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Waters Warm, and Cod Catch Ebbs in Maine
By MICHAEL WINES and JESS BIDGOODDEC. 14, 2014
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Warming Oceans Affects Fishing Industry
itTristan Spinski for The New York Times
PORTLAND, Me. — In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.
Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.
But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth, scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that depends on it.
“Stocks are not necessarily showing up in the places that they have in the past,” said Meredith Mendelson, the deputy commissioner for Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, which regulates fisheries. “We’re seeing movement of stocks often north and eastward.”
Regulators this month canceled the Maine shrimp catch for the second straight year, in no small part because shrimp are fleeing for colder climes. Maine lobsters are booming, but even so, the most productive lobster fishery has shifted as much as 50 miles up the coast in the last 40 years. Black sea bass, southerly fish seldom seen here before, have become so common that this year, Maine officials moved to regulate their catch. Blue crab, a signature species in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, are turning up off Portland.
In decades past, the gulf had warmed on average by about one degree every 21 years. In the last decade, the average has been one degree every two years. “What we’re experiencing is a warming that very few ocean ecosystems have ever experienced,” said Andrew J. Pershing, the chief scientific officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here.
A warmer ocean is not merely a matter of comfort or discomfort for creatures that dwell there. Scientists suspect that some species struggle to spawn when the temperature fluctuates. Others may spawn at the wrong time when food is scarce. Freshwater from melting arctic glaciers may be altering levels of minerals crucial to plankton, the base of the gulf’s food chain.
There is a human toll as well. Cod-fishing restrictions have ravaged, at least temporarily, the community of day boats — the ones owned by small-business fishermen, with smaller boats and incomes than corporate trawler fleets — that defined New England for centuries.
“They’ve been tied up at the wharf since Nov. 13,” the day of the cod-fishing ban, said Angela A. Sanfilippo, the president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association. The group is handing out $100 food vouchers to newly indigent fishermen. “A good amount of our industry just became poor people,” she said.
Joe Orlando, 60, who fishes from a Gloucester, Mass., base, said the effect of the ban was terrifying.“It’s completely, completely over,” he said. “I got a house, kids, payments.”
But many other fishermen do not blame climate change. They blame the regulators, calling the moratorium cruel and needless, because they say their latest cod catches are actually better than in recent years. More than a few talk of a conspiracy between scientists and environmentalists to manufacture a fishing crisis that will justify their jobs.
Scientists say the truth is more prosaic: Although the gulf is generally warming — 2012 was the hottest year on record — the last year was cooler, and kinder to cod. Moreover, the gulf’s remaining cod have congregated in deeper, colder waters in southern Maine and Massachusetts, where their abundance masks their scarcity elsewhere.
“A fisherman’s job isn’t to get an unbiased estimate of abundance. It’s to catch fish,” said Michael Fogarty, the chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors sea life. “The world they see is a different world than we see in the surveys.”
That said, much about warming’s effect on the gulf remains unclear. Years of overfishing have winnowed some fish populations, muddling efforts to measure climate change’s impact. Fishermen, scientists and regulators often disagree over whether the current changes are temporary or the new normal.
And in fact, the latest warming is not unprecedented. Weather records document a steady, if slow warming of the region’s waters since the 1850s, and a 50- to-70-year climatic cycle set off unusual ocean warming in the 1950s. A similar cycle is believed to be heating up the northwest Atlantic today.
But scientists say those cyclical effects are now being turbocharged by human-caused climate change. The gulf has been at least two degrees warmer than its historical 50-degree average in each of the last five years. In 2012, it measured four degrees higher, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If that is a clear win for sea bass, and a loss for cod, the consequences for some species are not so easily tallied.
Take lobster, Maine’s iconic seafood. Thirty years ago, the best lobstering was in Knox County, the center of Maine’s ragged seacoast. Today, the lobstering powerhouses are places like Stonington, an island town two counties closer to the Canadian border. “We did pretty good lobstering — better than the guys down east,” said Mark Brewer, 43, from Boothbay, in the southern half of the state, referring to his hauls 20 years ago. “Now they control all the lobsters.”
Not all, actually, for the lobster catch has skyrocketed across the gulf. Last year, lobstermen hauled in more than 63,000 tons — more than three times what they caught just 20 years ago.
“We’ve had record years, year after year after year, just growing and growing,” said Chris Radley, 40, who has lobstered for 18 years on Vinalhaven, a tiny island in midcoast Maine. “This amount of lobsters we’re seeing, I don’t think there’s ever been.”
One reason may be that lobsters migrate from deep to shallow waters in the spring when the temperature rises; because the gulf warms earlier than in the past, lobsters spend more time close to shore, where they can be trapped. Scientists also suspect that warming has driven away predators. But warm water is also conducive to a bacterial infection that strikes lobsters’ shells. Shell disease is not a problem now in the gulf, but it lurks. The record warmth in 2012 led to an outbreak off the Maine coast, and the infection has sped the collapse of lobster populations farther south.
“It makes lobsters really ugly — like something that crawled out of the walking dead,” said Dr. Pershing, of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “It doesn’t kill them outright, but it does make them much less valuable, and it slows reproduction.”
Scientists are not yet predicting that Maine lobsters will go the way of the cod. But they say the very idea should prompt the fishermen and regulators alike to plan for change before it arrives.
By MICHAEL WINES and JESS BIDGOODDEC. 14, 2014
Continue reading the main storySlide Show
Warming Oceans Affects Fishing Industry
itTristan Spinski for The New York Times
PORTLAND, Me. — In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.
Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.
But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth, scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that depends on it.
“Stocks are not necessarily showing up in the places that they have in the past,” said Meredith Mendelson, the deputy commissioner for Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, which regulates fisheries. “We’re seeing movement of stocks often north and eastward.”
Regulators this month canceled the Maine shrimp catch for the second straight year, in no small part because shrimp are fleeing for colder climes. Maine lobsters are booming, but even so, the most productive lobster fishery has shifted as much as 50 miles up the coast in the last 40 years. Black sea bass, southerly fish seldom seen here before, have become so common that this year, Maine officials moved to regulate their catch. Blue crab, a signature species in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, are turning up off Portland.
In decades past, the gulf had warmed on average by about one degree every 21 years. In the last decade, the average has been one degree every two years. “What we’re experiencing is a warming that very few ocean ecosystems have ever experienced,” said Andrew J. Pershing, the chief scientific officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here.
A warmer ocean is not merely a matter of comfort or discomfort for creatures that dwell there. Scientists suspect that some species struggle to spawn when the temperature fluctuates. Others may spawn at the wrong time when food is scarce. Freshwater from melting arctic glaciers may be altering levels of minerals crucial to plankton, the base of the gulf’s food chain.
There is a human toll as well. Cod-fishing restrictions have ravaged, at least temporarily, the community of day boats — the ones owned by small-business fishermen, with smaller boats and incomes than corporate trawler fleets — that defined New England for centuries.
“They’ve been tied up at the wharf since Nov. 13,” the day of the cod-fishing ban, said Angela A. Sanfilippo, the president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association. The group is handing out $100 food vouchers to newly indigent fishermen. “A good amount of our industry just became poor people,” she said.
Joe Orlando, 60, who fishes from a Gloucester, Mass., base, said the effect of the ban was terrifying.“It’s completely, completely over,” he said. “I got a house, kids, payments.”
But many other fishermen do not blame climate change. They blame the regulators, calling the moratorium cruel and needless, because they say their latest cod catches are actually better than in recent years. More than a few talk of a conspiracy between scientists and environmentalists to manufacture a fishing crisis that will justify their jobs.
Scientists say the truth is more prosaic: Although the gulf is generally warming — 2012 was the hottest year on record — the last year was cooler, and kinder to cod. Moreover, the gulf’s remaining cod have congregated in deeper, colder waters in southern Maine and Massachusetts, where their abundance masks their scarcity elsewhere.
“A fisherman’s job isn’t to get an unbiased estimate of abundance. It’s to catch fish,” said Michael Fogarty, the chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors sea life. “The world they see is a different world than we see in the surveys.”
That said, much about warming’s effect on the gulf remains unclear. Years of overfishing have winnowed some fish populations, muddling efforts to measure climate change’s impact. Fishermen, scientists and regulators often disagree over whether the current changes are temporary or the new normal.
And in fact, the latest warming is not unprecedented. Weather records document a steady, if slow warming of the region’s waters since the 1850s, and a 50- to-70-year climatic cycle set off unusual ocean warming in the 1950s. A similar cycle is believed to be heating up the northwest Atlantic today.
But scientists say those cyclical effects are now being turbocharged by human-caused climate change. The gulf has been at least two degrees warmer than its historical 50-degree average in each of the last five years. In 2012, it measured four degrees higher, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If that is a clear win for sea bass, and a loss for cod, the consequences for some species are not so easily tallied.
Take lobster, Maine’s iconic seafood. Thirty years ago, the best lobstering was in Knox County, the center of Maine’s ragged seacoast. Today, the lobstering powerhouses are places like Stonington, an island town two counties closer to the Canadian border. “We did pretty good lobstering — better than the guys down east,” said Mark Brewer, 43, from Boothbay, in the southern half of the state, referring to his hauls 20 years ago. “Now they control all the lobsters.”
Not all, actually, for the lobster catch has skyrocketed across the gulf. Last year, lobstermen hauled in more than 63,000 tons — more than three times what they caught just 20 years ago.
“We’ve had record years, year after year after year, just growing and growing,” said Chris Radley, 40, who has lobstered for 18 years on Vinalhaven, a tiny island in midcoast Maine. “This amount of lobsters we’re seeing, I don’t think there’s ever been.”
One reason may be that lobsters migrate from deep to shallow waters in the spring when the temperature rises; because the gulf warms earlier than in the past, lobsters spend more time close to shore, where they can be trapped. Scientists also suspect that warming has driven away predators. But warm water is also conducive to a bacterial infection that strikes lobsters’ shells. Shell disease is not a problem now in the gulf, but it lurks. The record warmth in 2012 led to an outbreak off the Maine coast, and the infection has sped the collapse of lobster populations farther south.
“It makes lobsters really ugly — like something that crawled out of the walking dead,” said Dr. Pershing, of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “It doesn’t kill them outright, but it does make them much less valuable, and it slows reproduction.”
Scientists are not yet predicting that Maine lobsters will go the way of the cod. But they say the very idea should prompt the fishermen and regulators alike to plan for change before it arrives.
he was coming up either way.....quid pro quo ......much of the heads and bones I will make a fish stock with and a chef friend will take the rest for the same reason
