By Jenna Reynolds

Exc. Director

Save Coastal Wildlife Nonprofit

Global warming is changing New Jersey in many ways, and not just for people. Wildlife is feeling the heat too. Fish, birds, plants and other species must respond to temperatures rising, sea levels increasing, and an ever-increasing warming world. Tidal marshes, for example, are threatened by erosion, which could harm long-established and important species like blue-claw crabs, diamond-back terrapins and ribbed mussels.

But that’s not all that is taking place. Multiple changes are taking place along the Jersey Shore that many people don’t ever see or realize. Only a handful of scientists in New Jersey have put the pieces of the puzzle together to see the entire picture of how global warming is changing long established biodiversity, but sadly their information doesn’t get much media attention.

Among wildlife experts, we are seeing reorganizations of sea life in real time along the Jersey Shore. An assortment of fish from the south are becoming more common like black sea bass (Centropristis striata) and cobia (Rachycentron canadum), while aquatic animals that require cooler conditions have disappeared or are in decline or are stressed, including winter flounder (Pseudopleuronectes americanus), American lobster (Homarus americanus), and silver hake, also known as whiting, (Merluccius bilinearis). Unfortunately, it’s this information that rarely makes the headlines on evening news shows or gets highlighted on social media. Yet, ever rising air and water temperatures are changing life every year.

Not just aquatic animals, birds too are feeling the heat. The American goldfinch, the state bird of New Jersey, is threatened by climate change in several ways including fluctuations in temperature and precipitation which can affect the availability of seeds from coneflower and thistle, and other food sources. This can cause goldfinches to move their breeding range further north away from New Jersey to adapt to climate change. Common backyard birds, the Northern black-capped chickadee and the southern Carolina chickadee are feeling the heat as well. They once had a boundary that ran approximately between Trenton to the mouth of the Manasquan River, but due to global warming the boundary has steadily been moving northward with the Carolina Chickadee taking up more real estate in New Jersey.

As we look back on a very warm summer across the Jersey Shore, the month of June came in as New Jersey’s 2nd warmest, tied with 1943 and just behind 2010, I am struck by just how much the natural world is changing from an increasing warmer coastal environment, and how many animals and plants are changing their habitats and geographic ranges.

During the summer of 2024, staff and volunteers with the environmental nonprofit, Save Coastal Wildlife, conducted several biodiversity studies and surveys of fish, birds and plants in Barnegat Bay and in the Raritan Bay-Sandy Hook Bay estuarine complex. The following information is the result of these activities and observations. All together the information indicates the Jersey Shore is getting warmer, and that biodiversity is in a state of flux and transition.

Take for example tropical fish. This past summer we found more numbers of southern fish along the Jersey Shore more than ever before.

Volunteers with Save Coastal Wildlife for over 15 years have conducted fish surveys throughout the summer with a seine net that is dragged alongside the edge of a bay or estuary to see what fish, crabs, shrimps and other sea life are living at that moment along the coast. Even though it sounds strange, every summer we usually encounter a few fish during our surveys in New Jersey that are more commonly found in the Gulf of Mexico. The list can include juvenile lookdowns (Selene vomer), juvenile permit fish (Trachinotus falcatus), juvenile crevalle jacks (Caranx hippos), juvenile Florida pompanos (Trachinotus carolinus), and juvenile spotfin butterflyfish (Chaetodon ocellatus).

To the non-fishing person, catching tropical fish in New Jersey might sound bizarre, like a story you would find in Weird New Jersey magazine, but it’s not that unusual. Juvenile tropical fish have been coming to the Jersey Shore for countless decades. They sometimes get caught up in the strong Gulf Stream currents flowing northward as they follow food sources or from hiding underneath flotsam to escape predators. Occasionally these wandering fish will get swept inshore from tides and eddies as they travel north, and then abracadabra we have tropical fish along the Jersey Shore.

What was exceptional in the summer of 2024 was not that we were finding tropical fish, but the number of tropical fish found. We just didn’t encounter one or two or even three lookdowns, we discovered 20 or more during just one survey in Sandy Hook Bay in July. We also encountered over a dozen juvenile crevalle jacks in Sandy Hook Bay during one survey in August. Subsequently, we kept finding tropical fish scattered throughout Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay during different surveys in July and August. This was the first time in 15 years that so many lookdowns and jacks were found in one summer.

The most unusual find, however, were several juvenile short bigeye fish (Pristigenys alta). We encountered this colorful fish for the first time while surveying Barnegat Bay in early July. This species is generally found from North Carolina southwards to the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the West Indies. Named for their “big” eyes, the fish is adapted for low-light conditions in deep waters as bigeyes normally inhabit depths ranging from 164–1,312 feet (50–400 m). Nevertheless, here were a handful of small, juvenile short bigeyes surviving in the warm, shallow waters of Barnegat Bay. We were not alone either in finding this fish. Scanning the web we discovered quite a few people in the summer of 2024 catching this fish in abundance in Barnegat Bay and Long Island Sound and even as far north as the Gulf of Maine.

