Water warming, fish are on the move… now you can track them

Black sea bass like this one caught by angler Steve Burstein of West Warwick are plentiful but RI quotas are tight.  Regulations have not caught up with migrating fish.

Water warming, fish are on the move… now you can track them

Ever wonder why black sea bass quotas are so low, yet fishermen catch so many?  Or why it’s easy for Rhode Island to overfish summer flounder quotas?   Why cod has moved offshore or why cobia, a warm water exotic fish, is now being caught in our waters more than ever before?

It all has to do with our oceans warming which has caused fish populations to move north and/or into deeper cooler water.  You can now track 80 northeast species (650 in total) on a new Rutgers University website called OceanAdapt at http://oceanadapt.rutgers.edu .

How warm is the water? URI Bay temperature studies confirm that Narragansett Bay has warmed 2 to 2.5 degrees depending on time of year in past 45 years. 

“Since 1854 ocean temperatures on the northeast continental shelf have risen 1.3 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit.” said Dr. Jonathan Hare, director of the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration’s Narragansett, RI Laboratory.

Dr.  Hare and Dr. Malin Pinsky of Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Science have developed “OceanAdapt” which is a collaboration between the Pinsky Lab at Rutgers and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).  The OceanAdapt website provides information about the impacts of changing climate and other factors on the distribution of marine life.  The website hosts an annually updated database of fisheries surveys and provides tools for exploring changes in marine fish distribution.

“We found that all over North America, marine fish and invertebrates are shifting their distributions quite rapidly,” said Dr. Pinsky.  OceanAdapt allows anglers to search and download data on the geographic and depth ranges of fish and invertebrates by region and track how those distributions have changed over time.

This data is a valuable tool for the fishermen, fishery managers, and scientists who are grappling with the challenge of adapting fishing regulations to a changing climate. 

Black sea bass are a good example of fish moving and how fishing regulations need to change to accommodate this movement.  The Rutgers website explains “Black sea bass are important to both recreational and commercial fishermen on the East Coast, and each state gets a fixed share of the total catch. That catch was divided up based on where black sea bass were in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, the fish were most abundant off North Carolina, so that state got the largest share of the catch. Since then black sea bass have moved, but the regulations haven’t caught up. Today, New England fishermen are catching black sea bass as far north as the Gulf of Maine. Meanwhile, North Carolina fishermen often have to motor far north to fill their quota, with the extra fuel costs eating into their profits.”

“Our fisheries regulations are built around the idea that fish distributions don’t change very much. When they do, that makes things complicated for fishermen and for managers trying to maintain a sustainable fishery,” Pinsky said.

Visit the OceanAdapt website and experiment.  It is easy to use.  I ran data graphs on black sea bass, summer flounder and cod.  The most telling graphic for me was looking at the movement and depth change of all east coast species together… the shift north was dramatic. 

As a fishermen and fish policy advocate, OceanAdapt gave  me a better understanding as to how fishing in Rhode Island has been impacted by climate change and how fishing policy and regulations have to be flexible and change faster to adapt to climate change.

Summer flounder and black sea bass regulations to tighten

Last week the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council (MAFMC) and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) had a joint meeting to discuss summer flounder (fluke), black sea bass and scup.  These two organizations have a direct impact on fishing regulations in Rhode Island as some of our species fall under the MAFMC and migratory species that travel the east coast are regulated by the ASMFC.

Scup saw liberalization in Federal waters with the recreational catch limit increased to 50 fish, scup regulations will likely be liberalized in RI waters too.

A summer flounder addendum will go out to public hearing in January.  East coast anglers overfished their quota in RI and other coastal states this year. Capt. Rick Bellavance, president of the Rhode Island Party and Charter Boat Association, said, “I am concerned about the options that bring RI into the NY/CT/NJ region, mostly because of the uncertain data and how dramatically it can change from year to year. I got the sense that a lot of people want to see us in the NY region which could reduce our (recreational) bag limit to five and shorten our season by quite a few days.”

Capt. Bellavance continued, “Black Sea Bass is a train wreck. The Northern Region has to take a 28% reduction so I would think we will look at a shortened season and a reduced bag limit. I know this does not make any sense with what we see on the water, but we are stuck with the existing law right now.”

 Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to meet February

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s 2015 Winter Meeting has been scheduled for February 3-5, 2015 at the Westin Hotel in Alessandria, VA. The agenda is available online at http://www.asmfc.org/home/2015-winter-meeting. Meeting materials will be available on January 23, 2015 on the Commission website. Agenda highlights include such items as winter flounder plans, Atlantic herring, American lobster, Atlantic menhaden, weakfish and big decisions are on the agenda for  summer flounder, scup and black sea bass.

The Striped Bass Management Board meeting is scheduled for Thursday, February 5 from 8:00 a.m. to noon.  The key agenda item to be discussed and considered for approval are Addendum IV Conservation Equivalency Proposals and Implementation Plans which coastal states have been working on. 

Rhode Island is expected to submit a plan that would allow the party and charter boat industry to take two fish at 32” or 33” minimum size which is expected to surpass the 25% reduction mandated by the new striped bass conservation equivalency threshold.  Coastwide one fish at 28” was approved by the ASMFC for recreational anglers which is a 31% reduction.  Other states may opt for a two fish solution for recreational anglers in general and/or charter boats as long as they meet the “conservation equivalency” reduction goal of 25%. 

More conservative anglers want to stay with the one striped bass fish at 28” regulation for 2015 while other recreational fishermen (and states) want to meet the 25% reduction goal but do it with two fish rather than one even though the two fish would have to be a larger minimum size.

Where’s the bite

Tautog season closes, cod and black sea bass fishing still good. The tautog fishing season closed December 15^th.  Angler Larry Norin reports a slow cod bite off Jamestown and Newport last week.  This weekend the Frances Fleet had good cod and black sea bass trips.  Capt. Frank Blount said, “Weather sidelined us for a good chunk of the past week. Friday saw a pick of nice green market cod to nearly ten pounds and a decent amount of keeper sea bass with a bunch of sea bass limits. One angler did really well with the cod boxing 8 nice keepers and while his score was not representative of the average, most of the anglers aboard did leave with a cod fish...On Saturday's run the cod fish were a bit more evenly distributed around the boat. Hi hook boxed four keepers and two other anglers recorded three keepers apiece. The sea bass bite was very good as well with many anglers limited out and they were much bigger average size than the day prior. A lot of jumbos in the 2 to 3.5 lb range with a handful of bigger ones to over 4 lbs.” Elisa Martin of Sung Harbor Marina, South Kingstown said, “The Island Current party boat started sailing this weekend form our docks, too early to tell how they doing. The only other highlight was our customer appreciation holiday party last week on.  The fish chowder continues to be a big hit with customers.” Party boats sailing for cod fish at this time include the Frances Fleet at www.francesfleet.com , the Seven B’s (with Capt. Andy Dangelo at the helm this week) at www.sevenbs.com, and the Island Current at www.islandcurrent.com .