NJ’s lucrative clam fishing industry is threatened by climate change – and the wind farms that will fight it

By John Upton (Climate Central) and Michael Sol Warrent (NJ Spotlight News) with data reporting by Joseph Giguere (Climate Central)

This story was produced through a collaboration between Climate Central and the NJ Spotlight News.

Seagulls and the setting sun hung low over the Manasquan Inlet as a 125-foot clam trawler motored into a berth at Point Pleasant Beach. The crew set to work unloading the fruits of 58 hours at sea: Enough Atlantic surfclams to fill eight tractor trailers, which hauled the bounty south to a processing plant along Delaware Bay. 

The Atlantic surfclam fleet fishes year-round from Virginia to Massachusetts and out to the edge of the continental shelf. The fleet sold $27 million worth of surfclams to processors last year, federal data shows, and the sector is largely based out of New Jersey — three-fifths of last year’s haul was brought ashore in the Garden State. 

Surfclam meat is used for chowders, clam strips and other products, including tinned products. Muscles that the clams use to pull themselves around the seafloor, which are called tongues or feet, are the most highly valued parts. The product unloaded in Point Pleasant Beach was destined to be shucked at the processing plant and delivered to manufacturers like Campbell’s, Bumble Bee Foods and LaMonica Fine Foods. “We’re seeing clams move offshore because of the warming waters — because of global warming,”

“We’re seeing clams move offshore because of the warming waters — because of global warming,”
Tom Dameron, Surfside Foods

But the surfclam bounty, and the industry it supports, is being squeezed by the effects of climate change. Fossil fuel pollution is causing ocean waters globally to warm and acidify, and oxygen levels are declining. Oceans are growing more polluted and wetlands continue to be lost. 

The clams are shifting away from traditional near-shore habitats, with warming presumed to be the main cause. That’s forcing New Jersey’s fleets to travel farther for the catch and creating a regulatory headache as they mingle with different seafood hauls. 

“We’re seeing clams move offshore because of the warming waters — because of global warming,” said Tom Dameron, a government affairs representative at clam company Surfside Foods as its clam dredge, the Christi Caroline, was unloaded. “New Jersey actually had a very vibrant inshore fishery, which when I say inshore we’re talking from the coastline out three miles. That fishery is gone.” 

Even as climate change harms the surfclams, a large-scale solution to global warming is expected to bring a jolt of its own. Dameron and others in the industry fret over plans to construct wind energy turbines in their fishing grounds. The turbines are key components in efforts by East Coast states to aggressively drive down heat-trapping emissions and slow the very warming that’s wounding fishing sectors globally.  

The oversized turbines will be aggregated into wind farms 15 miles or more from shore, connected to the coast through high-voltage electrical cables running beneath the seafloor. Turbines within the farms could be a mile apart, which is close enough that clam fishermen say they couldn’t work safely between them.  

Dameron warns that the possibility of having a ship collide with a turbine, or a dredge come in contact with a cable, is something that fishing companies consider an unacceptable safety and legal risk – effectively closing off existing clamming grounds. “We can’t take that risk,” Dameron said. 

With the surfclam industry facing an uncertain future amid all these threats, shellfish researchers at Rutgers and elsewhere are working to find solutions that may help both the clams and the fishers adapt. 

Change in sea surface temperature since 1982

“The front line of climate change” 

Triple-digit ocean temperatures off Florida this summer garnered global headlines containing words like “unprecedented,” “stunning” and “hot-tub.” Coral reefs from the Sunshine State to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been bleaching and dying for years, largely because of rising ocean temperatures. 

While the waters off Northeastern shorelines are neither tropical nor home to colorfully photogenic ecosystems, they’ve been warming faster than most of the global ocean in recent decades, with profound impacts on wildlife and fishing fleets. 

“The oceans are on the front line of climate change,” said Malin Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University who researches global ocean changes. “They’re warming quickly. They’re also becoming more acidic, and those changes are disrupting almost every aspect of life in the ocean.” 

The entrance to the New Jersey Aquaculture Innovation Center, operated by Rutgers University researchers, in Cape May.

The waters fished by New Jersey’s surfclam fleet have warmed 2.6°F on average since the early 1980s, analysis of U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information data shows, with their hunting grounds warming faster than 75% of the global ocean — and up to 95% in some patches. 

One of the most striking impacts of ocean warming has been what Pinsky called “a massive movement of life in the ocean towards higher latitudes and towards deeper depths” as fish and other wildlife seek out cooler waters. 

Pinksy said the unusually rapid warming here is related to changes in large ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current, which are constantly shuffling cooler and warmer waters between different depths and regions. “While that’s something scientists would expect from global climate change, it’s not entirely clear if and how this will continue,” he said. 

The changes are affecting more than wildlife — they’re disrupting fisheries, aquaculture operations and local economies. 

“To go fishing you need fish, and when they move away the fishing boats have to either travel further to follow them or find new target species,” Pinksy said. “Fish are one of the most globally traded commodities, so this is important for international trade.” 

