Harley warns B.C.'s beaches and waters will transform

 Harley warns B.C.'s beaches and waters will transform if species like mussels and barnacles are replaced by populations that thrive in warmer temperatures.

"Mussels and barnacles filter out a lot of the gunk in the water. What would False Creek look like if we lost those filters or replaced them with something that might work a little bit differently? There are questions that we hadn't even thought to ask prior to last summer, because we weren't expecting this sort of thing to happen this quickly," he said.

"I expect in another five, 10, 15 years, this is going to be, instead of a mussel-dominated shore, it's going to be more of an oyster-dominated shore. And it might actually look like subtropical parts of of East Asia at that point."

Harley and his students aren't the only group looking at how climate change is impacting the waters off B.C.

William Cheung, a marine biologist at UBC, analyzed 340 menus from restaurants in the Vancouver area between 1880 and 2021 as he searched for alternate data sets to determine how climate change will affect fish populations.

His research, which also looked at restaurant menus from Anchorage and Los Angeles, found the preferred water temperature of the seafood getting served up to customers is getting warmer and warmer.

"We found a significant increase in the temperature of the seafoods that restaurants are serving since the 1980s," said Cheung.

"One of the interesting things is that increase relates closely to changes in seawater temperature, as well as the composition of species that fishermen are catching in relation to changing temperatures over that period."

 William Cheung, a marine biologist at UBC, analyzed 340 menus from restaurants in the Vancouver area between 1880 and 2021 as he searched for alternate data sets to determine how climate change will affect fish populations. (Gian Paolo Mendoza/CBC)

Cheung said the Humboldt squid, a warm water species, was hardly found on restaurant menus before the 1990s, but has popped up more and more frequently in recent years. He also projects that sardines, a warm-watered species that faced population collapse in the 1950s, will once again become a staple of restaurant menus in B.C. as they swim up the current to warmer waters.