OCEAN WARMING THREATENING COMMERCIAL SHELLFISH

Ocean warming threatening commercial shellfish. Ocean warming is paradoxically driving bottom-dwelling invertebrates – including sea scallops, blue mussels, surfclams and quahogs that are valuable to the shellfish industry – into warmer waters and threatening their survival, a Rutgers-led study shows. In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers identify a cause for the “wrong-way” species migrations: warming-induced changes to their spawning times, resulting in the earlier release of larvae that would then be pushed into warmer waters by ocean currents. The researchers studied six decades of data on 50 species of bottom-dwelling invertebrates, and found that about 80 percent have disappeared from the Georges Bank and the outer shelf between the Delmarva Peninsula and Cape Cod, including off the coast of New Jersey. “These deeper, colder waters of the outer shelf should provide a refuge from warming so it is puzzling that species distributions are ...