May 17, 2013 — The news is that all around the world, fish and other marine creatures are escaping rising sea temperatures and migrating to colder water, toward the North Pole in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the South Pole in the Southern.
In the tropics, the fish are leaving but there are no fish to replace them in the warmest waters of the world.
What's worse, according to the researchers at the University of British Columbia who published their study in the journal Nature, is that all of this began 40 years ago, quite a head start.
We're seeing this in the Northeast. Cold-water species such as cod and yellowtail flounder have been in decline, in large part because of the warming waters, and warmer-water fish are moving in.
The sea clams that were once off Maryland and Virginia are abundant now in Georges Bank, and Dr. Brian Rothschild of the UMass School for Marine Science and Technology says a viable clam fishery has developed there.
The Mass. Marine Fisheries Institute met earlier this month and catalogued a long list of environmental factors other than fishing that affect the fishery. In Seattle, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under the direction of their stock assessments chief Dr. Richard Methot, is doing the same thing.
"I think the managers have done a pretty lousy job in managing fisheries even when the ecosystem wasn't changing," Shelley told me Thursday. "As far as the prospects for improvement when it is changing, I'm not hopeful."
Remember, back in January another study found that fisheries stock assessments have less than a 1 in 5 five track record in predicting the potential catch.
Back then, Rothschild reacted to this by telling me "An environmental account is impossible. We don't know what more things to take into account. The thing I'm fairly certain of is that it cannot be done. It's so complicated."
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times