OCEAN
OF TROUBLE
over the last four years. The foundation
compared this to estimates, both public
and private, of how much cash will actually be needed to address the problem in
coming decades. The Ocean Carbon and
Biochemistry program, a joint effort supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, suggested that as much
as $100 million annually — more than
three times current funding levels —
would be needed over the coming decade.
Taking a wider view of ocean science
and management, the bipartisan Joint
Ocean Commission Initiative, in its ocean
policy report card last year, put the issue
bluntly: “Ocean management, science,
and education programs remain severely
underfunded, hindering them from effectively supporting our national security
and economic interests and undermining
the health of ocean reso urces.”
A ‘PHENOMENAL WEIRDNESS’
Perhaps not surprisingly, these shortfalls have left fishermen, regulators and
coastal economies flat-footed. Runge
points by way of example to shifts in the
growth process of one of Maine’s iconic
seafood staples: the lobster. Warmer
waters caused the prized crustaceans to
molt earlier than expected last year. “It
contributed to a mini-economic crisis
in the lobster industry here in Maine,”
Runge says. “You had this early molting,
and then there was a supply of lobsters
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
that now were of size much earlier than
usual, and processors in Canada just
weren’t ready for that. So you had this
tremendous oversupply of lobsters early
in the year that flooded the market and
the price just took a nose dive.”
Early molting appears to be underway
again this year — and similar behavior
and lifecycle shifts are being documented
in fisheries the world over. In September, scientists at the University of British
Columbia reported that warming oceans
appeared to be causing fish to get smaller. The study, published in the journal
Nature Climate Change, modeled some
600 fish species from oceans all over the
globe, projecting that in aggregate, average maximum body weight of fish was
likely to decrease between 14 and 20 percent over the first half of this century.
Last spring, Britain’s Marine Climate
Change Impacts Partnership, which
unites a wide array of scientists, government agencies and industries, issued
an analysis that found “clear changes
in the depth, distribution, migration
and spawning behaviors of fish — many
of which can be related to warming sea
temperatures.” Sole were reported to be
moving away from the Netherlands and
toward the eastern edges of the English
Channel, the group noted, while sea bass
and red mullet had drifted northward.
Many of the Gulf of Maine’s subarctic species — including Runge’s Calanus