Out of plaice: popular UK fish at risk from rising temperatures

Some of the UK’s most popular fish may be driven from the North Sea, and the UK’s dinner plates, by rising temperatures, scientists warned on Monday.
Fishmonger favourites plaice, lemon sole and haddock are being pushed out of their traditional feeding grounds by rapidly warming sea temperatures. The waters of the North Sea have warmed by 1.3C in the past 30 years, four times faster than the global average. Since the 1980s landings of cold-adapted species have halved.
Flatfish, such as plaice and sole, live on the shallow, muddy bottom of the southern North Sea. As the sea warms some species are being driven further north. But the rockier, deeper seas to the north are unsuitable habitat for these bottom feeders. With North Sea temperatures set to increase another 1.8C in the next half century, a team of scientists from Exeter University believes the fishing industry for these species is likely to collapse.

“For flatfish there’s really not anywhere to go. They’re kind of squeezed off the edge of a cliff,” said study author Dr Steve Simpson who is a senior lecturer in marine biology. “In terms of being commercially viable, I doubt these fisheries can continue for much longer.”
For haddock, the North Sea is already its southern limit. Their fishery, and much of the UK’s supply, is increasingly coming from Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic waters.
The study assessed future distributions of 10 common North Sea fish species and predicted a general trend of decline. By including habitat requirements into its modelling, the new research confounds previous assertions that fish species will simply be able to shift northwards as the oceans warm.
Dr Peter Richardson, biodiversity programme manager at the UK’s Marine Conservation Society, said the study “rightly questions the assumption that species can simply head polewards as waters warm” and called for stronger catch limits to ensure the North Sea’s native species remained sustainable for as long as possible.
“Our fisheries are worth billions, providing an important and healthy source of protein, yet European governments (including the UK) consistently fail to follow scientific advice and set total allowable catches over and above the sustainable limits advised by their fisheries experts. We cannot continue to be so cavalier with such a valuable resource and expect it to be resilient to the impacts of climate change,” he said.
The Exeter team has previously found that sardine, anchovy, squid and cuttlefish are likely to become staples of the UK fishing industry.
Simpson said their study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, had confirmed the changing ecology of the North Sea.
“We will see a real changing of the guard in the next few decades. Our models predict cold water species will be squeezed out, with warmer water fish likely to take their place. For sustainable UK fisheries, we need to move on from haddock and chips and look to southern Europe for our gastronomic inspiration,” he said.
Separate research released last week found cod increased dramatically in recent years. Cod is an apex predator and a heavily-fished species. These interactions confounded modelling, said Simpson, and the study could not predict its future under a warming climate.
Angus Garrett from seafood industry body Seafish said the new research was valuable, but the future for many fisheries remained uncertain.
“Temperature change is clearly influencing fisheries and ought to be considered in fisheries management. How temperature is considered and the modelling of impacts is likely to be a continuing debate but we welcome this contribution to the evidence base,” he said.

WA shark policy allowing killing of great whites will not be reviewed

The Environmental Protection Authority will not review Western Australia’s policy of using drumlines to catch sharks that pose a “serious threat” because it is unlikely to have a significant effect on the environment, the authority’s chairman has said.
WA Greens MP Lynn MacLaren referred the policy to the EPA in January.
It grants fisheries officers an exemption to kill great white sharks, which are protected under federal laws, in the event of a shark attack or when a “high hazard” shark is reported to have a continuous presence near a popular beach.
The definition of a high hazard shark incident was broadened last year when the “imminent threat” policy, introduced in 2012, was rebadged as a “serious threat”.
Conservationists said the new policy could potentially kill more great white sharks than the now-defunct shark cull, which caught 172 sharks before the EPA declared it environmentally unacceptable and it was dumped.
But EPA chairman Paul Vogel disagreed, saying the policy was “a discrete and different proposal” to the shark cull, under which drumlines would have been strung across beaches along WA’s south-west coast every summer for three years.

Vogel told Guardian Australia MacLaren’s referral was not valid because the serious threat policy did not qualify as a “significant proposal” under the Environmental Protection Act.
Under the Act “significant” referred to environmental impact, not “the level of community or other interest”, Vogel said.
He said the policy was “not considered significant”, in part because it had been invoked to authorise the use of drumlines only 11 times in the past two years.
It has killed sharks only once, when drumlines deployed after Bunbury surfer Sean Pollard was attacked in Esperance in October resulted in the death of two juvenile great whites.
“The EPA also noted that deployment of capture gear in accordance with the policy has been undertaken for a limited duration; and further, its implementation is responsive and temporary in nature,” Vogel said.
“Therefore, based on the existing level of impact and implementation under both the 2012 guidelines and the 2014 guidelines … the EPA considers the policy, implemented in accordance with the 2014 guidelines, is unlikely to have a significant effect on the environment.”
MacLaren’s office received the response, dated 23 March, on Thursday, more than 60 days after submitting the referral. The process was paused for 10 days while the WA Department of Premier and Cabinet provided the EPA with more information.
MacLaren said she disagreed with the rejection and would seek a meeting with Vogel.
“I’m no more confident, in spite of this two-page letter, about the environmental impact of this policy or whether the EPA has assessed it,” she said.
“The new policy, I would have thought, would suffer the same rejection by the federal authorities that the previous one did.”
MacLaren said it was concerning that the EPA had sought information only from the department, rather than any scientific sources, in determining the impact of the proposal. She also questioned why her referral was not opened up for the usual seven-day public comment period.
She said there were significant differences between the 2012 policy and the 2014 policy and it was not appropriate to assess the impact of the latter based on the implementation of the former.
One change was that the 2014 policy removed a clause that specifically recommended against the destruction of scientifically tagged sharks.
That clause was used in December, when the WA government authorised the culling of a tagged great white shark at Warnbro Sound, about an hour south of Perth, after it was repeatedly detected on acoustic receivers in the area. The government denied it had targeted the tagged shark.
Both the shark cull and the imminent threat policy were introduced as a public safety measure in response to a spike in shark attacks. There have been 14 fatal shark attacks in WA waters since 2000.
The serious threat policy has not been invoked since 31 December, when drumlines were deployed for three days following a fatal shark attack near Albany.
Natalie Banks, from No Shark Cull WA, said it was disappointing that the EPA had rejected the referral and urged WA to follow the lead of re-elected NSW premier Mike Baird, who has promised to investigate non-lethal shark hazard mitigation methods.
“It is a shame that we can’t get the same forward-thinking vision in Western Australia,” Banks said. “We clearly need non-lethal alternatives before we wipe out the white sharks completely.”
Vogel said the EPA was investigating “non-lethal alternatives”.