CLIMATE NOW

Changing tides for fisheries: how adaptation can help keep seas bountiful in an uncertain future

As fish are starting to adapt to their changing habitats, what is the impact on the industry?

Melanie Brown has been fishing for sockeye salmon in Alaska’s Bristol Bay for the last 40 years. The world’s biggest run of wild sockeye salmon is here, with catches in the last year came in at around 60 million fish. But last year, during Alaska’s hottest summer on record, Melanie and fellow fishermen saw heat-exhausted salmon flowing lifeless downstream without spawning. “In three years or so, we will know how much impact that heat wave had on that generation of sockeye,” Brown says. 
 “The warmer temperatures last summer caused the salmon to wait and pool outside the river district where I fish to wait for cooler temperatures,” says Brown about the situation in Alaska. “When they couldn’t wait any longer, they surged into the river on the rising tide in the deep river channel where the water is cooler. When this happens, people with set net sites like me have fewer opportunities to catch salmon that would normally hug the shoreline,” Brown explains.

Across the world, fishermen and scientists are seeing fish stocks reacting to changes in their habitats, with climate change increasingly mentioned as a factor shaping new realities underwater. Knowing how much climate change is responsible for these realities remains challenging, but the discourse on adaptation is on the rise.

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