Puffer Fish Found - Jordan River BC

[Englishman]

Puffer Fish found on the beach in Jordan River. First time ever recorded. Climate change likely driver of this event.

https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/2019/10/27/poisonous-porcupine-fish-first-time-bc-canada/

 

[wildmanyeah]

Add it to this thread

https://www.sportfishingbc.com/foru...how-resilience-to-shifting-environment.76084/

 

[Birdsnest]

This item is a shoe without the foot washed up on a beach, a video of a skinny dyeing polar bear, or images of walruses jumping off cliffs. Im not sure I assume this one fish showed up on our coast on its own and is a direct correlation to ocean warming.

 

[agentaqua]

 

[Seagirt]

More planktonic-like species, like nudibranchs, that are known in the south are being documented here for the first time. Could be that we are just looking closer but weight of evidence seems to suggest a shift in ocean habitat. Puffer fish is just another example.

 

[OldBlackDog]

Ask the commercial people if this is a first, it is not.
Ask when they began documenting warm water species in B.C.
Ask when the ocean temperatures were documented and for how long have they kept records.

More planktonic-like species, like nudibranchs, that are known in the south are being documented here for the first time. Could be that we are just looking closer but weight of evidence seems to suggest a shift in ocean habitat. Puffer fish is just another example.

 

[Stephen Kowalski]

Ask the commercial people if this is a first, it is not.
Ask when they began documenting warm water species in B.C.
Ask when the ocean temperatures were documented and for how long have they kept records.

So, if the commercial folks are seeing puffer fish I would have thought this would be required reporting. I guess the research on this story is wrong. I will email the reporter and let him know commercial fisherman have been seeing puffer fish since....?

Poisonous puffer fish found in B.C. waters a first for the region, researchers say

by Travis Lupick on October 29th, 2019 at 12:19 PM

"It’s not known how the puffer ended up on a beach on Vancouver Island, about 70 kilometres west of Victoria. It’s possible it was brought to the region as a pet and subsequently released into the wild or disposed of there after it died in captivity.

It’s also possible the fish swam from California on its own, Gavin Hanke, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Royal B.C. Museum, told CBC News.

If that was the case, it wouldn’t be the first time that a species from warmer southern waters somehow made it all the way to B.C."

 

[Seagirt]

Yes, good questions, thanks. If we have only been documenting species for 50 years and it is only in recent years that we have seen seeing these more southern species than I believe something is shifting. It isn’t proof but if I had to pick a shift or no shift I’d lean towards a shift. Short term shift or long term shift or cause of shift is outside of the scope of this.

I’m guessing commercial guys aren’t required to report every species that comes on board. Do you have at least anecdotal evidence of a puffer fish being caught in bc waters? One would assume the observers would make note of a species like this if they came across it. Even still, the sample size isn’t 100% so even if commercial guys have never caught a puffer fish it doesn’t mean that specie has never been here. I get that.

Ask the commercial people if this is a first, it is not.
Ask when they began documenting warm water species in B.C.
Ask when the ocean temperatures were documented and for how long have they kept records.

 

[searun]

Baked puffer was sure good and fluffy...yummie.

 

[Stephen Kowalski]

Baked puffer was sure good and fluffy...yummie.

Want in on that action. Since we are getting close to never fishing for salmon, can you tell me what bait I need and how I should go about catching them? DFO will need to come up with daily catch limits so we can protect this new and exciting fishery!

 

[cracked_ribs]

So, if the commercial folks are seeing puffer fish I would have thought this would be required reporting. I guess the research on this story is wrong. I will email the reporter and let him know commercial fisherman have been seeing puffer fish since....?

Poisonous puffer fish found in B.C. waters a first for the region, researchers say

by Travis Lupick on October 29th, 2019 at 12:19 PM

"It’s not known how the puffer ended up on a beach on Vancouver Island, about 70 kilometres west of Victoria. It’s possible it was brought to the region as a pet and subsequently released into the wild or disposed of there after it died in captivity.

It’s also possible the fish swam from California on its own, Gavin Hanke, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Royal B.C. Museum, told CBC News.

If that was the case, it wouldn’t be the first time that a species from warmer southern waters somehow made it all the way to B.C."

That quoted section actually makes it sounds like the research on this story is not wrong...in that it doesn't presume this incident to be the result of climate change.

Might be a pet, might have swum here but wouldn't be the first time we've seen warm water species make it here. That's what the expert is saying.

This is a pretty good example of one of the inherent problems with "climate change reporting" as a phenomenon: while this particular reporter has talked to an expert who is clearly aware that the discovery of this fish could mean absolutely nothing, many reporters see these one-off incidents as indicative of something larger, which they might be, but they might not be. This happens with every storm now. It happens with every unusual event, like this fish. But the question is...are these events linked to anything at all? The answer is "we have no idea" because we're comparing the record-keeping of a previous, lower-tech, lower-population civilization to the record-keeping of our present one...and looking at rare events.

Would you trust the commercial fishermen of 1925 to keep records so accurate that a once-in-twenty-years event is properly documented? Clearly that's a terrible idea, so the fact is we just have no idea whether these fish have been spotted here before, by people who didn't care or didn't know what they were, or whatever. If we start seeing them every year, that might mean something. But it also might mean nothing because we might never have been looking for them before.

I happen to be a believer in climate change pretty much exactly as described by every mainstream source on the subject - I spent a bit of time back in university studying atmospheric composition on other planets and became sufficiently convinced of the properties of various atmospheric gases that I don't really have a problem with the general principles of increased energy retention in the atmosphere as we load it up with C02, even in relatively small quantities.

But the fact that someone found a fish is not necessarily an indicator of anything, exactly as the expert from the Royal BC Museum acknowledged.