Saving Seafood

Ocean animals face a mass extinction from climate change, study finds

April 29, 2022 — Not since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs — along with at least half of all other beings on Earth — has life in the ocean been so at risk.

Warming waters are cooking creatures in their own habitats. Many species are slowly suffocating as oxygen leaches out of the seas. Even populations that have managed to withstand the ravages of overfishing, pollution and habitat loss are struggling to survive amid accelerating climate change.

If humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, according to a study released Thursday, roughly a third of all marine animals could vanish within 300 years.

The findings, published in the journal Science, reveal a potential mass extinction looming beneath the waves. The oceans have absorbed a third of the carbon and 90 percent of the excess heat created by humans, but their vast expanse and forbidding depths mean scientists are just beginning to understand what creatures face there.

Yet the study by Princeton University earth scientists Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch also underscores how much marine life could still be saved. If the world takes swift action to curb fossil fuel use and restore degraded ecosystems, the researchers say, it could cut potential extinctions by 70 percent.

“This is a landmark paper,” Malin Pinsky, a Rutgers University biologist who did not contribute to the paper, said in an interview. “If we’re not careful, we’re headed for a future that I think to all of us right now would look quite hellish. … It’s a very important wake-up call.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

2021 was the hottest year on record in the Gulf of Maine, new data show

March 29, 2022 — Scientists say the highest water temperatures ever in the Gulf of Maine were recorded last year.

The Gulf is one of the fastest-warming bodies of water on the planet, and fishermen are noticing signs of the change.

Data released by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute show that last year surface water temperatures in the Gulf were on average a half-degree higher than the previous record, with record highs recorded on 169 days — almost half the year.

The Gulf experienced what scientists now call a “marine heatwave” for the entire year.
“As unusually warm as 2021 was in a historical context, it’s likely to be one of the coolest years we’ll experience going forward, especially if we’re not able to reduce greenhouse gas emission globally,” says the institute’s David Reidmiller.

Reidmiller says the latest data punctuate a decades-long trend that shows no sign of abating.

“The warming trend is unequivocal in the Gulf of Maine. It’s been going on now for decades, and from a climatological sense we are assuredly in a new regime,” Reidmiller says.

Read the full story at Maine Public Radio

In hot water: Ocean warming hits another record high on climate change

January 18, 2022 — The ocean is now warmer than it’s ever been in recent history, according to a new study. And this isn’t the first time such a record has been set. For the past six years, ocean temperatures have exceeded each previous year in a trend one scientist calls “inexorable.”

Human-induced climate change is to blame, says John Abraham, co-author of the new study published Jan. 11 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

 “We should be very concerned,” Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, U.S, told Mongabay in a video interview. “But frankly, we should have been concerned years ago.”

The research team used a network of high-tech autonomous ocean buoys to measure global ocean temperatures, which they compared to data from the 1950s. They found that in 2021, the upper 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) in all of the oceans absorbed 14 zettajoules more of human-made energy than the previous year, equal to about 145 times the world’s electricity generation in 2020.

Abraham puts it another way: “It’s the equivalent of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonated every second of every day of every week of every month.

“The story we’ve been telling since 2018 is that every year it’s getting hotter and hotter,” he added. “And records are being broken as this inexorable, unrelenting rise of ocean temperatures occurs.”

Read the full story at Mongabay

 

Gulf of Maine waters warmed to highest fall temperatures on record

January 13, 2022 — The Gulf of Maine – which has been warming faster than 96 percent of the world’s ocean areas – experienced its warmest fall surface water temperatures on record last year in what scientists tracking it call a “distinct regime shift” for the ecosystem.

The Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland announced its findings Wednesday in its seasonal warming report, which showed average sea surface temperatures in the gulf hit 59.9 degrees, or more than 4 degrees above the long-term average.

Last fall’s figures exceeded even those in the infamous “Northwest Atlantic Ocean heat wave” of 2012, which triggered a two-year explosion in green crabs that devoured clams and eelgrass meadows and led to the starvation of puffin chicks. That warming cycle also triggered the early shedding of Maine lobsters, which fueled armed confrontations between Canadian lobstermen and truckers trying to carry the soft-shell boon to New Brunswick processing plants at the height of Canada’s own lobstering season.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at the Portland Press Herald

 

Study finds aquaculture production vulnerable to climate change

December 16, 2021 — Unchecked global warming could reduce global aquaculture production by as much as 16 percent by 2090, a new study from the University of British Columbia Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries shows.

