Derrick Z. Jackson
A big climate warning from one of the Gulf of Maine’s smallest marine creatures
All of New England could issue new specialty plates featuring creatures threatened by the speed climate change is slamming the gulf: a critically endangered right whale, a cute puffin, or a vanishing cod.
For all the escalating climate-related threats to iconic and commercially valuable marine life in the Gulf of Maine, though, scientists say there is one creature we should especially keep our eye on—a barely visible creature that helps those whales, puffins and cod survive: the zooplankton Calanus finmarchicus.
Often likened to a grain of rice, this “copepod”—or microscopic crustacean—is the keystone of the sub-polar food web that makes the Gulf of Maine one of Earth’s richest marine ecosystems. By munching on phytoplankton and microzooplankton invisible to the naked eye, Calanus pack themselves so densely with fatty acids that researchers call them “butterballs” of the sea. Species that directly eat Calanus at some point in their lives include herring, mackerel, cod, basking sharks, haddock, redfish, sand lance, shrimp, lobster and right whales. The tiny crustaceans fuel the vast North Atlantic food web, where bigger fish forage on smaller fish until the bigger fish end up in the bellies of seabirds, seals, tuna, other flesh-eating sharks and whales—or on our dinner plates.
Bigelow Laboratory zooplankton biologist David Fields has said that the ideal timing of the Calanus finmarchicus life cycle for fish larvae in the spring and whales in the late summer is one of the top examples of why the Gulf of Maine “is beautifully intertwined and synchronous. It is what has made the ecosystem so productive.”
That very synchronicity, Fields said, also makes Calanus highly vulnerable to the gulf’s warming. It makes these tiny creatures a giant symbol of climate change. These metaphoric grains of rice in the ocean are now, like grains in an hourglass, slowly draining away.
Dramatic declines
The Gulf of Maine already marks the southern end of the range for Calanus finmarchicus on this side of the Atlantic. With record warmth in recent years, the species is in a decline that correlates with right whales bypassing the gulf in search of food hundreds of miles to the north in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There are also early correlations with a decline in baby lobsters. While scientists are often careful to say that correlations do not necessarily mean causation, the decline of Calanus populations coincides with current and projected declines for many fish populations in the gulf.
Last summer, a major summary paper on expected climate-driven changes to the Gulf of Maine by 2050 estimated that current global warming projections mean that populations of lobster, cod, haddock, pollock, herring, northern shrimp, Acadian redfish, and red hake will all be diminished further than they already are. That finding adds to a 2016 assessment by two dozen scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which found that more than half of more than 80 fish species on the Northeast US Continental Shelf have a high or very high probability of distribution shifts due to climate change.
This is despite valiant federal and state efforts to rebuild the stocks of several of those species, including haddock and redfish. Some of those shifts mean that as some species shrivel in prominence in the Gulf of Maine, other species historically more plentiful in the mid-Atlantic, such as longfin squid, butterfish and black sea bass, will likely be more present. Major effects are already being felt in New England’s fishing communities.
Core populations of lobster have moved northward more than 100 miles over the last half century, giving Maine a momentary boom while lobstering has crashed in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island Sound. Last year was the most valuable in the history of Maine’s lobster industry, with 108 million pounds of crustaceans bringing in $725 million in value. But lobsters are moving so fast toward Canada that there are signs that Maine has already peaked in volume.
The 2021 catch was the third straight of about 100 million pounds, still down from the record range of 123 million pounds to 133 million-pounds from 2012 to 2016. Maine’s commissioner of natural resources, Patrick Keliher, said in a press release, “Last year was one for the books and it should be celebrated. But there are many challenges ahead.”
Compound impacts
An adult tern and its chick lie dead on Eastern Egg Rock, Maine, possibly due to overexertion for the adult from trying to find food for the starving chick. (Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson)
The bedeviling thing about the shifts, according to Andy Pershing, director of climate science at Climate Central, and one of the authors of the 2050 summary paper, is that warming is unleashing “compound events” that can spur species’ declines. As a human parallel, Pershing cited Hurricane Ida’s landfall last year in New Orleans. He noted that while some people died during the actual hurricane, far more succumbed to the heat wave that followed because of a lack of power and air conditioning.
