Saving Seafood

Past heat waves and low sea ice continued to impact Alaska’s waters in 2021

January 18, 2022 — The so-called blob that brought warm surface water temperatures to the Gulf of Alaska between 2014 and 2016 has passed.

But the effects of that blob, and a subsequent heat wave in 2019, are not all in the rearview mirror. And researchers are bracing for more as climate change brings with it more ocean warming.

“For an area like the Gulf of Alaska, definitely this is a topic we need to understand better,” said Bridget Ferriss, a research fish biologist with NOAA Fisheries. She edited this year’s Ecosystems Status Report for the Gulf of Alaska, used by federal managers to inform fisheries policy in Alaska.

Last year, researchers continued to track the impacts of recent heat waves on Alaska’s marine species.

Ferriss said a heat wave happens when the sea surface temperature on a given day is warmer than 90% of the temperatures on record for that same day, for five days in a row.

Read the full story at KTOO

Scientists catch billions of juvenile polar cod under arctic sea ice

October 13, 2015 — Polar cod are a vital food source for whales, narwhals, ringed seals and arctic seabirds, but researchers have had a hard time studying these fish and estimating their numbers.

That’s now changing, thanks to new netting technology. Recently, a team of German researchers were able to catch a large number of polar cod living beneath the arctic sea ice. Their findings suggest billions of juvenile cod prefer the shelter of the arctic shelves and drifting sea ice.

The researchers published their findings this week in the journal Polar Biology.

“For the first time, we’ve been able to use a special net directly below the sea ice to catch a large number of polar cod, and therefore to estimate their prevalence over a large area,” Carmen David, a biologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute and first author of the new study, said in a press release.

Read the full story from UPI