You’ve seen the headlines – tuna is in trouble. “Bleak outlook for sushi favourite as bluefin tuna levels drop 97 per cent,” writes the Telegraph. CBS News says: “Sushi eaters pushing Pacific bluefin tuna to brink of extinction”. Does this mean that you should be putting down those tuna sandwiches and spicy tuna rolls? Not necessarily.
Variations in climate lead to fluctuations and changes in fish stocks; they can have effects on such things as fish behaviour, distributions and growth. Because of this, fisheries management has to respond dynamically to these fluctuations. If management decisions are made primarily on past patterns, the negative impacts can be exacerbated, especially with climate change.
Phytoplankton are the foundation of ocean life, providing the energy that supports nearly all marine species. Levels of phytoplankton in an ocean area may seem like a good predictor for the amount of fish that can be caught there, but a new study by Nereus Program researchers finds that this relationship is not so straightforward
According to the FAO, anchovy and sardine made up 13% of global catch in 2012. These small fish are consumed by humans, marine mammals, seabirds, squid, and other fish. They are also used for aquaculture feed, industrial oil, and health supplements. “Climate, Anchovy, and Sardine” a new study in the Annual Review of Marine Science, co-authored by Nereus Alumni Rebecca Asch (Princeton University) and Ryan Rykaczewski (University of South Carolina), reviews the past, present, and future of anchovy and sardine.
Meeting the Paris Agreement global warming target of 1.5°C will have large benefits to fisheries, finds a new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published in Science. For every degree Celsius decrease in global warming, potential fish catches could increase by more than three million tonnes per year.
The ten most popular stories on the Nereus Program website in 2016, including on El Ninos, fishing subsidies, Brexit, science fiction prototyping, the TPP, salps, jellyfish fisheries, vaquita and the South China Sea.
This chapter explores recent and future impacts of rapid temperature changes in the North Sea, identified as a ‘hot spot’ of climate change, with respect to biological, operational, and economic concerns in fisheries. The region is one of the most important fishing grounds in the world.
‘Aliens’, ‘jelly-balls’, ‘globs’, ‘buckets of snot’, and ‘sea-walnuts’. These are the names media have used to describe salps, as mentioned by Nereus Fellow Natasha Henschke, Princeton University, in her recently published paper “Rethinking the Roles of Salps in the Ocean”.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released their Methodological Assessment of Scenarios & Models of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, for which Nereus Director of Science William Cheung was a coordinating lead author, as well as a contributing author for Chapter 5 “Modelling consequences of change in biodiversity for nature’s benefits to people” (200-243).
Global fisheries could lose approximately $10 billion of annual revenues by 2050 if climate change continues at current rates, and countries most dependent on fisheries for food and livelihoods will feel more of the effects, finds new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program research published today in Scientific Reports.
