Saving Seafood

Researchers find summer heat’s lasting longer in the Gulf of Maine

The warmer conditions endure two months longer than in the early 1980s, posing threats to the food chain and raising risks from more powerful hurricanes.

September 11, 2017 — New scientific research has revealed that summer temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, the second fastest warming part of the world’s oceans, are persisting two months longer than they were as recently as the early 1980s.

The findings, by a Maine-led team of scientists, have ramifications for marine life, fishermen and the strength of hurricanes, which appear in late summer and are fueled by warm water.

“What we found was quite astonishing in that almost all the warming is in the late summer and the winter is not contributing very much at all,” says the project’s lead scientist, University of Maine oceanographer Andrew Thomas. “You can think of impacts all across the food chain, from animals that have actual temperature tolerances to the distribution of species, their prey, and even their predators, not to mention the bacteria and viruses, which we have no idea how they will react.”

The researchers used daily satellite readings collected between 1982 and 2014 to map changes in sea surface temperatures along the Eastern Seaboard from North Carolina to Nova Scotia, breaking out the data by month to reveal seasonal differences in warming rates. They weren’t surprised to find the strongest warming in the Gulf of Maine and adjacent Scotia Shelf – team members had worked with Andrew Pershing of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland to demonstrate this in a 2015 study – but the profound seasonal differences were unexpected.

The satellite data show warming trends across the Gulf of Maine for every month and very sharp increases during July, August and September, especially off the Maine coast. While the Gulf of Maine warmed by an average of 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit per decade during the 33-year period, the warming rate was twice that in the months of July through September, or 1.44 degrees F per decade.

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald at Central Maine

A Bacteria That Thrives In Warmer Waters Keeps Mass. Oyster Fisheries On High Alert

August 31, 2017 — Massachusetts loves its local oysters from places like Wellfleet and Duxbury. The state’s bivalve business is booming along with increased consumer demand. These days there’s no shortage of $1 oyster specials and oyster-centric restaurants around here.

But the ways oysters are harvested and handled have become more involved and challenging since 2013. That’s when bacteria linked to warming waters appeared in our marshes for the first time.

The result was an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness caused by Vibrio Parahaemolyticus — Vp or Vibrio for short. (To be clear, this is different from norovirus, which led to a closure of shellfish beds in Wellfleet last year.)

In response to the Vp bacteria’s emergence in New England, the state implemented a Vibrio Control Plan. Here’s how those state efforts to control bacterial infection have been affecting people in the oyster industry.

‘The Waters Are Warmer Than They Used To Be’

At Select Oyster Bar in Boston, you can find a rotating selection of Massachusetts oysters on-the-half-shell — Moon Shoal petites from Kingston, Ichabods from Plymouth and Wellfleet Puffers.

For about a dozen years Select’s chef-owner Michael Serpa has been serving mollusks in Boston establishments, including the cult-favorite Neptune Oysters in the North End. “I’ve seen a lot of oysters,” he told me, smiling.

Read and listen to the full story at WBUR

Warming oceans: fish on the move

August 17, 2017 — The oceans are getting warmer, and fish are adapting to rising ocean temperatures with their fins and swimming to waters that better suit their temperature preferences. Shifts in the distribution of important coastal fish species are resulting in changes to historical fishing options, new fishing opportunities and new fisheries management challenges.

There are many examples of the distributions of fish species changing in response to the warming oceans, but let’s focus on a few species important to Delaware both past and present. Winter flounder were popular recreational fish decades ago, but they have largely left Delaware waters that are now too warm. Summer flounder and black sea bass remain two of the most sought-after recreational fish in Delaware, but their distribution is gradually shifting northward, with fewer fish available in Delaware waters.

While flounder and black sea bass are examples of changing fish distributions that have decreased fishing opportunities in Delaware, other species seem to be more available in Delaware due to the warming ocean, such as cobia and blueline tilefish, with other southern species likely to become more common in Delaware as our waters continue to warm.

