- [Mike] One summer morning on Narragansett Bay the trawler, John H. Chafee, sets out from Fort Wetherill in Jamestown.

We're headed for a spot off Scarborough Beach.

The crew sets their nets for 100 feet down, but these are not your typical fishermen.

- I've been doing it for a while now and honestly you never know what it's gonna be.

- [Mike] Chris Parkins is chief biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, or DEM for short.

They have been surveying the area's fish since 1979.

- The longer you do the same thing, you'll notice trends and changes over time.

So that's what we are doing.

We're looking for those changes of species diversity, the size of the species, when they arrive, when they leave, things like that.

Okay, so scup, this is your typical scup.

This is a butterfish.

These and all these little silver dollar looking things.

This is our longfin squid.

Any of the small stuff like silver hake we'll just pick a bucket, put 'em in that bucket.

Same thing with squid.

So just separate everything by species.

- [Mike] And that separation has provided a window on something that looms large, climate change.

An early warning sign that the Bay was changing came in the 1990s when the popular winter flounder went into sharp decline.

Today this fish has become a poster child of sorts for how warming waters affect cold water fish.

- Winter flounder are kind of interesting, right?

Because their life history is they come into the Bay in the wintertime, hence the name, when most of all the other fish leave.

So they have the Bay to themselves.

With the excess fishing and climate change, they've struggled to recover.

- And climate change produces winners and losers.

The winners, warmer water species like scup and black sea bass, which are swimming up from the south in greater numbers.

So when you see the changes, you know, with warming waters and the climate, what worries you?

- It's the rate at which it's happening.

The ocean is notorious for being able to adapt to change, through some pretty significant events in the history of Earth.

We see species that have survived asteroids and things like that.

Whereas, climate change is happening at such a rapid rate, it's pushing a lot of species out quickly.

And then the species that are taking their place are changing the structure of the ecosystem.

- The northeast U.S. it is one of the fastest warming areas in the globe.

And I think there is cause for concern.

- [Mike] Conor McManus, chief of DEM's Division of Marine Fisheries, calls Narragansett Bay an essential nursery for sea life, but according to a study published last winter in the journal "Climate" the Bay also lies in one of the fastest warming areas on the planet.

- How do we as a society and ecosystem effectively adapt to these changes?

And really has us asking questions of for the species that are maybe climate change losers, how do we build management plans to either help rebuild, or maintain these populations that have declined over time?

- [Mike] And that's certainly been the case in Narragansett Bay where temperatures have risen almost three degrees Fahrenheit in the last 60 years.

- That can be the difference of whether a species is now able to thrive in an environment that it used to not be able to, or conversely species not being able to spawn, or reproduce, or survive in an area that they once were able to.

- [Mike] The day we went out, the DEM's fishermen scooped up a lot of different things, crabs, butterfish, skates, and the Rhode Island State appetizer, longfin squid, aka, calamari, but the biggest catch is a fish that some have never heard of.

- [Chris] So the scup total weight is 11.4723.

- [Crew] 22.

- [Chris] 21.

- [Mike] Also known as sea bream or porgy, scup is a fish that has been around for centuries.

Roger Williams referred to it by its Narragansett name, mishcuppauog.

Today, while more plentiful, thanks to warming waters, many Rhode Islanders have never given it a try.

- I've made poke bowls with it at home, which is really good, but it also makes a really great fish taco.

- Kate Masury is the executive director of a Rhode Island nonprofit called Eating with the Ecosystem.

And you say that you connect the dots between food systems and the fisheries ecology.

Can you tell us what you mean by that?

- Those food systems and then fishery science kinda happens in two different almost like silos.

There's the fishery science that looks at, you know, the populations of fish and shellfish and how well they're reproducing and all these other factors.

And then there's the food system side that it's, you know, looking at how to feed people and creating food plans for the different states.

And a lot of times those aren't necessarily linked up.

- [Mike] Rhode Island fishermen caught more than four million pounds of scup last year, making it the state's top catch among fish, but most is exported to big cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago with large immigrant communities that favor it.

Here in Rhode Island the demand is low.

