‘‘We thought we had more time’’
The changes in the ocean are so stark they have been noticed outside scientific circles.
In the hills above Blenheim, between the wineries and pine plantations, trucks rumbled through January along the narrow road. They would make the journey 160 times over, through the hot summer months, winding from the coast to the hill and back again. Their cargo was tonnes upon tonnes of fish: king or “chinook” salmon, the most expensive variety of the salmon family, prized enough that a single large fish can sell for up to $1,700.
Usually, it would be sliced into sashimi, or smoked and laid atop hors d’oeuvres. Instead, it lay rotting in the truckbeds, more than 1,300 tonnes of it, carried to be dumped in a pit in the hills.
In Marlborough’s fish farms last year, the fish had died in their thousands, unable to survive the rising temperatures around them. In warmer areas, about 42% of total fish stock died. The country’s largest salmon producer, NZ King Salmon, announced it would have to shut down some of its farms as the climate heated waters around the sounds.
“When I joined this company, I never heard of the term ‘marine heatwave’,” said CEO Grant Rosewarne, as the company reckoned with the losses. “Recently, there’s been three of them.
“We thought we had more time,” he said. “Climate change is a slow process. But faster than many people think.”
New Zealand’s seafood industry plays a key role in the economy, contributing around $2bn in export earnings and employing more than 13,000 people. As sea temperatures warm, they are wreaking havoc with some of the most profitable sections of that industry.
“There’s been definitely changes with marine fisheries – with a lot more warmer water fish being caught further south,” Langlands says. “I really do feel fear. And feel for the price of seafood in New Zealand.”
“It’s a terrifying thing, if they keep coming,” says Rachel Brooking, New Zealand’s minister for oceans and fisheries. “We do need to take it very seriously.”
As the climate continues to heat, Niwa projects that the average number of days of marine heatwave a year could double by the end of the century.
Some sense of what changes lie ahead for New Zealand can be found in its recent past. Five years earlier, Constantine remembers, a group of scientists had sat bobbing in a boat off the wild coast of the South Taranaki bight. They were there to see a group of pygmy blue whales, which had been visiting these waters for centuries. In the summer months, pods liked to linger at upwellings where cool water from the deep flows up to mix with warm water near the surface, creating a rich zone of zooplankton. The researchers scanned the horizon for the broad, dark shapes of their backs as they cut through the water, the long, high channels of mist that come when they exhale. That year, though, the waters were still. Looking out at the wide, empty ocean, the scientists realised the whales were gone.
“It was like, where are they?” says Constantine. But as the hot blob of 2018 had moved down New Zealand’s coast, the changes had sent the whales hundreds of kilometres south, in search of food and cooler waters, where the scientists eventually found them.
“In 2018, that really hit home for us,” she says: the heat was changing the way animals behaved and lived and hunted for food. Those who could move, like the whales, did. But those that were tied to a place could find themselves in trouble.
“This had been a place where blue whales had been coming to feed long before humans were even here,” Constantine says.
Before her, the Hauraki Gulf shimmers, the sun reflecting off the sea’s surface like a foil, obscuring the waters below.
Adblock test (Why?)