S. California Fisheries Hit Hard By Warming Water

LOS ANGELES—

Squid have pretty much disappeared from Southern California in the last several months.

“Squid’s kind of our bread and butter. That’s what a lot of us make our payments and survive on,” said Corbin Hanson who fishes off the coast of Southern California.

”It’s extremely frustrating. It’s demoralizing to go out and not be able to catch anything,” Hanson said.

Hanson has not caught any squid for more than four months. Squid is one of California’s largest commercial fisheries, and much of it is exported to countries in Asia and the Mediterranean.

Oceanographer Andrew Leising with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries said unusually warm water is causing squid and other fish to move farther north. At a meeting at the Aquarium of the Pacific, scientists explained one cause of the warming waters is what they call “the blob.”

“During the, say, 30-year record, this event “the blob” stands out far beyond anything we’ve seen in that 30 years. And in terms of that total warmth of the water, it’s pretty much the warmest we’ve ever measured and over an extremely large volume of water,” Leising said.

At its warmest, “the blob” is 4 degrees Celsius above normal temperatures. While “the blob” warms the water’s surface layers, another weather phenomenon called “El Niño” is warming the deeper waters.

“We’re looking at a situation where we have two years of the blob warming the water. Now we’re going into El Niño warming the water, so we really have about three years solid of kind of these warm conditions that have been affecting the fisheries,” Leising said.

Oceanographers said while “the blob” is mostly gone, they don’t know if it will return. The National Weather Service’s Mark Jackson said there is a promising forecast for warm waters caused by El Niño.

“Those waters will cool through the summer, and it looks right now a very distinct possibility that we could be in a La Niña situation next winter,” Jackson added. “That’s where the waters in the eastern and central Pacific will actually cool below normal.”

Cooler waters next winter also mean good news for Corbin Hanson and his crew, but until then, they have to be frugal.

“There’s hardly anything spent on new equipment, new gear. We’re trying to get by and stop the bleeding this year,” he said.

Scientists said if there is a La Niña next winter, squid and other fish should return to Southern California.

Read the original post: http://www.voanews.com/

California Sardine Numbers are Low – Why is Oceana Blaming Fishing?

Last week Dr. Geoff Shester, California campaign director for the nonprofit advocacy group Oceana criticized the Pacific Fishery Management Council for the persistence of low numbers of California Sardines. The lack of a population recovery may cause the commercial moratorium to last until 2017.

The author explained this sardine population decline as being 93 percent less than it was in 2007. Dr. Shester does not believe this is because of environmental causes like climate change, El Nino, or natural fluctuations in forage fish species however – instead he blames the management body. “They warned of a population collapse and the fishery management body basically turned a blind eye and continued moving forward with business as usual.”

Shester also cited recent sea lion deaths, specifically 3,000 that washed ashore in California in 2015.

“When fishing pressure occurs during a decline, which is exactly what happened here,” said Dr. Shester. “It puts the stock at such dramatically low levels it impedes any recovery potentially for decades.”

Comment by Ray Hilborn, University of Washington, @hilbornr

Dr. Shester’s comments are some of the most dishonest commentary I have seen in the fisheries world.

He knows that the NOAA Scientists and Prof Tim Essington, in work funded by the Pew Foundation, have stated clearly that the decline in sardine abundance is due to natural causes. He also knows that sea lions are not dependent upon sardines; the die off of sea lions is caused by the oceanographic conditions – not the result of fishing. In fact, reproductive failures of sea lions have occurred repeatedly in the past at times of high sardine abundance.

If he has read Dr. Essington’s paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences he would also know that there is no relationship between fishing and the duration of periods of low abundance of sardines and other forage fish.

The harvest rule for sardines is highly precautionary, even when sardines are at high abundance the harvest rate is low. Indeed the harvest control rule for sardines matches very well the recommended harvest rule for forage fish that emerged from the LENFEST report – that is a low target harvest rate at high abundance with the fishery closed when the stock reaches low abundance.

Members of the Science and Statistics Committee of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council have explained all this to Dr. Shester before – he simply continues to ignore science and pursue his own agenda.

Ray Hilborn is a Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. Find him on twitter here: @hilbornr

Read the original post: http://cfooduw.org/

The Wild, Wild West Coast

A UC Santa Cruz Special Report: The Wild, Wild West Coast

A warm blob of water, a bloom of toxic algae, unexpected sightings of ocean life, and an El Niño have left UC Santa Cruz researchers wondering what the future holds for North America’s west coast and its marine ecosystem.

By Amy West

Mark Carr excitedly skimmed through email in his UC Santa Cruz office.

“The divers just found a really weird urchin off Cannery Row, and it’s called…,” he trailed off, trying to recall the name.

His colleague Pete Raimondi walked in and rattled off a few unusual urchin species that had shown up in Monterey Bay the past year.

“No, no,” Carr said, looking pointedly at him. “It’s even weirder than that.”

Divers found the warm-water urchin Arbacia stellata last year as far north as Cannery Row. (Photo by Kenan Chan)

Turns out it was Arbacia stellata—an urchin found mainly in the Gulf of California in Baja, Mexico. A few were seen as far north as the Channel Islands during the 1997–98 El Niño.

