November 30, 2016 — Warming oceans have fish on the move, and one man is in hot pursuit.
That man, Rutgers University marine biologist Malin Pinsky, has tracked fish species all over North American waters to learn where they’re headed in search of cooler conditions.
Recently, he’s seen lobsters nearly disappear from Long Island Sound, driven out by disease and a series of warm summers. The delicacies are thriving in the cooler Gulf of Maine, but that may be temporary: Water temperatures there are rising faster than anywhere else in the North Atlantic. Pinsky has also observed Black sea bass, traditionally plentiful off Virginia, start to relocate to the Gulf of Maine and the waters off the New Jersey coast. And out west, Pacific halibut and arrowtooth flounder in the eastern Bering Sea off Alaska have shifted north toward the Arctic.
“It’s not one species in one place or a few species in a limited area,” Pinsky says of the moving populations. “It’s actually hundreds of species in North America shifting toward cooler waters, and that’s significant.”
The changes pose major questions for fishermen and fishery managers. As species move, will fishermen relocate their businesses to follow? How do fishery managers set rules when fish have moved to new areas where they may be more susceptible to overfishing? And will species such as lionfish, which are invasive in the Atlantic Ocean and thrive in warm Southern waters, suddenly appear in force farther north along the Atlantic coast? Even more confounding is the effect of temperature changes on species such as corals that have difficulty relocating to a more suitable place.