AS WATERS WARM

 

A couple of days ago, we were trolling for tuna 30-something miles southeast of Fire Island Inlet, New York.

As usual, I was running the boat, while Mike Mucha did his job in the cockpit, helping me spot life on the surface, and making sure that the lures remained weed-free and running the way they’re supposed to.  Sometime around mid-afternoon, he told me to slow down, so he could bring in the long center line, which had picked up some sort of trash.

From where I stood, I could see a good-sized clump of brown something hanging onto the lure, and figured that we had managed to find the only piece of weed in an otherwise weed-free sea.  But as Mike cranked, whatever was on the line was acting in a very un-weedlike way, splashing on the surface instead of just trailing behind the lure.  The 50-pound trolling rod barely bent, and provided no feel, but Mike noticed the same thing that I did and wondered, “Do I have a fish?”

It's far from unusual for little dolphin to make a pass at lures barely smaller than they are.  Sometimes, somehow, they manage to get the lures’ big hooks in their mouths.  Sometimes they get snagged in the side of the head.  Years ago, we had one manage to knock the line out of the outrigger clip and, a second or so later, when the line came tight against the same stiff 50-pound rod, seemingly snap its spine and come to the boat already, for all purposes, dead.

We were speculating that another small dolphin had met its demise, but…the fish on the line was clearly brown, and lacked the rainbow and silver coloration of the typical dolphin.  We had a brief “What is it?” moment when the fish came over the rail; then I noticed the diagonal black streak running up from it’s eye and tentatively called it a very small amberjack—a tropical reef fish foreign to Long Island’s waters—although its body seemed a little broad, and its color a little dark, to fit that ID. 

I reached for a camera to document the moment and provide a basis for better identification, but the jack, still lively despite its recent ordeal, shook, drove a spine into Mike’s hand and, having created such distraction, launched itself out of his grasp and, fortunately for the fish, back into the sea.

I hit the books when I got home, and decided that I had initially misidentified the fish; it was not an amberjack, but rather an Almaco jack, a closely related species.

Still, amberjack or an Almaco jack, it didn’t belong anywhere close to Long Island.

Every year, a few tropical fish always get lost and stray into Long Island waters.  There are records of tarpon being caught in local pound nets, a Montauk charter boat oncecaught a sailfish, and every season, a variety of juvenile groupers, angelfish, and similar oddities are found swimming in Long Island bays.  I’ve heard rumors of anglers catching amberjack—or maybe they were Almaco jack—in the region before.

But it’s still not what one might consider normal.

To get a better idea of how often it happens, I took a look at New York’s commercial landings, because commercial fishermen catch all sorts of things while targeting their intended species, and will try to market such fish when they can.  

The National Marine Fisheries Service maintains a database of commercial landings, sorted by state, year, and species, going back to 1950.  When I queried that database, seeking any landings of greater amberjack, lesser amberjack, or Almaco jack off New York, I found just one entry, for an undetermined quantity of Almaco jack landed in 2018.  The details were deemed “confidential,” meaning that fewer than three fishermen reported such landings; it was probably a one-time event.

NMFS also maintains a database of recreational landings, which dates back to 1981.  It seems to indicate that Almaco jacks and their close relatives are more frequently encountered in New York waters, providing one record of Almaco jack (2020), four records of greater amberjack (1993, 1995, 1996, 1998), two records of lesser amberjack (1988, 2007), and five records of fish identified only to “amberjack genus” (1995, 2005, 2017, 2018, 2019).

The problem with the recreational records is that, for most observations, we have to accept the anglers’ identification of what they caught, since almost all of the jacks were either released or “reported harvest,” a term that generally means that the fish was likely returned to the water dead or was used for bait but, in any case, was not available for the NMFS surveyor to independently identify.  Even anglers in southern waters have difficulty telling the varjous jacks apart, so the odds of local fishermen getting it right can be somewhat high.

