About 20 miles off the coast of Nantucket, Bill Amaru steers his fishing boat, Paladin, toward a school of summer flounder. Amaru cuts the motor, and crew members drop lines in the water.
For a minute, all is quiet.
Then the rods tug, the reels turn, and soon the deck is flopping with flounder.
Amaru hauls in a big one. “That’s a nice fish,” he says, tossing it into a cooler. “Probably about 2 pounds.”
Then he adds: “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.” The crew chuckles. Amaru smiles and casts his line back into the sea.
Self-deprecating dad jokes aside, Amaru knows these waters. He’s been a commercial fisherman for more than 50 years — no small feat in a tough industry. And his expert eye sees the ocean changing. The most obvious shift: The water is warming and attracting different species of fish.
“Nothing is weird anymore out here,” he said. “Tropical is getting to be fairly common.”
The shifting species could bring new opportunities for fishermen. But the changes are coming so fast, the industry is struggling to keep up. Scientists, regulators and fishermen are all scrambling to adjust to a new reality.
The New England seafood industry generates more than $20 billion in sales each year and employs more than a quarter million people.
It’s also embedded in the history and character of many coastal communities, and the fabric of many families. Amaru’s son and grandson are both full-time commercial fishermen. He worries about their futures.
Amaru has a lot of concerns about the industry: convoluted regulations, the potential impact of offshore wind development and a booming population of fish-eating seals.
But climate change tops his list.
“The more that we disrupt the climate, it’s making it very difficult to make a living on the traditional stocks,” he said. “The fish are just not here anymore."
When familiar fish flee or die
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most of the world’s oceans. As a result, iconic New England species like cod and lobster have shifted north or moved deeper into the ocean in search of colder water.
But temperature is not the only change. Melting glaciers are altering ocean currents, weather patterns are shifting, and carbon dioxide dissolving into the ocean is making the water more acidic.
All these factors affect different fish species in different ways, said Jon Hare, director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, the research arm of NOAA Fisheries.
“What surprised me the most was the magnitude of the changes,” Hare said.
Mostly, these changes have been bad for New England fisheries, with many habitats vulnerable or in decline and many fish populations shrinking.
“We had considered climate change as a large-scale, somewhat slow-moving process,” said Cate O’Keefe, executive director of the New England Fishery Management Council. But, “we’ve seen some things change very quickly.”
Herring is one of the populations undergoing rapid changes. The species is key to ocean ecosystems, serving as food for other fish and birds. Herring are also important to fishermen who use them as bait.
But herring, like many fish, face challenges in the changing ocean conditions. The most recent federal data suggested a precipitous population decline, though scientists have not yet been able to pinpoint an exact cause. To address the decline, fishery managers recently proposed reducing the herring catch by 89%.
Fishermen said the reduction would be devastating.
“Are you crazy?” asked fisherman Daniel Fill at a council meeting in Gloucester last fall. “That’s decimation [of] the whole herring fleet.”
Mary Beth Tooley, who works for the fishing company O’Hara Corporation in Rockland, Maine, said the outfit will mothball its two herring boats for 2025.
“The amount of fish that’s allocated is not enough to, quite frankly, pay your insurance to get away from the dock,” said Tooley, who coordinates government affairs for the company.
Like Amaru, Tooley said climate change tops the long list of challenges facing the fishing industry.
“The pace of change has been much faster than people had anticipated,” Tooley said. “And the pace of regulatory change is not fast.”
As a fishery manager, O’Keefe agrees regulators are struggling to keep pace with climate change. Managers, she said, have few tools to respond to sudden events like marine heat waves or die-offs.
One example: sea scallops, New England’s most valuable fishery. Scallops have had a number of die-offs in recent years, likely associated with warmer water.
So when surveyors spot an area with a surprisingly large number of baby scallops, it’s welcome news. Ideally, managers would place the area off-limits to fishing and allow the scallops to mature, said O’Keefe. But a quick pivot isn’t always an option.
Perhaps even more frustrating, fishery managers can’t always take advantage of climate shifts that could benefit the industry.
Black sea bass is a prime example. The commercially valuable fish have been expanding north into New England waters. But while the fish are moving, the regulations are stuck.
Since black sea bass were not historically abundant in New England, the fishery is managed by mid-Atlantic regulators. While some New England fishermen have permits to catch these fish, the lion’s share of the quotas and permits remain trapped in the mid-Atlantic.
“What that means for us, not having any management authority over it, is that we don’t have opportunities to harvest it,” said O’Keefe.
To adapt to climate change, she said the industry needs more options, like flexible permits, ways to react quickly to fish booms and die-offs, and the ability to land new fish that are coming in.
“It’s a very high priority for us right now,” O’Keefe said. “As we see some of our traditional stocks declining or shifting north to Canada, we want to be able to take opportunities of stocks that are shifting into our waters.”
Addressing these shifting populations will be difficult, said Amaru.
“You’re going to be taking something away from one region that may not want to give it up to another,” he said. “That’s a challenge that the fishery service, all the states as well as the federal government, is working to try to solve, but it isn’t easy.”
‘We can’t wait a decade’
Scientists and fishermen have a historically fraught relationship. That may be changing, at least somewhat, as both groups recognize the value of the other.
“There’s just a wealth of knowledge” in the fishing community, said Glen Gawarkiewicz, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Gawarkiewicz meets regularly with a group he affectionately calls the “squid squad” — a handful of scientists and squid fishermen trying to understand the dramatic changes they’re seeing in the ocean.
“Some of these fishing families go back multiple generations,” said Gawarkiewicz. He said their detailed logs and collective memory are a necessary complement to scientific data, as both groups try to understand “patterns that we haven’t seen before.”
Another cooperative program, called “eMOLT,” outfits New England fishing boats with devices that collect data on water temperature and oxygen levels. NOAA’s George Maynard, who runs the program, said it’s popular among fishermen who hope the data can lead to more accurate ocean models.
At the regulatory level, fishery manager O’Keefe is part of the East Coast Climate Coordination Group, which is working with other management councils to puzzle through thorny regulation issues. The group is also coordinating Inflation Reduction Act funding for programs intended to help regional fisheries meet the challenges of climate change.
The Biden administration poured hundreds of millions of dollars into NOAA Fisheries for climate change efforts. This includes $15 million for more effective permitting and $40 million for the Climate, Ecosystem, and Fisheries Initiative, to accelerate work linking NOAA’s climate science to its assessment of fish stocks.
It’s unclear how these initiatives will fare under President-elect Donald Trump. While some money from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has already been spent, other funds are supposed to roll out over the next few years. Trump has promised to rescind unspent funding, and he’s called global warming a “scam.”
Maynard, a Marine Resources Management Specialist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, said his group faced budget cuts before — including under the Biden administration — and found ways to keep the cooperative work moving forward. He expects the same will be true under the Trump administration.
“There’s always a little bit of a scramble to pull in the dollars to keep the lights on,” he said.
Fishery manager O’Keefe said she’s hoping to work with the Trump administration. She said the impacts of climate change are too important to ignore, and time is running out.
“My biggest worry is losing the industry,” she said. “We can’t wait a decade, because there won’t be New England fishing industries left anymore.”
This is the first of two stories on challenges facing the New England fishing industry. The final installment airs and publishes Thursday.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. This story is shared via the New England News Collaborative.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center's StoryReach U.S. Fellowship with reporting from Columbia University's Duy Linh Tu.
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