Saving Seafood

NORTH CAROLINA: North Carolina weighs habitat protections, fishing licenses

August 19, 2026 — North Carolina fisheries managers will consider advancing new coastal habitat protections and setting the number of commercial fishing licenses available for the coming year at the Marine Fisheries Commission meeting on August 19-20 in Raleigh.

Commissioners are scheduled to vote on whether to release a proposed 2026 amendment to the state’s Coastal Habitat Protection Plan for public and advisory committee review. The action would not adopt the plan or create new fishing restrictions but could set the stage for a broader habitat rulemaking process beginning in 2027, according to the Island Free Press.

The draft amendment calls for further consideration of how fishing gear and other activities affect submerged aquatic vegetation, or underwater grass beds, as well as deep-water oyster recovery areas. Any regulations developed through that process would require additional commission approval and public review.

North Carolina’s coastal waters have historically supported nearly 200,000 acres of submerged aquatic vegetation, which provides spawning, nursery, and feeding habitat for commercial and recreationally important species. The draft says those grass beds are declining by more than 1 percent annually as water clarity, warming temperatures, and sea-level rise affect coastal waters.

The proposed habitat work would also overlap with upcoming reviews of the state’s shrimp and bay scallop fishery management plans. Marine Fisheries staff are recommending delaying the bay scallop review until 2027 so it can move forward alongside the shrimp review and habitat rule development.

If the amendment is released for review, the commission would consider comments from the public and advisory committees before the plan returns for possible final action in November.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

$15M grant aims to protect New England’s ‘legacy’ seafood industry

August 17, 2026 — This grant will fund new fishery technology and innovations, which will help researchers at URI and other partners better understand the changing sea environment.

The seafood industry has long been an economic driver in Rhode Island, but it’s facing a number of challenges — including rising costs, warming waters and an aging workforce. In an effort to combat these obstacles, the National Science Foundation has awarded a $15 million grant to the University of Rhode Island and several regional partners.

Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Marta Gomez-Chiarri, an aquaculture and fisheries professor at URI, about how her lab is hoping to use the money to spur technological innovations that can help strengthen the health and viability of the local seafood industry.

Read the full article at Ocean State Media

El Niño could bring highest sea levels ever recorded to CA coast

August 11, 2026 — A strengthening El Niño could bring the highest sea levels ever recorded to the California coast this year, raising the risk of widespread and damaging flooding.

It’s the latest effect forecast for what’s expected to be an historically strong event, one forecasters warn could also lash Southern California with powerful rain and broil both land and sea with punishing heat waves.

“We’re expecting likely the highest sea levels ever recorded on the California coast associated with this event,” said Mark Merrifield, director of the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation.

During a recent online town hall, Merrifield presented a NASA satellite image showing sea levels already more than half a foot higher in the eastern Pacific Ocean compared to the reference state, and said by this fall and winter, “we should be seeing sea levels far above the average seasonal cycle.”

According to NASA, El Niño’s warmer ocean water displaces colder water close to the sea surface. Warmer water causes a rise in the sea surface height because water expands as temperature rises.

Data collected by scientists over the years also have shown how El Niños contribute to “enormously strong” waves, which can cause beaches to “erode and to narrow,” Merrifield said. “It’s well documented that during El Niño events, beaches across the entire state tend to move landward by about 30 meters [98 feet] or so.”

Read the full article at the Seattle Times

Kelp’s crisis is the fleet’s crisis

August 11, 2026 — Kelp forests in the United States are under threat and are facing the same stresses as the commercial fisheries that work around them. The Forest of the Sea by David Helvarg, published in May, tells the story of kelp, the importance of healthy kelp forests, and the challenges these habitats face. While this book is not about commercial fishing, it does include fishermen, and its insights are vital to those who make a living harvesting wild fish from a rapidly changing sea.

Kelp forests have evolved as the anchor habitat for nearshore ecosystems in the cold waters of temperate climes across the globe. Helvarg dives into the ecological and economic importance of kelp forests, and how they’re under threat as waters warm and other environmental stressors diminish their footprint, often drastically so.

As a commercial fisherman on the West Coast and as a journalist covering fisheries and oceans for more than 15 years, the health of fisheries and the health of kelp forests have mirrored each other from my vantage point. Since the Blob, the extreme marine heatwave that hit the West Coast from 2014-2016, whale entanglements ravaged the California Dungeness crab fishery while 90 percent of the Northern California kelp forests disappeared. This isn’t a situation where one affects the other, but parallel plot lines in the same story.

Helvarg, a veteran journalist who also serves as the executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean advocacy NGO, uses Fort Bragg, Calif., as an example of just this. The shoreline of the small city nearly 200 miles north of San Francisco has historically been dominated by thick kelp forests teeming with life. It has also been an important commercial fishing port for Dungeness crab, salmon, and groundfish.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Birds Are Dying. Clues Point to El Niño.

August 7, 2026 — Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful.

But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses.

“Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.”

In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined.

“It’s painful,” he said.

In July, they counted an additional 968.

It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy.

But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated.

This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms.

In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain.

But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk.

Read the full article at The New York Times

UN chief issues ‘SOS’ for Pacific Islands worst hit by warming ocean

August 27, 2024 — United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday ocean temperatures are rising in the Pacific Islands at three times the rate worldwide, and its population was “uniquely exposed” to the impact of rising sea levels.

