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As Offshore Wind Ramps Up, Scientists Flag Potential Impacts

August 21, 2023 — Last year, the Biden administration announced an ambitious goal: enough offshore wind to power 10 million homes by 2030. The move would reduce carbon emissions, create jobs, and strengthen energy security. It would also help the United States — which was responsible for just 0.1 percent of the world’s offshore wind capacity last year — catch up with renewable energy leaders like China and Europe.

The plan is already well underway: Massive turbines are rising off the coast of Massachusetts, and more projects are planned up and down the U.S. coastlines. Advocates say these turbines, and other offshore projects around the world, are a crucial tool in minimizing the effects of climate change: The technology is touted as clean, renewable, and plentiful. And, since offshore wind farms aren’t located in anyone’s backyard, they are, at least in theory, less prone to the political pushback onshore wind power has faced.

The fishing industry fears wind farms will affect their ability to yield a profitable catch — especially since the windy, shallow waters that support a rich diversity of sea life also tend to be ideal locations for turbines. Some scientists say these fears have been overblown — a 2022 study, for example, concluded that the Block Island Wind Farm located off the coast of Rhode Island does not appear to negatively impact bottom-dwelling fish. (Coastal regulators in the state of Rhode Island mandated the study be conducted and paid for by wind farm developers.) Others, like [Rutgers University’s Dr. Daphne] Munroe, say specific fisheries such as Atlantic surfclams will be significantly affected.

Surfclam fishing in wind farm areas, said Munroe, is logistically difficult, if not impossible, since vessels use dredges that drag though the sand to collect the clams. The presence of power cables on the ocean floor, she said, would make it too dangerous to use this kind of equipment around wind farms.

Installed boulders surrounding turbine foundations will also create obstacles, according to Munroe. “Each of the foundations is going to have what’s called scour protection,” she said. “So basically, big boulder fields that are going to be placed around the base of the turbine foundation in order to prevent the sand from scouring away.”

Read the full story at Undark

Study: Overfishing caused cod to evolve rapidly

June 5, 2023 — New genetic evidence suggests the overfishing of cod in the 1900s led the fish to rapidly evolve over decades, according to a study led by Rutgers University.

The study, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, shows that the collapse of cod stocks in the Atlantic due to overfishing may have spurred genetic changes that were previously thought to take place over millions of years.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Offshore wind farms could reduce Atlantic City’s surfclam fishery revenue up to 25%, Rutgers study suggests

July 1, 2022 — New research from Rutgers University shows Mid-Atlantic surfclam fisheries could see revenue losses from planned offshore wind farms, at least in the short- to medium-term after the development takes place.

The data is sure to fuel opposition from the fishing industry to the Biden administration’s rapid offshore wind development along the New York, New Jersey, and Delaware coasts. President Joe Biden has a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of wind energy by 2030 as part of his effort to tackle climate change.

Clammers and scallop fishermen fear a shrinking patch of fishable ocean will lead to the collapse of the industry.

Surfclam harvests stretching from Maine to Virginia generate about $30 million in annual revenue. The Rutgers study, “The Atlantic Surfclam Fishery and Offshore Wind Energy Development,” published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, used a newly-developed model to determine average revenue reductions between 3 and 15% overall.

Read the full story at WHYY

Study: Offshore wind development could reduce surf clam catch revenue by as much as 15%

June 28, 2022 — Offshore wind farms could reduce the catch of Atlantic surf clams in the mid-Atlantic, according to a new study from Rutgers University.

The research published last week was funded by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Rutgers associate professor Daphne Munroe found that the leases for wind projects could reduce surf clam revenue by 3-15% in the area from Virginia to Massachusetts. The fishery is worth more than $30 million annually.

The study did not include Maine, but adds to a sparse but growing body of research about potential conflicts between offshore wind and fishing.

Read the full story at Maine Public

 

Surf clam fleet could take big hit from offshore wind

June 24, 2022 — Offshore wind projects off the East Coast could take up to a 15 percent bite out of the surf clam industry’s $30 million annual revenue, according to two new studies from Rutgers University researchers.

The biggest loss could be up to 25 percent for boats based in Atlantic City, N.J., a historic center for the fishery.

The paired studies, published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, show how total fleet revenue may range from 3 percent to 15 percent, “depending on the scale of offshore wind development and response of the fishing fleet.”

The researchers developed a complex computer model to predict how the surf clam fishery may change in response to large-scale wind turbine arrays – such as the 1,100-megawatt Ocean Wind 1 project planned off Atlantic City.

“Understanding the impacts of fishery exclusion and fishing effort displacement from development of offshore wind energy is critical to the sustainability of the Atlantic surf clam fishing industry,” according to co-author Daphne Munroe, an associate professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences. Munroe and the research team worked closely with fishermen and the clam industry in developing the model.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Ocean warming will scramble fish species diversity, Rutgers study finds

May 18, 2022 — Climate change effects in the ocean are already shifting fish populations, and a new study by Rutgers University scientists predicts changes in the food web could prevent those species from thriving in their new geographic ranges.

The study, published 13 April in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, points out how climate-driven changes to food web relationships could change over time. Using computer modeling for hundreds of fish populations over 200 years of warming, the researchers showed that species-by-species predictions of fish movements are likely overestimating their ability to adapt to changing conditions.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Climate change could significantly impact commercial fishing, Rutgers study says

April 18, 2022 — Fish such as cod, anchovy and sardines could decline in the future as climate change forces marine species to find survivable ocean temperatures and disrupts predator-prey relationships, according to a new Rutgers University study. The authors say this could have implications for the fishing industry.

