Saving Seafood

Sen. King tells researchers that data is the key to protecting lobster industry

June 6, 2017 — Calling proposed cuts in federal science funding “unacceptable,” U.S. Sen. Angus King told lobster researchers Monday that data is the key to protecting Maine’s most valuable fishery.

Maine’s independent senator asked the 250 biologists, oceanographers and fishery managers at a global conference on lobster biology in Portland this week to give him data on the impact of the changing sea environment on lobster, including temperature, salinity and acidification, and whether that is prompting a migration of Maine’s $533.1 million a year fishery to Canada.

“If lobsters are moving toward Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, that’s a serious practical issue that will get the attention of politicians,” he said. “It’s when you start seeing jobs go away that politicians start saying ‘Gee, we’d better do something about this.’ Are they moving, if they are why, and if they are, what’s the timing? Is it five years? Twenty years? A hundred years?”

But federal funding for scientific research is under fire. President Trump’s budget calls for a 17 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the national fisheries programs and funded almost a fifth of Maine Department of Marine Resources’ annual budget. It would eliminate the Sea Grant program, which funds research by the University of Maine’s Rick Wahle, conference co-chairman, among others.

“The lobster industry in New England is valued at close to $500 million and yet we know very little about how ocean acidification may affect this species,” Libby Jewett, NOAA’s ocean acidification director, said last fall when awarding Wahle’s team a $200,000 grant for lobster research. “These projects should help move the needle forward in our understanding and, as a result, enable broader resilience in the region.”

King said it is unlikely that Trump’s budget, containing what he considers drastic cuts in scientific funding, will pass Congress.

“The last thing we should be doing on a federal level is cutting research funding,” King said. “That is one of the most important functions of the federal government, whether it is climate change or cancer. It’s how we solve problems. To cut research, and particularly to cut research when you get the feeling that the motivation is that we don’t want to know, is unacceptable. … Congress understands this.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

West Coast Ocean Acidification Rates Among Highest In World

June 2, 2017 — Carbon emissions aren’t just causing climate change, they’re having a profound effect on ocean chemistry.

Our oceans are becoming more acidic and this is a major threat to fisheries.

Researchers have now recorded some of the highest levels of ocean acidification in the world,  right off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

When oceans absorb carbon, they become more acidic, preventing oysters and tiny marine snails at the base of the food chain from forming shells.

A new study from Oregon State University documents ocean acidification off the coast of California and Oregon.

“What we didn’t know is that if you’re an animal living on the shore, how often do you see a bad day?” Francis Chan, a lead author, said. “And now because we have sensors that are actually taking a measurement of ocean PH every 10 minutes throughout the summer, we can start to build that picture.”

The study found that while there were persistent hotspots of destructive acid levels, there were also areas that stayed within healthy ranges.

Read the full story at Northwest Public Radio

Gulf of Maine will become too warm for many key fish, report says

May 22, 2017 — A new study by federal fisheries scientists predicts the warming of the Gulf of Maine will cause a dramatic contraction of suitably cool habitat for a range of key commercial fish species there. On the other hand, lobsters are more likely to find hospitable areas.

The study by seven scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, used a high-resolution global climate model and federal fisheries survey data to model how key fisheries species would likely be affected by predicted warming over the next 80 years.

The results confirmed previous research using other models and methods that found that the Gulf of Maine can be expected to become increasingly uncomfortable for many of the cold-loving species that have thrived here for all of recorded history but are at the southern ends of their ranges. Those include cod, haddock, redfish, plaice and pollock.

“The main message here is how important it is to understand the potential magnitude of the changes that you see when you get a finer, higher-resolution view of the implications of changing sea temperatures,” says co-author Michael Fogarty, chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

The scientists caution that the research analyzes just one factor – albeit an important one – the distribution of thermally appropriate habitat for each of 58 species. Their results predict the changes in the amount and location of such habitat but don’t account for many other factors that can influence the future populations of the species themselves, such as what happens to what they eat or what likes to eat them, or how the increasing acidity of the ocean – another product of climate change – will affect each.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Pacific Region Cooperating To Address Ocean Acidification

March 28, 2017 — APIA, Samoa — If the land is well and the sea is well, the people will thrive.

This adage is relevant now more than ever as climate change is encroaching on our shores.

Leaders from around the Pacific have joined in to tackle the issue of climate change specifically focusing on ocean acidification.

Last week, was the opening of the New Zealand Pacific Partnership on Ocean Acidification (P.P.O.A) project and the Tokelau Project Inception Workshop at Taumeasina Island Resort.

The New Zealand Pacific Partnership on Ocean Acidification (P.P.O.A) project is a collaborative effort between the Secretariat  of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the university of the South Pacific, and the Pacific Community which aims to build resilience to ocean acidification in Pacific Island communities and ecosystems, with financial support form the NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Government of Monaco.

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

Ocean waters off Southeast coast are acidifying faster than anyone expected and threatening marine life

March 6, 2017 — Gray’s Reef is a run of small ridges in the ocean off northern Georgia that looks like a Western rock canyon underwater. It’s swarmed by a stunning diversity of more than 300 different kinds of marine creatures and fish. And it’s more threatened than any one expected. The entire Southeast coast is.

The ocean water there is acidifying — becoming more corrosive, more poisonous — even faster than the air above it, where the acid is supposed to be coming from. There must be other sources. Finding them could be key to protecting marine life and a multi-million fishing industry and food source.