Changing temperatures, changing fish

Winter flounder were a popular, cool weather catch for Delaware’s recreational anglers during the 1960s and 1970s. Delaware was at the southern range of winter flounder distribution and their departure from Delaware waters began soon after those peak years. The number of winter flounder caught during December in Delaware’s Inland Bays by the Division of Fish and Wildlife’s trawl survey declined by more than 90 percent between 1966 and 1981.

Adult winter flounder had virtually disappeared from the trawl survey catches by the early 1990s, with a similar and notable reduction in recreational angler catches. Winter flounder have suffered a steep population decline over the past 20 years and the current winter flounder distribution suggests that this species is still moving north to stay in its preferred temperature range, making it unlikely that they will return to Delaware.

Read the full story from Outdoor Delaware at the Delaware State News

Marine Scientist Follows Hot Fish as They Move to Cooler Waters

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.

Read the full story at National Geographic

CONNECTICUT: Beneath the waves, climate change puts marine life on the move

August 29, 2016 — There was a hefty irony to the announcement by Connecticut’s two U.S. senators earlier this summer that they were joining the sponsorship for a National Lobster Day next month.

The iconic symbol of the state’s fishing industry for years, Long Island Sound was once flush with lobster, traps and people who made their livings from them.

But no more.

Connecticut’s lobster landings topped 3.7 million pounds a year, worth $12 million, in the late 1990s, but by 2014 had diminished to about 127,000 pounds worth a little more than $600,000.

Instead of the picture of fishing success, lobster has become the face of climate change in New England: a sentinel of warming water, ocean acidification and other man-made impacts that have sent them and dozens of other marine animals scurrying in search of a more hospitable environment.

“We’ve found quite dramatic shifts in where species are found,” said Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist with the Rutgers University Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources who researches how climate change affects fish and fisheries. He has used data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create OceanAdapt, which includes animations that regionally show how dozens of marine species have moved in the last 50 years. “Especially here in the Northeast you have something like American lobster about 200 miles further north than they used to be, and other species shifting similar amounts.”

Read the full story at the Connecticut Mirror

Research supports blaming warmer waters for lobster decline

May 2, 2016 — HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut researchers found no pesticides in lobsters collected in Long Island Sound in late 2014, a new study has found, boosting evidence that warming water temperatures are the main culprit in a huge crustacean decline that has decimated the local lobster industry.

The findings raise questions about restrictions Connecticut passed in 2013, amid concern over declining lobster stocks, limiting coastal use of pesticides that can control mosquito populations that transmit diseases, including the West Nile and Zika viruses.

Lobstermen supported the restrictions, believing pesticides contributed to lobster die-offs. Some municipal and environmental officials were opposed, saying the rules would restrict the use of effective mosquito-controlling pesticides that can protect public health and there was no proven connection between pesticides and lobster die-offs.

The renewed debate about pesticides and lobsters comes as concern grows about the Zika virus spreading to the U.S. from Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus is mainly spread through mosquito bites and causes mild illness or no symptoms in most people. But it can cause microcephaly, a severe birth defect in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

A fisherman’s doubt, and his love of the sea

November 3, 2015 — He is up before the dawn, and, a creature of steady habits, he heads for the seashore.

It’s dark when Frank Mirarchi jumps into his black pickup truck, and dark still when he reaches Scituate Harbor. He parks on the town pier and stares at the ocean. But his 55-foot stern dragger is no longer moored there.

Actually, the boat is there. But it’s no longer his. It was renamed last June after he sold it — a poignant punctuation point to Mirarchi’s half-century career as a commercial fisherman.

“I’m down here every morning to watch the boats go out,’’ he told me Monday as we sat on a bench overlooking the dazzling harbor and under an unseasonably warm autumn sun. “I did it for 52 years. And I still love it.’’

I first met Mirarchi in early January when the harbor was icy and fat flakes of snow gently fell as if one of those snow globes had been softly shaken.

He is the son of a scientist and is something of a self-taught scientist himself. When I suggested Governor Charlie Baker would do well to pick his brain and appoint him to an ad hoc group looking into the travails of the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine, the new governor took my advice. And soon Mirarchi was shaking hands with Baker on Beacon Hill.