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When surf clams and ocean quahogs collide 

Surfclams are among the roughly 100 species hauled in by New Jersey’s commercial fishing industry, which along with shellfish farming contributes an estimated $1 billion a year to the state’s economy. Among those dozens of species is a smaller variety of clam: The ocean quahog is longer-lived than the surfclam, a little less sweet, and favors deeper waters. Quahog meat is mostly used in chowders and soups. Both species are larger than the hard clams and soft-shell clams that are typically sold whole at the supermarket fish counter. 

Surfclams and ocean quahogs are regulated as separate fisheries with different rules. Boats are banned from catching both during the same outing.  

The rules against mingling clam hauls didn’t cause many problems when they were introduced, because the species generally occupied different parts of the seafloor. Now, surfclam beds are shifting farther from the surfline into the cooler and deeper waters favored by quahogs, causing the populations to mingle more frequently. That’s making it harder for fishing crews to ensure their trawls bring up only a single species. 

Regulations aside, separating the two clam varieties creates “pretty significant” problems aboard the clam trawlers and at the clam processing facilities, said Dameron of Surfside Foods. 

A load of Atlantic surfclams is unloaded from the Christi Caroline, a clamming ship operated by Surfside Foods, in Pt. Pleasant Beach on July 20, 2023.

“We can’t have both surfclams and ocean quahogs going into the same can. If a buyer is buying surfclams, he’s buying surfclams. If they’re buying quahogs, they just want to see quahogs,” Dameron said. “We need changes in the regulations, and we need to develop technologies that can separate these two.” 

Cage tags needed to catch surfclams are more expensive than for quahogs, and regulators didn’t want quahog clammers surreptitiously bringing in hauls containing the more valuable species. Law enforcement procedures, population monitoring efforts, catch and allocation tracking and processing facilities were all established assuming only one type of clam would be caught each fishing trip. 

Jessica Coakley, a staffer at a fisheries council created by the federal government to inform its management of Mid-Atlantic fish stocks, is spearheading efforts to modernize the regulations affecting species mingling. The years-long slog has been made more difficult by the wide variety of boats and on-board systems used by clammers. 

In the Northeastern U.S. and elsewhere, climate change appears to be moving more quickly than fisheries regulators can respond. U.S. fisheries regulators are bound by rules requiring extensive environmental and other reviews, consultations with broad groups of stakeholders and multiple layers of approval before regulations can be changed. And the job is made more difficult by established procedures that assume only one type of clam will be caught at a time. 

“There’s enforcement challenges, there’s monitoring challenges,” Coakley said “The timelines tend to be slow.” 

A climate boon is also a clammers’ threat 

Sweeping offshore wind farms have provided climate-friendly electricity across Europe and Asia for decades, but only three commercial facilities currently produce power in the U.S. A small farm of five turbines has been operating off Rhode Island since 2016, two turbines are generating power off Virginia, and although the South Fork Wind project off Long Island is still under construction, it recently started sending power ashore. 

Construction of towers needed to hold turbines and their blades aloft over the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey is underway in South Jersey. The state has been working to establish itself as a manufacturing and logistics hub for wind farms planned on ocean sites in the region, though global energy company Ørsted recently blew a hole in the state’s progress when it abandoned plans to construct what would have been two of the first wind farms off the state’s shoreline.  

While state agencies, the Biden Administration and utilities bound by clean energy laws are preparing for an aggressive buildout of offshore wind farming during the coming years, some fishing fleets, tourism operators, local governments and wealthy coastal communities are opposed to the plans, fearful of their effects on their businesses, tourism sectors and beach views. 

Some of the loudest critics of the planned wind farms are local and neighborhood groups that fear their ocean views will be sullied by the distant wind turbines. But not all complaints are rooted in NIMBYism. Research published last year validated the concerns of New Jersey’s clammers. 

The results of modeling efforts published in a scientific journal last year concluded that fishing around proposed wind farm areas could increase fishing costs as much as 5% through additional gas and labor costs, and reduce revenues for fishing vessels and processors by as much as 15%. The Atlantic City-based fleet faces the steepest potential revenue losses of up to 25%. 

“Our worst case scenario was, they can’t fish in these areas, and they also have to transit around them if they want to go to a fishing location that’s on the other side,” said Daphne Munroe, a marine biologist at Rutgers University who co-authored the study. “It’s these Atlantic City boats that we think are kind of going to be the most vulnerable.” 

The Christi Caroline, a clamming ship operated by Surfside Foods, sails through the Manasquan Inlet after returning from a fishing trip on July 20, 2023.

Surfside Foods, Cape May County and other groups recently sued federal regulators over what they argued was insufficient analysis of the overall environmental impacts from the nascent energy industry and other alleged violations of federal laws. 

Similar lawsuits have been filed elsewhere against the federal government, which has already leased out patches of Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey, Long Island and other locations from the Mid-Atlantic to the Northeast, with more lease sales planned. 

The Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a nonprofit group funded by foundations, is leading efforts to bring 11 state governments from North Carolina to Maine, wind energy companies, and fishing groups together to develop a regional fund that would compensate fishing fleets for economic losses. The funding would come from the energy companies’ profits. 

“The first goal is to avoid impacts,” said Kris Ohleth, executive director of the nonprofit. “Then minimize impacts and then mitigate for impacts.” 

Ohleth said the idea of a regional fund to compensate fishermen took hold after negotiations for compensation on a project-by-project basis proved to be “not the ideal set-up,” though such systems are being put in place at some projects. She said it’s difficult to parse out fisheries impacts on wide-roaming fishing fleets of any individual wind farm, many of which are adjacent to one another. 

While the details remain preliminary, Ohleth said the concept of the fund would be that “if there is demonstrable harm, financial harm” from offshore wind energy, “the fishermen could be compensated for any financial losses.” 

Dameron, of Surfside Foods, sees the development of offshore wind farms on his turf as inevitable. He said he wants the developers — mostly energy companies with headquarters in Europe and fossil fuel giants like Shell — to work more closely with the fishing industry. While he said he’s “very concerned” about offshore wind energy, he’s also “very optimistic” that it can be developed in a way that coexists with his industry.  

Dameron wants the wind developers to restore lost clam beds away from their facilities, and he credited the industry for funding efforts at Rutgers University to support such efforts, known as ‘stock enhancement.’ 

“This is something that through the proper research, we can figure it out,” Dameron said. 

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Scientists on quest for hardy strains — and new clam products 

Some hope may be found in experiments now underway at a clam hatchery in Cape May.  

A team of Rutgers researchers is working at the New Jersey Aquaculture Innovation Center in Cape May County, trying to determine how surfclams are vulnerable to climate change — and to identify strains that are most hardy to it. They spawned the first surfclam ‘seeds’ a little more than a year ago, and now they have millions of individual surfclams growing in an array of different types of tanks at the site. 

“The surfclam is a really economically important species,” said Laura Steeves, a Rutgers researcher as she showed NJ Spotlight News around the Lower Township hatchery. “So we care about them commercially as well as ecologically. These species are good for the environment.” 

As well as ocean temperature changes, shellfish are affected by acidity and oxygen levels, both of which are changing because of climate change and other effects of fossil fuel emissions. 

“We’re really interested in the combined effects of thermal stress, so water that’s getting warmer,  and also ocean acidification stress — the pH is going down,” Steeves said. “This year we have had some extremely warm ocean temperatures, even compared to more recent years. We believe that it’s these changes in water temperature that’s already changing the distribution of the surfclam.” 

“The surfclam is a really economically important species. So we care about them commercially as well as ecologically. These species are good for the environment.”
Laura Steeves, Rutgers researcher

Through selective breeding, the research could create opportunities to create surfclam beds in new areas. The work could be key to Tom Dameron’s hope for restoring or replacing wild surfclam beds disrupted by offshore wind development. 

It could also help shellfish farmers working in New Jersey’s back bays raise surfclams within their aquaculture facilities – potentially creating new farmed-products markets, such as young surfclams that are small and sweet enough to be served on the half-shell. 

While ocean quahogs can live for centuries, surfclams tend to live for decades. The shorter lifespans of surfclams compared with ocean quahogs might help to explain why their populations are moving more quickly out to sea. Adult clams don’t migrate — the migration occurs when spawn settles in new areas.  

It’s their short lifespan that has Dale Parsons, a fifth-generation bayman who runs Parsons Seafood, excitedly collaborating with the Rutgers researchers on their experiments. 

“They’re fast — they grow fast,” Parsons said of the surfclams. 

Parsons Seafood has been operating for more than a century. It harvests wild and farm-raised oysters and ocean quahogs from the muddy bottoms of Barnegat Bay and Great Bay in Ocean County. 

“As a farmer, when I purchase my oysters, my hard clams, whatever I’m farming, it’s your investment. It’s money out,” Parsons said. “The faster that shellfish is going to grow, the sooner you get a return.” 

Now, Parsons has big plans for surfclams in the future of his family business. Parsons has already begun raising surfclams at his hatchery in Little Egg Harbor and seeding experimental plots in the bay leases he works. And he says he has already been in early conversations with an interested canning company. 

Parsons pointed out that the large size of wild-caught surfclams means they have to be processed and turned into clam strips or another processed product. Farm-raised surfclams come with the promise of new markets – and, he hopes, a sizable new revenue stream. 

“What we’re trying to do is grow them to a steamer size, where the whole clam gets steamed,” Parsons said. “It’s a different product. Same species, same meat, different products.” 

That type of innovation gives Munroe, the Rutgers researcher, hope that surfclams will remain a lucrative species. She sees a future where farmers like Parsons are able to not only bring new products to market, but where regulators adapt to changing realities in the water and science brings new solutions to help fishing fleets coexist with wind farms. 

“I think there are certainly challenges related to other user groups like offshore wind, or climate change,” Munroe said. “But I think that there’s ways to overcome these challenges, and I am optimistic about the future.”