ocean warming Archives - Page 2 of 3

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.

Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish

A new study suggests warming sea temperatures could result in smaller fish sizes.

August 22, 2017 — Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes.

Because warmer seas speed up their metabolisms, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures will need to draw more oxygen from the ocean. At the same time, warming seas are already reducing the availability of oxygen in many parts of the sea.

A pair of University of British Columbia scientists argue that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“What we found was that the body size of fish decreases by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature,” says author William Cheung, director of science for the university’s Nippon Foundation—Nereus Program.

These changes, the scientists say, will have a profound impact on many marine food webs, upending predator-prey relationships in ways that are hard to predict.

“Lab experiments have shown that it’s always the large species that will become stressed first,” says lead author Daniel Pauly, a professor at the university’s Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, and principal investigator for the Sea Around Us. “Small species have an advantage, respiration-wise.”

Still, while many scientists applaud the discovery, not all agree that Pauly’s and Cheung’s work supports their dramatic findings. The study was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Where’s the kelp? Warm ocean takes toll on undersea forests

August 22, 2017 — APPLEDORE ISLAND, Maine — When diving in the Gulf of Maine a few years back, Jennifer Dijkstra expected to be swimming through a flowing kelp forest that had long served as a nursery and food for juvenile fish and lobster.

But Dijkstra, a University of New Hampshire marine biologist, saw only a patchy seafloor before her. The sugar kelp had declined dramatically and been replaced by invasive, shrub-like seaweed that looked like a giant shag rug.

“I remember going to some dive sites and honestly being shocked at how few kelp blades we saw,” she said.

The Gulf of Maine, stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is the latest in a growing list of global hotspots losing their kelp, including hundreds of miles in the Mediterranean Sea, off southern Japan and Australia, and parts of the California coast.

Among the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems, kelp forests are found on all continental coastlines except for Antarctica and provide critical food and shelter to myriad fish and other creatures. Kelp also is critical to coastal economies, providing billions of dollars in tourism and fishing.

The likely culprit for the loss of kelp, according to several scientific studies, is warming oceans from climate change, coupled with the arrival of invasive species. In Maine, the invaders are other seaweeds. In Australia, the Mediterranean and Japan, tropical fish are feasting on the kelp.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Boston.com

Fishing Partnership Support Services: Pass a price on carbon to protect fisheries and livelihoods

July 31, 2017 — A few years ago, scientists, fishermen and fishing managers concluded that cod stocks were rebuilding off the coast of Massachusetts. This understanding led ground fishermen (those who catch cod and other groundfish) spanning coastal New England to invest their life savings into their fishing businesses.

Soon after, industry experts changed their tune, reporting that drastic changes were underway. With livelihoods and families on the line, cod stocks began collapsing, leaving thousands devastated both financially and mentally. Today, an astounding 87 percent of Massachusetts ground fishermen suffer from mild to severe PTSD after experiencing the financial consequences of the crash, according to a Northeastern University study.

The situation only worsens as fishermen resort to unsafe practices — going farther out to sea in subpar boats, downsizing crews, and working longer hours on insufficient sleep. It is no surprise that New England ground fisherman are 200 times more likely to die on the job than the average worker, and that fishermen have the highest suicide rates among U.S. workers.

With ocean temperatures in the Northeast increasing more rapidly than global averages, sea animal populations are already noticeably shifting. Populations of cod, lobster, sea bass, and many others are decreasing in size or migrating farther north. And in turn, food chains are altered and fishermen struggle to pay the bills.

From cod to fishermen to families, climate change has the power and potential to cause true devastation, and the time to act is now. In Massachusetts, we have the opportunity to confront this issue head-on and cut greenhouse gas emissions through carbon pricing legislation H.1726 and S.1821.

Read the full option piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times