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posted by mrpg on Friday August 31 2018, @05:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the gone-swimming dept.

Waters off New England in Midst of Record Year for Warmth:

The waters off of New England are already warming faster than most of the world's oceans, and they are nearing the end of one of the hottest summers in their history.

That is the takeaway from an analysis of summer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine by a marine scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. The average sea surface temperature in the gulf was nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average during one 10-day stretch in August, said the scientist, Andy Pershing, who released the work Thursday.

Aug. 8 was the second warmest day in recorded history in the gulf, and there were other sustained stretches this summer that were a few degrees higher than the average from 1982 to 2011, Pershing said. He characterized this year as "especially warm" even for a body of water that he and other scientists previously identified as warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.

[...] The Gulf of Maine is a body of water that resembles a dent in the coastal Northeast, and it touches Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Atlantic Canada. It's the nerve center of the U.S. lobster fishing industry, an important feeding ground for rare North Atlantic right whales and a piece of ocean that has attracted much attention in recent years because of its rapid warming.

[...] The warming of the gulf is happening at a time when the center of the U.S. lobster population appears to be tracking northward. America's lobster catch is still high, but rising temperatures threaten to "continue to disrupt the marine ecosystem in this region," said John Bruno, a marine ecologist with the University of North Carolina who was not involved in Pershing's work.

The warming waters are causing a migration of lobsters northward which is having repercussions in Maine's $400+million lobster fisheries. This story in Bloomberg, Maine's Lobster Tide Might Be Ebbing explores what may lie ahead:

The numbers came in earlier this month on Maine's 2017 lobster harvest. By historical standards, the 110.8 million-pound, $434 million haul was pretty spectacular. But it was a lot lower than 2016's 132.5 million-pound, $540 million record, and it was another sign that the Great Lobster Boom that has surprised and delighted Maine's lobster fishermen since the 1990s -- and brought lobster rolls to diners from coast to coast -- may be giving way to ... something else.

[...] Given how quickly the lobster harvests grew, though, especially from 2007 through 2012, it's hard not to wonder whether they might not eventually collapse. They already have in several states farther down the Atlantic coast. Lobster landings were still on the rise as of 2016 (data aren't available yet for 2017) in New Hampshire and Massachusetts but peaked in Rhode Island in 1999, Connecticut in 1998, New York in 1996 and New Jersey in 1990.

[...] Offering more of a hint on timing are the American Lobster Settlement Index readings made by the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences along with fisheries agencies in the U.S. and Canada. The settlement index measures the density of baby lobsters in quadrants of rocky seafloor, and its readings started declining off the coast of Maine about a decade ago. It takes five to 10 years for a lobster to reach harvestable size, so "the downturn in Maine's landings is indeed consistent with our ALSI based forecast," University of Maine zoologist Rick Wahle wrote in an email.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @06:32PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @06:32PM (#728882) Journal

    This is true. Collective resource management is important. But those actions aren't making the the great barrier reef not dead. Some problems are truly global.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 31 2018, @09:31PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 31 2018, @09:31PM (#728973)

    True enough - habitat destruction doesn't just take place in geographic areas, we spread our excrement in the air and water too...

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:01AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:01AM (#729086) Journal

    But those actions aren't making the the great barrier reef not dead.

    Hypothetical actions (which != actual actions) generally don't.

    Collective resource management is important.

    More important than climate change here. Because you can prevent a collapse of fisheries in the face of climate change, if you stop overfishing. But managing climate change doesn't prevent a fishery collapse from overfishing.