In the oceans, the climate-driven warming temperatures set catastrophe in motion. One example is Maine’s northern shrimp, which was a sweet, crawfish-sized regional winter delight. The shrimp fishery has been closed since a crash of the species following the hottest waters on record in 2012. A study last year found that the crash was not directly due to the heat. It was more likely that shrimp were gobbled up by longfin squid attracted by the warmer waters. The study’s authors said their findings “provide further evidence that changing species interactions will have major impacts as ecosystems face disruptions due to climate change.”
Catastrophic effects on seabirds
Last summer, I personally saw how “compound events” create chaos for seabirds at one end of the Calanus food web. I spent several nights on three islands managed by National Audubon’s Seabird Institute and the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge. I had visited there many times since 1986, but had never previously seen so many carcasses of tern and puffin chicks strewn across the landscape. Nor had I experienced what I realized was a funereal quietude from the absence of terns screeching to help protect their chicks.
The die-off was the result of a relentless double whammy of heat waves and record rain events. Some chicks starved because the heat drove traditional puffin and tern prey—such as haddock, hake and herring—too far away or too deep for parents to catch. Others died of hypothermia because they could never dry out from the rain. Steve Kress, the retired founder of the 49-year-old Project Puffin, told me that Eastern Egg Rock, the first island he repopulated with that bird, endured 54 days of rain events. The prior record was 32.
Islands throughout New England reported record chick failures of puffins and various species of terns. Many puffin chicks that survived the onslaught were so underweight and undersized that researchers called them “micro puffins.” On Eastern Egg Rock, research assistants led to me to a spot where an adult tern and its chick appeared to die next to each other. They speculated that the chick died of hunger while the adult died in the vain effort to find enough food. “You hear of humans dying of heartbreak,” research assistant Jasmine Eason told me. “This looked like it.”
I heard heartbreak too from seabird researchers like I have never heard it. Longtime Canadian ecologist and seabird expert Tony Diamond, commenting on what he’s seen on Machias Seal Island, the island in the gulf with the most puffins, said, “Sometimes I’m shocked by the meals the birds are bringing in compared to what we used to see. Thirty years ago, it was big, fat juvenile herring. Today, so many times, they’re bringing in tiny little fish in their beaks. It’s not nearly enough to sustain them if this keeps up.”
Fellow Canadian researcher Heather Major, Project Puffin ecologist Keenan Yakola, and Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) scientist Kathy Mills all worry about how the warming creates “mismatches” in when prey bloom and spawn and when predators come and go. The timing is crucial for migratory animals. Puffins, for instance, come to Maine’s islands for only about four months of late spring and mid-summer to breed. Right whales fatten up in New England and Canada for their winter calving waters off the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
“A species like the Arctic tern will leave for South America in the fall, but its survival the next year and the survival of its chicks may depend on everything that’s happening in Maine while it is away,” Yakola said.
Record heat
What a tern, whale or puffin will return to after their winter migrations depends increasingly on whether humans act to curb the warming. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) recently announced that last fall was the warmest on record in the gulf. Average sea surface temperatures in early October that used to hover around 60 degrees Fahrenheit were nearly five degrees warmer. Even in November, a month where temperatures historically descended into the high 40s, they stayed in the low 50s.
The data shows that sea surface temperatures last summer were the second warmest ever recorded in the gulf, four degrees Fahrenheit higher than the historical average. The six warmest summers ever recorded for sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have all been logged since 2010. In 2020, the gulf hit a single-day sea-surface record temperature of nearly 70 degrees. The primary reason is that the warm Gulf Stream is expanding its presence as cold currents coming down from Labrador are losing their power.
“We’re getting to levels that are really exceptional,” Mills said. “We’re already running ahead of climate models. There’s always going to be some year-to-year variability, but the warming has become a persistent pattern where variability doesn’t get us back to ‘normal,’” she added.
For cold-water sea animals, such a four-to-six-degree difference in sea temperatures is akin to stepping out of an air-conditioned home into punishing Arizona summer heat. The big question is can humans keep nature’s “air conditioner” running in New England.
