Saving Seafood

Warm Pacific Ocean ‘blob’ facilitated vast toxic algae bloom

September 30, 2016 –SEATTLE — A new study finds that unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures helped cause a massive bloom of toxic algae last year that closed lucrative fisheries from California to British Columbia and disrupted marine life from seabirds to sea lions.

Scientists linked the large patch of warm ocean water, nicknamed the “blob,” to the vast ribbon of toxic algae that flourished in 2015 and produced record-breaking levels of a neurotoxin that is harmful to people, fish and marine life.

The outbreak of the toxin domoic acid, the largest ever recorded on the West Coast, closed razor clam seasons in Washington and Oregon and delayed lucrative Dungeness crab fisheries along the coast. High levels were also detected in many stranded marine mammals.

“We’re not surprised now having looked at the data, but our study is the first to demonstrate that linkage,” said Ryan McCabe, lead author and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean. “It’s the first question that everyone was asking.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WSBT

El Niño is Going to Starve a Lot of Fish

October 14, 2015 — When Joe Orsi goes trawling, he doesn’t go trawling for 900-pound ocean sunfish. Orsi’s title is biologist, his employer the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Research Center, his cause researching said state’s fisheries. His typical prey, therefore, are juvenile Alaskan salmon. Sunfish are tropical—occasionally temperate—creatures, and do not belong about 40 miles offshore of a place called Icy Point. But that’s what Orsi’s nets brought up in June.

“What’s crazy is, like a day before, a guy asked me what was the strangest thing I’d brought up in a trawl,” says Orsi. Whatever he answered then—sea otter, Dall’s porpoise, maybe a blue shark—is certainly obsolete now.

Strange things are aswim along the Pacific coast. Starving sea lion pups, jellyfish swarms, toxic algae blooms. All because of an enormous mass of warm water stretching from California to Alaska that scientists have dubbed “the Blob.” And the Blob is about to get joined by more warm water from the gargantuan El Niño—with its own scientific nickname, “Godzilla“—forming in the equatorial east Pacific. When these monster warm water systems eventually meet, they aren’t just going to bring charming equatorial fish on subarctic vacations. They’re probably going to deliver a generation (or several generations) of scrawny fish to the oceans.

Read the full story from Wired