Fish & Fisheries

"Maine’s long-shuttered shrimp fishing business has a chance to reopen in the coming winter, but the warming of the ocean threatens to keep the industry shut down."

"This summer's low-oxygen dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico along the Louisiana coast covered 6,334 square miles - 10 times the size of Lake Pontchartrain and well above the average size for the past five years, researchers said Tuesday."

"Nauru, which sponsors a company to mine the seabed for minerals in ungoverned waters, has triggered a rule with the International Seabed Authority that requires it to allow seabed mining in two years, regardless of whether regulations have been written."

"With the era of building big dams over in the U.S., a growing number of existing dams are being modified to produce hydropower. These projects, advocates say, avoid the damaging impacts of new dams and could generate enough renewable electricity for several million homes."

"The Dawn Marie is rising and falling in the gray swells, one of a hundred boats crowded together in search of striped bass — sometimes called America’s fish — on the Chesapeake Bay."

"Baby salmon are dying by the thousands in one California river, and an entire run of endangered salmon could be wiped out in another. Fishermen who make their living off adult salmon, once they enter the Pacific Ocean, are sounding the alarm as blistering heat waves and extended drought in the U.S. West raise water temperatures and imperil fish from Idaho to California."

"After decades of lobbying and legal action from environmental groups, the federal government has proposed protecting more than 500 miles of river habitat for the Pearl River’s namesake fish, the Pearl darter."

"Few places in the world rival Montana’s fly fishing, and the state’s cold, clear mountain streams are renowned for their large populations of trout, especially the rainbow and brown. But this is a drought year, and a confluence of extreme conditions now threatens the state’s legendary waters."

"Maine is home to the last wild Atlantic salmon populations in the U.S., but a new push to protect the fish at the state level is unlikely to land them on the endangered list."