Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of marine heat waves—warm water anomalies that disrupt marine ecosystems—and this is creating new challenges for fisheries management and ocean conservation.
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of marine heat waves—warm water anomalies that disrupt marine ecosystems—and this is creating new challenges for fisheries management and ocean conservation. A new study shows how the record-breaking marine heat wave of 2014 to 2016 caused changes along the U.S. West Coast that led to an unprecedented spike in the numbers of whales that became entangled in fishing gear.
“With the ocean warming, we saw a shift in the ecosystem and in the feeding behavior of humpback whales that led to a greater overlap between whales and crab fishing gear,” said Jarrod Santora, a researcher in applied mathematics at UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering and first author of the study, published January 27 in Nature Communications.
Santora, who is also affiliated with the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, uses data-driven models of marine ecosystems to inform fishery management and conservation. As science advisor for a working group convened to address the whale entanglement problem, he has been providing his analyses to state and federal agencies to help them make management decisions that can reduce the risk of entanglement.
“It was a perfect storm of events over those three years, but we now have the ability to prevent that from happening again,” Santora said. “We’ve developed a risk assessment and mitigation program, we’re doing aerial surveys, and we’re providing ecosystem-based indicators to the state resource managers so they can make informed decisions. There’s a huge team of people working on this.”
Read more at University of California - Santa Cruz
Photo Credit: bobwright via Pixabay
