California's Commercial Fishing Fees to Rise From $20 Million Shortfall in Fish and Wildlife Budget
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Copyright © 2017 Seafoodnews.com
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Eureka Times-Standard] by Ruth Schneider - March 29, 2017Both of the state’s North Coast legislators, Sen. Mike McGuire and Assemblyman Jim Wood, are vocal in their opposition to a proposal put forward by the governor to increase fishing landing fees.The plan from Gov. Jerry Brown to fill a $20 million shortfall in the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife budget would increase landing fees for the state’s commercial fishing fleet. The increases would raise an additional $12.4 million.“Currently, revenue from the commercial fish landing fees support less than one quarter of the Department’s program costs,” the budget summary states, adding that landing fees have not been adjusted for 20 years.According to McGuire, the increase in the fees “exceeding 10,000 percent” is “simply unacceptable.”“We have to protect and preserve California’s fisheries, and we’re deeply concerned about the future based off of threats from the federal government and the exorbitant fees being proposed by the Governor’s Office,” McGuire said in a statement.Wood reacted similarly.“As Vice Chair of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture and a member of the Assembly who represents nearly one-third of California’s coastline, I am adamantly opposed to the Governor’s proposal to increase landing fees on commercial fisheries,” Wood said in a statement.He added that the fishing industry has not had it easy the past few years with toxic algae blooms halting the crab fishing season on the North Coast last year and salmon populations declining significantly.“Exacerbating the financial hardships of an industry that has so recently suffered these crises in order to address the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s budget concerns is unconscionable,” Wood wrote in a letter to the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, which he co-chairs.McGuire announced last week a fisheries forum set for Wednesday. It is set to begin at 12:30 p.m. and a live-stream can be found on the Senate’s website.Here’s the status of a few environment-related bills working their way through the state Legislature:Sustainable seafood >> SB 269, introduced by McGuire, would develop and implement a sustainable seafood promotion program for California. The bill seeks to increase direct sales of sustainable seafood from California fisheries. Under a provision of the bill, “Seafood produced through aquaculture or fish farming shall not be certified as sustainable under this division until nationally or internationally accepted sustainability standards have been developed and implemented,” the bill states. Earlier this month, the bill passed out of the Committee on Natural Resource and Water. It is set for an April 3 hearing in an appropriations committee.Steelhead reporting >> McGuire introduced and Wood is a co-author of SB 144, which would extend the steelhead report-restoration card system that had been set to sunset in July 2017. The bill would extend the program through July 2022. The program charges steelhead fishers $5 annually for the card. The program tracks angling trends over time which help the Department of Fish and Wildlife make fisheries management and regulation decisions. Because the funds are generated from steelhead anglers, the restoration projects must benefit both steelhead populations and the anglers themselves. The bill is set for an April 3 hearing by the Senate Appropriations Committee.Nature >> AB 1433, introduced by Wood, make funding available to the Wildlife Conservation Board for grants and programs that protect and improve natural resources. It would also fund programs that aim to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. On March 13, the bill was forwarded to the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, where it awaits a hearing.
Copyright © 2017 Seafoodnews.com
Congress to consider relief funds for California crab fleet
Long-awaited federal funds to alleviate California’s crabbing fleet after last year’s dismal season could be approved by Congress as early as the next few weeks, according to California 2nd District Rep. Jared Huffman.Huffman (D-San Rafael) said Congress is set to vote on a supplemental budget appropriation to prevent a government shutdown in the coming weeks. He said he and a bipartisan group of legislators have signed on to a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urging them to include fishery disaster funds in this budget bill.“I don’t want to say ‘mission accomplished’ at this point,” Huffman told the Times-Standard on Wednesday. “I think the fact that we’ve got a nice bipartisan request in and that it’s not tied to President Trump’s budget is a good thing.”Meanwhile at the state level, local legislators and fishing organizations are protesting Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to increase commercial fishing landing fees by as much as 1,300 percent in order to help close a $20 million shortfall in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife budget.North Coast Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg), who also serves as the vice chairman on the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, stated Wednesday that he is “adamantly opposed” to Brown’s proposal.“I recognize that the department’s budget is unsustainable and a solution must be found, but not on the backs of the men and women in California’s commercial fishing industry,” Wood said in a statement.
