In late 2014, fishery regulators announced that for the second consecutive year, there would be no shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Maine this winter. The culprit? Principally, warming ocean waters caused by global climate change.

Maine in particular is feeling this climate pinch: The water temperature in the Gulf of Maine increased eight times faster that the rest of the world’s oceans in recent years, according to a 2014 study by Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

As a result, while the shrimp fishery is the first to close in New England primarily as a result of our changing climate, it is unlikely to be the last. Some of the Gulf of Maine’s depleted stocks of groundfish, particularly Gulf of Maine cod, have been slow to rebuild from overfishing in the 1980s and 1990s in part as a result of warming water. Lobster has been disappearing from its traditional habitat in southern New England. 

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