BY CLARKE CANFIELD

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

PORTLAND, Maine

A new federal study documenting the warming waters of the North Atlantic confirms that they're right--and that the typical meal could eventually change to the Atlantic croaker, red hake and summer flounder normally found to the south.

"Fishermen are businessmen, so if they have to go farther and deeper to catch the fish that we like to eat, eventually it won't be economical to do that," said Janet Nye, a fishery biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the lead author of the study.

"It just won't be in your local seafood store, or maybe it'll be more expensive," said Nye. "So I think there'll be a natural, hopefully slow, switch to different seafoods."

For the study, which first appeared Oct. 30 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, Nye and three other NOAA biologists analyzed water temperature trends from North Carolina to the Canadian border off Maine from 1968 to 2007. They then looked at fish survey data collected each spring and assessed where the fish were caught and how abundant they were.

The researchers looked at the familiar New England species. as well as lesser-known fish such as longhorn sculpin and blackbelly rosefish.

Of the 36 stocks studied, the distribution range of 24 had changed in unison with the rising water temperatures that have been occurring off the Northeast since the 1970s.

That temperature rise doesn't sound like much--less than half a degree Fahrenheit, on average--but it's been enough to cause fish to slowly move to areas with temperatures more to their liking.

The greatest movement was exhibited by the blackbelly rosefish, which moved more than 200 miles to the northeast during the years studied. Among commercial species, movements of more than 100 miles were observed for southern stocks of yellowtail flounder and red hake, as well as American shad and alewives.

Some fish exhibited little movement to the north, but rather moved to deeper waters where temperatures are lower, according to the report.

Small-boat fishermen on Cape Cod caught most of their haddock and flounder, as well as the peninsula's namesake fish, in waters close to shore 20 years ago, said Tom Dempsey of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association. Nowadays, they have to travel as far 100 miles offshore to find those same fish, he said.

At the same time, he said, Massachusetts fishermen are catching more fish traditionally found in the Middle Atlantic--Atlantic croaker, in particular, usually caught off Virginia and North Carolina.

"How much of that is directly impacted by climate change is hard to get a handle on," Dempsey said. "There are a number of other factors that have been at play, one being overharvesting in inshore areas and, subsequently, ecological changes as inshore areas have become dominated in a lot of areas by spiny dogfish populations."