Disaster funds
After its season was delayed up to six months by toxic algae blooms in 2016, California’s commercial crabbing fleet has waited more than a year for federal relief.Across the state, crabbers pulled in less than half of their average yearly haul by July 2016. North Coast crabbers hauled in about one-third of their average catch.Many crabbers fell into debt as their boats and crews sat unused, which resulted in some crabbers leaving the industry for good.Huffman and other members of Congress introduced a bill to in March 2016 to provide more than $138 million to the fleet, but the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker needed to declare a fisheries disaster before those funds could be made available. That declaration occurred in January.Should Congress approve the relief funds, Huffman said the funds could be made available in a few months at the latest.If the disaster funds do not make this latest funding bill, Huffman said they still have until the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 to appropriate the money.
Landing fee
In an effort to address a $20 million shortfall in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife budget, the governor is proposing in his budget to increase landing fees for the state’s commercial fishing fleet to raise an additional $12.4 million.“Currently, revenue from the commercial fish landing fees support less than one-quarter of the department’s program costs,” the budget summary states. “Further, these fees have not been adjusted in at least 20 years. This proposal sustains the current level of service, acknowledging the need to implement more permanent measures in 2018‑19.”In the 2015-16 fiscal year, landing fees — which are collected on a per pound basis of the amount of seafood fishermen catch or land — only brought in $500,000 and is expected to bring in $900,000 this year, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office.The office — a 16-member bipartisan advisory committee overseen by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee — states in its review of Brown’s 2017-18 budget that the proposal would increase fees by as much as 1,300 percent. The office states this increase “may be too large for the industry to sustain” and that the department would still have a shortfall in the 2018-19 fiscal year.Landing fees have not increased since 1992 as they are not adjusted for inflation. Even if the fee were increased to current inflation levels, the legislative analyst’s office states that would only result in an 80 percent increase — or about $725,000 — compared to the 1,300 percent in Brown’s proposal.Trinidad crab fisherman Craig Goucher said typically buyers pay the landing fees for the fishermen. If Brown’s proposal goes through, he said it could result in buyers paying less for fishermens’ catch to make up for the increased costs. While California’s landing fees are lower than Oregon’s and Washington’s, Goucher said Brown’s increase would change that and result in unfair competition.“(Brown) can justify raising it some, but they can’t justify raising $0.25 per pound,” Goucher said.Fort Bragg Groundfish Conservation Trust President Michelle Norvell said that the fleet has already experienced losses due to poor ocean conditions and that the increased fee would only work to drive out fishing businesses from California.“I hope wholeheartedly that the assessment is rejected and they go back to the drawing board and look at other ways of filling the shortfall,” she said. “I hope that it’s borne across more than just the commercial fishers. It’s not the burden of the commercial fishermen and hope they’re not going to slip something past us.”
A crab fishing boat sits docked at Woodley Island Marina across the bay from crab pots at Caito Fisheries. Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed an increase to commercial fishing landing fees by as much as 1,300 percent in order to help close a $20 million shortfall in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife budget. Shaun Walker — The Times-Standard
Will Houston can be reached at 707-441-0504.
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Figuring Out When and Why Squids Lost Their Shells
A 166-million-year-old fossil of an extinct relative of the squid. Credit Jonathan Jackson and ZoË Hughes/National History Museum of London
Shaped like a torpedo and about as swift, squids are jet-propelled underwater predators. Together with their nimble brethren, the octopus and cuttlefish, they make for an agile invertebrate armada.
