NEWS & LIFE
Climate Change Creating New Options for Fish Lovers Who Want to “Eat Local” Species once common in the mid-Atlantic are becoming fixtures off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts In part nership with The Public’s Radio • ThePublicsRadio.org • By Sofie Rudin and Antonia Ayres-Brown
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limate change is pushing fish species north, changing what it means to eat local.
RUDIN: So, Antonia, a couple weeks ago I met up with Jason Timothy. He’s the creative culinary director and co-owner of a restaurant called Troop. TIMOTHY: Alright so we’re gonna drop these guys in our – we have water going, a bouillon of sorts. That’s gonna cook for about, you know, three or four minutes or until they turn a little bit red. RUDIN: We were in his kitchen in Providence, cooking up blue crabs. AYRES-BROWN: Okay that’s interesting because I mostly think of blue crabs as being a Mar yland thing. RUDIN: Yeah, I grew up in Baltimore, and they are ever ywhere. You’ve got crab cakes, soft shell crabs, crab dip… restaurants where they steam tons and tons of crabs, coat them in Old Bay, and dump them on a table for you to hammer open. It’s the official state crustacean, and Mar yland’s most valuable fisher y. AYRES-BROWN: That sounds so good, and it also kind of sounds like what quahogs or calamari are to Rhode Island. So, do blue crabs live around here too ? RUDIN: Yes, but you can only fish them recreationally because the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management says the population is too small to support a commercial fishery.
keeps the blue crab population lower in its northern range is its winter mortality. So when waters get cold, around 50 degrees or so, they start to actually go dormant, and they’ll just sort of like hunker down in the sediment. RUDIN: Our winters are getting warmer. And scientists think that, because of climate change, the temperatures in Narragansett Bay could become more like the Chesapeake – and the blue crab population could really take off. AYRES-BROWN: So blue crabs are one of these examples of species that could expand in the Northeast because of warmer temperatures. But I imagine this isn’t just affecting blue crabs, right ? I’ve also heard about lobster and winter flounder becoming more rare here. RUDIN: Yep, and other historically more southern species are becoming more common, including scup, striper, sea robin, and dogfish. And the one people mentioned to me over and over as the poster child of the impact of climate change is black sea bass. There are these maps of the black sea bass biomass distribution over time. And you can see that the species used to be centered sort of off Virginia and the Carolinas. But over the last few decades, the center of the population has shifted north, towards New England. AYRES-BROWN: So what does this mean for our region? Are Rhode Island fishermen already seeing this change, in terms of what they’re catching ?
But that could be changing. I talked to Katie Rodrigue, a DEM biologist, about this.
RUDIN: Yeah, they are. I talked to Fred Mattera, a long-time fisherman who now leads the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island. And with black sea bass especially, he said the population has just exploded.
RODRIGUE: So one of the factors that sort of
MATTERA: They’re everywhere. And they’re all sizes,
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you know, from little babies, to some things that weigh four or five pounds. They’re big, mature females and males. Everybody catches them. Pot fishermen catch ‘em. Lobstermen catch ‘em. Gill netters, trawlers… you know, everybody’s catching them because they’re so prolific. AYRES-BROWN: It sounds like that could be a good thing for fishermen here. RUDIN: Yeah. The thing is, Fred says reg ulators have been slow to shift quotas to keep up with this change. MATTERA: It’s so slow, so slow, it’s ridiculous. As fishermen we live in real time, you know. I go last night and I’m fishing out there today, and I’m seeing all these sea bass. And the key here is we need to start to change the quotas. We got to increase the quotas. RUDIN: Rhode Island’s quota for black sea bass was increased slightly. But it takes time for scientists to measure these population shifts and analyze that data. And then the process for splitting quota among the states is political, and Rhode Island doesn’t have a seat on one of the councils that makes that decision. So as species like black sea bass shift north, more of them may move out of their traditional range – which is where some of these regulatory decisions get made – into more northern waters. AYRES-BROWN: Okay so even if the fish are moving , there are these human systems – like how we catch fish, how we set quotas, how we package and market and sell the fish – that need to adapt, too. Are people tr ying to get ahead of these changes ? RUDIN: Yeah. Blue crabs are one example of that. So just this year, Rhode Island DEM Hey Rhody DINING MAY 2022 |
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