That odd arrival in Monterey Bay was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Many species of warm-water predators and their prey moved farther north and closer to the coast during the past 18 months, including ocean sunfish and skipjack tuna seen off Alaska; sub-tropical fish such as marlin and blue-fin tuna and a pod of rare pygmy killer whales just off southern California; tropical sea snakes that washed up on southern California beaches; a green sea turtle typically found in Mexico that floated into San Francisco Bay and up the San Joaquin River; and porcupine fish and a fine-scaled triggerfish spotted in Monterey Bay, which turned tropical blue in August from a rare bloom of single-celled algae called coccolithophores.

Carr and Raimondi, both professors of ecology and evolutionary biology who have been studying ocean life along the West Coast for the past 25 years, say they have been seeing things they’ve never seen before. Carr, for example, was surprised to encounter large numbers of juvenile California sheephead and kelp bass in the kelp forests off Carmel and Monterey. Small numbers of sheephead adults had been spotted this far north after El Niños, he explains, but a whole school of baby sheephead meant many survived as larvae carried northward by ocean currents for hundreds of miles. Early life stages of other marine critters, including pink sea slugs, spiny lobster, and red pelagic crabs, also floated far north of their normal ranges. Many of these unusual visitors last appeared during the 1997–98 or 1982–83 El Niños.

2015 was a remarkable year, to say the least, for ocean life along the west coast of North America. Unprecedented warm water formed a corridor for marine organisms, big and small, to head north. It also led to perfect conditions for a massive bloom of toxic algae, creating a toxic buffet that traveled up the food chain and eventually shut down valuable fisheries and triggered national attention. Now, the third-largest El Niño on record is adding yet another variable to the mix. For researchers like Carr and Raimondi, armed with 25 years of data, it’s still impossible to make sense of these bizarre conditions. Will they be a footnote? Or are they a harbinger of a drastically different ocean?

A ‘blob’ of warm water forms

It all began in the fall of 2013, when an abnormal weather system—an unmoving ridge of high pressure—formed off the Pacific Northwest coast. It shut down ocean-stirring winds and slowed the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean, a process that regulates the Earth’s climate.

This weather system, farther north than usual, spun out winds that pushed cold weather to the East Coast and left California bone dry. It also created a “blob” of warm water in the Gulf of Alaska.

In spring of 2014, the ocean rapidly warmed off Baja and Southern California due to persistently weak winds, says NOAA climate researcher Nate Mantua. By fall of 2014, after another shift in wind patterns, the warm patches had all merged.

The unusually warm water (5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal in some places) dampened conditions for microscopic algae to grow, but Monterey Bay was a region rife with life. Normally in the spring and summer on the West Coast, wind-driven upwelling brings to the surface cold, nutrient-rich water from deep in the ocean, spurring the growth of algae that form the base of the food chain. In 2014 and 2015, however, unusually weak winds meant upwelling happened mainly in Northern California and farther north. Monterey Bay had enough nutrient input to maintain phytoplankton blooms with help from its deep-water canyon, according to UCSC research biologist Baldo Marinovic.

“Monterey Bay is a refuge in hard times because we have deeper water close by,” Marinovic says. But upwelling occurred only within a narrow band close to shore. This coastal strip of productivity meant abundant and spectacularly close encounters with whales, sea lions, dolphins, and sharks while they foraged.

That activity was great for the tourist boats, but it turned out to be bad for the animals.

Marine life feeds on a toxic buffet

The downside to food being concentrated near the coast was that the animals munching on the phytoplankton, or munching on animals that eat the phytoplankton, also ingested mouthfuls of a neurotoxin called domoic acid. The strange oceanographic conditions in 2015 had spurred the worst year on record of a domoic acid outbreak, right after 2014 had already broken records. Silica rods of microscopic algae called Pseudo-nitzschia produce domoic acid when stressed by, say, the temperature changing. Blooms of these algae normally last just a few weeks in early spring and autumn. In 2015, however, rather than tapering off, the algae remained for months and at levels never seen before—from Southern California to Alaska.

Pseudo-nitzschia are the goldilocks of phytoplankton. “They don’t want it too hot, they don’t want it too cold,” says ocean scientist Raphael Kudela, the Lynn Professor of Ocean Health at UC Santa Cruz. With unusually warm water from the blob syncing with upwelled water that injected some nutrients, he says, “suddenly across the whole West Coast [the algae] got exactly what they wanted.”

Foretelling ocean blooms

UC Santa Cruz researchers are developing models to predict toxic algae blooms along the West Coast. In 2018, the forecasts will be part of updates provided by the National Weather Service and the National Ocean Service.

