November 3, 2013 — Gone is a seasonal palette where “cold-tolerant” fish once ruled in the winter and spring and “warm-tolerant” fish were more dominant in the summer and fall. Instead, the Sound is becoming a single community of fish more adapted to its increasingly warmer water, according to the researchers.
Think more black sea bass and spot, fewer winter flounder and Atlantic herring; an ecosystem more like the waters off New Jersey, and less like the waters off Cape Cod.
“The warm-temperate species has actually increased, especially in the fall,” said Kurt Gottschall, another Connecticut state fisheries biologist overseeing the trawl survey on a recent sunny day. “Those species per tow have risen pretty steadily in the last 12 to 15 years.”
Under a cooperative agreement with New York, Connecticut biologists do almost all the deep-water research on the Sound’s 1,320 square miles. Trawl survey sites stretch from the middle of the Sound off of Mamaroneck to about New London, Conn., and spread across to the north shore of Long Island.
The work has been going on almost continuously since 1984. Forty sites are sampled each April, May, June, September and October in the same fashion, giving the data a highly valued level of consistency.
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