It's quite possible the increase in the number of tropical fish found this summer is a correlation of a warming Gulf Stream that is getting closer to the coast and allowing more fish to find their ways inland. In an October 9, 2023 article in Nature Climate Change entitled, The Gulf Stream is warming and shifting closer to shore, by Robert Todd and other scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the researchers found that over the past 20 years, the Gulf Stream has warmed faster than the global ocean as a whole by about 1°C (2°F) over the past two decades and has shifted towards the coast by about 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per decade on average, meaning that the Gulf Stream is moving gradually closer to the Northeastern United States continental shelf. “The warming we see in the Gulf Stream is due to two combined effects. One is that the ocean is absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere as the climate warms," said Todd. "The second is that the Gulf Stream itself is gradually shifting towards the coast.”

Could this mean we might expect a rise in encounters with juvenile tropical fish along the Jersey Shore? Southern fish are often attracted to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream which are typically around the mid 80-degree range Fahrenheit every summer. They are carried northward by swift and strong currents in this powerful “underwater river” that is getting warmer and flowing nearer to the coast every year. The tropical fish could more easily be drawn into warm estuarine waters that are also commonly around the mid 80-degree range Fahrenheit every summer along the Jersey Shore.

For bird life, our biodiversity surveys around Barnegat Bay saw many sights of adult and juvenile white ibises (Eudocimus albus). This wading bird is common in Florida and the Caribbean and prefers warmer environments from the southern United States south through Central America. Yet, the tropical white ibis is now confirmed to be nesting in southern New Jersey and is likely a permanent breeder. During the summer of 2024, birders counted a flock of about 100 white ibis nesting in southern New Jersey. This tropical bird is increasingly moving northward not just to forage for food in shallow wetlands and estuaries, but as a breeder and has been breeding successfully in New Jersey since 2020. The white ibises typically arrive in New Jersey in late April to breed and stays to feed until autumn when the birds migrate south possibly to Florida.

It should also be noted that the cousin of the white ibis, the glossy ibis (Plegadis falcinellus) was once a rare sight too in New Jersey, but the population has increased mightily sometime in the late 1950s. The glossy ibis is now seen nearly anywhere in the state where there are large wetlands or wet soils to search for food and to raise their young.

In early September, two juvenile roseate spoonbills (Platalea ajaja), a close relative of the ibises, were seen feeding in New Jersey. One was spotted in wetlands along Raritan Bay, within sight of New York City, and another spoonbill was identified in Cumberland County. Typically, roseate spoonbills are found in Florida, coastal Texas and southern Louisiana. Between 1992 and 2023, however, 15 sightings of the spoonbill were recorded in New Jersey, according to the New Jersey Bird Records Committee, which is kept by the Audubon Society.

Other southern species are becoming more common here as well, including the wood stork (Mycteria americana), a tropical bird listed as a threatened species in Florida, and the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), a water bird that commonly breeds between Maryland and Venezuela.

In 2017, a juvenile wood stork was identified in Cape May County, and in December 2021, a pair of wood storks were sighted at Spermaceti Cove in Sandy Hook, NJ. While still uncommon in New Jersey, the population is slowly moving northward. Wood storks now nest in North Carolina, and were first documented nesting in southeastern Columbus County in 2005. Since then, the population has been increasing. Once a wood stork starts to nest in either Maryland or Delaware, it will not take long for another wood stork to make a home in New Jersey.

Brown pelicans, on the other hand, are common sights right now in New Jersey. We spotted over a dozen around Barnegat Bay and Sandy Hook Bay during the summer of 2024. Non-breeding and post breeding birds have been moving up into NJ coastal waters to feed for more the 20 years in greater abundance.

Finally, and perhaps the strangest creature we discovered was not a bird or fish, but a plant. We noticed several moss rose plants (Portulaca grandiflora) growing along Sandy Hook Bay. This small plant is native to southern Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. We first encountered moss rose two years ago growing around Sandy Hook Bay, but only sparsely. We suspected the plant would die after several winters, but in the summer of 2024, we encountered moss rose again growing in abundance at certain areas around the estuary. Moss rose only survives in the wild in largely frost-free climates. This plant should be dead, but it is surviving due to warmer and shorter winters along the Jersey Shore.

Although the consequences of a warming planet might seem like a far-away science fiction movie with scientists calling for more intense weather patterns that include extreme heat, protracted drought, increased flooding, more intense storms, and rising sea levels, we are in fact living through that science fiction movie now. According to NASA’s website devoted to climate change, “the effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible for people alive today, and will worsen as long as humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.” They stress that “while Earth's climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.”

While we don’t have palm trees growing year-round along the Jersey Shore quite yet, there are still many signs that climate change is taking place right now along the Jersey Shore. Fifty years ago, it would be laughable to tell someone you saw a wood stork or a white ibis in New Jersey, but here they are moving in and staying to feed or breed along an increasingly warmer coast. The trend is for southern species to move northward.

Get outdoors and see for yourself.

If you are concerned about global warming as we are at Save Coastal Wildlife, please consider doing something to lessen the effects and improve the lives of people, plants and animals that we share this planet with. People around the world need to mitigate climate change, which means limiting and reducing our carbon, methane, and greenhouse gas output and usage, while at the same time increasing and enhancing renewable and sustainable resources. We also need to identify actions now to live in a changing climate that includes enhancing natural systems and ecosystems, providing better health care and infrastructure, and improved local economies, while at the same time creating high quality food systems and stronger government systems in place to care for people who lost their home and caring for a loved one from a natural disaster. This is what it should mean to do something about global warming.

What are you doing?