The algae are not the problem; the issue is when they produce the potentially fatal neurotoxin. Consuming this toxin can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, which overexcites the nervous systems of vertebrates and assaults the memory center of the brain (the hippocampus), leading to seizures and disorientation. Toxins—compounded with nutritional deficiencies due to reduced availability of prey (also linked to the warm water)—led to record numbers of seabird and sea lion strandings and deaths. Additionally, the unprecedented fishery closures—including Dungeness and rock crab, anchovy, oyster, razor clams, and mussels—meant many fishing communities took major hits to the economic punching bag. This scientific, economic, and health problem caught the attention of government officials, and monitoring this harmful algal bloom became a priority.

For the first time, scientists found domoic acid not only in the guts, but also in the meat of commercial fish and crabs. Animals can typically flush the toxin through their systems in 24 hours, but the prolonged exposure allowed it to seep into their flesh. Levels in crabs were still too high in early December, when the California crab season normally opens. Although algae populations were dwindling, the toxicity endured because the algae fell to the seafloor where crabs scavenge, explains Kudela. The toxin doesn’t hurt the crabs, but they continuously accumulate it as they feed. Kudela’s team sampled seafloor sediments and invertebrates and found that regardless of which invertebrates were analyzed for domoic acid, the results came back 10 times higher than toxin levels in the sediment. Crab season finally opened in Oregon the first week of January, but in California, commercial fishing for Dungeness crab was still closed in mid-February.

There was a big domoic acid bloom in 2014, notes Kudela, and in 2015 the whole west coast was affected. “If we go into 2016 and it’s another year like this, then we are talking about restructuring the way the ocean is working,” he says.

Kudela worries about new toxic hotspots, such as Humboldt County, which aren’t traditionally problematic and, therefore, not regularly sampled. “Suddenly we are going to have toxic shellfish coming in where no one is expecting them.”

El Niño whammy

Adding to this jumble of anomalous winds, ocean warming, harmful algal blooms, and atmospheric weirdness, is the 2015-2016 El Niño—one of the three strongest on record. During El Niño, warm, tropical water that’s usually held up against the Indonesian coast sloshes over to the other side of the ocean off South America after trade winds back off or reverse. This irregular weather pattern doesn’t just affect countries bordering one ocean, but influences the entire planet. Thus far in 2015, El Niño has already been linked to outlandish weather around the globe: record-breaking warmth on the East Coast and at the North Pole, tornadoes and floods in the southern United States, and drought and fires in Indonesia.

Every El Niño is different, and predicting the effects of this one is challenging, though the previous warming of the ocean between Hawaii and the West Coast may add more moisture to storms. Typically an El Niño in California means more frequent and intense storms, higher rainfall, and higher sea levels (because warm water expands).

Raimondi and Carr’s lab has routinely monitored the rocky coastline from Alaska to Southern California and the kelp forests along Central California for the past 25 years. Their long-standing data on biodiversity and abundance means they are able to distinguish larger-scale transformation from the seasonal changes. Their temperature sensors close to shore in 2015 registered two to three degrees Celsius warmer than normal, says Raimondi, and he attributes to ocean warming the disappearance of a highly desired and rare algae, sea palm (Postelsia palmaeformis), from its southern range in California. “It has a particular life history that makes it hard to come back,” says Raimondi. “It doesn’t replenish quickly after some sort of disturbance.”

For giant kelp, El Niño’s storm waves and warmer water carrying fewer nutrients is a double whammy: they grow poorly, and the swell hammers them. If climate change forecasts are accurate with respect to storms increasing in frequency and the swell direction changing, says Carr, the growing season for giant kelp will be shortened each year. Kelp forests harbor a host of invertebrates and fish—some commercially important, like sea urchins, lobster, rockfish and lingcod—and generate food for other species. Both Carr and Raimondi emphasize that what happens after an El Niño year is most critical. Kelp forests and other ecosystems can recover from the battering because El Niño and its impacts typically vanish the following year.

“If that doesn’t happen with this event, then I think people will really be scratching their heads,” says NOAA’s Mantua.

Connection conundrum

Raimondi notes that in some places marine organisms have disappeared or expanded their ranges, though currently there’s no consensus on whether these events are related to ocean warming or El Niño. For instance, a disease that wiped out sea stars up and down the North American coast hit before the warm water blobs formed. That disease, called sea star wasting syndrome, took out an important urchin predator in Monterey Bay, the sunflower sea star. Purple urchins can decimate kelp forests, and large numbers have popped up recently during some of the team’s survey dives. Paradoxically, warm water is generally bad for echinoderms like urchins, says Raimondi, “So you’d think urchins would be creamed, but they weren’t.” Sea urchins are experiencing die-offs, however, in a few areas off the coast of southern California.

So what’s really affecting what? Understanding how diseases and ocean anomalies like ocean warming or acidification are linked to population bursts and disappearances within a very complex environment is anything but straightforward. Trying to unravel that scientific tangle is the raison d’être for Kristy Kroeker, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “Most research on climate change happens in isolation, because it’s so challenging to tease apart what’s happening in nature and wrap your head around all the different interactions as things change simultaneously,” says Kroeker, who is focusing her research on kelp forests and estuaries.

