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OCEAN WARMING THREATENING COMMERCIAL SHELLFISH

Frozen Scallop
Frozen Mussel
Frozen Clam
United Kingdom
Published Sep 11, 2020

Tridge summary

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

Original content

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 contracting into shallower water,” said Heidi Fuchs, an associate professor at Rutgers University’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author. Many species of fish respond to the warming ocean by migrating to cooler waters. But the “wrong-way” migrators – which include shellfish, snails, starfish, worms and others – share a few crucial traits. As larvae, they are weak swimmers and rely on ocean currents for transportation. As adults, they tend to remain in place, sedentary or fixed to the seafloor. The researchers found that the warming ocean would have have caused these creatures to spawn earlier in the spring or summer, exposing their larvae to patterns of wind ...
Source: Fish Focus
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