The Fieldsites

In Senegal fishing towns such as Joal-Fadiouth, Hann, M’Bour and Kayathe warming ocean temperatures have caused the important sardinella stock to increasingly flee out towards deeper and cooler water further north. For Senegalese small-scale fishers, these changes require larger boats, heavier equipment and being out to sea at longer period, and many now fear that further northward movement of the sardinella will make them out of reach altogether. The rhythms of fishers’s involvement with sardinella are definitely up for massive changes, and people have begun longing for a past where sardinella were abundant, reliable and reachable, while at the same time combining fear and hope in what seems to become a post-sardinella refugees seeking new lives further north in Europe. This sub-projecet is conducted by PhD fellow Louis Pille-Schneider.

In the Gulf of Maine, US, warming waters have led to an unprecedented abundance of lobsters, which is welcomed and becomes a source of hope for a future in the lobster industry for many young aspiring lobster fisher. However, with lobster overflowing the market, prices drop and fishers need to develop new markets, for instance in Eastern Asia, where consumption patterns affect the seasonal rhythms and pace of the local lobster industry significantly. At the same time, marine scientists, for instance at the civil science-oriented Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stontington, Maine’s primary lobster village, warn that overheating of the Gulf of Maine may eventually make the gulf uninhabitable for lobsters, driving them into colder waters further north in Canada, thus making the current lobster boom a temporary phenomenon. A number of other multispecies relations emerge in the Gulf these days that potentially entangle and disentangle humans and marine life in new ways to form new multispecies polyrhythms: Right whale protectionists are attempting to ban the use of lobster pot ropes to prevent deadly entanglements, and efforts are made to restore the local river-migrating alewife population, a former source of lobster bait that may be used when the sea temperatures also changes the seasonal movements of the current bait fish, herring. This sub-project will be conducted by SEATIMES project leader, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme.

In Norway, changing sea temperatures have attracted new species that has resulted in a variety of emergent human-marine ecologies. Up north, a snow crab industry is emerging, with seasonal migrant workers arriving from low-income Eastern European countries into Norwegian harbors such as Båtsfjord to work long periods in a dangerous working environment. Further south, the eastern south coast the invasive species Pacific oyster has taken over many beaches, bays and other coastal areas often used for recreational purposes. Despised by many, scientists and coastal managers foresee a rather gloomy coastal future if the Pacific oyster is allowed to take over. At the same time, food entrepreneurs are seeing the possibilities these have, particularly in European andAsian markets hungry for fresh seafood. In both cases, the arrival of new wanted or unwanted species engender transformations of human-marine relations, not only in Båtsfjord or in southern beaches, but also in for instance Poland and Lithuania from where migrant fishers arrive. The arrival zone thus also harbors a multitude of different forms of human-marine temporalities, all undergoing climate change induced transformations. This sub-project is conducted by PhD fellow Sadie Hale.

In all these zones, SEATIMES will ask: what can climate change induced transformations in human-marine temporalities tell us about how humans and marine life are mutually entangled and how temporality emerge in human-marine relations?