Pacific Sardine Landings May Shift North as Ocean Warms, New Projections Show

Pacific sardines are a small but sometimes numerous fish closely intertwined with California’s fishing history. A new study linking climate change and the northern sardine stock fishery shows that they may shift north along the West Coast as the ocean warms.

A climate-driven northward shift by sardines could cause a decline in landings of the northern sardine stock by 20 to 50 percent in the next 60 years. These changes would affect historic California fishing ports such as San Pedro and Moss Landing, according to the new research published in Fisheries Oceanography. The study did not examine whether southern sardine stock would also shift northward, potentially offsetting this decline in landings. In turn, landings at northern port cities such as Astoria, Oregon, and Westport, Washington, are projected to benefit.

Researchers examined three possible “climate futures.” The warmest had the most pessimistic outcomes, with total sardine landings in all West Coast states declining 20 percent by 2080.

Understanding climate-driven shifts in habitat helps predict impacts on landings

The study translates environmental shifts into possible impacts on fishing communities and coastal economies. Sardines have historically gone through “boom and bust” changes in their population. Their numbers off the West Coast have remained low in recent years, with the West Coast sardine fishery closed since 2015. This research does not project changes in the abundance of sardines. Instead, it shows that climate-driven shifts in their habitat may have a significant impact on landings at historically important ports.

“As the marine environment changes, so too will the distribution of marine species,” said James Smith, a research scientist with the University of Santa Cruz affiliated with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “But linking future changes in the distribution of species with impacts on the fishing fleet has been challenging. Hopefully our study can provide information about potential impacts in coming decades, and thereby inform strategies to mitigate these impacts.”

Maps illustrate projections of how sardine habitat off the West Coast will shift as climate change warms the ocean. Blue shading illustrates where habitat will improve for sardines over coming decades, while red shows where habitat will grow worse. Credit: Fisheries Oceanography.

Looking to the Past to Predict the Future

The estimated shifts illustrate how climate change may alter the traditional fishing economies of the West Coast, as once depicted in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.” The 1945 novel featured historic canneries in Monterey, once supplied by sardine catches delivered to nearby Moss Landing. Sardines helped make Monterey one of the busiest fishing ports in the world until their collapse in the 1950s. Sardines are well known to undergo boom and bust cycles. Their numbers, and landings with them, increased again in the 1990s, but have declined more recently. The new research does not attempt to project changes in sardine numbers, but uses recent numbers as a baseline. It demonstrates how average landings by port may change due to future shifts in sardine habitat.

“We can’t predict how many sardines there will be in 50 to 60 years,” says James Smith, “but we have a much better idea where they will be. And their northward shift [of the northern sardine stock] promises to have a significant impact on the fishery, regardless of how many sardine there are.”

The study aligns with earlier research indicating that many marine species, including sardines, will follow their preferred temperatures north as climate change warms the Pacific Ocean. The new research estimates the northward shift in sardine, and its potential impact on the fishing fleet. These findings emerged from newly developed and very fine-scale projections by climate and ocean models of changes in ocean conditions along the West Coast.

There are three stocks of sardine: northern, southern and Gulf of California. The research examined the northern stock, which can range from southeast Alaska to the northern portion of the Baja Peninsula, not the Gulf of California stock or the southern stock typically found mostly in Mexican waters off the west coast of Baja California but sometimes ranging into Southern California. Researchers noted that a northward shift by the southern stock may help offset the projected declines in landings at southern ports.

The potential impact of a shifting Pacific sardine distribution on U.S. West Coast landings.

Original post: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/pacific-sardine-landings-may-shift-north-ocean-warms-new-projections-show

From science to fake news: How ocean misinformation evolves

We have seen this cycle play out in fisheries with the headline that there won’t be any fish in the ocean by the year 2048. It started in 2006 when a group of scientists published a paper with the fun fact that at the rate of fisheries decline from decades ago, there would be no fish by 2048. It was a small part of the paper, meant to highlight a broader point that past fisheries management had been poor. However, the press release that accompanied the paper touted it as a significant finding leading to context-lacking news stories, hyperbolic headlines, and a pervasive notion that there won’t be any fish in the ocean by 2048. The paper’s original authors have stated that their findings are misconstrued and have worked to publish papers correcting them.

Brandolini’s law states that, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.” Fifteen years later, the 2048 myth continues to appear in articles across the internet.

The evolution of a bycatch myth

Now a new myth is rising to prominence: that global bycatch rates are as high as 40%.

Some background: The global authority on world fisheries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), defines bycatch as, “the total catch of non-target animals.” This is the widely accepted definition.

Bycatch can be a useful indicator of fishery impacts on the broader ecosystem and provides important data that fishermen and fishery managers use to improve sustainability. Different fisheries have different rates of bycatch with varying degrees of impact. However, an important nuance is that bycatch is used or discarded. Used bycatch is generally accepted as sustainable so long as the non-target species isn’t a threatened species. Discards are wasteful and an unfortunate reality of food production. The most recent research showed that about 10% of fish have been discarded at sea over the past decade.

So how did 10% get inflated to 40%?

In 2009, three people working for NGOs (World Wildlife Fund & Dorset Wildlife Trust) and one unaffiliated person decided to write a paper arguing that the definition of “bycatch” needed to be redefined to include ALL catch from unmanaged fisheries. From their paper:

“The new bycatch definition is therefore defined in its simplest form as: Bycatch is catch that is either unused or unmanaged.”

