Gulf of St. Lawrence | Squid seek fishermen

Squid are now abundant in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A commercial fishery would even be possible. But this abundance is also a bad omen: it clearly indicates that the waters are warming up, a consequence of climate change.

Jean-Thomas Léveillé
The Press

A small mollusc is increasingly found alongside northern shrimp, halibut and cod in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A short-finned squid, the northern red squid, is more abundant, find scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“We have seen an increase in recent years,” says marine biologist Marie-Julie Roux, research scientist at the Maurice-Lamontagne Institute, a federal marine science research center located in Mont-Joli, in Bas-Saint-Jean. -Laurent. Other indicators also bear witness to this abundance, such as observations of squid stranded on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands for two or three years, she indicates.

The presence of the northern red squid in the waters of the St. Lawrence is not new in itself, it is rather the abundance of this squid, whose lifespan is approximately one year, which arouses astonishment. It makes great migrations to feed, from Florida to Labrador, but then joins its breeding area located off North Carolina and South Carolina.

However, scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada have captured in recent years in the Gulf of St. Lawrence “mature individuals, ready to reproduce”, explains Marie-Julie Roux.

Water warming

“There is clearly a link with climate change. The abundance of squid in the Gulf of St. Lawrence “corroborates the increase in water temperature at depth” observed over the past 10 years, says Marie-Julie Roux.

This increase is “linked to a much greater contribution from the Gulf Stream”, this warm ocean current which regulates the climate of the Atlantic, explains the researcher, specialist in the ecology of fisheries and the impact of climate change on peaches.

“What is worrying is the drop in oxygen that accompanies the increase in water temperature, and that is harmful to all species,” she says, explaining that the water in the Gulf Stream is lower in oxygen than the cold waters coming from the Arctic.

Ravenous predator

The presence of squid “can have quite fundamental impacts on ecosystems,” says Marie-Julie Roux. On the one hand, they are a food source for certain species, such as halibut, but they are also “very, very voracious predators”, explains the marine biologist, specifying that they feed on capelin, shrimp and juvenile cod.

Additional predation pressure could have a big effect on these species, she says. It is difficult to have an accurate picture of the situation, since the squid captured so far have been captured with a tool used to measure the abundance of other species, but the data collected since 2018 as part of a program devoted to squid and launched by the researcher are beginning to be analyzed, which should make it possible to learn more.

Fishing possible

If the squid abounds in the St. Lawrence, it should be fished, says Sandra Gauthier, general manager of the Exploramer museum in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts. She is the founder of the Fourchette bleue program, which promotes local marine species.

“Can we eat our squid caught in our own waters, by our own fishermen, processed in our own factories? “, she says, deploring that Quebecers eat imported seafood, while “80% of what we fish in the St. Lawrence is exported”.

Quebec imported 1,271 tonnes of frozen squid last year, mostly from China and Thailand, and 30 tonnes of fresh squid, mostly from the east coast of the United States, shows Statistics Canada data for the first 11 months of the year.

There is currently no commercial squid fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but it is possible, says Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “The scientists who did the stock assessment tell us that we could sustainably fish up to 34,000 tonnes of squid a year” on the east coast of Canada, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, told The Press Antoine Rivierre, Senior Regional Resource Management Officer for Quebec.

Absent fishermen

There are 15 squid fishing licenses still valid in Quebec, all in the Magdalen Islands, and all inactive, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“We call that dormant permits,” says Mario Déraspe, president of the Association of Fishermen and Owners of the Magdalen Islands, who does not know who owns these permits, the existence of which was revealed to him by The Press.

“It must be 40 years since we last fished that on the Islands,” he says.

Because there was a time when squid was actually fished in the Gulf of St. Lawrence – data from the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) show high catches in the Gulf, from mid from the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s. An abundance linked to a temporary warming of the waters, according to a study published in 2000 in the Journal of Marine Science.

The squid is still used as bait for crab fishing, in particular, “but it comes frozen, by the way”, specifies Mario Déraspe.

But the resumption of fishing promises to be complex, since Fisheries and Oceans Canada says it wants to “prioritize the reactivation of existing licenses before [de délivrer] new permits for this species.

However, these licenses are not transferable, recognizes the Ministry, even if they probably belong to fishermen … retired.

In the stomach of gannets

The return of squid to the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is also confirmed… in the stomachs of northern gannets.

The northern red squid has indeed made its appearance in the diet of these seabirds, noted doctoral researcher David Pelletier, who teaches biology at the Cégep de Rimouski. “Since 2017, we have started to see new species emerge, including the squid,” he explained in an interview with The Press.

Gannets are not fond of this cephalopod, however, which appeared in less than 2% of the regurgitations analyzed that year, he specifies, adding that he made no observations in 2018, then detected it from new in 2019 and 2020.

The presence of squid in the stomachs of northern gannets is nevertheless very revealing of the state of health of the marine ecosystem, and attests to the collapse in the last decade of stocks of mackerel and herring, on which the big white bird.

“Since 2012, we have observed an increase in the area for food quests [du fou de Bassan], where he goes to explore and fish,” explains David Pelletier, who is studying the colony at Parc national de l’Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé.

Among other things, his team has installed satellite geopositioning devices (GPS) and dive recorders to know where the birds go diving and what they feed on.

These upheavals greatly harm the reproductive success of gannets, which have declined and become very irregular over the past dozen years.

“We have shown in our studies that there is a strong relationship between reproductive success and the abundance of certain species, including mackerel,” explains David Pelletier.

In 2019, for example, the presence of mackerel in the waters of the gulf was very low and the reproduction rate of the northern gannet was only 12.7%, which corresponds to the number of chicks leaving the nest per slice of 100 laid eggs.

That year, the gannets therefore had to go further to feed themselves and diversify their diet, feeding in particular on squid and fish that they do not generally eat, but also on crustaceans, “what we never observe in [son] diet,” says David Pelletier.

However, these substitutes for mackerel and herring contain much less lipids and fatty acids, which have a high “energy density”.

But if he is not fond of squid, the gannet can still be very useful for measuring the progress.

“The northern gannet is a good sentinel species, or bio-indicator, of the state of health of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, because it is a species that practically patrols it as a whole,” explains David Pelletier.

Variations in the bird’s diet are therefore indicators of the evolution of the marine ecosystem.