Gambiaj.com – (DAKAR, Senegal) – Coastal communities in Senegal are reeling as stocks of sardinella – the country’s most consumed fish – disappear from local waters. While fishermen blame industrial trawlers, scientists say climate change is sending the small, paddle-shaped fish northwards in search of cooler habitats.
Fisherman Amadou Gueye returns to Dakar’s small port of Ouakam with only five octopuses after a long day spent at sea.
“It’s not good. There’s the current and no fish,” he laments. “The big boats make it hard, leaving us with nowhere to fish.”
Finding sardinella, a staple food and crucial economic resource in Senegal, has become a major challenge, confirms Ibrahima Ndiaye, vice-president of Ouakam’s local fishermen’s committee.
“The pirogues now spend seven days at sea going to Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry – whereas in the past there was daily fishing,” he tells RFI.
“We used to go out in the morning and come back in the evening.”
A study this month in the British journal Scientific Reports found that sardinella were migrating up the coast of west Africa from Senegal and Mauritania to Morocco, where large catches are now being recorded.
The so-called “tropicalisation of ecosystems” – or warmer sea temperatures altering north-west African coastal waters – is driving the redistribution of sardinella and other small pelagic fish.
The warming has caused sardinella to migrate northward at a rate of 181 kilometres per decade.
Led by scientists in Senegal, France, Norway, Morocco, Mauritania and the Gambia, the study analyses data from 2,363 trawlers and 170,000 kilometres of acoustic sea surveys done between 1995 and 2015.
It found that more than three decades of warming had impacted the cold ocean Canary Current that flows along the coast, regulating the marine ecosystem and influencing climate patterns.
Already over-exploited fish stocks were being forced out of their usual habitats by a “complex interplay of climatic-related stressors”, the report warned.
These included changes to wind patterns and “upwelling” – when nutrient-rich, colder waters from the bottom of the ocean rise to the surface to support marine life.
“While overfishing is obviously a direct human activity, the powerful environmental impacts are an indirect human activity,” Vincent Rossi, an oceanographer with the French research centre CNRS, told RFI.
The loss of sardinella, a vital resource, risked further threatening food security in West African countries that depend on the fish, the study found.
It warned that shared stocks would become increasingly difficult to manage sustainably.
The researchers said better monitoring was needed to properly understand the ways in which the marine ecosystem off north-west Africa was responding to climate change.
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmt
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utma
ID used to identify users and sessions
2 years after last activity
SourceBuster is used by WooCommerce for order attribution based on user source.
Name
Description
Duration
sbjs_migrations
Technical data to help with migrations between different versions of the tracking feature
session
sbjs_current_add
Timestamp, referring URL, and entry page for your visitor’s current visit to your store
session
sbjs_first_add
Timestamp, referring URL, and entry page for your visitor’s first visit to your store (only applicable if the visitor returns before the session expires)
session
sbjs_current
Traffic origin information for the visitor’s current visit to your store
session
sbjs_first
Traffic origin information for the visitor’s first visit to your store (only applicable if the visitor returns before the session expires)
session
sbjs_udata
Information about the visitor’s user agent, such as IP, the browser, and the device type
session
sbjs_session
The number of page views in this session and the current page path