Marine aquaculture, or mariculture, could double its output by 2050, from a current 30 million metric tons (MT) per year live-weight to 74 million MT, but UBC’s researchers modeled that estimate against climate change scenarios and found climate change to be a more serious threat to the industry than expected.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Heat, no food, deadly weather: Climate change kills seabirds

December 2, 2021 — The warming of the planet is taking a deadly toll on seabirds that are suffering population declines from starvation, inability to reproduce, heat waves and extreme weather.

Climate-related losses have hit albatrosses off the Hawaiian islands, northern gannets near the British Isles and puffins off the Maine coast. Some birds are less able to build nests and raise young as sea levels rise, while others are unable to find fish to eat as the ocean heats up, researchers have found.

Common murres and Cassin’s auklets that live off the West Coast have also died in large numbers from conditions scientists directly tied to global warming.

With less food, rising seas that encroach on islands where birds roost and increasingly frequent hurricanes that wipe away nests, many seabirds have been producing fewer chicks, researchers say.

And tern species that live off New England have died during increasing rain and hailstorms scientists link to climate change. Some species, including endangered roseate terns, also can’t fledge chicks because more frequent severe weather kills their young, said Linda Welch, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

Marine heatwaves could have severe negative impacts on global fish stocks

October 4, 2021 — Extremely hot years will wipe out hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fish available for catch in a country’s waters in this century, on top of projected decreases to fish stocks from long-term climate change, a new UBC study projects.

Researchers from the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF) used a complex model incorporating extreme annual ocean temperatures in Exclusive Economic Zones, where the majority of global fish catches occur, into climate-related projections for fish, fisheries and their dependent human communities.

Modelling a  where no action is taken to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions they projected a six percent drop in the amount of potential catches per year and 77 percent of exploited species are projected to decrease in biomass, or the amount of fish by weight in a given area, due to extremely hot years. These decreases are on top of those projected due to long-term decadal-scale climate change.

Read the full story from the University of British Columbia at Phys.org

 

Northern Shrimp Population Collapse Linked to Warming Ocean Temperatures, Squid Predation

September 29, 2021 — An extreme heatwave in the Gulf of Maine in 2012 resulted in the warmest ocean temperatures in the region in decades. By 2013, the Atlantic northern shrimp population in the gulf had experienced a stock “collapse.” That is what fishery scientists call a rapid decrease in numbers that is not a natural fluctuation in stock size. Scientists studying the collapse have found that during this time, warmer temperatures were linked to increases in longfin squid, a major shrimp predator. They arrived in the Gulf of Maine sooner than usual and in more areas where shrimp occur.

”Our results suggest that longfin squid may have been a major player in the collapse of Gulf of Maine northern shrimp during an extreme heat wave event,” said Anne Richards, a biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Richards co-authored the study with Margaret Hunter from the Maine Department of Marine Resources Division of Biological Monitoring and Assessment. They recently published their conclusions in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Read the full story from NOAA

Climate change, sparse policies endanger right whale population

November 8, 2017 — North Atlantic right whales – a highly endangered species making modest population gains in the past decade – may be imperiled by warming waters and insufficient international protection, according to a new Cornell University analysis published in Global Change Biology.

North Atlantic right whales’ preferred cuisine is copepods that thrive in cool waters, such as the Gulf of Maine, said author Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, who conducted the work as a doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Charles Greene, professor of oceanography and co-author on the paper.

Scientists once relied on continuous plankton sampling to track the copepods, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations’ National Marine Fisheries Service discontinued the program, preventing researchers from observing ecosystem changes as they occur.

Read the full story at Science Codex

 

Cleaner fuels for fishing boats could backfire on the climate

February 5, 2016 — Fish is better than pork and beef—not just for your body, but for the planet. That’s long been the thinking, anyway. But a new study has uncovered a hidden climate impact of the fishing industry—one that, ironically, will get worse as boats switch to cleaner fuels. In some cases, the effect could make fishing for tuna as hard on the climate as raising pork, and trawling for shrimp about half as bad as raising beef.

Hogs and cattle get a bad rap because they—and their manure—emit a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. But the fishing industry also contributes to climate change: mostly from the carbon dioxide (CO2) from burned diesel fuel that persists in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The boats produce other short-lived pollutants, such as sulfur oxides and black carbon, which have cooling and warming effects, respectively. But they have typically been neglected as unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

The new study may change that. Elliott Campbell and Brandi McKuin, environmental engineers at the University of California (UC), Merced, estimated fishing industry emissions by combining fisheries catch records with the amount of fuel typically needed to catch various species. Given the total burned fuel, they estimated the amounts of the pollutants, using information about engine types and fuel types. Black carbon, a form of soot that arises from incomplete combustion, has been underestimated by an order of magnitude in previous studies, the team reports in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Read the full story from Science Magazine