Saving Seafood

ALASKA: St. Paul’s new research vessel marks a milestone in effort to rebuild local economy

August 28, 2026 — The Pribilof Islands community of St. Paul is now the homeport for a research vessel. The 50-foot Eventide arrived in St. Paul late last month, marking a major milestone for the community.

John Wayne Melovidov is president of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government. He said St. Paul is working to build a research economy after declines in the local fishing industry. The island’s Trident Seafood plant closed after the Bering Sea crab fishery crashed in 2022. Melovidov said monitoring the area’s crab, halibut and fur seal populations will be especially important.

“If anybody should be doing the research on what’s going on with our species out in our backyard, it should be us,” he said. “So we set up a lab to do that research ourselves, but also to invite other scientists to do whatever research they want to do.”

Read the full article at KUCB

ALASKA: Record-breaking pink run surges into Sitka

August 26, 2026 — Sitka purse seiners broke the area’s single-day pink salmon harvest record twice this month, as a strong late run and increased fishing effort turned around what had initially looked like a difficult season.

According to an Aug. 20 report from Raven Radio, seiners in District 13 harvested 1.23 million pink salmon on Aug. 6, surpassing the previous single-day record of roughly 950,000 fish set in 2017.

Four days later, the fleet broke the record again, harvesting 1.28 million pink salmon on Aug. 10.

“We’ve just been seeing really strong harvests of pink salmon and really strong escapements, which was kind of unusual for an even year, and fairly unusual, given what’s been going on with pink salmon in the rest of the Gulf of Alaska,” Alaska Department of Fish and Game Sitka area management biologist Aaron Dupuis told KCAW. “So it’s pretty special to have a good pink run in the Sitka area this year.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Trump’s offshore drilling revival survives early court challenge

August 25, 2026 — A federal judge in Alaska has blocked environmental groups’ challenge against the Trump administration’s decision to reopen millions of acres of offshore waters in the Arctic and elsewhere to oil and gas development.

Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on Monday ruled the environmental coalition led by the Northern Alaska Environmental Center lacked standing to bring their suit.

The groups failed to show they faced imminent harm from President Donald Trump’s 2025 decision to reverse his predecessors’ orders to permanently close off broad swaths of the outer continental shelf (OCS) from fossil fuel development, she said.

Read the full article at E&E News

ALASKA: ‘How do you buy time?’ Scientists look to slow an Alaska glacier’s march to the sea

August 21, 2026 — The Valerie Glacier is sliding toward the ocean, fast. Over the course of 18 days in July, the glacier galloped a whopping 150 feet— the length of four school buses parked end-to-end.

With it went a small research camp, made up of a cluster of tents pitched under jagged peaks. The scientists were there to study the Valerie and whether it might be possible to slow its disappearance into the sea.

As the team donned snowshoes and skis to head into the field, Melenda Lekanof, the project’s community liaison, took in the seemingly endless glaciated landscape. She said she was thinking about her ancestors – the Ginéix Kwáan or Kwáashk’ikwáan, of the Copper River region – migrating through here centuries ago.

“It’s breathtaking, and it’s a bit overwhelming, because this is part of who I am,” said Lekanof, who is from Yakutat and is Tlingit and Aleut.

But she’s also worried about the future. The world’s glaciers have lost about 5% of their ice since 2000 as temperatures rise with climate change. And Alaska’s glaciers are disappearing even more quickly.

“I don’t know if this is going to be here in my time,” Lekanof said. She added: “We need to know what’s going on.”

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Fish fights take center stage in Alaska Senate race

August 20, 2026 — The plight of the state’s fisheries, some of the most productive in the world, has become a flashpoint in Alaska’s Senate race and arisen as a potential weakness for two-term incumbent Dan Sullivan.

Sullivan faces a tough reelection bid against former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, who has centered her campaign around “Fish, Family, Freedom.” She’s trying to harness anger at out-of-state commercial fishing to win her way back to Congress.

Alaska hosts some of the largest commercial pollock fisheries in the world as well as major salmon populations — buttressing a seafood industry that supports more than 15,000 Alaskan jobs with around $5 billion in value. Many Alaska Natives harvest fish from the state’s mighty rivers and rely on the catch during winter.

Read the full article at E&E News

ALASKA: After historic crash, Yukon River’s iconic king salmon run shows early signs of rebound

August 18, 2026 — For the past few years, smokehouses in the Yukon River village of Anvik have sat empty.

After salmon populations crashed, dozens of Alaska Native communities along the river faced a stark new reality, one without the fish that fed families and sustained Yup’ik and Athabascan traditions for generations.

This summer, though, smoke once again wafted through Anvik, on the middle Yukon some 350 miles west of Anchorage.

