Fish Fine with Frozen Bay

Fish are cool with frozen Bay and go see the slide show.

For much of February and into March, the Chesapeake Bay was covered with ice. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ four ice-breakers were in high demand, working in the Severn River, Tangier Sound, the Kent Narrows area and the mid-Bay areas around the Choptank River.

Commercial fishermen struggled. Tangier and Smith island were iced in for days. One waterman lost his boat trying to oyster in Rock Hall. Many watermen lost income in a year when it matters a lot - oysters are at $50 a bushel, nearly twice the price two years ago.

But one group that likely hasn’t struggled? The fish. Despite appearances to the contrary, the fish survive in these frigid waters. They’ve been doing it for centuries.

‘This is something that has happened in the past. They endure it. They can tolerate it,” said Harry Hornick, fisheries biologist with the Department of Natural Resources. “We have had years with a lot more ice. I honestly don’t think ice is hurting the fish.”

Hornick said that, when he and his staff sample nets in November, the fish thrive even in cold temperatures.

For the most part, the fish that stay in the Bay in winter are cold adapted fish, and survive temperatures down to freezing just fine if the water cools slowly, which it does most of the time. A quick drop in temperatures can harm even these fish, if they can't, or don't move to avoid it.  This is called "cold shock" and is well known.

Last winter, cold shock killed a large number of Speckled Trout down in Virginia and the Carolinas, and the speck fishing in the Bay this last summer suffered as a result.

The Bay also hosts a number of transient warm or tropical water fish in the warm months, Red Drum, Norfolk Spot, Atlantic Croaker, Blue Fish, who time their migrations to arrive in warmer water, and they too could be susceptible to unseasonable cold.

Climate Stability Threatens Florida Corals

An amusing case of alarmism in action from Watts Up With That.  A few days ago the USGS published a paper entitled: A Century of Ocean Warming on Florida Keys Coral Reefs: Historic In Situ Observations:

There is strong evidence that global climate change over the last several decades has caused shifts in species distributions, species extinctions, and alterations in the functioning of ecosystems. However, because of high variability on short (i.e., diurnal, seasonal, and annual) timescales as well as the recency of a comprehensive instrumental record, it is difficult to detect or provide evidence for long-term, site-specific trends in ocean temperature. Here we analyze five in situ datasets from Florida Keys coral reef habitats, including historic measurements taken by lighthouse keepers, to provide three independent lines of evidence supporting approximately 0.8 °C of warming in sea surface temperature (SST) over the last century. Results indicate that the warming observed in the records between 1878 and 2012 can be fully accounted for by the warming observed in recent decades (from 1975 to 2007), documented using in situ thermographs on a mid-shore patch reef. The magnitude of warming revealed here is similar to that found in other SST datasets from the region and to that observed in global mean surface temperature. The geologic context and significance of recent ocean warming to coral growth and population dynamics are discussed, as is the future prognosis for the Florida reef tract.

In  "Data Reveal Florida Keys Sea Surface Temperatures Haven’t Warmed in 80+ Years*", Bob Tisdale, a frequent author on global lack of warming and sea surface temperatures destroys their primary result, that temperatures have risen over the "several decade" interval. As with most of his posts, it's data packed and dense, but the best illustration is:

Using carefully cherry-picked data sets, (lighthouse keepers, really?) the USGS had hoped to continue the campaign to convince the public that global warming was already doing all kinds of harm and requires massive government intervention to fix a problem that is, simply put, not happening.