Warmer World Spells Trouble

It’s months away from when the main stock of striped bass will spawn in the headwaters of Chesapeake Bay, but already all the signs are pointing to there being little hope of a good spawning year.

As we’ve watched striped bass stocks build and decline over the last three decades, we’ve seen that the years when they have a good spawn all seem to have something in common: a cold winter and a wet spring.

There’s no telling what the spring will bring, but it’s pretty safe to say that this clearly will not be a cold winter in southern Maryland, where the stripers spawn. It has not snowed there yet this year, and even this week, when we got a good chill here, temps there were in the high 40s.

And the big cows are already heading upstream — the fishing around the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is outstanding right now.

If the Chesapeake striper spawn is a dud again this year, it will be the fifth year in the last eight of disastrously low recruitment to the population.

In the long run, the stock of stripers in the Chesapeake might be in real trouble if things don’t change climatologically.

They wouldn’t be alone.

Last week, I wrote for our news section about a study by Stony Brook University scientists published recently that shows that local waters have now warmed to the point that bay scallops are teetering on the edge of viability in our bays.

This week, I read a story in the Boston Globe about New Englanders lamenting that ponds have not frozen yet this year — which means no skating, no hockey, no ice fishing.

It’s been six years since I wrote a similar story about the East End’s ice boaters having essentially lost their favorite pastime because the local bays almost never freeze thick enough for them to sail across anymore — and they haven’t since I wrote the story.

Whatever you think about what is to blame, there is no denying that climate change is happening, and it’s happening more starkly in the Northeast United States almost faster than anywhere else — three times faster here than the global average.

Now, we may not have the melting glaciers and ice shelves that are going to eventually cause real global problems, but the changes we are seeing are starting to mess with a lot of things that we here on Long Island cherish.

For a lot of saltwater fish species, a warming climate might just mean their range will shift northward — witness: the thousands of cobia that moved into waters off Long Island last summer.

But for stripers, as with scallops, their ability to shift their range is limited by the need for suitable habitat to sustain them, and both rely on habitat that is increasingly scant the farther north along the Eastern Seaboard you go.

There are other places — the Hudson River, for one, and a river in Nova Scotia — where stripers are having much better spawning success in recent years than in the Chesapeake, which is wonderful news. But those systems will never be able to support striper stocks the size of the one that comes out of the sprawling Chesapeake system.

Scallops are sorta in the same boat. No other estuary has historically produced the number of bay scallops that the Peconic Bay system has historically, and there is not another shallow estuary even close to its size to our north until you get to downeast Maine.

Maybe striped bass and bay scallops will be able to adapt their biology or geography quickly enough to persevere and thrive again in new locales — only time will tell.

I don’t see any way that we’re going to “reverse” climate change fast enough to have an impact at the rate things are deteriorating for these species. We will have to adapt, like they will.

What we can do is accept that some of these species are now facing new “natural” hurdles that they haven’t in the past and adjust the other impacts we might have on them. We should start by killing fewer striped bass, across the board.

And buy electric pickup trucks.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.