Don Lyons, director of conservation at National Audubon’s Seabird Institute, home of Project Puffin, said he remains hopeful that the Gulf of Maine can inspire action on climate change because there’s been so much investment in preserving so many species of animals and so much habitat. These waters are concentrated with historic conservation victories, from the restoration of puffins to the rebounding of fish stocks, and from the 1972 creation of the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge to the 2016 creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument.
So far, the overall investment and vigilance in preserving the gifts of the gulf continues to pay dividends. Over the last decade, there have been enough cooler summers interspersed with the record heat to keep puffin populations at record levels, with at least one bird being 32 years old. Some cousins of the puffin, razorbills and murres, are increasing their population. “We’re not going to avoid all impacts,” Lyons said. “But I think it’s possible for us to bend the curve.”
Bending the curve of course ultimately means curbing the fossil fuels driving the heat-trapping gases of climate change. It means that we cannot just “ooh and ahh” at whales and puffins; we need to look out for the health of creatures like Calanus finmarchicus. In the paper on the gulf at 2050, Pershing, Mills, Diamond and 10 other co-authors said this zooplankton is the “signature invertebrate animal of the North Atlantic subpolar ecosystem.”
Without it, there’s no telling how many more whales we will see blowing at the surface, how many puffin will be bringing fat juvenile haddock for their chicks, or whether there will be a fat Maine lobster on your plate. It was only in 2016 that a campaign by schoolchildren resulted in officially designating the lobster as the state crustacean of Maine. Perhaps now there should be a campaign to make to Calanus finmarchicus the official plankton of New England, before they—and the lobsters they help sustain—are gone.
This originally published at the Union of Concerned Scientists blog and is republished here with permission.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a UCS Fellow in climate and energy and the Center for Science and Democracy. Formerly of the Boston Globe and Newsday, Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a 10-time award winner from the National Association of Black Journalists, a 2-time winner from the Education Writers Association, a commentary winner from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and co-winner of Columbia University's Meyer Berger Award. He's also a board member at Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of The Daily Climate.
Banner photo: In a sign of a conservation victory, here a healthy, banded puffin in Maine returns to its young with a plentiful haddock catch. Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson
Facing uncertain future, puffins adapt to survive climate change
"I wonder if the puffins can feel the change," said crew supervisor Sarah Guitart, 29, a marine science Boston University graduate of Boston University. "How long will they adapt? Will they adapt or die?"
These puffins got more than enough fish in the 46th year of Project Puffin, the world's first successful restoration of a seabird to an island where human activities eliminated it. Puffins had not bred on Egg Rock for nearly 100 years after being killed for their meat and eggs by people living and fishing along the coast. Puffins were down to their last pair or two in the entire state of Maine in the early 1900s.
This summer ended with 188 breeding pairs of puffins on Egg Rock, surpassing last year's record of 178. One day, the count of breeding and nonbreeding birds hit a record 407.
"The first puffins I saw this summer, I almost cried," Nadia Swanson, 22, a wildlife ecology graduate of the University of Wisconsin said. "Then to have the chance to be out here all summer with them flying all around me, especially after having just graduated from college, I just wish everyone could feel that joy."
Puffin gathering food for chicks on Eastern Egg Rock, Maine – July 2019. (Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson)
There are now 1,300 breeding pairs of puffins on several islands in Maine. They are a significant source of revenue in the state's $6.2 billion tourist economy, with 9,200 wildlife watchers circling Egg Rock on Audubon-narrarated cruises last summer.
Some politicians now understand the value of the bird. In the first visit ever to Egg Rock by a member of Congress, Maine Democrat Chellie Pingree told the Bangor Daily News in July, "There's there's an awful lot we can learn from what [seabirds] are eating and what these [researchers] are observing."
Researchers have learned a lot since 1981, when Steve Kress, the founder of National Audubon's Project Puffin, saw the first breeding puffins return to Eastern Egg Rock with fish in their mouths for chicks.
That was the culmination of eight years of bringing chicks to the island from Newfoundland, which is hundreds of miles away. Kress and colleagues banded them and raised them in makeshift burrows until they fledged into the Atlantic Ocean.
