November 7, 2014 — Populations of the cold-water species are down across their normal range as warming seas affect their ability to reproduce.
Marine scientists see the collapse of local shrimp stocks as part of a global pattern reflecting the impact of rising sea temperatures.
Regulators canceled the Maine shrimp season Wednesday, citing dwindling shrimp populations in the Gulf of Maine. But the implosion of northern shrimp stocks here is part of a larger trend across the North Atlantic. Stocks within fishing grounds from Labrador to Norway are in sharp decline, indicating that warming ocean temperatures are affecting the species’ abundance and ability to reproduce, according to fishery biologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Populations of northern shrimp, a cold-water species, are down across their range, including in the Flemish Cap, Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, and waters off Greenland, Iceland and southern Norway, said Anne Richards, a fishery biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Richards serves as an adviser to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which met in Portland to cancel the upcoming winter shrimp season for the second year in a row. Regulators say the region’s population of northern shrimp in the Gulf of Maine plummeted from 2011 to 2012.
“All of a sudden, everything was gone,” Richards said. “It was almost like a vacuum came and sucked up all the shrimp.”
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