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The waters off the New England coast are warmer because of climate change. That has brought in new fish and the potential for new opportunities for fishermen. But climate change is happening so fast that fishermen and regulators are falling behind. WBUR's Barbara Moran has more.
BARBARA MORAN, BYLINE: The fishing boat Paladin is off the coast of Nantucket. And on the deck, the flounder are flopping.
(SOUNDBITE OF FISH FLOPPING)
MORAN: Fisherman Bill Amaru casts a line off the side, reels in another one and shows it off.
BILL AMARU: Yeah, that's a nice fish.
MORAN: Yeah. How big is that?
AMARU: I'd say, it'll just be your borderline large, probably about two pounds.
MORAN: Amaru has worked as a commercial fisherman for more than 50 years. And this part of the Atlantic Ocean is a lot warmer than when he started out. Sometimes, even fish from the tropics show up, like tarpon or sailfish.
AMARU: Nothing is weird anymore out here. Tropical is getting to be fairly common, but I think what we're losing is way, way in excess of what we're gaining.
MORAN: What scientists say New England is losing are iconic species like cod and lobster. They've shifted north or moved to deeper parts of the ocean in search of colder water.
JON HARE: What surprised me the most was the magnitude of the changes.
MORAN: Jon Hare directs the Northeast Fisheries Science Center at NOAA. He says higher temperatures are not the only change in New England waters.
HARE: As carbon dioxide increase (ph) in the atmosphere and then it dissolves into the ocean, and that makes the ocean more acidic. And there's also changes in ocean circulation, which are becoming more pronounced as climate change continues.
MORAN: Most of these changes are harming New England fisheries. Habitats are changing, invasive pests like green crabs are arriving, and many valuable fish species are in decline. But it's not all bad news - take black sea bass. It's a fish people want to eat, and it's expanding into New England waters. But most of the quotas and permits to catch black sea bass are reserved for fishermen in the Mid-Atlantic.
CATE O'KEEFE: What that means for us, and not having any management authority over it, is that we don't have opportunities to harvest it.
MORAN: Cate O'Keefe leads the New England Fishery Management Council, which recommends catch limits, quotas and other management measures to NOAA. She says fishermen need to be able to land the new fish that are coming in.
O'KEEFE: It's a very high priority for us right now. 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.
MORAN: That means helping fisheries meet the challenges of climate change. To do that, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars through the country's first major climate law. So far, President Donald Trump has not frozen those dollars for fisheries. O'Keefe says the impacts of climate change are too important to ignore. Time, she says, is running out.
O'KEEFE: My biggest worry is losing the industry. We can't wait a decade 'cause there won't be New England fishing industries left anymore.
MORAN: The fishing industry in Massachusetts, for example, generates nearly $22 billion a year and employs hundreds of thousands of people, including Bill Amaru.
(SOUNDBITE OF COOLER SLIDING)
MORAN: Back at the dock, Amaru and his crew load coolers of fish into the bed of a pickup truck, then take them to be weighed.
AMARU: So that adds up to, yeah, 170 pounds.
MORAN: OK. And is that good?
AMARU: That's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. How about we put it that way?
MORAN: All joking aside, for Amaru, the stakes are personal. His son and grandson are both full-time commercial fishermen. Amaru worries about their future.
AMARU: The more that we disrupt the climate, it's making it very difficult to make a living on the traditional stock. They - the fish just are not here anymore like they were back then.
MORAN: The question is whether the industry can adapt to the new fish coming in. Amaru is betting that it can. He just invested in a rare permit and a new set of traps designed to catch black sea bass.
For NPR News, I'm Barbara Moran in Boston. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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