Skeptics thought the chicks would go back to Newfoundland when their breeding instincts kicked in two or three years later. But they chose Maine. To fool birds reared on Egg Rock that the island was their home, Kress planted puffin decoys and mirrors around the island. Such techniques have since been used to preserve 65 species of seabirds in 17 nations.
As co-author and photographer with Kress on our 2015 book "Project Puffin," I spent four days on the island in July, seeing puffins bring plump young haddock and hake fish out of the deep for their chicks. These species of fish have rebounded into abundance in New England with strict fishing limits. There were even occasional herring, which are currently under strict federal limits because of overfishing.
When the puffins took breaks from fishing, they sometimes loafed on boulders in clumps scores thick, waddling around each other in a kaleidoscope of orange, yellow, black and white.
For me, this symbolized their resilience, for it belied the fact that the last decade has been the most volatile in the project's history. These particular puffins reside in the Gulf of Maine, where its waters are warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.
In cooler periods, such as from 1997 to 2011, the number of breeding puffins on Egg Rock grew steadily upward from 20 pairs to a then-record 123 pairs.
Puffin carrying fish to chicks. Eastern Egg Rock, Maine; July 2019. (Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson)
Then in 2012, the ugly face of climate change reared its head as summer sea-surface temperatures set an all-time record by approaching 70º degrees Fahrenheit, nearly 4 degrees higher than normal.
To most humans, water in the high 60s is still bone-chilling. But in an analogy I came up with last year for The American Prospect magazine after consulting with ocean scientists, 4 degrees warmer for a cold-water fish is like wearing a parka on Miami Beach.
The result was a scary window into a future of unbridled warming.
Unable to shed their "parkas," the hake, haddock and herring either fled to far out to sea or too deep for puffins to catch.
A lot of what the fish puffins did catch was the wrong shape. Chicks need elongated fish to slurp down. Warm years increases the presence of butterfish, a species more predominant along the mid-Atlantic coast. Butterfish are too oval and wide for young chicks to swallow.
For the first time in a quarter century, the number of breeding pairs on Egg Rock dropped, from 123 pairs down to 104. Other puffin islands in the gulf were dramatically impacted. The number of breeding puffin pairs was more than halved on the national wildlife refuge of Petit Manan Island, from 104 pairs in 2009 to 47 pairs in 2013.
On Project Puffin's sister projects on Seal Island and Matinicus Rock, puffin parents fledged only 1 of every 10 chicks, compared to 4 out of every 5 in good years. The birds rebounded with cooler waters from 2014 to 2017. Then last year, Kress and his crews went through a summer they've never seen.
Author Derrick Jackson holding puffin chick.
The summer began with great promise with cool water and abundant puffin breeding. Then, temperatures spiked close to the 2012 boiling point in mid-July. Puffins stopped finding proper fish to feed chicks. Or they found plenty of the dreaded butterfish. Starvation set in, with researchers finding many dead puffin chicks.
The chicks that clung to life were in such poor condition that 2018 Egg Rock intern Kay Garlick-Ott told me for the American Prospect, "You can actually feel the lack of food in the bird. You expect your fingers to hit something like bones, but it was just a puffball. When I pulled it out of its burrow, I knew it wasn't right. It was so sad."
Given what happened in 2012, Project Puffin's crews steeled themselves for grim end-of-summer reports. When past years went bad, they stayed bad. But the waters cooled dramatically in mid-August. As suddenly as fish had disappeared, they reappeared. Puffins resumed feeding chicks that were still alive.
Mid-August is normally the time that chicks have fledged and adults have abandoned the islands for 8 months of migration. But in a frantic effort to make up for lost time, parents fed chicks three weeks longer than usual, some well into September.
Kress said the peaks and chasms of early-summer feast, mid-summer famine and late summer banquet symbolize the unpredictability humans keep throwing at birds like puffins. "The good news is that we saw remarkable adaptations and strategies under adversity," said Kress, 73. But how much more unpredictability can we subject puffins to?