When the latest news arrived last week about the depths of the cod collapse, the numbers were so alarming that I instantly thought of Frank and those like him who found their livelihood at sea.

Read the full story at Boston Globe

Woods Hole Report: Climate, weather and the economy

October 31, 2015 — The coastal ocean and its fisheries have played a huge role in the cultural and economic development of Cape Cod. Yet recent changes in the atmosphere and deep ocean threaten the natural rhythms that govern the ecosystems of the shallow waters surrounding Cape Cod.

One factor affecting the coastal ocean in the northeastern United States is a change in the motions of the atmospheric jet stream. We felt the effects during the past winter, which was exceptionally cold and snowy. In recent years, the north-south movements of the jet stream have been increasing. However, the eastward motion has been stalling, resulting in more persistent weather patterns – cold or warm – that affect the temperature distribution in the coastal ocean.

In early 2015, the jet stream dipped well southward of its normal position and stalled, bringing a steady burst of storms moving along the coast and cooling the coastal ocean. By contrast, the jet stream remained well north of its normal wintertime position in the winter of 2011-2012 so that warm air remained over New England for much of the winter. As a result, spring water temperatures were much warmer than usual, 3-4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal over a six-month period, and as high as 10 degrees Fahrenheit for short time periods.

Research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found temperatures of continental shelf waters in 2012 off New England were the highest they’ve been in 150 years of measurements.

Read the full story at The Metrowest Daily News

 

 

Maine business owners explore challenges, opportunities of climate change

October 30, 2015 — SOUTH PORTLAND — Several Maine business owners said Friday that adapting to climate change doesn’t have to be costly and, in many cases, can help a company’s finances as well as the environment.

Climate change presents considerable challenges but also potential opportunities to Maine businesses and communities, many of which are witnessing the impacts of a changing ocean environment before their counterparts elsewhere around the country. That was a key theme of a forum co-sponsored Friday by the South Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“Ultimately, this has to make economic sense,” U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said via Skype because early-morning budget votes in Washington prevented his return to Maine. “We can’t depend on everybody simply being good guys or nice men and women. It has to work in terms of a return on investment.”

Laying out the challenges facing Maine due to a changing climate, King and Gulf of Maine Research Institute President and CEO Don Perkins discussed how lobster and other fish species are already changing their habits as the Gulf of Maine warms. A recent six-part Portland Press Herald series explored the ecological and economic implications of the fact that the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than almost every part of the oceans around the globe during the past decade.

“It’s real and it has very sobering implications for our fishing industry, obviously,” said Perkins, whose staff at GMRI recently co-authored a scientific study showing cod populations were not recovering because of warming Gulf of Maine waters. “Once you get over agonizing about that – and it is cause for agony – the fact is that we’re dealing with that problem a decade or a few decades earlier than many other ocean regions. And as a result, there is a huge opportunity in this state to figure out how to understand a changing system.”

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

Cod Could Recover in Warming Waters

October 28, 2015 — The first clue came in 2008, recalled George Rose, a marine biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, when he saw the cod aggregating in large numbers offshore during the spawning season. It was a sight he had sorely missed in 15 years. In the early 1990s, cod fisheries suffered such a dramatic collapse that they emerged as an aquatic poster child for fisheries mismanagement, according to Rose.

In a paper published yesterday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Rose and his colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, document the comeback of the Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade. The fact that they have shown that the cod stock there is on the way to recovery is good news, Rose said, as “it shows that it is not all gloom and doom.”

Their study attributed the recovery to improved environmental conditions, better fish management and the availability of an important food source, capelin, whose populations also fell drastically in the early 1990s and have recently bounced back, too. The rebound of Atlantic cod in this region contrasts with their rapidly declining populations off the northeastern coast of the United States, where until last year the stocks remained significantly below sustainable levels. Previous research has associated this persistent population slump with the pressures of overfishing and also warming waters. The warming temperatures, however, seem to be favoring a cod fishery revival in Newfoundland and Labrador, or at least not hampering its recovery.

Read the full story at Scientific American