Vancouver seafood lovers may see more Humboldt squid but less sockeye salmon on restaurant menus in the near future due to climate change.
Vancouver seafood lovers may see more Humboldt squid but less sockeye salmon on restaurant menus in the near future due to climate change.
That’s according to a new study by UBC researchers which examined 362 Vancouver restaurant menus from four time periods, spanning 1880 to 2021. They identified locally-caught species on these menus, and determined each species’ preferred water temperature based on previous studies. The researchers then took an average preferred temperature across all species’ identified for each of the four time periods, and found that the highest preferred temperature occurred in the present-day at nearly 14 degrees Celsius, three degrees higher than in 1880, and almost five degrees higher than the lowest temperature calculated in 1962.
These temperatures were related to contemporary sea surface temperatures, which increased from about 10 degrees Celsius in 1980 to 10.7 degrees in 2021.
“We set out to discover if warming waters due to climate change are already affecting what seafood restaurants serve in their menus,” said senior author Dr. William Cheung, professor and director of the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. “While it’s not a case of cause and effect, our findings indicate that the seas around Vancouver were warming during the studied time periods, so fish species that prefer warmer waters dominated there. It’s likely that they were more available to catch for sale, and so local seafood restaurants offered more of these types of fish.”
Read more at: University of British Columbia