Marine species require certain temperatures to survive and reproduce, and they also need to eat. Rutgers researchers evaluated the relationship between survivable ocean temperatures and species’ need to find prey.

They found that climate change could dramatically reshuffle marine food webs (how one species feeds on another), and that predator-prey interactions could prevent marine species from keeping up with the temperatures they need to flourish. The result is fewer productive species that can then be caught by fisheries, and feed the world.

“Marine life, in many ways, is at the frontlines of experiencing the effects of climate change — they’re moving to new locations much faster than species on land, for example,” said study author Malin Pinsky, an associate professor of ecology, evolution, and natural resources at Rutgers.

Read the full story at WHYY

Scientists are tracking the link between pollution, climate change, and rising mercury levels in fish

April 11, 2022 — Eating fish is the most common way people are exposed to mercury — more specifically, methylmercury, a highly toxic organic compound. While low levels of exposure are typically harmless, and fish is a healthy source of protein, its overconsumption can lead to neurological problems, especially for fetuses and young children.

The amount of mercury in the atmosphere has quadrupled since the Industrial Revolution, according to some estimates. The pollution has been largely caused by emissions from coal-fired power plants, but other industries also play a role.

Though mercury levels in water are declining — thanks to decreasing coal use in North America and Europe, and technology that reduces sulfur in smoke stacks — scientists are now discovering that climate change might increase methylmercury levels in fish. That’s because fish are becoming more active with rising ocean temperatures, requiring more food and therefore, ingesting more mercury, according to a 2019 Harvard University study.

Researchers in Delaware and New Jersey are trying to find out where and why mercury levels persist. The research, they say, is part of an effort to manage marine fisheries and inform human health guidelines.

“Understanding how methylmercury accumulates in marine fish will help us identify and control its sources to the ocean, and studying how concentrations of methylmercury vary among fish that people eat will improve guidelines for safe seafood consumption,” said Dr. John Reinfelder, an environmental sciences professor at Rutgers University, who has been studying mercury levels in bluefin tuna populations.

Read the full story at WHYY

Jersey Shore’s fishing industry wonders: Can it coexist with planned massive wind farms?

September 24, 2021 — As part of the Biden administration’s commitment to tackling climate change, it wants to develop 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2030 — enough to light up 10 million homes. Only two small wind farms now exist in the United States: the five-turbine farm off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, operated by a unit of the Danish energy company Orsted, and a small pilot project in Virginia operated by Dominion Energy. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, has already awarded 17 lease areas between Massachusetts and North Carolina, and this year it added another eight between Long Island and Cape May.

New Jersey was awarded the largest leasing area yet: Hundreds of turbines will rise more than 80 stories tall, like a forest of steel bolstered by a bed of rocks on the seabed and stretching over hundreds of thousands of acres 10 to 15 miles from shore.

[Tom] Dameron says clammers will compete for a smaller patch of ocean.

“It’s going to lead to localized overfishing,” he says, “which will lead to the boats targeting smaller and smaller clams, which has the potential to lead to the collapse of this fishery in Atlantic City.”

Researchers, funded by a mix of grants from the fishing industry, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, the Department of Energy, and the wind industry, are racing to figure out what this massive industrialization — which includes 1.7 million acres of lease area along the East Coast and more than 1,500 structures in the seabed — will mean for fisheries, marine mammals, and ecosystems.

“From my perspective as a fishery scientist, that’s a lot of ocean and a lot of fisheries and a lot of marine habitat that is on the table,” says shellfish ecologist Daphne Monroe, who works at Rutgers Haskin Shellfish Research Lab. “So it’s a lot to think about.”

Monroe recently had to shift her focus to the impact of wind. Her computer modelling shows fishermen like Dameron and [Charlie] Quintana are right to be fearful.

Another fear is what could happen to a unique feature of New Jersey’s coastal fishery — the “cold pool.” Though surface waters warm each summer, lower parts of the mid-Atlantic ocean don’t mix very much with the warmer surface waters unless there’s a strong storm like a hurricane. So that deeper, colder water acts as a refrigerator for species like clams and scallops, along with bottom fish like summer flounder, or fluke.

In fact, the same ecosystem that makes fishing along the Jersey coast so lucrative, its flat sandy bottom, makes it ideal to construct a wind farm. But it’s unclear whether the wind turbines will affect that mix of ocean temperatures for better or for worse. Or whether they will shift migration patterns.

Travis Miles, a meteorologist and physical oceanographer at Rutgers University, says that in the summertime, the mid-Atlantic ocean is one of the most highly stratified and stable water columns. Warm on top, cold on the bottom, with very little mixing. He says that we can learn some things from the large wind farms that have been built in the North Sea, but that it’s a very different ecosystem.

“Europe has very strong tidal currents,” he says. “Tides happen every day, twice or more, and those strong currents can cause mixing, the faster the water goes past a structure the more mixing. The mid-Atlantic has very weak tides, what usually causes mixing are very strong storms, cyclones, or nor’easters.”

The Science Center for Marine Fisheries funded Miles to do research on both the impact of the North Sea wind farms and local impacts. He recently published his results in a peer-reviewed journal, Marine Technology Journal.

Read the full story at WHYY

 

Study finds “cell-cultured” or “cell-based” best label for lab-grown meat

August 19, 2021 — Researchers at Rutgers University exploring the issue of what lab-grown meat products should be called to differentiate them from their traditional livestock counterparts have landed on the terms “cell-based” or “cell-cultured.”

The labeling issue has more at stake than just being accurate: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture require food products to have a “common or usual name” on their labels so consumers can make informed choices, but the fast-growing industry has yet to settle on a term on its own.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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