Scientists link oceanic shifts to ebbing of sea life

By Brian T. Meehan, Newhouse News Service Copyright 1998 The Plain Dealer August 2, 1998

   Scientists suspect a climate shift has changed the Pacific Ocean and damaged its rich marine ecosystem.

The problem cannot be blamed on El Nino, the notorious warming of equatorial waters that has eased since spring, the scientists say. There is growing evidence that a longer-term climate shift has rippled along the ocean's food chain like a poison wave.

"It is amazing how fast this is happening," says David Welch, head of marine research for Canada. "None of us fully understands what is going on and what the links are."

In a recent study, John A. McGowan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography documented a 20-year-long rise in Pacific Ocean temperatures. McGowan says the warmer temperatures have harmed a variety of sea creatures, from zooplankton to fur seals to sooty shearwaters, a gull-sized seabird that has declined by 90 percent off California.

Perhaps nowhere are the effects of a changing ocean more apparent than in Alaska, where Bering Sea salmon stocks suddenly are reeling. Recently, Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles sent his salmon cabinet to gauge the depth of the fishery collapse in western Alaska.

On the Yukon River, chinook salmon were smaller and fewer this season. The salmon averaged 18 pounds; their usual average is 25 pounds.

"The catch of Yukon River kings is 40 percent of previous years; it is the worst run since statehood," says Bob King, a spokesman for Knowles. "It is obvious this is tied to some climactic shift in the North Pacific. The effects are just too broad, too widespread."

Consider that elsewhere:

Brown pelicans failed to nest this winter in Baja California, Mexico.

Fewer Cassin's auklets returned this spring to the Farallon Islands in Northern California. The small seabirds were two months late in nesting, and chick production is poor. Pigeon guillemots, seabirds related to murres, did not nest at all on the Farallons, about 30 miles west of San Francisco.

Common murres, Oregon's most numerous seabird, abandoned colonies this spring for the third year in a row. Biologists blame the nesting failure on a lack of food.

British Columbia closed most of its world-famous steelhead trout and coho salmon fisheries because of dismal returns. Annual harvests of British Columbia salmon are a third of what they were in the late 1980s.

Scientists are just beginning to fathom that the ocean has limits. Changes in weather and ocean currents underlie shifts in ocean productivity. These climate changes reach beyond the powerful El Nino that dissipated this spring.

The shift is a 20- to 50-year cycle between cooling and warming trends in the North Pacific. In the early 1990s, Bob Francis, a University of Washington fisheries professor, and Steven Hare, a graduate student, first identified the shift by changes in the abundance of salmon.

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