But that was not always the case. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of the tentacled trio were slow, heavily armored creatures, like the coil-shelled ammonites and the cone-shelled belemnites.
Alastair Tanner, a doctoral student at University of Bristol in England, wanted to better understand why those cephalopods lost their shells. But though both ammonites and the belemnites have left behind rich fossil records, their shell-less descendants have not.
So Mr. Tanner conducted a genetic analysis of 26 present day cephalopods, including the vampire squid, the golden cuttlefish and the southern blue-ringed octopus.
With the molecular clock technique, which allowed him to use DNA to map out the evolutionary history of the cephalopods, he found that today’s cuttlefish, squids and octopuses began to appear 160 to 100 million years ago, during the so-called Mesozoic Marine Revolution.
Mr. Tanner published his findings last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
During the revolution, underwater life underwent a rapid change, including a burst in fish diversity. Some predators became better suited for crushing shellfish, while some smaller fish became faster and more agile.
“There’s a continual arms race between the prey and the predators,” said Mr. Tanner. “The shells are getting smaller, and the squids are getting faster.”
The evolutionary pressures favored being nimble over being armored, and cephalopods started to lose their shells, according to Mr. Tanner. The adaptation allowed them to outcompete their shelled relatives for fast food, and they were able to better evade predators. They were also able to keep up with competitors seeking the same prey.
Today most cephalopods are squishy and shell-less. The biggest exception is the nautilus. But though there are more than 2,500 fossilized species of nautilus, today only a handful of species exist.
Squid and octopus species number around 300 each, and there are around 120 species of cuttlefish. The differences in number, compared with the nautilus, indicates the advantages that these cephalopods may have gained over their shelled relatives, according to Mr. Tanner.
“It became a much more successful strategy to be a really high metabolism, very rapid moving animal,” Mr. Tanner said, “and they evolved into these really quite amazing things we see today.”
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White House proposes steep budget cut to leading climate science agency
(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via AP)
The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from its current funding level.The Office of Management and Budget also asked the Commerce Department to provide information about how much it would cost to lay off employees, while saying those employees who do remain with the department should get a 1.9 percent pay increase in January 2018. It requested estimates for terminating leases and government “property disposal.”The OMB outline for the Commerce Department for fiscal 2018 proposed sharp reductions in specific areas within NOAA such as spending on education, grants and research. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would lose $126 million, or 26 percent, of the funds it has under the current budget. Its satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the proposal.The National Marine Fisheries Service and National Weather Service would be fortunate by comparison, facing only 5 percent cuts.The figures are part of the OMB’s “passback” document, a key part of the annual budget process in which the White House instructs agencies to draw up detailed budgets for submission to Congress. The numbers often change during the course of negotiations between the agency and the White House and between lawmakers and the administration later on. The 2018 fiscal year starts Oct. 1.A spokesperson for the Commerce Department declined to comment. A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the process was “evolving” and cautioned against specific numbers. The official would not respond to questions about the four-page passback document.The biggest single cut proposed by the passback document comes from NOAA’s satellite division, known as the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which includes a key repository of climate and environmental information, the National Centers for Environmental Information. Researchers there were behind a study suggesting that there has been no recent slowdown in the rate of climate change — research that drew the ire of Republicans in Congress.Another proposed cut would eliminate a $73 million program called Sea Grant, which supports coastal research conducted through 33 university programs across the country. That includes institutions in many swing states that went for President Trump, such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, the University of Florida and North Carolina State University.The OMB passback said that the administration wanted to “prioritize rebuilding the military” and would seek “savings and efficiencies to keep the Nation on a responsible fiscal path.” It said that its proposed funding cut for the Commerce Department “highlights the tradeoffs and choices inherent in pursuing these goals.”The OMB also said that the White House would come up with ideas to modernize “outdated infrastructure,” but