John Delgado, the seafood buyer for Dave's Supermarkets is trying to change that.

- It should be a staple, especially in the New England northeast area, and it's not, it's definitely underutilized.

- One reason for that Delgado says is that many people are intimidated by having to cook a whole fish, bones and all.

- We have to take that element out of it to make sure we have a filet, and then the feedback is usually wonderful.

Once people try it, Mike, it comes back as a positive.

Wow, I thought it was gonna be a lot stronger, or a lot gamier.

It was mild, my children liked it.

We used it in this dish or that dish, and it becomes family-friendly, children-friendly.

I do a broiled with some onions and tomatoes, and I also do fish tacos with it, which is fantastic.

And when I have company over, they never really ask what the fish is until after.

They love it and then I'll say, believe it or not, it was scup.

"You gotta be kidding me."

- [Mike] In the dozen or so years that Dave's has carried scup, sales at its 10 stores have climbed from 25 pounds to several hundred pounds a week.

Scup is also on the menu at some of Rhode Island's finest restaurants.

It's a nice thick piece right there.

- [Ben] That's beautiful, right?

- [Mike] Ben Sukle is the chef owner of Oberlin in Providence.

His downtown restaurant has won national acclaim for his locally sourced seafood.

And a critic from "Bon Appétit" wrote that scup was his new favorite fish.

- Tonight's preparation will be raw for our crudo, so it'll just be salt, lemon, and in this case we're using this olive oil called Arbequina olive oil.

It's a really nice buttery Spanish organic olive oil that we always pair with almost all of our fish.

- [Mike] Sukle has been serving scup for 15 years.

To make it sound more appetizing he used to call it silver bass.

- When you get, like, the old salty ones that come through and, like, say, like, they used to catch this fish and used it for bait, or they would just, like, kill it right away, and, like, or throw it back right away.

I just know the more we keep doing it, the more it seems like that is becoming what people want.

- Is it a sustainable model to keep eating seafood that's caught far away when we have this abundance of underutilized fish in our own back Bay?

- I mean, I personally don't think so.

I think that, like, for when you're eating local, you're not only, like, I guess supporting kind of your local fishing community, not just the fishing community, but the full kind of supply chain of, like, people that are involved in that, but your food is traveling less far before it reaches your plate, which is helping in terms of carbon emissions.

- [Mike] Since the pandemic, Masury's group and the Rhode Island Seafood Coalition have worked to connect local fishermen to poorer communities.

They created a program that has handed out more than 210,000 pounds of seafood.

- In 2021 Rhode Island harvested 99 different species alone.

That was from commercial fishermen.

And so we've got this huge selection of different local seafood species, but a lot of it there's not as much of a market for it here 'cause consumers kind of aren't demanding it.

- [Mike] But some immigrant groups are, and Masury says we can learn a lot from people from far away about how to eat local.

- I think that there's a lot we can learn from them about adapting our diet to what's actually being produced in our local waters and caught by our local fisheries.

And then beyond that, I think that we can really look to them for how to utilize some of these species and how to prepare them in delicious ways.

- [Mike] And that's been true for Liberian immigrants, Michael Neor and his wife Esther, who work with and are beneficiaries of the program.

To them, scup offers a taste of Africa.

Is this a fish that you would eat back home in Liberia?

- Oh yeah, we have this one in Liberia, we call it black snapper.

Liberia is like an island.

So, like, we're surrounded by water, the real island.

So, like, we have a place called Providence Island.

It's in Monrovia, so they got the fishermen and the fish.

We go there buy the fish.

- Then it was time to taste the scup, which is smothered in a sauce of onions, fresh tomatoes and garlic.

I hold the tail to get, I wanna get a little of this sauce here.

Look how nice and white and flaky it is.

- [Esther] Make sure don't eat the bones.

- This scup was swimming in the Narragansett Bay a few days ago.

- [Esther] Yeah, get the bone out of it.

Make sure you taste it.

Spicy, huh?

Yeah, spicy.

- It's really good, really good.

- [Esther] And spicy.

- I could eat this whole fish.

- Finally, last May as part of our continuing