In the 1980s, the diet of Egg Rock puffins was almost exclusively herring. No more with overfishing. Now come these wild temperature fluctuations as climate change drives many species of marine life northward and deeper. It is uncertain what suitable fish will come to Maine's puffins, which live at the absolute southernmost edge of their known range in North America.
Then add politics. Only five years ago, it was discovered that Maine's puffins spend the late winter feeding in waters 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod. Those waters happened to harbor pristine canyons and seamounts where whales, turtles, deep sea corals and other seabirds thrive.
President Obama designated the area a national monument in 2016. The wonders underneath are still being understood as scientists announced the discovery of two new corals this spring, even as warming water threatens their long-term survival.
But in an appeal scheduled to be heard in federal circuit court in October, fishermen are suing to have the designation reversed. They have a key ally in President Trump, who is threatening to gut the key protection undersea monuments offers, a ban on commercial fishing.
On top of that, the Trump administration this month unveiled its long-anticipated plans to weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA). A key provision would allow the government to disregard the effects of climate change in species protection and factor in the economic losses of protection to industry.
It is perhaps the worst possible time to take climate change out of the equation and allow industry a seat at the table when in so many cases, industrial activities pushed species to the brink of extinction. You hardly need a critically endangered creature to tell you why weakening the ESA is foolish.
Puffins will suffer on a national and international level. As Maine's Atlantic puffins deal with unprecedented fluctuations of temperature, the species is being battered in Europe by the multiple whammies of climate change, overfishing, pollution and invasive plants, and ground predators such as rats, mink and cats.
Listed in 2012 as a bird of Least Concern on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List (IUCN), the Atlantic puffin today is listed as Vulnerable. In the Pacific, the Tufted Puffin is undergoing a parallel struggle.
In 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to have that puffin species listed as endangered in California, Oregon, and Washington as its numbers had crashed from 30,000 to 4,000 over the last 30 years. That petition is under review as the agency found "substantial" evidence warranting action.
Eastern Egg Rock Research Crew L to R: Kathryn Devers, Nadia Swanson, Sarah Guitart, Angel Mendez, Michael Rickershauser. (Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson)
Similar action may ultimately be warranted necessary far to the north, as a team of scientists, including several from the very federal agencies Trump repeatedly attempts to cut science funding from − including Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration − reported this spring that a mass Tufted Puffin starvation and die-off two years ago in Alaska likely was triggered by warming waters forcing fish out of range.
The study said the die-off, one of many from 2014 to 2018, suggests "broad-scale ecosystem change," with total puffin mortality in the thousands and representing "a significant portion of Bering Sea colonies."
For most people taking a stroll on a beach, seabirds appear to be abundant. Science says this becoming a tragic illusion. Bird Life International says 28 percent of species are globally threatened, more than any other group of birds. A major study this past winter by researchers from France, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Canada found that competition with commercial fishing has slashed the world's seabird population by 70 percent since 1950.
And a new study published this month by researchers from the UK, US, and Argentina found that nearly half of the world's seabirds are threatened by either invasive species, fishing by catch, and climate change, and 20 percent are being hit by all three.
A top example is the endangered African Penguin. A bird that once numbering numbered 3 million to 4 million in the 1800s, is down to its last 25,000 pairs in South Africa and Namibia with overfishing, climate change dispersing the remaining fish, pollution, and habitat destruction.
As part of an effort to stave off extinction, researchers and the South African government are seeing some initial benefits of strict fishing bans near penguin habitat of their preferred prey, anchovies and sardines. Conservationists are also borrowing from Project Puffin by trying to lure penguins to new habitats with decoys.
The success of decoy efforts remains to be seen, but researcher Christina Hagen said, "We definitely fooled some of the tourists." What is for certain is that the fate of seabirds are heavily in the hands of humans.
Back on Egg Rock, Guitart said, "I don't know if we're doing much to fight climate change out here, but if the fish data is useful, we can say we played a small part."
Swanson added, "I really wish people could understand that we're already at the point that even if we take action now, our baseline, like the fish the puffins eat, is not going to return to what it was 30 and 40 years ago."
Derrick Z. Jackson is on the advisory board of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in climate and energy. This post originally ran on the UCS Blog and is republished here with permission.