The river’s two main species, chinook and chum, have recorded a surprising uptick in numbers. And in spite of state regulations that bar fishing for chinook, Anvik’s fishermen have caught dozens of the fish this year, plus even more salmon of other species — meaning that there are enough to share with elders, hang in smokehouses and store in freezers.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen the smokehouses smoking in five years,” said Robert Walker, former chief of the Anvik Tribal Council. “I was just amazed. People are so happy.”

The returning fish could represent a remarkable rebound for one of Alaska’s most iconic and culturally important salmon runs, though scientists caution that numbers are still relatively low and that more data are needed before they can be confident about a meaningful turnaround.

The harvest in Anvik, announced by Walker on a public teleconference with fishery managers and local leaders in July, also has inflamed a long-running political debate over fishery closures and government policies aimed at rebuilding the runs.

In 2024, Alaska state officials agreed with the Canadian government to a seven-year ban on harvesting chinook along the Yukon, which flows from northwest Canada more than 2,000 miles through Alaska to the Bering Sea.

Even though many Alaska Native leaders generally agreed about the need to limit fishing, they also criticized Alaska’s government for not formally including tribal governments in the decision-making process.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Trawling and bycatch dominate political messaging in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race

August 17, 2026 — Trawling ships that over the years have incidentally scooped up and wasted millions of pounds of salmon and other fish have burst onto the forefront of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race.

Multiple Outside political advocacy groups with little public information about their donors are targeting candidates over their approach to limiting bycatch in the pollock industry, which critics blame for contributing to historic declines in Alaska salmon, halibut and crab fisheries.

Alaska fishermen have appeared in ads discussing the bycatch records of the major candidates, Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and challenger Mary Peltola, a Democratic former U.S. representative.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Preliminary 2027 forecast for Alaska’s Bristol Bay fishery predicts more, smaller sockeye

August 17, 2026 — With the 2026 commercial salmon harvests winding down in Alaska, the seafood industry is already calculating how to navigate at a profit in 2027, given dynamic biological, economic, climate and market conditions.

Their forecast has a far-reaching socio-economic impact across the state — Bristol Bay’s commercial fishery had about $2 billion in economic impact and supported 15,000 jobs in 2019 according to research from the McKinley Research Group.

Data from the University of Washington’s forthcoming preliminary preseason forecast for the celebrated Bristol Bay wild sockeye fishery anticipate a run of 45 million fish next year, up from the 2026 forecast of 41.5 million. But run size is just one of many factors under consideration.

Fish size is one of those factors: 45 million big fish have more meat — and a bigger economic effect — than 45 million smaller fish. The size of the fish also helps determine which products the processors will produce.

“When we get really big returns the fish are smaller for their age, because they are competing for their food,” said salmon researcher Daniel Schindler of the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “We estimate how many fish of each age class are coming back.”

For 2027 those preliminary indications are for 20 million fish that have spent three years in the ocean — known as three ocean fish — and 30 million fish that have spent two years in the ocean in 2027. Because there are more fish that have spent less time in the ocean, the overall catch will be smaller.

But the climate can affect how much of that forecast becomes a reality.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Beyond bycatch: The bigger story of Alaska pollock

August 14, 2026 — Alaska pollock is the biggest catch in the United States. But the fish drawing the most attention are the ones the fleet never meant to pull up.

For Sam Murphy, vice president of the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance (APFA), the focus on bycatch misses a much larger story.

That argument comes at a pointed moment for the fishery. In February, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) voted 8-3 to recommend the first mandatory limit on chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery, an annual cap of 45,000 Western Alaska chum, paired with a corridor closure near the Alaska Peninsula between June 10 and Aug. 31, apportioned among the at-sea processor, catcher vessel, mothership, and Community Development Quota (CDQ) sectors.

The NPFMC heard testimony from more than 170 people over four days, including tribal leaders, subsistence fishermen, CDQ groups, and pollock industry participants. The new rules are not expected to take effect until June 2028 at the earliest.

Murphy didn’t dismiss the difficult conversations about salmon bycatch or the challenges facing Alaska’s fisheries. Those discussions are necessary, he said. But after spending the past year and a half aboard fishing vessels, touring processing plants, and visiting fishing communities across Alaska, he believes the conversation had become too narrowly focused on a single issue while overlooking the broader role pollock plays in the state’s seafood economy.

“I don’t really see it as an argument,” Murphy said in an interview with National Fisherman. “To me, it’s simply the reality that I hope more people start to recognize.”

That reality, he said, was one of interdependence.

Murphy described Alaska’s seafood economy as a three-legged stool. Commercial fishermen harvest the resource, processors transform that harvest into products consumed around the world, and coastal communities provide the workforce, ports, and infrastructure that allow the system to function.

“Remove any one of those three legs, and the whole thing starts to wobble,” Murphy said.

That connection, he said, was why framing Alaska’s fisheries as rivals missed the point.

“Pollock doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Neither do salmon, crab, cod, or halibut,” Murphy said. “These fisheries are connected economically, operationally, and culturally.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman