Saving Seafood

Pacific Territories Are Getting Millions To Address Climate Change. Is It Enough?

April 5, 2023 — In American Samoa, the oceans are rising and the land is sinking.

Even the territory’s largest private employer — the StarKist tuna cannery that provides nearly 80% of all private employment — sits along the water’s edge.

That makes recent federal investments in island infrastructure all the more important, especially when it comes to climate resiliency.

But a lingering question is whether it will be enough.

Earlier this year, representatives from the U.S. Government Accountability Office traveled to American Samoa to meet with members of the territory’s newly formed climate resilience commission, chaired by Lt. Gov. Talauega Eleasalo Vaalele Ale.

They discussed, among other things, the challenges American Samoa and other Pacific Island territories face when it comes to competing against states for federal funding.

“As a small island in the middle of the ocean, we feel the effects of climate change every day,” Talauega told GAO officials. “We see it in the rising tides and we feel it in the increased heat in the day. We are mindful of the constant change and have refocused our efforts through this commission.”

Read the full article at Civil Beat

Report on growing specter of climate change warns of threats to StarKist and regional economy

April 4, 2023 — A report on Climate Change in the Western Pacific recently released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council drills down on the effects of climate change on American Samoa and warns that the loss of StarKist and the tuna industry due to the implications of climate change would be devastating not only to American Samoa but also to other Pacific communities it supports — particularly Samoa, Niue, Tokelau and Tonga.

In the report, the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant, says American Samoa’s sea level rise of 2.6­4.6 feet by 2100 would severely impact coastal infrastructure.

As reported earlier by Samoa News, infrastructure in American Samoa is extremely vulnerable to sea level and was worsened by the rapid sinking of the islands, triggered by the 2009 Samoa earthquake and predicted to last for decades. This subsidence is estimated to lead to roughly twice as much sea level rise by 2060 as what was already predicted from climate change alone.

“As sea level continues to rise, the future of businesses like the StarKist Samoa cannery, located at sea level in Pago Pago Harbor, are in question,” stated the report.

“Loss of this industry due to the implications of climate change would be devastating to American Samoa and the communities it supports.”

Tuna exports from American Samoa are valued at approximately $353 million per year, with canned tuna from StarKist American Samoa comprising 99.5% of the total, the report details.

Read the full article at Samoa News

CALIFORNIA: California’s salmon fishers warn of “hard times coming” as they face canceled season

April 3, 2023 — Sarah Bates, the captain of a fishing boat in San Francisco, had a feeling something was wrong with the chinook salmon population back in December.

“The fish weren’t coming up the river, and to a certain extent, we were just waiting,” Bates, 46, told CNN. “We thought the run was late. And then at some point, it just became clear that fish weren’t coming.”

But she and other fishermen weren’t sure how bad it could be. It later turned out that catchers along much of the West Coast likely won’t be fishing for salmon at all this year.

“Salmon is my livelihood. It’s my main fishery,” she said. “And it’s the main fishery for a lot of folks in Fisherman’s Wharf. So, I think there are a lot of us that have some hard times coming.”

In early March, West Coast regulators announced that they may recommend a ban on salmon fishing this year. It would be only the second time salmon fishing season has been canceled in California.

Read the full article at CBS News

Companies bid $264M in Gulf oil sale mandated by climate law

March 30, 2023 — Oil companies offered a combined $264 million for drilling rights in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday in a sale mandated by last year’s climate bill compromise.

The auction was the first in the Gulf in more than a year and drew strong interest from industry giants including Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil. But it could further test the loyalty of environmentalists and young voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and were frustrated by this month’s approval of a huge drilling project in Alaska.

Developing the Gulf leases would produce up to 1.1 billion barrels of oil and more than 4 trillion cubic feet (113 billion cubic meters) of natural gas over 50 years, according to a government analysis. Burning that oil would increase planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions by tens of millions of tons, the analysis found.

A legal challenge to the sale from environmental groups is pending in federal court.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

Why sea creatures are washing up dead around the world

March 29, 2023 — Dead fish in Florida. Beached whales in New Jersey. Sea urchins, starfish and crayfish washing ashore in New Zealand. Millions of rotting fish clogging up a river in the Australian outback. A mass fish die-off in Poland. Around the world, freshwater and marine creatures are dying in large numbers, leaving experts to puzzle over the cause.

In some cases, scientists say climate change may be leading to more algal blooms and other events that starve fish of oxygen. Warming oceans and marine heat waves are driving sea creatures from their normal habitats. Human activities including coastal shipping are suspected in a spate of recent marine mammal deaths in the United States.

Here’s a look at some of the events that led to the deaths of swaths of aquatic creatures around the globe in the past year.

Harmful algal blooms, called red tides, have sent scores of dead fish ashore in southeastern Florida in recent weeks. A similar red-tide event killed off thousands of fish in the San Francisco Bay Area last summer.

Read the full article at The Washington Post

Fisherman Friendly Climate Action

March 28, 2023 — Late in 2022, a group of industry people including fishermen and consultants volunteered to work on the idea of helping fishermen move away from fossil fuels. But rather than impose its ideas on fishermen, the group wants fishermen to guide the industry’s transition to a “Low-Carbon Fishing Fleet.”

Consultant  Sarah Schuman – who crews on a Bristol Bay gillnetter – and fellow fisheries consultant Noah Oppenheimer of Maine, organized a steering committee to consider how to “support voluntary emissions reductions in the U.S. fishing fleet.” In February the group launched a website and offered fishermen a chance to participate in a survey.

