Saving Seafood

Warming waters and migrating fish stocks could cause political conflict

August 8, 2018 — Climate change is driving fish species to migrate to new areas, and in the process they’re crossing political boundaries – potentially setting up future conflicts as some countries lose access to fish and others gain it, according to a recent study published in the journal Science.

Already, fish and other marine animals have shifted toward the poles at an average rate of 70 kilometers per decade. That rate is projected to continue or even accelerate as the planet warms.

When fish cross into new territory, it might prompt competitive harvesting between countries scrambling to exploit disappearing resources.

“Conflict leads to overfishing, which reduces food, profit, and jobs that fisheries can provide, and can also fracture international relations in other, non-fishery sectors,” Malin Pinsky, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of biology at Rutgers University, told SeafoodSource.

The study looked at the distribution of nearly 900 commercially important marine fish and invertebrates, examining how their movements intersect with 261 of the world’s Exclusive Economic Zones. By 2100, more than 70 countries will see new fish stocks in their waters if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rates.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions could reduce the scale and number of these migrations by half or more, Pinsky said.

Conflict over shifting fish stocks is not unheard of. In the 2000s, migrating mackerel in the northeast Atlantic caused such a rift between Iceland and other nations that it played a role in derailing attempts to join the European Union. In the eastern Pacific, a bout of warm ocean temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s shifted salmon spawning patterns, prompting a scuffle between U.S. and Canada.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Sharks Are Creeping Into the Northeast Because of Climate Change

July 30, 2018 — Warmer waters are pushing the animals further north into previously shark-free waters. Should we be worried?

Shark Week, Discovery Channel’s annual homage to the ocean’s most infamous predator, comes to a close this weekend.

But residents of northeastern states like New York—long considered a relatively shark-free zone—might not have to wait until July 2019 to see more, as global warming has been linked with a significant northern shift in the habitats of most marine animals, including most sharks.

“There’s an astounding mass migration of animal life towards the poles,” Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, told The Daily Beast. In his work with spiny dogfish, a thin, small shark that lives along most of the East Coast, he’s seen their habitat shift “quite substantially.”

Pinsky isn’t the only scientist to make this observation. In April, researchers in North Carolina published a paper in Nature’s Scientific Resources that documented the northern migration of bull shark nurseries.

By analyzing data from North Carolina’s Division of Marine Fisheries (NCDMF), the researchers found that between 2003 and 2011, when water temperatures in the sound were hovering closer to 22 degrees Celsius, only six juvenile sharks were caught in the area. But as temperatures began to rise, a group of bull sharks migrated from their previous home in Northern Florida and established a nursery in Pamlico, causing a drastic uptick in juvenile shark presence. Between 2011 and 2016 alone, NCDMF found 53.

Read the full story at The Daily Beast

 

Shifting fish giving New Jersey an early global warming challenge

July 13, 2018 — The slow warming of the Earth someday will require difficult adaptations in many sectors of society, for example farming, energy and insurance.

One challenge already is here — fish. They are voting with their fins, moving northward out of warming ocean waters and into cooler temperatures they prefer. And that is disrupting fisheries management and quotas, which only recently had achieved stability and acceptance.

Earlier this year, a study led by a Rutgers University marine biologist predicted two-thirds of the 700 ocean species it analyzed would be forced to migrate — some more than 600 miles — in the worst warming scenarios.

A 2016 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study found half of the Northeast’s fish and shellfish were highly vulnerable to climate change. It warned that fisheries dependent on a single valuable species, such as New Jersey is on scallops, are at particular risk.

And global warming might shrink fish as well. A pair of University of British Columbia scientists last year reported the size of fish is likely to decrease by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature, as their metabolisms speed up and the oxygen content of the water diminishes.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

Fish wars loom as climate change pushes lobster, cod, and other species north

June 22, 2018 — Over the past 50 years, as Atlantic waters have warmed, fish populations have headed north in search of colder temperatures. Lobsters have migrated 170 miles and the iconic cod about 65 miles, while mid-Atlantic species such as black sea bass have surged about 250 miles north, federal surveys show.

But fishing limits and other rules, by and large, haven’t shifted with them.

The rapid movement of fisheries, in New England and around the world, has outpaced regulations and exacerbated tensions between fishermen in competing regions and countries, threatening to spark conflicts that specialists fear could lead to overfishing.

“This is a global problem that’s going to be getting worse,” said Malin Pinsky, an assistant professor of ecology at Rutgers University, who led a recently released study on the movement of fisheries in the journal Science.

With climate change expected to accelerate in the coming years, new fisheries are likely to emerge in the waters of more than 70 countries and in many new regions, the study found.

Fishing quotas in the United States have been traditionally set by councils overseeing specific regions, based on the belief that fish don’t move much.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Climate change moving fish north, threatening turf wars, study says

June 21, 2018 — World conflict is likely to increase over access to fisheries, as species move north in response to a warming ocean, according to a Rutgers University study published last week in the journal Science.

“Seventy or more countries will likely have to start sharing with their neighbors” in coming decades, said lead author Malin Pinsky, including the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

The danger comes from overfishing when countries can’t cooperate, he said. Consumers and economies are harmed by overexploitation.

“If there’s a fish fight, you end up with less fish for everyone — less fish on every plate, fewer jobs for local economies and less profit for local businesses,” said Pinsky, 37, an assistant professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources who is soon to be an associate professor.

The right to harvest particular species of fish is usually decided by national and regional fishery management bodies, which assume species don’t move much, Pinsky said.

“Well, they’re moving now because climate change is warming ocean temperatures,” he said. Studies have estimated the oceans have absorbed about 93 percent of recent increases in global temperatures.

Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City

Climatic conflict: Is the Mackerel War a model for future trade disputes?

June 20, 2018 — What happens when a fish crosses the border? A new Rutgers University study presents evidence that as fish move with changing water temperatures, their tendency to cross borders will cause political conflicts among nations with varying fishery management authorities.

Fishery regulators write rules “based on the notion that particular fish species live in particular waters and don’t move much,” says Malin Pinsky, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and natural resources in Rutgers–New Brunswick’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “Well, they’re moving now because climate change is warming ocean temperatures.”

“Consider flounder, which have already shifted their range 250 miles farther north,” Pinsky says. “Federal fisheries rules have allocated many of those fish to fishers in North Carolina, and now they have to steam hundreds of extra miles to catch their flounder.”

Because fish are typically more nimble than their management systems, this kind of movement will exacerbate international fisheries conflicts, Pinsky says.

“Avoiding fisheries conflicts and overfishing ultimately provides more fish, more food and more jobs for everyone,” says Pinsky. He and his co-authors cite the “mackerel war” between Iceland and the European Union as an example of the disruption of fisheries causing international disputes.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

The Ocean Is Getting More Acidic —What That Actually Means

June 18, 2018 — Grace Saba steadies herself on the back of a gently rocking boat as she and her crew slide a six-foot long yellow torpedo into the sea. A cheer erupts as the device surfaces, turns on its electronic signal, and begins a three-week journey along the New Jersey coast.

“It’s taken seven years to get this done,” said Saba, who has been working on this experiment since 2011. “I’m so happy, I think I might cry!”

Saba is an assistant professor of marine ecology at Rutgers University, where she is studying how fish, clams, and other creatures are reacting to rising levels of ocean acidity. Acidification is a byproduct of climate change; a slow but exorable real-life experiment in which industrial emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are absorbed and then undergo chemical reactions in the sea. Rising ocean acidity has already bleached Florida’s coral reefs and killed valuable oysters in the Pacific Northwest.

Now scientists like Saba want to know what might happen to animals that live in the Northeast, a region home to commercially important fishes, wild stocks of quahogs (clams), scallops, and surf clams that can’t swim away from growing acidic waters.

“They are just stuck there,” Saba said.

Saba’s torpedo-like instrument is actually an underwater drone, known as a Slocum glider, that is carrying an ocean acidity sensor. This is the first time that oceanographers have married the two technologies—glider and pH sensor—to get a big-picture view of changes underway in the commercially important fishing grounds of the Northeastern United States.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Climate Change May Be Creating A Seafood Trade War, Too

June 15, 2018 — One of the grand challenges that I find as a climate scientist is conveying to the public the “here and now” of climate change. For many people, it is still some “thing” that seems far off in time or distance from their daily lives of bills, illness, kids, and their jobs. Ironically, climate change touches each of those aspects, but the average person does not often make the connections. People eat seafood and fish, but most people will not make any connections between tonight’s dinner of flounder, lobster or mackerel to climate change as they squeeze that lemon or draw that butter.

A new Rugters University study caught my eye because it is a good example of a “here and now” impact. Climate changes is causing fish species to adjust their habitats at a more rapid pace than the how the world policy’s allocate fish stocks. Many species of flounder, lobster, mackerel and crab are migrating to find colder waters as oceans warm.  The study suggests that such shifts may lead to international conflict and reductions in fish supply. Seafood is a pawn in the trade chess game.

Researchers at Rutgers University say that an obsolete and out-dated regulatory system has not kept pace with how the ocean’s waters are warming and shifting fish populations. I actually wrote a few years ago in Forbes about how warming waters were shifting crab populations in the North Pacific and was affecting fishers as well as one of my favorite TV shows, The Deadliest Catch. This new study published in one of the top scientific journals in the world, Science, has provided new insight that has implications for our food supply and potential international conflict.

Read the full story at Forbes

Your dinner might be swimming North thanks to climate change, Rutgers study says

May 18, 2018 — Climate change is making oceans warmer and the fish are taking flight.

And that could have a big impact on New Jersey’s $7.9 billion fishing industry according to a new Rutgers-led study published Wednesday.

Aquatic life has a narrow tolerance for temperature range, so as the water heats up species populations are shifting northward to find suitable habitat according to Malin Pinksy, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources.

By 2100, the Atlantic’s temperature off the Jersey Shore could rise to levels currently seen in Virginia. That could lead to species like black sea bass and summer flounder, both staples of New Jersey’s fishing industry, leaving the area and being replaced by more southern species like Atlantic Croaker.

Pinsky said the most dramatic example of a shifting fishery is the Atlantic Cod. The species could lose 90 percent of its habitat in U.S. waters by 2100 in a worst case scenario.

Read the full story at NJ

 

Warming Waters Push Fish To Cooler Climates, Out Of Some Fishermen’s Reach

May 17, 2018 — The oceans are getting warmer and fish are noticing. Many that live along U.S. coastlines are moving to cooler water. New research predicts that will continue, with potentially serious consequences for the fishing industry.

Fish can be as picky about their water temperature as Goldilocks was about her porridge. Ecologist Malin Pinsky of Rutgers University says a warming climate is heating up their coastal habitats. “Here in North American waters,” he says, “that means fish and other marine animals, their habitat is shifting further north quite rapidly.”

Pinsky studied 686 marine species ranging from bass and flounder to crab and lobster. He projected how much warmer oceans would get over the next 80 years, using various scenarios for emissions of greenhouse gases and the rate of global warming. Then he projected how fish species would probably react to that based on what they’ve been doing already. “And [with] about 450 of those,” he says, “we have high certainty in terms of how far they are going to shift in the future.”

Read the full story at NPR