Mantua echoed that sentiment when pondering recent El Niños that seemed different and wind patterns that were also changing. “El Niño is a really hard science problem by itself, and El Niño in a changing climate is even more so,” says NOAA’s Mantua. “It is tricky, because it’s not like A plus B equals C; its like A is part of B and it’s part of C and maybe C is causing A to change.”

Harbingers of our future ocean

The bottom line is that several unfamiliar scenes are developing along North America’s west coast at the same time that our oceans are changing on a global scale. The fallout could be from one thing, or it could be from a combination; but the more complex the relationship, the harder for science to keep pace.

“This stuff is happening now, but it takes science months to put these stories together,” says Mantua. “Science is always playing catch up.”

What is considered bizarre conditions now could become more commonplace. And it’s not just ocean life that suffers, but also humans who depend on ocean resources. Whether it hurts the economy, livelihoods, or drinking water, research into understanding the connections, so as to ultimately mitigate the problems, is vital, says Kudela.

Last year provided a good snapshot of how a complex marine community reacts to warming water—possibly a “dress rehearsal” for what’s to come, as suggested by Washington State climatologist Nick Bond. After all, excess heat from the atmosphere mixes into the ocean, which is why sea temperatures have been slowly increasing for well over a century. Thus, the looming mystery is what long-term warming of our oceans will do to marine ecosystems.

According to Carr and Raimondi, if a scenario of local ocean warming persists, many species will shift their ranges north, and Central California will start to look more like Southern California.

“The expectation has never been that change will be uniform everywhere,”says Raimondi, and that makes management decisions challenging. “It’s going to be more of a mosaic than a blanket.”

But then again, scientists have never seen a confluence of so many events occurring simultaneously, so what will happen along the West Coast is really anyone’s guess.

Read the original post and view the videos at: http://reports.news.ucsc.edu/

Why are so many sea lion pups starving? Scientists find the answer off the Central California coast

An emaciated and sick sea lion pup at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro in 2013. New research blames a lack of nutritious fish off California’s central coast for the rise in starving pups in Southern California. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Government scientists say there’s a simple explanation for the surge in starving sea lion pups along the Southern California coast: Their mothers can’t find enough nutritious food.

The high-fat, high-calorie fish species that female sea lions prefer to eat have been harder to come by in their usual hunting waters around the Channel Islands breeding colonies, according to researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As their preferred sardines and anchovies became less plentiful, they’ve had to settle for rockfish and market squid instead.

The decline in sardines and anchovies and corresponding increase in less nourishing fish explains 81% of the change in sea lion pup weights between 2004 and 2013, the NOAA scientists reported Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

California sea lions have had a precarious existence since the late 1800s, when humans began hunting them for their fur, meat and oil. Many of them also became casualties of fishing operations. By the 1970s, the number of sea lions had dwindled to around 50,000, experts estimate.

The animals’ fortunes began to change in 1972, when President Richard Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act. With federal protection, the population of Zalophus californianus grew about 5% per year, reaching 340,000 in 2014.

Hunger drove sea lion pups ashore in Southern California in record numbers in 2013. These rescued pups were cared for by the Marine Mammal Care Center at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

That progress hasn’t always been steady. In El Niño years, anchovies and sardines became scarce and sea lions switched to rockfish, squid and hake. Previous studies have found that when sea lion mothers eat more rockfish and squid (as determined by analyzing their scat), the pups they nurse have lower body weights.

A team from NOAA’s Fisheries Service wondered whether the effects were limited to El Niño years.

To find out, they needed to know where pregnant and nursing sea lions liked to hunt. They estimated a likely foraging range based on the movements of six female sea lions from San Miguel Island that were tagged by researchers in the 1990s. The data from those tags showed they liked to hunt off the California coast between Big Sur and Malibu.

Next they had to figure out what kinds of fish were available in those waters. For more than 30 years, researchers from NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center have been taking a census of young rockfish and other fish species in central California. Data for the area they needed was available from 2004 to 2014.

Finally, they looked up the average weight of 14-week-old sea lion pups from San Miguel Island for each year between 2004 and 2011. During that period, the average weight ranged from 14.8 kilograms to 20.9 kg for female pups and from 17.5 kg to 23.6 kg for male pups.

The pattern they found was clear: When sardines and anchovies were abundant and rockfish and squid were scarce, sea lion pups weighed more. Conversely, when rockfish and squid were plentiful and sardines and anchovies were not, sea lion pups weighed less.

The NOAA scientists weren’t able to study the “composition or quantity” of milk produced by sea lion mothers, so they couldn’t make a direct link between the types of fish in the sea and the nutritional value of their milk. Still, the results amount to “compelling evidence” that the pups are starving because their moms can’t produce enough milk for them, the scientists wrote.

At least 375 sea lions have stranded themselves on Southern California beaches so far in 2016, according to NOAA. The study authors said this trend could continue for quite some time.

“We expect repeated years with malnourished and starving sea lion pups,” they wrote.

Read the original post: http://www.latimes.com/

Sea Lion Die-Off Tied to ‘Junk Food’ Fish

A barking California sea lion pup shows signs of undernourishment.

Record numbers of California sea lion pups have been starving and stranding on beaches by the thousands in recent years, and now new research finds that a decline in their mothers’ food quality is behind the disturbing trend.

