By Andrew S. Lewis. Yale Environment 360. January 21, 2025.
Dolphins prey on migrating sardines off the coast of South Africa. As waters warm, sardines are delaying their winter migration. Photo Credit: David Salvatori / VWPics via AP Images
In the sea as on land, climate change is driving shifts in the abundance and distribution of species. Scientists are just beginning to focus on why some fish predators and prey — like striped bass and menhaden on the U.S. East Coast — are changing their behavior as waters warm.
For decades on the U.S. Mid-Atlantic coast, recreational anglers have braved the cold temperatures of late October and November to chase one of the region’s most iconic fish species, the striped bass. This season, just offshore of New Jersey and New York, the fall run was especially strong. “The amount of fish and [their size] was really, really high,” said Lou Van Bergen, a captain of Miss Barnegat Light, a 90-foot party boat out of Barnegat Light, New Jersey. “Every week, all the way through Thanksgiving, you could go out and catch nicer-sized fish.”
From the looks of the boat’s deck this fall, it would have been easy to assume that striped bass, once overfished to dangerously low numbers on the East Coast, had completed a remarkable comeback. Except that in the nearby Chesapeake Bay and in the Hudson River, where the fish return each spring to spawn, the hatching and maturation of juveniles “has been abysmal,” said John Waldman, an aquatic conservation biologist at the City University of New York. Waldman, an avid fisherman himself, called the low levels of striped bass recruitment, or spawning success, in these historically fertile estuaries “a real mystery.”
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As Oceans Warm, Predators Are Falling Out of Sync with Their Prey. By Andrew S. Lewis