Saving Seafood

1 million pounds and counting: Recycling fishing nets and lines takes off in Alaska coastal communities

December 1, 2021 — Over 1 million pounds of old fishing nets and lines from Alaska have made it so far to recycling markets where they are remade into plastic pellets and fibers.

The milestone was reached with a recent haul of nets from Dutch Harbor and more are already adding to the total. Shipping vans filled with old gear collected at Haines were offloaded in Seattle last week and another container from Cordova is on its way.

Dutch Harbor was the first to sign on four years ago with Net Your Problem, a small Seattle-based company that jumpstarted fishing gear recycling in Alaska and facilitates its collection and transport, primarily to Europe. The Net Your Problem team has partnered with the city and the region’s Qawalangin tribe to sort through piles of old nets and lines dumped at the landfill and undertake continuing outreach to boat owners to encourage them to recycle their gear.

Similar partnerships have formed in other Alaska coastal communities to start or sustain a recycling effort.

At Cordova, the Copper River Watershed Project collected and prepped roughly 16,000 pounds of gillnets for recycling so far, said Net Your Problem founder Nicole Baker-Loke, a former Alaska fisheries observer and current research associate at Washington State University.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Two Trawl Surveys in Northern Bering Sea Show Overall Decline in Many Species

November 30, 2021 — Results from two annual surveys in the northern Bering Sea this summer, one using bottom trawl and one using a surface trawl, show a decline in sea temperatures since the 2019 survey. Last year’s surveys, conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations’ Fisheries branch, were cancelled due to Covid-19. This year’s surveys showed the precipitous drop in snow crab and “large declines in the Bering Sea include walleye pollock, saffron cod, and various types of jellyfish.”

The presentations, reported by KNOM.org on November 10 and November 19, were part of the Strait Sciences program presented via Zoom reported Marion Trujillo of KNOM.

The surveys cover a grid from Cape Wales, the westernmost point on the North American mainland in the Bering Strait south to Nunivak Island, west of Bethel, AK.

“At this moment we’ve been in a very long stanza for warming. But we’ve dropped down a little bit. Both not only on the bottom temperatures but the surface temperatures. And I think there’s kind of a hope that maybe we are going to see us go into a cold stanza for a while, and start to cool down the Southeastern Bering Sea. But, this might also just be a little bit of variation, and (it will) jump back up. Next year is going to tell us a whole lot about what is happening,” NOAA research scientist Lyle Britt said in the presentation.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Gov. Dunleavy’s office announces formation of Alaska Bycatch Task Force

November 30, 2021 — Fishing vessels cast wide nets, and they often catch more than the species they’re targeting. That’s bycatch: one of the longest-running controversies in the fleet and a vexing problem for fisheries managers. Now, the Dunleavy administration is wading into the debate by naming a task force to study the issue and find ways to make it better for everyone working on the water.

Governor Mike Dunleavy’s office recently announced it’s setting up a task force to tackle the thorny issue of bycatch.

Federal data show trawl fisheries this year in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska have caught tens of thousands of Chinook salmon, millions of pounds of halibut, and in the case of the Bering Sea trawl fisheries, hundreds of thousands of crabs.

Stocks of staple species like Chinook salmon, red king crab, and halibut have been on the decline, forcing subsistence, sport and commercial fishermen to pack up nets or reduce harvest.

Read the full story at KNBA

Alaska legislators discuss bycatch concerns ahead of critical regional halibut meeting

November 26, 2021 — An Alaska legislative committee heard from state and federal fisheries officials earlier in the month prior to a critical regional meeting on halibut bycatch.

The three-hour meeting centered on bycatch concerns with chinook and chum salmon, crab and halibut. Commissioner Douglas Vincent-Lang of the Department and Fish and Game spoke first about catastrophic chum salmon returns in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Bycatch is the unintentional harvest of non-target species while commercial fishing.

According to state data, the Yukon alone was down this year by roughly 1.5-2 million chum salmon from pre-season projections. Chum salmon bycatch by trawlers, which has been rising in recent years, cannot alone explain those reduced numbers, Vincent-Lang said, and the state will now try to determine what caused the historic Western Alaska salmon failures.

But, it was halibut bycatch limits for trawlers that target pollock and cod in the Bering Sea that proved more controversial.