High calorie sardines and anchovies are now harder for sea lion moms to find, causing them to eat more rockfish and market squid that can be great for people on diets, but aren’t as hearty a meal for hungry sea lions. The findings are published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

“For human consumption, highly oily fish may actually be less desirable to consumers,” lead author Sam McClatchie told Discovery News. “In contrast, for predators with high energy demands, such as nursing female sea lions, eating fish with higher energy density due to higher content of calories and fats provides a more effective way to meet their nutritional demands.”

Human demand for anchovies, in particular, has been on the rise due to the savory fish’s popularity in Caesar salad dressing and in “junk foods” like pizza. The real junk food for breeding female sea lions, minus the high calories, turns out to be the other types of fish that are now more prevalent in their feeding areas off central California.

McClatchie, an oceanographer at NOAA Fisheries Service’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, and his team studied both the sea lion pup strandings and population trends for fish that adult sea lions eat. Data for the latter came from surveys that are conducted each summer off the coast of California.

A perfect storm now appears to be in place that is hurting the sea lions. Due to conservation efforts, numbers of these marine mammals increased from about 50,000 40 years ago to around 340,000 now. No one knows what the historic populations were like, given that Native Americans also frequently hunted sea lions and there are no detailed sea lion population estimates prior to the 1970s.

At a time when the sea lion population appears to be approaching what the researchers call its current “carrying capacity” for the region, sardine and anchovy numbers plummeted while market squid and rockfish abundance increased.

Several researchers, such as marine biologist Malin Pinsky of Rutgers, have attributed this and prior dramatic fish population plunges to overfishing by humans. He and his team note that such collapses started to occur more frequently in sardines and anchovies after the advent of efficient fishing vessels and techniques following World War II. Anchovies and sardines are important to the pet food and fish oil industries, in addition to their other mentioned common uses.

“Overfishing is a problem throughout the world and across all species, including slow-growing fish like sharks, many of which are in serious trouble,” said Pinsky. “But it turns out that fishery collapses are three times more likely in the opposite kinds of species — those that grow quickly.”

McClatchie and his team, however, believe that the problem is “environmental,” and not because of overfishing.

McClatchie and his team, however, believe that the problem is “environmental,” and not because of overfishing. This distinction is important, as federal regulators are planning to do an official stock assessment of anchovies in the fall and will consider updating the 25,000-ton rule that now limits catches.

“Sardine and anchovy populations both show large inter-annual variability that is environmentally driven and prior to any fishing,” McClatchie said.

Joshua Lindsay of the National Marine Fisheries Service told Discovery News that populations of anchovies, sardines and other small fish “are linked to prevailing environmental conditions. NMFS has been working to better understand these environmental processes driving fish populations as well as the diet linkages between forage fish species and higher order predators to enhance the ecosystem science used in our fisheries management.”

Marc Mangel, a professor at both the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Bergen, says the study “will help refocus the discussion about the causes of sea lion declines. More importantly, in my opinion, it is a terrific example of how we can use marine mammals and birds as sentinels or samplers of the environment.”

In the meantime, the short-term outlook for sea lions is worrisome, particularly for rescue centers that have been stretched to their limits. McClatchie and his colleagues say that they “expect repeated years with malnourished and starving sea lion pups,” but can’t predict when that will end.

Read the original post: http://news.discovery.com/

NOAA: Oceanic acidity caused by climate change could affect Alaska crab numbers

ANCHORAGE –

Oceanic acidification caused by climate change could cause a decline in numbers of Alaska crab species, according to new studies from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, officials announced in a press release Tuesday.

60 percent of U.S. seafood comes from Alaska and a profitable portion comes from crab fisheries. The acidic conditions in ocean water could affect crabs on varying levels depending on a crab’s age, according to NOAA official, Chris Long.

“The ocean environment that larval Tanner crabs live in is highly dynamic, with variable levels of acidity,” said Long. “At this age, tanner crabs seem able to tolerate shifts in pH. But if these animals are exposed to more acidic conditions at the embryo stage, they may be less able to tolerate changes in ocean acidification as larvae.”

Young crabs exposed to low pH levels do not accumulate calcium well which makes them more vulnerable to predation and that fewer crabs would make it to adulthood.

A separate study on blue king crabs revealed slower growth rates and higher mortality in juveniles exposed to more acidic conditions. The blue king crab populations around Pribilof Islands and St. Matthew Island areas have fluctuated dramatically, officials say.

“This suggests that environmental conditions play a big role in the number of young crabs that actually grow to maturity and can be caught by the commercial fishery,” officials wrote. “Changes in ocean acidification may make it even more difficult for these populations to recover from recent low levels.”

Bob Foy, head of the Kodiak Lab for Alaska Fisheries Science Center says the situation doesn’t look good. Based on the research, unless crabs are able to adapt to the changing conditions, officials say Alaskan fishermen will see a drastic drop in crab numbers within the next 50 years.