Speaking to reporters in Tonga where the Pacific Islands Forum is being held, Guterres highlighted the findings of a report that showed the South West Pacific was worst hit by sea level rises, in some places by more than double the global average in the past 30 years.

“I am in Tonga to issue a global SOS – Save Our Seas – on rising sea levels,” he said.

“Rising seas are amplifying the frequency and severity of storm surges and coastal flooding. These floods swamp coastal communities. Ruin fisheries. Damage crops. Contaminate fresh water. All this puts Pacific Island nations in grave danger,” he said.

Read the full story at Reuters

More Endangered Right Whales Are Leaving New England for Canada

April 25, 2022 — Local researchers are studying why North Atlantic right whales are migrating out of our area into more northern waters in Canada.

Some believe rapidly warming waters in the Gulf of Maine could be playing a role, but they’re just not sure how.

The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most critically endangered animals on the planet.

Researchers from the New England Aquarium are studying these majestic creatures and they think some of the answers might lie in their poop.

Dr. Elizabeth Burgess is a research scientist with the aquarium that studies hormone changes in right whales. Unfortunately, the easiest way to collect hormones is through their feces.

“So nutritional stress is of really great concern for this species, as is the reproductive viability as well. So all of these things we can, we’re using hormones to better understand what’s happening,” said Burgess.

Read the full story at NBC Boston

Climate change set to upend global fishery agreements, study warns

March 9, 2022 — Unlike boundaries on the land, the ocean is contiguous — fish move and transcend international waters as they please, without bothering about jurisdictions. As long as ocean temperatures remain generally stable, the fish remain in their known habitats and all is well. But as climate change heats up oceans rapidly, fish are on the move, upsetting fishing treaties between nations that stipulate who can catch how much fish in shared waters.

“Many of the fisheries management agreements made to regulate shared stocks were established in past decades, with rules that apply to a world situation that is not the same as today,” Juliano Palacios-Abrantes, a marine biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a press release.

In a recent study, Palacios-Abrantes and his colleagues from Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland predict that about half of the world’s commercial fish in shared waters will move from their known habitats by the end of the century. Published in the journal Global Change Biology, the study warns of a dramatic change in fish stocks by as early as 2030 that could lead to international disputes in exclusive economic zones, the area within 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) of a country’s coast where it has exclusive rights for fishing.

By 2030, according to the study, climate change will force 23% of shared fish stocks to move from their historical habitats and migration routes, if nothing is done to halt greenhouse gas emissions. By the end of the century, that number could rise to 45%.

Read the full story at Mongabay

2018 was hottest year on record for oceans

January 16, 2019 — Ocean temperatures in 2018 were the highest ever recorded, according to figures released Wednesday by a group of international scientists.

Last year’s levels surpassed the previous record, set in 2017. Record-keeping began in 1958.

According to the new figures, published in the scientific journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, the 2018 temperatures mean the last five years were the warmest on record.

Read the full story at The Hill

 

Dr. Malin Pinsky: Changing ocean temps and what they mean for fish and people

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — January 17, 2018 — Last Thursday, Dr. Malin Pinsky, a professor of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University, gave a Bevan Series lecture on how fish have adapted to changing ocean temperatures, and the implications for fisheries and people. “Fish and Fisheries in Hot Water: (How) Do We Adapt?” was the second of ten planned lectures in the 2018 Bevan Series, which features experts discussing fishery and marine conservation issues. The series is hosted at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Read more about the Bevan Series here

Watch Dr. Pinsky’s lecture here

See more Saving Seafood coverage of the Bevan Series here

A description of Dr. Pinsky’s lecture is below:

The same ecological and evolutionary processes operate in marine and terrestrial environments, and yet ocean life thrives in a fluid environment that is dramatically different from what we experience in air. The ocean is, in effect, a 1.3 sextillion liter water bath with muted thermal variation through time and space and limited oxygen. In this talk, I will trace what I see as some of the important consequences for fish and fisheries, including a number of striking contrasts and similarities to patterns on land. Most marine animals have evolved narrow thermal tolerances and live close to their upper thermal limits, which makes them surprisingly sensitive to even small changes in temperature. I will show that fish and other marine animals have responded rapidly and often quite predictably to temperature change and temperature trends, across time-scales from seasons to decades. Finally, I will link these rapid ocean changes to their impacts on fisheries and on people. The tight feedbacks and lagged responses between fisheries and ocean dynamics create both immediate impacts and complex dynamics that can complicate management efforts. The magnitude and extent of climate impacts on fisheries imply the need for a new era of climate-ready management more fully informed by environmental dynamics and long-term trends.

Malin Pinsky, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Ocean Sciences at Rutgers University. There, he leads a research group studying the ecology and evolution of global change in the ocean, including conservation and management solutions. He developed and maintains the OceanAdapt website to document shifting ocean animals in North America, a resource used by governments and NGOs for climate adaptation planning. He has published articles in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Biology, and other international journal, and his research has received extensive coverage in the press, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, CBC, and National Public Radio. He has received early career awards and fellowships from the National Academy of Sciences, American Society of Naturalists, and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Previously, he was a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Princeton University. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University, an A.B. from Williams College, and roots along the coast of Maine.