it said that agencies should not expect increases in their fiscal 2018 discretionary-spending “toplines” as a result.On Wednesday, after his confirmation, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that drawing up a budget would be a top priority. “One of the first steps,” he said, “will be securing adequate appropriations from the Congress. In a period of budgetary constraint, that will be a major challenge.”The OMB passback document said that the Commerce Department, like other agencies, should “buy and manage like a business.” It urged the department to explore greater use of privately owned commercial satellites and commercial cloud services while submitting to the OMB a plan to retire or replace “at least one high priority legacy IT system” beginning in 2018.Many scientists warned that the deep cuts at NOAA could hurt safety as well as academic programs.Conrad Lautenbacher, a retired vice admiral who was the NOAA administrator under President George W. Bush, said, “I think the cuts are ill timed given the needs of society, economy and the military.” He added, “It will be very hard for NOAA to manage and maintain the kind of services the country requires” with the proposed cuts.Jane Lubchenco, NOAA administrator under President Barack Obama, said that 90 percent of the information for weather forecasts comes from satellites. “Cutting NOAA’s satellite budget will compromise NOAA’s mission of keeping Americans safe from extreme weather and providing forecasts that allow businesses and citizens to make smart plans,” she said.Rick Spinrad, a former chief scientist for NOAA, said: “NOAA’s research and operations, including satellite data management, support critical safety needs. A reduced investment now would virtually guarantee jeopardizing the safety of the American public.”
He said that weather warnings for tornadoes and hurricanes could be compromised and that navigational capacity used to help guide commercial ships and other mariners would suffer, leaving them without the “improved forecasts they need to safely maneuver coastal waters.” It could become harder to warn of tsunamis and forecast weather that will cause power outages.David Titley, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University who served as NOAA’s chief operating officer in the Obama administration, said that “oddly” the White House budget office, despite the president’s commitment to building infrastructure, would cut NOAA’s budget for ships and satellites. “These cuts will impact good private-sector jobs in the U.S.,” Titley said. “The loss of capability will make America weaker both in space and on the sea — a strange place to be for an administration that campaigned to ‘make America great again.’ ”
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New methods further discern extreme fluctuations in forage fish populations
Anchovy, sardine, and hake scale deposition rate from AD 1000 − 1500 derived from a recent, age-calibrated sediment core from Santa Barbara Basin, California. Representative fish scales and the respective fishes are shown on the right. Image credit: I.L. Hendy, University of Michigan; S. McClatchie, NOAA Fisheries; NMFS image library
ANN ARBOR—California sardine stocks famously crashed in John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row." New research, building on previous since the late 1960s, shows in greater detail that such forage fish stocks have undergone boom-bust cycles for centuries, with at least three species off the U.S. West Coast repeatedly experiencing steep population increases followed by declines long before commercial fishing began.Natural population fluctuations in Pacific sardine, northern anchovy and Pacific hake off California have been so common that the species were in collapsed condition 29 to 40 percent of the time over the 500-year period from A.D. 1000 to 1500, according to the study published online Feb. 9 in Geophysical Research Letters.Using a long time series of fish scales deposited in low-oxygen, offshore sedimentary environments off Southern California, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Michigan described such collapses as "an intrinsic property of some forage fish populations that should be expected, just as droughts are expected in an arid climate."The findings have implications for the ecosystem, as well as fishermen and fisheries managers, who have witnessed several booms, followed by crashes every one to two decades on average and lasting a decade or more, the scientists wrote. Collapses in forage fish—small fish that are preyed on by larger predators for food—can reverberate through the marine food web, causing prey limitation among predators such as sea lions and sea birds."Forage fish populations are resilient over the long term, which is how they come back from such steep collapses over and over again," said Sam McClatchie, supervisory oceanographer at NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif., and first author of the paper."That doesn't change the fact that these species may remain at very low levels for periods long enough to have very real consequences for the people and wildlife who count on them," he said.Downturns in sardine and anchovy linked to changing ocean conditions have contributed to the localized stranding of thousands of California sea lion pups in recent years.