Copyright © 2016, KTUU-TV Read the original post at: http://www.ktuu.com/

Fish and Pregnancy: Mercury Exposure Outweighed by Beneficial Effects

— Posted with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM. Please do not republish without their permission. —

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

[Note: Although this article is just concerned with measurement, not causes, its findings support the hypothesis that selenium, which is also found in high concentrations in seafood, acts to prevent mercury from having toxic effects at low levels. The hypothesis is that selenium binds with mercury, making the mercury more inert in any biological process. This idea has been put forward to explain longitudinal studies, such as in the Seychelles, that show populations with extremely high levels of fish consumption, and therefore higher exposure to mercury, show no mercury toxicity effects. -JS]

Among its myriad of health benefits, fish contains nutrients that are important for developing fetuses, which is why pregnant women are advised to eat two or three servings of fish each week. However, concerns over the detrimental effects of mercury – found in nearly all fish – have given pregnant women a reason to be cautious. Now, a new study suggests the negative effects of ingesting low levels of mercury through fish are outweighed by the beneficial effects for newborns.

The study, led by Kim Yolton, PhD, from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio, is published in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.

According to the researchers, previous studies examining the effect of low-level gestational mercury exposure from fish intake on neurobehavioral outcomes of newborns have been limited.

As such, they conducted an in-depth study involving 344 infants at 5 weeks of age using the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS).

The researchers measured gestational mercury exposure through maternal blood and infant umbilical cord blood. They also collected information on maternal fish intake and estimated consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acid based on type and amount of fish the pregnant women ate.

In total, 84% of the mothers reported eating fish during pregnancy, but they only averaged about 2 ounces per week.

In 2014, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revised their advice to pregnant women regarding fish consumption; they advise consuming 8-12 ounces per week, as well as selecting fish with the lowest levels of mercury.

Fish with low mercury levels include salmon, shrimp, pollock, light canned tuna, tilapia, catfish and cod, whereas high-mercury fish include tilefish, shark, swordfish and mackerel.

Fish consumption counteracted neurotoxic effects of mercury

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mercury may have toxic effects on the nervous, digestive and immune systems, and also on the lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes.

It is on the WHO’s list of top 10 chemicals that are of major public health concern.

However, results from the latest study yielded little evidence of harm in newborns whose mothers consumed low amounts of fish and who had low exposure to mercury.

Interestingly, the infants whose mothers had higher mercury exposure during pregnancy and who also consumed more fish displayed better attention and required less special handling.

The researchers say this is likely due to the positive nutritional effects of consuming fish.

Although infants with higher prenatal mercury exposure showed asymmetric reflexes, after the researchers took fish consumption into account, they found that the infants whose mothers consumed more fish displayed better attention.

Commenting on their findings, Yolton says:

“The better neurobehavioral performance observed in infants with higher mercury biomarkers should not be interpreted as a beneficial effect of mercury exposure, which is clearly neurotoxic.

It likely reflects the benefits of polyunsaturated fatty acid intake that also comes from fish and has been shown to benefit attention, memory and other areas of development in children.”

Most people do not eat recommended two to three servings per week

According to the FDA, nearly all fish contain at least traces of mercury because as they feed, they absorb it. Mercury typically builds up more in certain types of fish, particularly in larger fish with longer life spans.

Although fish confers health benefits for the general public, many people do not currently eat the recommended amount of fish, which is two to three servings per week.

“The important thing for women to remember is that fish offers excellent nutritional qualities that can benefit a developing baby or young child,” says Yolton. “Moms just need to be thoughtful about which fish they eat or provide to their child.”

She adds that in their study, mercury exposure was low – likely due to the mothers consuming fish low in mercury – “so the detrimental effects might have been outweighed by the beneficial effects of fish nutrition.”

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Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries

 Juan Carlos Sanchez paddled a kayak with his shoes on a flooded street in Miami Beach last year. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press

The worsening of tidal flooding in American coastal communities is largely a consequence of greenhouse gases from human activity, and the problem will grow far worse in coming decades, scientists reported Monday.

Those emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing the ocean to rise at the fastest rate since at least the founding of ancient Rome, the scientists said. They added that in the absence of human emissions, the ocean surface would be rising less rapidly and might even be falling.

The increasingly routine tidal flooding is making life miserable in places like Miami Beach; Charleston, S.C.; and Norfolk, Va., even on sunny days.

Though these types of floods often produce only a foot or two of standing saltwater, they are straining life in many towns by killing lawns and trees, blocking neighborhood streets and clogging storm drains, polluting supplies of freshwater and sometimes stranding entire island communities for hours by overtopping the roads that tie them to the mainland.

Such events are just an early harbinger of the coming damage, the new research suggests.

“I think we need a new way to think about most coastal flooding,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, the primary author of one of two related studies released on Monday. “It’s not the tide. It’s not the wind. It’s us. That’s true for most of the coastal floods we now experience.”

In the second study, scientists reconstructed the level of the sea over time and confirmed that it is most likely rising faster than at any point in 28 centuries, with the rate of increase growing sharply over the past century — largely, they found, because of the warming that scientists have said is almost certainly caused by human emissions.

