NY Times -
In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay
of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their
families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in
the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.
Today, the
cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned
fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year,
fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could
before the ban.
But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s
waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth,
scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places
to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that
depends on it.
Regulators this month canceled the Maine shrimp
catch for the second straight year, in no small part because shrimp are
fleeing for colder climes. Maine lobsters are booming, but even so, the
most productive lobster fishery has shifted as much as 50 miles up the
coast in the last 40 years. Black sea bass, southerly fish seldom seen
here before, have become so common that this year, Maine officials moved
to regulate their catch. Blue crab, a signature species in Maryland’s
Chesapeake Bay, are turning up off Portland.
In decades past, the
gulf had warmed on average by about one degree every 21 years. In the
last decade, the average has been one degree every two years. “What
we’re experiencing is a warming that very few ocean ecosystems have ever
experienced,” said Andrew J. Pershing, the chief scientific officer for
the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here.
No comments:
Post a Comment