Even when a surveyor identifies an unusual fish, there is room for doubt; for example, all four of the greater amberjack reported were harvested, but their measured lengths were all between 7 and 10 inches, which raises the question of whether they were really amberjack, or whether they might have been banded rudderfish, which are relatively common in New York waters, and superficially resemble a juvenile amberjack.

But regardless of the niceties of identification, the data makes it clear that, with the exception of the banded rudderfish, jacks of the genus Seriola aren’t caught very often in New York’s waters; all records of Almaco jacks, along with most records of “amberjack genus,” which could include the Almaco, occurred since 2017.

If the Almaco jack that we caught had been an isolated incident, it would have been easy to write off as just one of those things that happens every once in a while.  But when it is placed in the context of everything else being caught (or not caught), something becomes very clear, although some people still try to deny it:  The ocean, like the climate as a whole, is warming.

Anyone who spends much time on the water can see it.

Dolphin, once a target of opportunity for New York’s offshore anglers, now support an active directed fishery.  Big cobia are becoming common enough to support a directed fishery, too; last year, someone caught one that weighed 97.40 pounds, a cobia larger than most caught in their traditional southern range.  Anglers fishing around menhaden schools for cobia are running into large numbers of blacktip and spinner sharks, species that were once rarely seen north of Delaware Bay.

Last season, running home after an offshore trip, I saw what was clearly a big king mackerel—a fish close to four feet long—rocket out of the water near the wreck of the Hylton Castle, a typical mackerel behavior when they’re feeding on fish near the surface.

Traditional inshore species are being affected, too.  Black sea bass recruitment is very dependent on the sea conditions on the outer continental shelf during their first winter; warm, salty water is likely to lead to high survival rates, and a large year class of fish.  While the species has long been an important component of Long Island’s recreational fishery, warming water has led to significantly increased abundance.  

Summer flounder abundance also seems to be shifting north, with the center of abundance now somewhere south of Long Island, when it was once located off the New Jersey coast.  While biologists have not yet determined the cause of that shift, the 2018 benchmark stock assessment suggests that “climate-driven increases in ocean temperature” may be the cause.

Thus, in some respects, a warming ocean can prove beneficial.  Yet while warming waters give, they can also take away.  

The most notable example of that may be the collapse of the Southern New England stock of American lobster, a collapse that is clearly attributable to a warming sea.  

A recent study conducted in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay suggests that winter flounder, a species that was once a backbone of the recreational fishery both there and on Long Island, but has since collapsed, may be permanently disadvantaged by the warming water.  Young-of-the-year fish are particularly impacted, as the warm water supports higher concentrations of predators that feed on juvenile flounder, while young flounder that escape such predators are stressed and sometimes killed by high summer water temperatures and correspondingly low levels of dissolved oxygen.

It is likely that other New England groundfish are being impacted by warmer waters as well.

Thus, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the three regional fishery management councils on the East Coast, and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission recently held a virtual East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning meeting to brainstorm on what a warming ocean may mean for Atlantic fish and Atlantic fisheries.

Attendees at the meeting considered four different scenarios, which ranged from the dismaying to the somewhat optimistic.

The most pessimistic of the scenarios was titled “Stress Fractures.”  

It assumed a situation in which a warming ocean led to radical changes in the marine environment and marine fish stocks.  Scientists were unable to cope with the magnitude of the changes, which included stronger, more frequent storm systems fueled by a hotter sea, that wreaked havoc on estuaries and coastal ecosystems.  As a result of the massive changes, a number of important fish stocks, many burdened by disease and parasites that thrive in warm water, collapsed; some fall over the brink to extinction.

Reduced numbers of fish resulted in real harm to the commercial and recreational fishing industries, which could not survive without strong government support.

Sadly, such scenario is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Much less dire, the scenario titled “Ocean Pioneers” does not envision the wholesale collapse of fish stocks.  Instead, it posits a sea beset by unpredictable weather patterns which arguably pose a greater threat to fishermen than to the fish they pursue.  Species may move into new areas and the center of local abundance may shift.

Under this scenario, some components of the fishing industry can still thrive, although fewer people choose to enter the business.  With a fewer people entering the fishing industry, dockside services could suffer, and the size of the working waterfront shrink as new businesses cater to other uses of waterfront space.