They also confirmed previous forecasts that if emissions were to continue at a high rate over the next few decades, the ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100.

Experts say the situation would then grow far worse in the 22nd century and beyond, likely requiring the abandonment of many coastal cities.

The findings are yet another indication that the stable climate in which human civilization has flourished for thousands of years, with a largely predictable ocean permitting the growth of great coastal cities, is coming to an end.

“I think we can definitely be confident that sea-level rise is going to continue to accelerate if there’s further warming, which inevitably there will be,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany, and co-author of one of the papers, published online Monday by an American journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a report issued to accompany that scientific paper, a climate research and communications organization in Princeton, N.J., Climate Central, used the new findings to calculate that roughly three-quarters of the tidal flood days now occurring in towns along the East Coast would not be happening in the absence of the rise in the sea level caused by human emissions.

The lead author of that report, Dr. Strauss, said the same was likely true on a global scale, in any coastal community that has had an increase of saltwater flooding in recent decades.

The rise in the sea level contributes only in a limited degree to the huge, disastrous storm surges accompanying hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy. Proportionally, it has a bigger effect on the nuisance floods that can accompany what are known as king tides.

The change in frequency of those tides is striking. For instance, in the decade from 1955 to 1964 at Annapolis, Md., an instrument called a tide gauge measured 32 days of flooding; in the decade from 2005 to 2014, that jumped to 394 days.

Flood days in Charleston jumped from 34 in the earlier decade to 219 in the more recent, and in Key West, Fla., the figure jumped from no flood days in the earlier decade to 32 in the more recent.

The new research was led by Robert E. Kopp, an earth scientist at Rutgers University who has won respect from his colleagues by bringing elaborate statistical techniques to bear on longstanding problems, like understanding the history of the global sea level.

Based on extensive geological evidence, scientists already knew that the sea level rose drastically at the end of the last ice age, by almost 400 feet, causing shorelines to retreat up to a hundred miles in places. They also knew that the sea level had basically stabilized, like the rest of the climate, over the past several thousand years, the period when human civilization arose.

But there were small variations of climate and sea level over that period, and the new paper is the most exhaustive attempt yet to clarify them.

The paper shows the ocean to be extremely sensitive to small fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature. The researchers found that when the average global temperature fell by a third of a degree Fahrenheit in the Middle Ages, for instance, the surface of the ocean dropped by about three inches in 400 years. When the climate warmed slightly, that trend reversed.

“Physics tells us that sea-level change and temperature change should go hand-in-hand,” Dr. Kopp said. “This new geological record confirms it.”

In the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, the ocean began to rise briskly, climbing about eight inches since 1880. That sounds small, but it has caused extensive erosion worldwide, costing billions.

Due largely to human emissions, global temperatures have jumped about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century. The sea is rising at what appears to be an accelerating pace, lately reaching a rate of about a foot per century.

One of the authors of the new paper, Dr. Rahmstorf, had previously published estimates suggesting the sea could rise as much as five or six feet by 2100. But with the improved calculations from the new paper, his latest upper estimate is three to four feet.

That means Dr. Rahmstorf’s forecast is now more consistent with calculations issued in 2013 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that periodically reviews and summarizes climate research. That body found that continued high emissions might produce a rise in the sea of 1.7 to 3.2 feet over the 21st century.

In an interview, Dr. Rahmstorf said the rise would eventually reach five feet and far more — the only question was how long it would take. Scientists say the recent climate agreement negotiated in Paris is not remotely ambitious enough to forestall a significant melting of Greenland and Antarctica, though if fully implemented, it may slow the pace somewhat.

“Ice simply melts faster when the temperatures get higher,” Dr. Rahmstorf said. “That’s just basic physics.”

How Much Warmer Was Your City in 2015?

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Study: Fish Prevents Alzheimer’s; Don’t Sweat Mercury Levels

— Posted with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM. Please do not republish without their permission. —

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Atlanta Journal] By Larry Clifton  February 17, 2016

Atlanta – A new study challenges the dietary populism that in the past suggested the consumption of fish poses more of a health risk to the brain than benefit.

According the study, there is not enough toxic mercury to damage our brains in the weekly consumption of seafood. Conversely, the new findings show that the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish had a role in defending our brains against Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Previous studies questioned whether increased mercury levels in the brain would cancel out such benefits, an issue specifically addressed in the new study, published by CNN.

Researchers questioned the study group about their diet every year starting in 1997. Furthermore, they performed brain autopsies on 286 participants who died between 2004 and 2013 to examine the levels of mercury and to determine whether there was neurological damage associated with dementia.

“The findings were very striking,” said Martha Clare Morris, director of nutrition and nutritional epidemiology at Rush University Medical Center.

“Our hypothesis was that seafood consumption would be associated with less neuropathology, but that if there were higher levels of mercury in the brain, that would work against that. But we didn’t find that at all,” said Morris, who is lead author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The research only added one caveat; they only observed the benefit among participants who had a strong genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s. These participants carried a version of the APOE gene called APOE-4, which is associated with higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Nevertheless, unless one has been specifically tested for the APOE-4 gene, consuming more fish is decidedly healthy and, according to the study, does not result in the accumulation of toxic amounts of mercury.

