Saving Seafood

Unalaska Boosts COVID Risk Level To ‘High’ After Potential Spread At Weekend Festivals

August 19, 2021 — The City of Unalaska confirmed what it called a “widespread community exposure” of COVID-19, after identifying two new community acquired cases of the virus Tuesday.

In a prepared statement and interviews, city officials said wastewater testing had recently shown an uptick in COVID-19 positivity. They also said they’re on guard after two major public festivals last weekend brought residents together in close quarters.

In response to the new cases, the city has raised its COVID-19 risk level to “high” and closed certain municipal buildings to the public.

Despite the uptick in cases, the city isn’t mandating any extra public health protocols or scheduling a special City Council meeting to discuss them. However, council will meet next Tuesday to review community-wide protective measures.

City Hall and the public library are also temporarily closing to the public, while the pool and Community Center will remain open at limited capacity, and by appointment only.

Read the full story at KUCB

LED lights offer potential solution to chronic bycatch problem in Alaska fisheries

August 17, 2021 — Bycatch gives Alaska’s otherwise stellar fisheries management its biggest black eye.

The term refers to unwanted sea creatures taken in trawls, pots, lines and nets when boats are going after targeted catches. Bycatch is the bane of existence for fishermen, seafood companies and policy makers alike, yet few significant advances have been found to mitigate the problem.

A simple device has recently offered a potential solution.

“Ten underwater LED lights can be configured to light up different parts of the fishing gear with six different colors, intensity and flash rates to attract, repel or guide fish through the gear while retaining the target catches,” said Dan Watson, CEO and co-founder of SafetyNet Technologies based in the U.K., which provides its Pisces light system to fisheries around the globe.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Pebble Mine owners discuss delay in appeals process

August 17, 2021 — Northern Dynasty Minerals announced this week that its appeal of the Pebble Mine decision is receiving new oversight and is likely to take a year or longer.

In November 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected the mining company’s permit application to build Pebble Mine at the headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay under its subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership, following a battle with local residents, Native tribes and fishing stakeholders that spanned three decades.

The mining company submitted its appeal of the decision in January, and now the Corps has assigned a new review officer to the appeal, after the prior RO was promoted out of the position, according to a release from Northern Dynasty President and CEO Ronald Thiessen.

The release notes that “guidelines indicate the administrative appeal process should conclude within 90 days.” However, “the Pebble Partnership has been advised that the administrative appeal process for Pebble is likely to take a year or more given the complexity of the case and the scope of the administrative record.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Record Salmon in One Place. Barely Any in Another. Alarm All Around.

August 16, 2021 — This summer, fishers in the world’s largest wild salmon habitat pulled a record-breaking 65 million sockeye salmon from Alaska’s Bristol Bay, beating the 2018 record by more than three million fish.

But on the Yukon River, about 500 miles to the north, salmon were alarmingly absent. This summer’s chum run was the lowest on record, with only 153,000 fish counted in the river at the Pilot Station sonar — a stark contrast to the 1.7 million chum running in year’s past. The king salmon runs were also critically low this summer — the third lowest on record. The Yukon’s fall run is also shaping up to be sparse.

The disparity between the fisheries is concerning — a possible bellwether for the chaotic consequences of climate change; competition between wild and hatchery fish; and commercial fishing bycatch.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Sabrina Garcia, a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “I think that we’re starting to see changes due to climate change, and I think that we’re going to continue to see more changes, but we need more years of data.”

The low runs have had ripple effects for communities along the Yukon River and its tributaries — the Andreafski, Innoko, Anvik, Porcupine, Tanana and Koyukuk Rivers — resulting in a devastating blow to the people relying on salmon as a food staple, as feed for sled dogs and as an integral and enriching cultural tradition spanning millenniums.

Read the full story at The New York Times

NPFMC October hybrid meeting

August 16, 2021 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

The NPFMC will hold meetings over the period September 30-October 15, 2021. The SSC and Advisory Panel will meet entirely via webconference, and the Council will meet via webconference on October 6th, and tentatively in person from October 10-15th, at the Egan Center in Anchorage, AK.  The eAgenda, Schedule, and a list of when documents are available is now posted. Please note the SSC has a separate SSC eAgenda. More detailed information is available on our website.

You can submit comments for each agenda item through the Council and SSC eAgendas during the written public comment period, which opens September 17th and closes September 29th at 5:00 PM AST.  Submitted comments will be reviewed and publicly visible after the deadline, as per the Council’s comment policy. The Council will have remote testimony available if it meets in person.

If you have questions, please email npfmc.admin@noaa.gov.

When Yukon Chum Stocks Suddenly Collapsed, Yukon River Residents Received Donations From Bristol Bay

August 13, 2021 — For eight years, Tanya Ives has been traveling up from Washington each summer to work at the Yukon River’s only fish processing plant: Kwik’Pak Fisheries. The plant sits outside of Emmonak at the river’s mouth. Normally at this time of year, Ives would be packing up chum salmon harvested by commercial fishermen along the Yukon River to sell around the world. But this summer, she’s doing the opposite.

