs worldwide experienced bleaching-level heat stress at some point between January 2023 and March 2025, according to a recent report.

Last year, the warmest on record, sea levels rose faster than scientists expected. Research showed that most of that rise in sea levels came from ocean water expanding as it warms, which is known as thermal expansion, not from melting glaciers and ice sheets, which in past years were the biggest contributors to rising seas.

Excess heat in the oceans can also affect weather patterns, making hurricanes more likely to rapidly intensify and become more destructive. In the southwest Pacific, last year’s ocean heat contributed to a record-breaking streak of tropical cyclones hitting the Philippines.

“If we understand how global warming is affecting extreme events, that is essential information to try to anticipate what’s going on, what’s next,” said Marta Marcos, a physicist at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.

Dr. Marcos was the lead author of a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found that climate change has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of marine heat waves in recent decades.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Northwest tribes say Trump’s proposed salmon budget cuts violate treaty rights

June 9, 2025 — Northwest tribal officials say the Trump administration’s latest budget proposal would violate their treaty rights to catch salmon.

Among other cutbacks, the White House’s proposed 2026 budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would eliminate the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, the leading source of money for restoring the Northwest’s struggling salmon runs.

The Trump administration is asking Congress, which controls federal spending, to reduce NOAA’s funding to nearly half of its 2024 levels. While the budget proposal lacks many details, it singles out the $100 million salmon recovery fund and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which had a $638 million budget in 2024, for elimination.

“If the plug is pulled, the tribe will have to do something to protect our treaty rights,” said David Troutt, head of the Nisqually Tribe’s natural resources department. “And if we don’t have the ability to do it collaboratively, we’ll look to other means, and it may drive us more quickly and more regularly into the courts.”

Federal treaties signed in the 1850s guarantee Northwest tribes the right to fish and hunt in their traditional territories in exchange for giving up most of their land.

“It’s in case law. It’s in treaties, which are the supreme law of the land, so I don’t know what more obligation than that there could be,” Lummi Nation Councilmember Lisa Wilson said.

“The guarantees were made back in the 1850s to be sure that we will be able to catch salmon forever,” Troutt said. “Well, apparently, forever ends in 2026.”

The relationship between tribes and the federal government could switch from collaborating on watershed restoration to fighting in the courts.

Tribal and state officials say the federal salmon fund is critical to keep the region’s salmon and orcas from going extinct.

“It really anchors salmon recovery across the West Coast,” said Erik Neatherlin, head of the governor’s Salmon Recovery Office in Washington state.

West Coast states harbor 28 federally threatened and endangered salmon populations.

“What will suffer are the salmon,” Neatherlin said.

And the people who rely on them.

Read the full article at OPB