Even people who test negative for the APOE-4 gene likely gain some lesser amount of protection from Alzheimer’s by a weekly consumption of seafood, but the current study was not able to confirm or deny that question, Morris said.

“One theory is that seafood consumption may be more beneficial in older age because, as we age, we lose DHA in the brain,” a molecule that is important to maintain brain health, Morris said. DHA is one of the main fatty acids that can be obtained from fish. People with APOE-4 are thought to lose even more DHA in the brain, so seafood consumption could be even more beneficial to them, Morris added.

Still, Morris maintained that individuals sustaining a steady diet of certain kinds of seafood could experience a downside to brain health. “Our findings can’t be generalized to people who are really high consumers of seafood,” Morris said. In the Midwest population in the study, very few ate seafood every day.

The latest study augments findings of previous surveys as well as the professional opinions of doctors who treat patients and study Alzheimer’s disease.

“The evidence is quite clear that people who consume healthier forms of fish [which are baked or broiled rather than fried] are going to end up with healthier brains,” said James T. Becker, professor of psychiatry and associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the current study.

As for whether mercury increases the risk of dementia, “I personally don’t think there’s evidence for it. I think these heavy metals are going to do other things first,” such as causing nerve pain, itching or burning, Becker said.

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Where is promised ‘Godzilla’ El Nino? Update says slimmer monster lying in wait

On the left, a satellite image from Jan. 23, 2016 of El Nino, vs. the latest image, on the right, of Feb. 4, 2016.

Southern Californians using newly purchased umbrellas as parasols and wearing sunscreen instead of rain slickers have been asking: Where is El Niño?

The answer from scientists, climatologists and weather forecasters is: Right here.

“No, it hasn’t gone away. It is still as strong as it ever was,” said Ken Clark, meteorologist with Accuweather.com in Southern California.

Huh?

With sunny skies and a week’s worth of summer-like weather spiking the mercury into the high 80s, how can that be true? Isn’t El Niño supposed to bring wet, stormy weather?

Be patient, says El Niño expert and climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It’s coming.

“A month from now you’ll be writing about the March Miracle or the April Apocalypse,” he said, responding to what he calls the media’s unquenchable thirst for colossal storms and massive mudslides, neither of which has happened as predicted for Southern California.

Even Josh Willis says that local rains are coming. He’s the JPL project scientist for oceanography satellite Jason-3, the newest sea-temperature and sea-level reading tool used by climatologists to identify the current El Niño as the largest ever.

“Don’t throw out that umbrella just yet,” he said Tuesday.

All three scientists say El Niño will perform, but its arrival into Southern California has been delayed. They’re expecting a conveyor belt of squalls to enter stage left in late February and continue through March, possibly into April. This is a month or so later than original predictions for heavy rains.

Patzert says sometimes El Niños take their sweet time.

“It is not unusual for El Niños, with regards to Southern California rain, to be slow starters,” Patzert explained. “When they hook up, they are fast and furious finishers.”

Also, in cases of El Niño, size matters. This one is too big — about 21/2 times the size of the continental United States — and is having trouble maneuvering. But new satellite data from Feb. 4 show the El Niño has shrunk nearly 40 percent since the last capture on Jan. 23, Patzert said. The El Niño has receded east of Hawaii, whereas last month’s image showed it west of the islands, he said.

“As this signal shrinks, the jet stream should pull farther south” tracking storms into Southern California, he said.

The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, released its monthly El Niño forecast on Thursday. It predicts a 50 percent to 60 percent probability of above-average rainfall in Southern California for March and April, with only 40 percent to 50 percent for Central California and 30 percent to 40 percent for Northern California, said John Gottschalck, chief of the center’s operational prediction branch.

In short, it reiterated a prediction of El Niño-patterned weather for Southern California. Namely, weakened westward-blowing trade winds and a warming of the upper ocean in the central and eastern Pacific will alter the jet stream, pulling storms into the West Coast, much like what happened during the last El Niño in February and March 1998.

Another reason for El Niño’s slow start is its entanglement with a high-pressure system over Utah that brought dry, hot weather into Southern California over the past week and a half. More importantly, the high-pressure dome pushed the jet stream north, sending El Niño-fueled storms into Central and Northern California in January and the Pacific Northwest and western Canada in February. This has increased Sierra snowpack to 105 percent, a positive sign for breaking the drought.

Calling it a “short-term” phenomena, Clark says the high pressure has begun to fade, with the National Weather Service predicting “a slight chance” or rain on Thursday. However, serious rain is not expected until the end of the month. “There may be more stormy patterns as we get into the end of February and into March,” he said.

Of course, no one can say for sure what El Niño will do. But scientists are hardly reprimanding El Niño, Spanish for “the child.” They are giving it a second chance.

“The ball game is not over yet. We do have a lot of innings left in the game,” Gottschalck said. “ We still have March.”

Read the original post: http://www.dailybreeze.com/