Read the full story at Alaska’s News Source

 

EPA looks to place permanent protections on Bristol Bay by 2022

November 24, 2021 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has placed dates on the timeline to reinstate Clean Water Act protections on Alaska’s Bristol Bay, with a Federal Register notice posted on Wednesday, 17 November, naming a date of 31 May, 2022, for the finalization of the safeguards.

Permanent protections of the bay are critical to protect its robust salmon fishery, which is projected to produce 71 to 75 million salmon returns in 2022, Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association Board President Michael Jackson said.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Surface Trawl Survey Reveals Shifting Fish Populations

November 23, 2021 — Researchers are predicting low fish runs in the Norton Sound and Northern Bering Sea region again next year, according to research biologist Jim Murphy.

Murphy, who works with the Salmon Ocean Ecology and Bycatch Analysis Group at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Juneau, presented the findings of the recent 2021 surface trawl survey during a Strait Science event. The survey, which tracks marine life across the surface and midlevel of the northern Bering Strait, was conducted in September this year. Researchers studied salmon, seabirds, shrimp, zooplankton and several other marine species.

The surface trawl survey has been conducted every year for almost two decades, and Murphy says when the survey is conducted is crucial. “The timing of the survey was established at the beginning to match the timing of marine entry and dispersal of juvenile salmon from estuarine habitats, and we’ve attempted to keep the timing of the survey as consistent as possible.”

Though the primary purpose of the surface trawl is to track pelagic fish, or species found in the middle and upper water columns, and invertebrate populations, researchers also collect zooplankton and sediments, as well as bottom-dwelling fish, crab and invertebrates.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Alaska lawmakers in both parties demand action on excessive fisheries bycatch

November 23, 2021 — A grilling on fish that is taken as bycatch didn’t satisfy the appetites of a bipartisan group of Alaska legislators at a special hearing on Nov. 15 by the House Fisheries Committee.

“We probably could not be more diametrically opposed on many things but we are frustrated with the waste of the resource and we are in lockstep. It’s all about the best economics and the best stewardship of our resources,” said Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, who devoted his entire November Capital Report to the topic.

“The fish don’t care if you’re red or blue,” said Sarah Vance, R-Homer, the catalyst behind the bycatch hearing. “We lay aside everything else and focus on good stewardship and making sure that every fisherman is able to get fish in the freezer and food on the table.”

The bycatch issue came to a head this summer when all Yukon River salmon fisheries were canceled due to so few returning chinook and chums. Along with ocean and climate impacts, villagers questioned the takes by huge trawlers that catch and process fish at sea.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

New How-To Guide for Observer Trip Selection in Alaska

November 23, 2021 — NOAA Fisheries has produced the first comprehensive manual describing the  Observer Declare and Deploy System—the ODDS. This web-based system determines which fishing trips require observer or electronic monitoring (EM) coverage in the federal groundfish and Pacific halibut fisheries off Alaska.

The ODDS is one of only two systems in the United States where fishermen, managers, and observer providers can all interact with information on past and upcoming fishing trips.

The ODDS was built and is maintained by the Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis division of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

Since its launch in 2012, ODDS has successfully logged more than 50,000 fishing trips.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

 

Ocean Beauty, Seagrove Kelp, Alaskan Leader win Alaska Symphony of Seafood awards

November 22, 2021 — The Alaska Symphony of Seafood announced its 2021 winners at Pacific Marine Expo on Friday, 19 November in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation Executive Director Julie Decker was on hand to announce all winners in the competition, which was created to encourage more product development in Alaska’s seafood sector.

Read the full story from National Fisherman at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Dunleavy administration announces formation of bycatch task force

November 22, 2021 — Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s office recently announced that it’s setting up a task force to tackle the thorny issue of trawler bycatch.

Bycatch is what fishermen catch unintentionally — fish they aren’t targeting that get caught up in their nets, anyway. Federal bycatch data shows trawl fisheries in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska this year have caught tens of thousands of chinook salmon, millions of pounds of halibut and hundreds of thousands of crabs.

Meanwhile staple species like chinook salmon, red king crab and halibut have been on the decline, forcing subsistence, sport and commercial fishermen to pack up nets or reduce harvest.

“We’ve had a reduction in or closure of the crab fisheries in the Bering Sea. The [North Pacific Fishery Management] Council is discussing how to deal with halibut bycatch, and I think there’s a lot of perception that there are bycatch issues associated with what’s happened with salmon in Western Alaska systems,” said Alaska Fish & Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang.

Read the full story at KTOO