Fisheries on the Move

Lead Investigator: Debra Murie, University of Florida, dmurie@ufl.edu

Natural Resource Manager: Daniel Luers, NOAA Southeast Regional Office, and John Froeschke, Gulf Council

Project Team: Zachary Siders, Edward Camp, Angela Collins, Robert Lamb (University of Florida)

Collaborators: Chelsey Crandall and Ted Switzer (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Fish and Wildlife Research Institute); Ryan Nichols (NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center)

Technical Monitors: TBD

Federal Program Officer/Point of Contact: Caitlin Young (caitlin.young@noaa.gov)

Award Amount: $3,499,949

Award Period: October 2025 – September 2030

Why it matters:

Studies across the globe have documented changes in the distribution of marine fishes related to changing ocean conditions, such as temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH (acidity). Many shifts in fish distributions are driven by their temperature tolerances or preferences because the vast majority of fish are cold-blooded, or ecotherms, and hence their body temperature and metabolism are regulated by water temperature. Thus, under warming water temperatures, fish species will tend to move to cooler waters to remain within their preferred temperature range. Similarly, when dissolved oxygen levels in the water become too low, fish will move toward waters with more oxygen. These changing ocean conditions can also impact the rate at which fish grow and therefore the age and size that they start reproducing and enter into the fisheries harvest. Although temperature is a primary driver for fish distributions, water quality, habitat availability, and interactions with other species may also limit their distribution. In the Gulf, in particular, the northern boundary physically limits the potential of fish species to move north with changing ocean conditions. These shifts in targeting, distribution, growth, and sexual maturity will pose challenges for fisheries management and have direct consequences for fishing communities.

What the team is doing:

The project team will estimate historical, current, and future long-term trends and variability in the targeting, distribution, growth, and sexual maturity of fish species in important recreational and commercial fisheries in relation to changing ocean conditions. The Florida west coast will serve as a latitudinal gradient due to the great diversity of fish species, localized stocks of focal fish groups, availability of complementary monitoring program datasets, and the largest number of recreational anglers in the USA. To understand changes in the fish species that fishers try to catch, the team will leverage existing NOAA and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission recreational and commercial fisheries data from over three decades. These data will also be used to model decadal changes in distribution and abundance of focal fish species and their fisheries relative to multiple environmental parameters. The team will also solicit fishers’ knowledge of changes over time to understand and integrate their experiences. The project team will use a cooperative research approach (called co-production) to select focal species with a range of temperature preferences or tolerances by conducting interviews with fisheries managers and intercept surveys and interviews with recreational anglers. The team will also estimate changes in growth and size at sexual maturity of the focal fish species over time by measuring growth increments in their otoliths, or ear stones. Finally, the team will monitor sentinel sites in four regions along the latitudinal gradient using underwater visual censuses, remote video surveys, and water parameter measurements to detect which species exhibit range shifts, where and when they occur, and the drivers of these changes.

Expected outcome:

The project team will identify fish species that are likely to experience distribution shifts, including northward or offshore to deeper, cooler water. Which species move, when, and where will inform fisheries managers who can modify regulatory actions that will help with stock assessments. Local ecological knowledge from angler surveys will provide insights into local perceptions of changes within the fisheries and drivers of change. Estimated rates of change in fish growth and size at sexual maturity may inform changes to minimum size limits and adaptive management plans. The team’s products will cater to different spatial scales for management, including: ecosystem-level reports to develop more holistic approaches to consider how management actions implemented for one species may reverberate through the system; species-specific “report cards” to help state and federal management processes set catch advice; and county-specific information to help local governments make more informed comments on how state or federal fishery management changes may affect their local economies.

Research area: Fish, fisheries, and fishing communities