That in a nutshell is why the newly formed Southeast Ocean and Coastal Acidification Network met in Charleston this week to work out priorities for monitoring and research.

Its goal is to pull together “the state of the science” as it applies to the Southeast, bring in commercial anglers and other interests for their in-the-field observations, then develop plans to prevent the sort of ecosystem collapse that occurred on the West Coast with shellfish, according to organizer Debra Hernandez in an earlier story.

Read the full story at The Post and Courier

Maine’s coastal waters are unhealthy from carbon, acidity. Are seaweed gardens the answer?

February 6, 2017 — Seaweed cultivation has been promoted in recent years in Maine as a way to produce local nutritious food and to boost the coastal economy.

Now, seaweed harvesters say their industry provides yet another benefit: environmental protection, in the form of improving water quality.

A new study from Bigelow Laboratory for Marine Sciences in Boothbay indicates growing and harvesting seaweed may be an antidote for increasing carbon and acidity levels in the ocean, which is harming a variety of marine life.

Since January 2016, the lab has been studying the effect of kelp growth on surrounding carbon levels at the Ocean Approved seaweed farm off Great Chebeague Island in Casco Bay.

The early results indicate that sugar kelp absorbs carbon from the surrounding water as it grows. This is prompting the lab to expand its research on kelp and to conduct a separate study on the carbon-absorption abilities of wild-grown rockweed.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Eelgrass and Ocean Acidification: California Takes Action

October 4, 2016 — What do eelgrass, the California state legislature, crabbers, and Ocean Conservancy have in common? They are all part of the solution in California’s remarkable actions this past week to address the threats that ocean acidification presents to California’s healthy fisheries, marine habitat and coastal jobs.

Governor Jerry Brown just signed into law a pair of bills that will address the concerns over ocean acidification raised by oyster growers, crabbers and others who make a living off of the ocean.

The two pieces of state legislation were crafted by Assemblymember Das Williams and Senator Bill Monning, as tailored place-based solutions to what amounts to a global problem. SB 1363 will protect and restore eelgrass habitats, increasing carbon sequestration amongst the roots of this coastal vegetation.

Read the full story at the Ocean Conservancy

CONNECTICUT: Beneath the waves, climate change puts marine life on the move

August 29, 2016 — There was a hefty irony to the announcement by Connecticut’s two U.S. senators earlier this summer that they were joining the sponsorship for a National Lobster Day next month.

The iconic symbol of the state’s fishing industry for years, Long Island Sound was once flush with lobster, traps and people who made their livings from them.

But no more.

Connecticut’s lobster landings topped 3.7 million pounds a year, worth $12 million, in the late 1990s, but by 2014 had diminished to about 127,000 pounds worth a little more than $600,000.

Instead of the picture of fishing success, lobster has become the face of climate change in New England: a sentinel of warming water, ocean acidification and other man-made impacts that have sent them and dozens of other marine animals scurrying in search of a more hospitable environment.

“We’ve found quite dramatic shifts in where species are found,” said Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist with the Rutgers University Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources who researches how climate change affects fish and fisheries. He has used data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create OceanAdapt, which includes animations that regionally show how dozens of marine species have moved in the last 50 years. “Especially here in the Northeast you have something like American lobster about 200 miles further north than they used to be, and other species shifting similar amounts.”

Read the full story at the Connecticut Mirror

REP. ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN & REP. CARLOS CURBELO: We must overcome the threat of growing acidity in our oceans

July 12, 2016 — Our two districts are among the most recognizable in Florida because they are defined by the waters around them. South Florida’s world-famous beaches, delicious seafood, incomparable fishing, boating, and sailing, spectacular marine life, and cultural connections to the Caribbean, can all be traced back to the sea.

Even the limestone bedrock we live on was created over thousands of years, in part, by the rise and fall of the ocean. South Florida’s economy and our very way of life — from the shores of Biscayne Bay to Key West — all depend on a healthy ocean.

However, our coastal waters are facing tremendous challenges from continuing pollution and water quality issues, and now from ocean acidification, as well.

Ocean acidification occurs when carbon dioxide is absorbed by seawater and the resultant chemical reactions increase the concentration of hydrogen ions in the water, making it more acidic. When the ocean becomes more acidic, animals like stone crabs, lobsters, and corals have trouble building their own natural defenses that they rely on for survival. The impacts on these species and our treasured coral reefs can ripple out to touch all our lives.

Read the full op-ed at the Miami Herald

NOAA: Dungeness crab in peril from acidification

May 19, 2016 — The Dungeness crab fishery could decline West Coastwide, a new study has found, threatening a fishing industry worth nearly a quarter-billion dollars a year.

Scientists at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle found that pH levels likely in West Coast waters by 2100 at current rates of greenhouse-gas pollution would hurt the survivability of crab larvae.

Increasing ocean acidification is predicted to harm a wide range of sea life unable to properly form calcium carbonate shells as the pH drops. Now scientists at the NOAA’s Northwest Fishery Science Center of Seattle also have learned that animals with chitin shells — specifically Dungeness crabs — are affected, because the change in water chemistry affects their metabolism.

Carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, is pumped into the atmosphere primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. Levels of atmospheric C02 have been steadily rising since the Industrial Revolution in 1750 and today are higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years — and predicted to go higher.

When carbon dioxide mixes with ocean water it lowers the pH. By simulating the conditions in tanks of seawater at pH levels likely to occur in West Coast waters with rising greenhouse gas pollution, scientists were able to detect both a slower hatch of crab larvae, and poorer survival by the year 2100.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times