It’s been the summer of squid in New England, the Salem News reports: “Local fishermen and boaters are seeing a marked increase in long fin squid, a species normally more common south of Cape Cod.”
Actually, it’s the second summer of squid, according to Michael Armstrong of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. “Their abundance is through the roof,” Armstrong told the Salem News, with the increase in the “tenfold” range.
Like many species that have extended their range, the long fin squid are responding to warmer waters.
The squid live about a year and “grow like crazy,” Armstrong said, devouring small fish like herring. “They are massive predators.”
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On the West Coast, it was an increasingly acidic ocean that prompted a Seattle business to move southwest. The Seattle Times reported on the family owned Goose Point Oyster Co. business that raised oysters in Oregon which left the Northwest because the ocean had become “so lethal that slippery young Pacific oysters stopped growing.”
The paper characterized the Nisbet family as “the closest thing the world has seen to ocean-acidification refugees.” The Nisbets borrowed and spent $1 million to move half their production 3,000 miles away to Hawaii.
“I was afraid for everything we’d built,” Goose Point Oyster Co. founder Dave Nisbet said of the hatchery. “We had to do something. We had to figure this thing out, or we’d be out of business.”
Billions of oysters began dying in the Northwest in 2005, the paper reported.
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Another bit of climate change news: the Associated Press reported that the New Jersey Supreme Court “overturned a $375,000 jury award given to a couple who complained that a protective sand dune behind their house blocked their ocean views. In a ruling seen as a wider victory for towns that want to build barriers to protect themselves from catastrophic storms “¦ the high court ruled that those protective benefits should have been considered along with the loss of the ocean views. The sand dune in question saved the elderly couple’s home from destruction in Superstorm Sandy in October.”
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Meanwhile, in Chesapeake Bay, it’s a crab-eat-crab world, DelMarVa public radio reports. “There has been a 60 percent decline down to 300 million blue crabs in the bay. Last year the figure was 765 million—a 20 year high.”
Those close to the industry blame “crab cannibalism,” along with with “Maryland’s warmer, saltier waters [and] an increase in predators from the sea such as striped bass.”
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Islands are disappearing around the world as rising sea levels become a reality, not a theory. But in one city, an island is being created”¦ sort of. The Star-Telegram, which reports on the Fort Worth, Texas region, wrote about an idea that a local group is pushing that would redevelop an 800-acre property north of the city’s downtown and call it Panther Island. Fort Worth’s nickname is Panther City.
The Trinity River “would be rechanneled to make room for the development, and to reflect the uptown (read, high-toned) feel that developers hope the area will have when it’s finally rebuilt and repopulated,” the paper reports.
“Cougar Island” was rejected because it may have given prospective visitors the wrong idea.
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Residents of Saint John, New Brunswick may have been happy to wave goodbye to a cruise ship that departed the port in mid-September. Passengers aboard the ship the Aurora had complained of stomach ailments that medical experts believe was the effects of the norovirus. The gastro-intestinal illness is tied to”¦ well, lapses in bathroom hygiene.
A passenger from Gosport, England told the CBC what was going on aboard the ship: “They’re just taking ultra-precaution against a possible tummy bug,” said Bob Hodgson. “They’ve been ultra-precautious. Washing hands, especially after toileting.”
The virus was probably contracted, according to some passengers, when the ship was in port in New York. Saint John port officials planned to disinfect the terminal after the ship sailed.