A third possible outcome, deemed “Seafood Lemonade,” might well be considered the Goldilocks scenario, depicting a tolerable future that is situated, for purposes of the discussion, between the two dismal possibilities and another that is probably unjustifiably optimistic.  

In Seafood Lemonade, the health of fish stocks still suffers.  Stocks shift north and east as waters warm, and fish abundance declines.  However, scientists are able to keep up with the changes, and in areas with effective fishery management programs, stock rebuilding takes place; elsewhere, as fish numbers drop, the fishing industry falls into decline.

Even in areas with good fishery management, everything is not rosy for the commercial fishing industry, which still has to cope with cheap imports, and must compete with an aquaculture industry able to reliably provide product to consumers, even when wild stocks falter.  However, the amount of cheap imports coming into the United States could well wane as foreign fishermen deal with the same issues that plague the domestic fleet.  If that happened, domestic fishermen could be freed from some of the pricing pressure created by an influx of foreign product.

The fourth scenario, which was called “Checks and Balances,” is probably too optimistic.  It envisions a world in which both fishermen and the fish they pursue are resilient enough to adjust to climate change; fish stocks shift north and east, but don’t decline in abundance.  It posits a reduction in both carbon emissions and other forms of pollution, and sees disease attributable to warming waters affecting only a limited number of stocks.  It also assumes that coastal regions will continue to attract wealth which, in turn, fuels a healthy recreational fishing industry.

As Jonathan Star, who facilitated the meeting, observed, “This may well be one we want to look at again.  This really may be stretching the bounds of plausibility.”

Yet it, as well as the three other scenarios, can claim some plausibility simply because each of them assumes some events that have already happened.

Diseases related to warming waters are already impacting marine resources.  Shell rot disease, which eats away at lobsters and renders them unmarketable, has long afflicted such animals toward the southern end of their range.  As waters warm, it has spread through southern New England, and beginning to appear in the Gulf of Maine.

Storms seem to be growing fiercer, and even when no storms rage, it seems that the winds are gusting higher than they once did.  When I began fishing offshore, absent a tropical storm or the occasional cold front, the last two or three weeks of July and the first two of August were reliably calm, with the NOAA forecast usually calling for winds between 10 and 20 knots, and seas between 2 and 4 feet.  Often, a big Bermuda high would settle in off the East Coast, and we’d enjoy uninterrupted calm seas for weeks at a time.  For many years, before I bought a larger boat, I chartered every summer, and never had a trip blown out.  Today, wind seems to be the rule, and not the exception, and comfortable days offshore are nowhere nearas common as they used to be.

Fish stocks are shifting.  I already mentioned fluke and black sea bass, which are more abundant off southern New England than they once were.  Cobia and warm-water sharks are now regulars off Long Island.  Dolphin abound.  Every year, there are more reports of black drum, spot, and croaker being taken from local waters.  

At the same time, even though pollock are abundant farther north, the once-spectacular late spring run off Block Island is now just a memory, while the silver hake (“whiting”) that once fueled a very active for-hire fishery off northern New Jersey and western Long Island ended long ago, although the species remains abundant offshore.

The recreational fishing and boating industry is, more and more, focused on wealthy consumers who are willing and able to spend their money on the fast boats, state of the art electronics, and high-tech fishing gear needed to find and exploit locally abundant fish, while the surfcaster or low-income angler, limited in where he or she can fish, suffers from local scarcity and declining abundance.

In those respects, all four scenarios are coming true.

Right now, given the many uncertainties, we can’t confidently predict which of the scenarios comes closest to future realities.  All we can know right now is that things are changing, and will continue to change.  Whether such change is for the better or worse may depend on just where you’re standing.

Still, it’s somewhat comforting to know that NOAA, the councils, and the ASMFC are trying to prepare for at least some of the possible eventualities.  While we can’t avoid the consequences of a warming sea, with enough preparation and perhaps some luck, we might at least deflect the worst impacts.