Read the full story at KYUK

‘Salmon is Life’: For Native Alaskans, Salmon Declines Pose Existential Crisis

August 12, 2021 — In St. Mary’s, Alaska, the people of the Yupiit of Andreafski look to the south wind, the budding tree leaves, and even the formations of migrating birds to discern whether the pulse of salmon returning upriver to spawn will be strong. Serena Fitka grew up in this tiny Yukon River village, and though she now lives in Valdez, she returns home every summer with her family, to partake in the traditional salmon harvest that is both the community’s main source of sustenance and the fabric of its culture.

This year, however, abysmally low salmon runs in the Yukon River have led Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) to impose a moratorium on fishing for Chinook (or King) and Chum salmon in the mighty river, which runs for 2,000 miles from the Bering Sea to Canada’s Yukon Territory. While Yukon run sizes for both salmon species numbered about 1.9 million in the past, this year they’re projected to be less than 430,000. The moratorium impacts 40 villages and roughly 11,000 people, 90 percent of whom are Indigenous Alaskans. And many have no access to grocery stores or any other source of food besides what they can hunt or harvest.

On a recent trip to St. Mary’s, Fitka said she felt depressed. “I walk on to the riverbank, and I look at the river and . . . I want to go get fish, but I can’t. And that’s how everyone was feeling this year. People came to me and said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’” Fitka is executive director of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association, which represents the interests of Indigenous subsistence fishermen on the Yukon River.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Alaska captain hit with $1 million fine, six-month sentence for misreporting

August 12, 2021 — A commercial fisherman in Alaska will pay a fine of $1 million and spend up to a six months in prison for misreporting his catch.

Kodiak fisherman James Aaron Stevens was sentenced last week for “knowingly submitting false records concerning the locations and regulatory areas where fish were harvested,” according to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, Alaska District.

The attorney’s office announced last August that Stevens had plead guilty to one count of false labeling, which constituted a Lacey Act violation. The false reporting occurred during 26 fishing trips between 2014 and 2017, when Stevens served as the owner and operator of the F/V Southern Seas and the F/V Alaskan Star.

“Specifically, Stevens knowingly falsified International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) logbooks, daily fishing logbooks, Alaska Department of Fish and Game fish tickets, and landing reports to show that fishing gear had been deployed in areas where the vessels did not fish, and omitted areas in which the fish were actually harvested,” the district attorney’s office said. “In addition to his falsified logbooks, the investigation further revealed that Stevens maintained the accurate fishing information in a separate, personal log.”

Stevens falsely reported the harvest of some 903,208 pounds of halibut and sablefish, which added up to around $4.5 million in ex-vessel value and $13.5 million in market value.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Wild Salmon Day: Alaska celebrates a mixed bag of returns

August 11, 2021 — This year, it’s complicated. Fishermen and other Alaska salmon stakeholders have some good reasons to celebrate of the fifth annual Wild Alaska Salmon Day on Tuesday, Aug. 10. But in some regions, the fleets are weighing their worries now that they’re just past the midpoint of the summer salmon season.

Overall, the state is seeing some bright spots in returns of pink, sockeye and silver salmon. But the success stories are stratified.

Both Bristol Bay and Prince William Sound are celebrating a big year.

As of the end of July, the Prince William Sound fleet had landed a 123 percent increase in pink salmon over the 2019 harvest (pinks tend to boom every other year), and sockeye, chum, silver and king returns were all up over the 2020 harvest. Though the bar was set low last year, healthy returns across the board are a welcome change after a downward trend over the last several seasons.

Not only is the Bristol Bay’s salmon return a significant record, closing in on 66 million fish (the last record was just under 63 million, set in 2018), but the base price is nothing to sneeze at either, coming out of the gates strong at $1.10 on a promise from Peter Pan Seafoods, and leaping up to $1.25, spurred by OBI Seafoods. That’s up from a covid-induced low of 70 cents last year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Multi-Year Effort to Observe Seafloor Habitats and Learn More about Deep-sea Corals and Sponges in Alaska

August 10, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

To learn more about deep-sea communities in the sub-Arctic waters of Alaska, NOAA Fisheries is implementing a four-year science initiative. Research teams will collect new information that will contribute to the management and protection of deep-sea coral and sponge ecosystems throughout Alaska.

Corals and sponges are found throughout Alaska’s rich marine waters—the Aleutian Islands have some of the densest and most diverse coral and sponge communities in the world. However, their full geographic extent is still unknown.

This is due in part to the vastness of Alaska’s exclusive economic zone. These offshore waters encompass an area greater than the combined EEZ of all the other U.S. continental states. As a result, approximately 72 percent of Alaska’s waters have yet to be thoroughly mapped with sonar.

“It’s really important that we conduct this research now. So much of the sub-Arctic and Arctic is changing due to climate change and we know so little about these seafloor communities and valuable fish and crab habitats,” said Jerry Hoff, the lead scientist for this effort, who is based at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

Read the full release here