Off the Alabama coast, Gulf waters are quickly turning from temperate to tropical.
Gardner Love, 17, holds an Alabama state-record common snook he caught in Perdido Bay on May 14, 2024. Snook are not considered native to Alabama waters but have been showing up in recent years as water temperatures rise.From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, rising water temperatures and more frequent heat waves are changing what’s found under the surface.
Powers, who chairs the university’s Stokes School of Marine and Environmental Sciences, said it’s called “tropicalization.” As temperatures rise more species from the tropics are shifting north, and snook can be found cruising waters from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana. “Snook, we found, had increased exponentially in the panhandle of Florida, and since coming here, I’ve been collecting reports of snook locally ,” Martin said.
But that’s changed. Since 2014, 82% of days in the Gulf of Mexico have been warmer than the historical average. “They’re everywhere you go and wildly populated. There’s so many of them, and a lot of the older people I’ve talked to said they never saw that as they were growing up.”The Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo — billed as the world’s largest fishing tournament — has run for nearly a century, leaving a record of common catches and a window into rapid changes. They’ve even had to create some new categories. African pompano were once entered in the most unusual category.
Mandy Karnauskas, ecosystem science lead at NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami, said NOAA is trying to determine whether species, such as amberjack, cobia, Spanish mackerel, and king mackerel, might be retreating to deeper, cooler waters in the Gulf since they can’t move any farther north.
“Mangroves are another species that have been encroaching northward on, actually, all three coasts, the Florida Atlantic Coast, Florida Gulf Coast, and the Texas Gulf Coast,” Martin said. “Black mangroves, as I understand it, now have made it all the way around.”“At first I thought it was a tarpon,” Love said. That’s another popular sport fish famous for putting up a big fight.
He called his father Len. Love’s catch weighed in at just over 7 pounds, smashing the Alabama state record by almost two pounds. But that’s partly because snook are still rarely caught in Alabama. “Right now we’re at the stage where we’re documenting all these changes, but we don’t know the consequence of all of these changes.”That could include more toxic algae blooms and “dramatic changes in our coastline,” as salt marshes are replaced by mangrove shrubs.
Ricky Harbison Jr. of Coden-based Anna's Seafood heaves a sack of oysters onto a pallet on Feb. 11, 2020, the last day of Alabama's oyster season. He and his brother Larry Harbison, in orange apron, were on hand to purchase freshly harvested wild oysters.“It is a real problem with oysters that we’re experiencing such high extreme temperatures,” Powers said. “That’s going to make the environment less hospitable for the oysters.
In the short term, since oysters take 18 months to two years to reach harvest size, that’s a bad omen for the 2025-2026 season. The bay that once produced 90% of Florida’s oysters, and 10% of all oysters in the country, hasn’t officially sent a single oyster to the market in four years. Florida wildlife officials are working to restore the oyster reefs in the Bay and determine whether the fishery can reopen in 2026, or needs to remain closed.
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