Former University of Michigan graduate student Karla Knudsen, left, and former U-M undergraduate Athena Eyster sample deep-sea sediment collected in 2009 with a coring device beneath the Santa Barbara Channel in California. The sediments were used in a fish-scale analysis. Image credit: Ingrid Hendy
Scientists traced the historic abundance of sardine, anchovy and hake by examining deposits of their scales collected on the floor of the Santa Barbara Channel from A.D. 1000 to 1500. While previous studies had shown that forage fish exhibited collapses prior to commercial fishing, the new research used methods developed by climatologists to examine the frequency and duration of the fluctuation in finer detail."The Mediterranean climate of California, with wet winters and dry summers, produces a sediment layer we can pull apart like pages in a book," said U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ingrid Hendy. "Although these sediments have been studied before, we are using new technology to examine them in unprecedented detail."Hendy and members of her lab collected the California sediments in 2009 using a coring device that allowed them to sample large portions of the sea floor beneath the Santa Barbara Channel. Hendy is an associate professor in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.In the lab, fish scales from the core were identified under a binocular dissecting microscope by comparing them to reference specimens from the U-M Museum of Zoology collection. Anchovies in the collection were bought at the San Pedro Fish Market, near Long Beach, Calif., in 1922. The sardines came from Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and were collected in 1933.
From left to right: Former University of Michigan undergraduate Athena Eyster, former U-M graduate student Karla Knudsen, Ingrid Hendy and former U-M graduate student Meghan Wagner examine a sediment core collected in the Santa Barbara Channel, California, in 2009. Image credit: Arndt Schimmelmann
The fish-scale analysis was performed by former U-M undergraduate Alexandra Skrivanek, who is now a graduate student at the University of Florida. Hendy's lab has also helped to advance techniques used to date the layers within marine sediment cores. Those advances involve improved radiocarbon dating of organic materials in the sediments and better ways to count the annual layers, Hendy said.The scientists described a collapse as a drop below 10 percent of the average peak in fish populations, as estimated from the paleorecord. Anchovy took an average of eight years to recover from a collapse, while sardine and hake took an average of 22 years.
The record also showed that sardine and anchovy fluctuated synchronously over the 500-year study period. Combined collapses may compound the impact on predators and the fishery, the scientists said. The finding runs counter to suggestions that the two species' cycles alternate.Sardine and anchovy have at times been the most heavily harvested fish off Southern California in terms of volume. Hake, also known as Pacific whiting, spawn off California but are harvested in large volumes off the Pacific Northwest and Canada.The new study concludes these forage fish are well-suited to variable fishing rates that target the species in times of abundance, "while recognizing that mean persistence of fishable populations is one to two decades, and that switching to other target species will become a necessity."Collapses last, on average, "too long for the industry to simply wait out the return of the forage fish."The study authors concluded that "well-designed reserve thresholds" and adjustable harvest rates help protect the forage species, the fishery and nonhuman predators for the long term. However, they added that "reserve thresholds only protect the seed stock for recovery, and cannot prevent collapses from occurring."Funding for the study was provided by NOAA and the National Science Foundation.