The authors define “unmanaged” as catch that “does not have specific management to ensure the take is sustainable;” in contrast, a managed fishery will have “clearly defined measures specifically intended to ensure the sustainable capture of any species or groups of species within any fishing operation.” An example they gave in the paper is that, because a 1993 study showed that members of the Indian bottom trawling fleet used nets with illegal mesh, “such a fishery cannot be considered managed, as defined in this paper, [thus] the entire catch of the Indian bottom trawl fleet is considered bycatch.” By their definition, they calculated 56.3% of India’s total catch as bycatch.

Adding up all this calculation for each country brought them to declare 40.4% of the world’s catch as bycatch.

Researchers making arguments in the scientific literature is nothing new. Still, it is surprising to see peer-reviewers and editors accept a paper arguing for redefining a widely accepted and common term that would necessitate a paradigm shift in fishery management. Especially with assumptions that a 1993 finding applied to a 2009 definition.

Regardless, their new definition has not been adopted. FAO still uses the widely accepted definition of bycatch, and I could not find a single authoritative body that uses the WWF & Dorset definition.

However, if you thought the redefined, inflated numbers would lose the nuance of “unused or unmanaged” and would be used as a call to action by advocacy groups, you are correct.

Read the full article here

Original post: https://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/fisheries-misinformation/

Setting Biden’s seafood policy table

© Getty Images

Fishermen have been invited to be partners with the Biden administration on ocean policy and we are prepared to engage. Hard work, honest dialog and commitments to justice and equity will ensure that we remain at the table and not on the menu.

January’s executive order tackling climate change includes ambitious provisions that set agencies on a course to climate mitigation. Most importantly for America’s commercial fishing families, the order established two parallel processes to secure direct input from fishermen on, respectively the appropriate ways to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030, an initiative known as 30×30, and ways to make our fisheries more resilient to climate change.

Fishing communities are precisely where policymakers should look for durable ocean-based climate solutions. Here are some starting points.

Expand place-based fisheries protections

Today’s ocean is increasingly industrialized and our coasts are more densely occupied than ever. The historic pattern of ocean and coastal development exacerbated by climate change has resulted in reduced protections for fish habitat and serial declines of functional working waterfront. The administration has the ability to reverse both trends.

The U.S. should strengthen existing fisheries habitat protection processes by requiring federal agencies to avoid, minimize and mitigate impacts to Essential Fish Habitat (EFH). EFH consultations are regularly conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), yet NOAA’s recommendations are routinely ignored by other agencies. Executive action requiring permitting agencies to incorporate NOAA’s EFH conservation recommendations into their decisions would significantly benefit fish habitat, fisheries and biodiversity.

The U.S. can also promote the resilience of our working waterfront through infrastructure investments and policy action that secure fishing community access. National infrastructure investments should support climate resilient working waterfronts that meet the needs of community-based fishermen. National Standard 8, a key community protection provision of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, should be strengthened and its implementing guidelines updated.

Decarbonize U.S. seafood systems

Domestic wild-caught fish has the lowest associated carbon emissions on average of any animal protein. Americans should be eating more wild domestic seafood to mitigate climate change and improve their health. With proper incentives and support, U.S. fishermen can secure new markets while increasing food security and reducing the carbon footprint of America’s food supply.

The Biden administration should take this opportunity to invest in local seafood systems, which can decrease emissions from this already low-emissions food source. Strengthening NOAA and USDA programs that support and promote sustainable wild-capture seafood consumption at home is a win-win. Simultaneously, the U.S. must strengthen policies and programs to eliminate Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing, which undermines international conservation efforts, harms domestic fisheries and increases seafood-associated emissions.

The administration can also partner with fishermen on direct emission reductions. Diesel engines remain the only widely available marine propulsion option for fishing vessels, but innovations in hybrid power and alternative fuels are advancing. New programs to accelerate development and acquisition of next-generation marine propulsion technology will set the course to low- or zero-emission fisheries.

Give 30×30 a dose of ocean reality

The fishing industry is united in insisting that 30×30 policies recognize our world-leading fisheries management and avoid walling off areas of the ocean to all commercial fisheries. This call was echoed by two dozen of the country’s leading fisheries scientists. Fishermen objected primarily to mandates for no-take marine protected areas, including those that would set aside large parts of the ocean for recreational exploitation while disenfranchising fishing families.

Implementing 30×30 equitably should start at the inventory stage. According to the United Nations World Database of Protected Areas and by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s definition of marine protection, existing marine protected areas already cover over 37 percent of U.S. ocean waters. Over the past 40 years the U.S. has developed a visionary system for fisheries governance and conservation and through it implemented sweeping science and process-based conservation measures. Rather than circumventing existing processes, arguing over semantics and disqualifying our sustainable fisheries, the 30×30 process in the ocean should focus on investing resources in comprehensive climate-focused stock assessments, strengthening participatory fisheries management and integrating climate change into existing management processes.

In his inaugural address, President Biden issued a clarion call for the new administration: “Let’s begin to listen to one another again, to hear one another, see one another, show respect to one another.”

Fishermen’s appeals for equitable participation have been heard. We are optimistic the administration is setting a collaborative course for ocean climate action that will result in just and durable solutions and we are ready to get to work.

Original post: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/538931-setting-bidens-seafood-policy-table

Linda Behnken is a commercial fisherman and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, an association of small-scale fishermen based in Sitka, Alaska. Mike Conroy is an attorney and executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations based in San Francisco.