[LINK] "Climate Change Is Wicked Bad for New England’s Cod"

[rfmcdonald]

Nick Stockton's Wired article notes that, however cod stocks in Newfoundland may be faring, cod off of New England's coast are endangered by climate change.

New England. Before Tom Brady, three-way sandwiches, or trips to the packy, the region’s residents shared a cultural identity defined mostly by the cod fish. But a fishing technology boom coupled with bad management led to the fish’s collapse in the early 1990s. Cod never bounced back, and warm water could be part of the reason why.

The Gulf of Maine—cupped by Cape Cod, capped by Nova Scotia—has been getting about .03˚C warmer every year since 1982. But cod are cold water fishes, and the warmer waters mess with their biology in bad ways. It also changes the prey available to them, and exposes them to new predators. Added up, that means fewer fish. A new paper in the journal Science says these rising temperatures have contributed to cod’s dwindling numbers, and should be considered when calculating future fishing regulations.

New Englanders have harvested the sea for centuries, and up until a few decades ago cod was their biggest cash crop. In the 1960s, new technology like sonar and radar let fishermen catch more fish, as well as selectively target older, larger fish. Unfortunately, marine ecologists and fisheries managers didn’t experience a similar technological boon. Without knowing crucial ecological information—Where do cod migrate? How do cod reproduce? Just how many cod are there?—fisheries managers couldn’t write regulations that kept up with the record number of cod being pulled out of the ocean.

Around 1992, the Northwest Atlantic cod fishery crashed. Fish stocks were around 1 percent of their historic levels. Since then, despite decades of severe catch limits, cod has not come back, and nobody totally understands why.

Sea temperature is a part of that equation. “Temperature affects cod in every way you can imagine,” says Michael Fogarty, head of ecological assessment at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center. Cold water-adapted cod have speedier metabolisms in warm water, which means they need more food. But those meals aren’t always around. So cod are smaller, and fewer survive to reproduce.