Tag: fish

The Western Drought Is Bad. Here’s What You Should Know About It.

New York Times: The Western Drought Is Bad. Here’s What You Should Know About It. Answers to questions about the current situation in California and the Western half of the United States.

Much of the Western half of the United States is in the grip of a severe drought of historic proportions. Conditions are especially bad in California and the Southwest, but the drought extends into the Pacific Northwest, much of the Intermountain West, and even the Northern Plains.

Drought emergencies have been declared. Farmers and ranchers are suffering. States are facing water cutbacks. Large wildfires are burning earlier than usual. And there appears to be little relief in sight.

Experts with the United States Drought Monitor, a collaboration of several federal agencies and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, assess the severity of drought in a given area, ranking it from moderate to exceptional. They take many factors into account, including precipitation totals, snowpack, stream flows and soil moisture measurements, and use images from remote-sensing satellites to assess the health of vegetation.

Study: This Commercial Fishing Technique Is a Climate Catastrophe

Mother Jones: This Commercial Fishing Technique Is a Climate Catastrophe. Globally, it releases as much CO2 as 320 million cars, a new study estimates.

Bottom trawling, a common fishing practice where large nets are dragged along the sea floor, is exacerbating the climate crisis, a new study has found.

Centuries of dead plankton, fish and marine mammals lie on the sea floor, their decomposed bodies locking vast amounts of carbon in the sediments beneath the waves. When those sediments are moved by giant trawl nets, the carbon they contain is released back into the ocean and atmosphere, say the team behind the research.

There’s quite a bit more carbon in the sediments than we (first) thought, said Boris Worm, professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University and co-author on the study. “It’s, in fact, more than (is stored) on land—we did not know that.”

“We want to move away from protected areas as a feel-good measure to protect areas that actually do something for people and for nature, and, yeah, the west coast of Vancouver Island would be the region,” he said. The study also looked at how marine protected areas (MPAs) could bolster biodiversity and food production.

The Daily Climate, April 15, 2021

Articles include: 2050 Goals are inadequate; champagne & climate change; 100% clean power; renewable energy powers decarbonization; electric vehicles by 2035; Interior Department and Manchin; Epic Drought; Indian monsoon season; ticks moving into the Arctic; East African oil pipeline; American research station abandoned; food web in the Great Lakes.

Study: Algal blooms – 2 articles

Environmental Health News: Algal blooms target sea otter hearts. A toxin formed during algal blooms, which are increasingly common due to climate change, leaves sea otters at risk of deadly heart disease. Within the past decade, those working on the frontlines of marine health have treated an unprecedented number of animals poisoned by harmful algal blooms. Jayme Smith, the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project’s harmful algal bloom expert, was an undergraduate student at Vanguard University of Southern California working with sea lions at a local marine mammal rehabilitation center when she consistently saw these devastating impacts. “It’s really heartbreaking,” Smith told EHN. “A lot of times it’s the adult female sea lions and they’re in really bad condition, they have seizures, and a lot of times they can’t recover.” The culprit behind these episodes: domoic acid. This biotoxin accumulates in the food web during algal bloom events and causes severe health effects in larger animals, humans included. Now, researchers warn that the potent toxin targets the hearts of sea otters, threatening already sensitive populations, according to a recent study in the Harmful Algae journal.

The Conversation: Water being pumped into Tampa Bay could cause a massive algae bloom, putting fragile manatee and fish habitats at risk. Millions of gallons of water laced with fertilizer ingredients are being pumped into Florida’s Tampa Bay from a leaking reservoir at an abandoned phosphate plant at Piney Point. As the water spreads into the bay, it carries phosphorus and nitrogen – nutrients that under the right conditions can fuel dangerous algae blooms that can suffocate sea grass beds and kill fish, dolphins and manatees. It’s the kind of risk no one wants to see, but officials believed the other options were worse.

 

Study: Marine species increasingly can’t live at equator due to global heating

The Guardian: Marine species increasingly can’t live at equator due to global heating. Study suggests it is already too warm in tropics for some species to survive.

Global heating has made the ocean around the equator less rich in wildlife, with conditions likely already too hot for some species to survive, according to a new study.

Analysis of the changing locations of almost 50,000 marine species between 1955 and 2015 found a predicted impact of global heating – species moving away from the equator – can now be observed at a global scale.

It said further global heating, which is now unavoidable, would cut the richness of species in the ocean in tropical regions even further.

Scientists said the consequences of the shift could be profound and would be challenging to predict.

The research, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said: “Ocean warming is thus causing large-scale changes in the global latitudinal distribution of marine biodiversity. Despite less warming in the ocean than on land, marine species are shifting their distributions as fast or faster in response to warming than those on land.”

Then and now: Rising temperatures threaten corals

BBC News: Then and now: Rising temperatures threaten corals.

Coral reefs are hives of activity in the ocean, where many different species can be found. Scientists refer to such zones as biodiversity hotspots.

Although reefs take up less than 1% of the area covered by ocean, they are estimated to be home to more than a third of life under the waves.

The Daily Climate, March 23, 2021 – Study

Articles include: Pennsylvania & solar electric power; NY offshore wind; California oil companies; nitrogen hot spots & agriculture; Biden & greenhouse gas emissions; infrastructure plans; housing and flooding;  climate polluters & greenwashing; FOIA reveals interference with offshore wind farms; migration caused by storms; Sharks, climate change, and restoring ocean habitats –  study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

What’s Good for the Ocean May Also Be Good for Business

New York Times: What’s Good for the Ocean May Also Be Good for Business. Companies are trying to prove that conservation, sustainable fishing and carbon sequestration are profitable.

This article is part of our new series, Currents, which examines how rapid advances in technology are transforming our lives.

Marty Odlin, who grew up and lives on the Maine coast, remembers what the ocean used to be like. But now, he said, “It’s like a desert and just within my lifetime.” In the last few years, he said, he has seen lots of sea grass and many other species virtually disappear from the shoreline.

Mr. Odlin, 39, comes from a fishing family and has a passion for the history of the ocean and the coast, both of which have informed his sense of the ocean’s decline, a small part of the catastrophic deletion of marine life over the last several hundred years.

The Daily Climate, March 11, 2021

Articles include: Saguaro cactuses are under threat because of climate change;  Warming oceans mean smaller baby sharks struggle to survive;  Food systems responsible for ‘one third’ of human-caused emissions; Bitcoin rise could leave carbon footprint the size of London’s; The economic case for restoring abandoned oil wells;  Summer could last six months by 2100, study finds; As oil prices rise, executives aim to keep them high;  Between a black rock and a hard place;  Utah agency reverses course, pulls back energy leases in original Bears Ears monument; LAW: Big Tobacco had to pay $206B. Is Big Oil next?