“The project is a lot more demanding than I anticipated,” says Schuman, who is currently conducting survey interviews in Alaska. “We feel like we have to get this work done because government programs are being set up, and this week the White House released an Ocean Climate Action plan that is pretty bad. But on page 97 it specifically calls for programs to support the de-carbonization of the fishing fleet.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Here’s why scientists are worried about newly discovered underwater heat waves

March 27, 2023 — In a recent study, researchers discovered extreme warming along the seafloor of the North American continental shelves.

Continental shelves form the edge of the continent. They extend up to 300 miles out to sea and, compared to the majority of the ocean floor, have shallow water. Their shallow depths and relative proximity to land allow continental shelf waters to be productive.

For example, the bottom of continental shelves serves as critical habitats for commercial species such as lobsters, scallops, crabs, flounder, cod and other groundfish, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).

Read the full article at Fox Weather

Scientists Scramble to Help Bay Scallops Survive Climate Change

March 27, 2023 — Stephen Tettelbach was surveying the bay scallop population in Nantucket with colleagues late in the summer of 2019 when he got the call: A longtime friend and fisherman on Long Island reported a mass die-off of scallops in Peconic Bay, Long Island’s legendary fishery.

Tettelbach, head of the Peconic Bay Scallop Restoration Program at Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) in Suffolk County, New York, said his first response was denial. Peconic Bay’s prized shellfish had been thriving in June. In fact, it was supposed to be another banner season—commercial landings in the two preceding years had been the largest since 1994, topping 110,000 pounds.

But after returning to Long Island a few days later and setting out on his annual October surveys of Peconic Bay, an estuary nestled between eastern Long Island’s North and South Forks known for its pristine waters, lush eelgrass meadows, and scallops considered to be the best in the country, Tettelbach saw the devastation for himself. “There were almost no living scallops anywhere,” he remembers.

Once the country’s leading bay scallop fishery, Peconic Bay is now holding on for dear life. 2019 marked the first in a series of die-offs that has led to the collapse of one of the few remaining fisheries of wild bay scallops, whose native East Coast populations have declined dramatically in recent decades.

Coastal change in the Northeast is fast outpacing other areas, with summer water temperatures increasing at a rate more than twice the global average, according to research published in Global Change Biology in January.

Read the full article at Civil Eats

Ocean acidification, warming will slow sea scallop growth, study says

March 26, 2023 — A new study published in the journal PLOS Climate indicates that ocean acidification conditions projected between now and 2100 depress the growth of juvenile Atlantic sea scallops. Ocean acidification is caused by the ocean absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, resulting in chemical changes that increase acidity. Ocean warming may further hinder growth. Atlantic sea scallops support one of the most valuable fisheries in the United States, worth $670 million in 2021.

Postdoctoral researcher and lead author Emilien Pousse said, “This work describes the energetic balance of sea scallops under ocean acidification conditions for the first time, a species of economic and socio-cultural importance. Within our changing world, getting to know how our marine resources and fisheries could be affected by ocean warming and acidification in the near future is the key to anticipate the upcoming changes.”

The 8-week study was a collaboration between NOAA Fisheries and Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Faculty and students helped NOAA scientists conduct the study at the campus’ aquaculture lab. Scientists exposed the scallops to three different carbon dioxide levels and measured their growth and metabolism, including feeding, respiration, and excretion rates. Ocean acidification conditions significantly reduced the scallops’ ability to take up energy.

The NOAA Ocean Acidification Program, which funded this work, has a mission to better prepare society to respond to changing ocean conditions and resources by expanding our understanding of ocean acidification.

Dwight Gledhill, deputy director of NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program, explained further. “Sea scallops represent a critically important fishery for New England and the Mid-Atlantic,” he said. “Because the effects of ocean acidification can vary considerably from species to species, it is necessary that we conduct targeted studies on sea scallops to better evaluate the risk ocean acidification may pose to them in coming decades.”

Dvora Hart is the lead assessment scientist for the species at NOAA Fisheries as well as a co-author of this study. She has studied Atlantic sea scallops for 24 years.

“This is the first information on post-larval scallop growth under ocean acidification,” she noted. “I previously worked on computer modeling studies with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution oceanographers focused on climate change and ocean acidification effects on sea scallops. At the time, we did not have experimental data on sea scallop response. We estimated it based on what we knew about other scallop species and oysters. We now have real data on how sea scallops respond, filling a major gap in our knowledge.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Phytoplankton blooms offer insight into impacts of climate change

March 23, 2023 — The first study into the biological response of the upper ocean in the wake of South Pacific cyclones could help predict the impact of warming ocean temperatures, New Zealand researchers believe.

Dr. Pete Russell, of the University of Otago’s Department of Marine Science, and Dr. Christopher Horvat, of the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics, have published a study on the oceanic biological effect of Cyclone Oma which passed near Vanuatu in 2019.

“While Oma was a relatively benign , it produced a massive phytoplankton  in its wake—the single most abnormal event in the history of South Pacific chlorophyll measurements,” Dr. Russell says.

“Such an extreme event can produce a large amount of biomass in a part of the  that is typically a biological desert. We don’t yet know about the fate of this biomass, but one possibility is that it could end up on the bottom of the ocean, sequestering carbon.”

Read the full article at phys.org