Read the original post: http://www.ns.umich.edu/
Scientists: Major Oxygen Loss to Oceans Linked to Warming Climate
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Copyright © 2017 Seafoodnews.com
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Washington Post] by By Chris Mooney - February 16, 2017A large research synthesis, published in one of the world’s most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world — a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, found a decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010. The loss, however, showed up in some ocean basins more than others. The largest overall volume of oxygen was lost in the largest ocean — the Pacific — but as a percentage, the decline was sharpest in the Arctic Ocean, a region facing Earth’s most stark climate change.The loss of ocean oxygen “has been assumed from models, and there have been lots of regional analysis that have shown local decline, but it has never been shown on the global scale, and never for the deep ocean,” said Schmidtko, who conducted the research with Lothar Stramma and Martin Visbeck, also of GEOMAR.Ocean oxygen is vital to marine organisms, but also very delicate — unlike in the atmosphere, where gases mix together thoroughly, in the ocean that is far harder to accomplish, Schmidtko explained. Moreover, he added, just 1 percent of all the Earth’s available oxygen mixes into the ocean; the vast majority remains in the air.Climate change models predict the oceans will lose oxygen because of several factors. Most obvious is simply that warmer water holds less dissolved gases, including oxygen. “It’s the same reason we keep our sparkling drinks pretty cold,” Schmidtko said.But another factor is the growing stratification of ocean waters. Oxygen enters the ocean at its surface, from the atmosphere and from the photosynthetic activity of marine microorganisms. But as that upper layer warms up, the oxygen-rich waters are less likely to mix down into cooler layers of the ocean because the warm waters are less dense and do not sink as readily.“When the upper ocean warms, less water gets down deep, and so therefore, the oxygen supply to the deep ocean is shut down or significantly reduced,” Schmidtko said.The new study represents a synthesis of literally “millions” of separate ocean measurements over time, according to GEOMAR. The authors then used interpolation techniques for areas of the ocean where they lacked measurements.The resulting study attributes less than 15 percent of the total oxygen loss to sheer warmer temperatures, which create less solubility. The rest was attributed to other factors, such as a lack of mixing.Matthew Long, an oceanographer from the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has published on ocean oxygen loss, said he considers the new results “robust” and a “major advance in synthesizing observations to examine oxygen trends on a global scale.”Long was not involved in the current work, but his research had previously demonstrated that ocean oxygen loss was expected to occur and that it should soon be possible to demonstrate that in the real world through measurements, despite the complexities involved in studying the global ocean and deducing trends about it.That’s just what the new study has done.“Natural variations have obscured our ability to definitively detect this signal in observations,” Long said in an email. “In this study, however, Schmidtko et al. synthesize all available observations to show a global-scale decline in oxygen that conforms to the patterns we expect from human-driven climate warming. They do not make a definitive attribution statement, but the data are consistent with and strongly suggestive of human-driven warming as a root cause of the oxygen decline.“It is alarming to see this signal begin to emerge clearly in the observational data,” he added.“Schmidtko and colleagues’ findings should ring yet more alarm bells about the consequences of global warming,” added Denis Gilbert, a researcher with the Maurice Lamontagne Institute at Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Quebec, in an accompanying commentary on the study also published in Nature.Because oxygen in the global ocean is not evenly distributed, the 2 percent overall decline means there is a much larger decline in some areas of the ocean than others.Moreover, the ocean already contains so-called oxygen minimum zones, generally found in the middle depths. The great fear is that their expansion upward, into habitats where fish and other organism thrive, will reduce the available habitat for marine organisms.In shallower waters, meanwhile, the development of ocean “hypoxic” areas, or so-called “dead zones,” may also be influenced in part by declining oxygen content overall.On top of all of that, declining ocean oxygen can also worsen global warming in a feedback loop. In or near low oxygen areas of the oceans, microorganisms tend to produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, Gilbert writes. Thus the new study “implies that production rates and efflux to the atmosphere of nitrous oxide … will probably have increased.”The new study underscores once again that some of the most profound consequences of climate change are occurring in the oceans, rather than on land. In recent years, incursions of warm ocean water have caused large die-offs of coral reefs, and in some cases, kelp forests as well. Meanwhile, warmer oceans have also begun to destabilize glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, and as they melt, these glaciers freshen the ocean waters and potentially change the nature of their circulation.When it comes to ocean deoxygenation, as climate change continues, this trend should also increase — studies suggest a loss of up to 7 percent of the ocean’s oxygen by 2100. At the end of the current paper, the researchers are blunt about the consequences of a continuing loss of oceanic oxygen.“Far-reaching implications for marine ecosystems and fisheries can be expected,” they write.
Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com
Ocean acidification to hit West Coast Dungeness crab fishery, new assessment shows
The acidification of the ocean expected as seawater absorbs increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will reverberate through the West Coast’s marine food web, but not necessarily in the ways you might expect, new research shows.Dungeness crabs, for example, will likely suffer as their food sources decline. Dungeness crab fisheries valued at about $220 million annually may face a strong downturn over the next 50 years, according to the research published Jan. 12 in the journal Global Change Biology. But pteropods and copepods, tiny marine organisms with shells that are vulnerable to acidification, will likely experience only a slight overall decline because they are prolific enough to offset much of the impact, the study found.
Dungeness crab.jkirkhart35/Flickr
Marine mammals and seabirds are less likely to be affected by ocean acidification, the study found.“What stands out is that some groups you’d expect to do poorly don’t necessarily do so badly – that’s probably the most important takeaway here,” saidKristin Marshall, lead author of the study who pursued the research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington and NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center. “This is a testament in part to the system’s resilience to these projected impacts. That’s sort of the silver lining of what we found.”While previous studies have examined the vulnerability of particular species to acidification in laboratories, this is among the first to model the effects across an entire ecosystem and estimate the impacts on commercial fisheries.“The real challenge is to go from experiments on what happens to individual animals in the lab over a matter of weeks, to try to capture the effects on the whole population and understand how vulnerable it really is,” said Isaac Kaplan, a research scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.The research used sophisticated models of the California Current ecosystem off the Pacific Coast to assess the impacts of a projected 0.2 unit decline in the pH of seawater in the next 50 years, which equates to a 55 percent increase in acidity. The California Current is considered especially vulnerable to acidification because the upwelling of deep, nutrient-rich water low in pH already influences the West Coast through certain parts of the year.The ocean absorbs about one-third of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, which has led to a 0.1 unit drop in pH since the mid-1700s.The research built on an earlier effort by NOAA scientists Shallin Busch and Paul McElhanythat quantified the sensitivity of various species to acidification, as originally reported in 393 separate papers. In a novel approach, Busch and McElhany weighed the evidence for each species based on its reported sensitivity in the laboratory, relevance to the California Current and agreement between studies.This synthesis by Busch and McElhany identified 10 groups of species with highest vulnerability to acidification. Marshall and colleagues incorporated this into the ecosystem model to examine how acidification will play out in nature. The study particularly examined the effects on commercially important species including Dungeness crab; groundfish such as rockfish, sole and hake; and coastal pelagic fish such as sardines and anchovy over the period from 2013 to 2063.
The study modeled the potential risks of ocean acidification (under a future decrease in pH) on the West Coast marine food web and fisheries over 50 years, from 2013 to 2063. NOAA Fisheries
“This was basically a vulnerability assessment to sharpen our view of where the effects are likely to be the greatest and what we should be most concerned about in terms of how the system will respond,” said Tim Essington, a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and a co-author of the research.The study provides a foundation for further research into the most affected species, he said.Although earlier studies have shown that Dungeness crab larvae is vulnerable to acidification, the assessment found that the species declined largely in response to declines in its prey – including bivalves such as clams and other bottom-dwelling invertebrate species.Since Dungeness crab is one of the most valuable fisheries on the West Coast, its decline would have some of the most severe economic effects, according to the research. Groundfish such as petrale sole, Dover sole and deep-dwelling rockfish are also expected to decline due to acidification, according to the assessment. However, fisheries for those species are much less valuable so the economic impact would not be as large.Coastal pelagic fish were only slightly affected.“Dungeness crab is a bigger economic story than groundfish,” Kaplan said. “There are winners and losers, but the magnitude of the impact depends on how important the species is economically.”The research was funded by the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program and the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. Marshall was supported by a National Research Council fellowship.###For more information, contact Marshall at kmarsh2@uw.edu and Kaplan atisaac.kaplan@noaa.gov 206-302-2446.This piece was adapted from a Northwest Fisheries Science Center news release.