Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Board of Fisheries denies setnetters’ emergency petitions

August 4, 2021 — Kenai Peninsula setnetters are likely to remain closed for the rest of the season after the Board of Fisheries denied two emergency petitions seeking a partial reopening.

In an emergency meeting held Aug. 2, the Board of Fisheries voted 4-2 to deny a petition seeking a limited reopening of the East Side setnet fishery in Upper Cook Inlet. The petitioner, Chris Every, asked the board to reopen the East Side setnets within 600 feet of mean high tide, known as the 600-foot fishery.

“We believe by utilizing the 600-foot fishery we can reduce both the economic and biological impact while conserving chinook salmon, which is our ultimate goal with this 600-foot fishery,” he wrote in the petition.

The setnetters had a foreshortened and significantly restricted season because of low late-run king salmon returns to the Kenai River. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimates that 6,420 large kings have passed the sonar on the Kenai River since July 1, significantly less than the lower end of the escapement goal of 15,000 large kings. In response, the department placed progressively stronger restrictions on the sportfishery, going from no bait to catch-and-release, and finally to a complete closure.

Because of the paired-restriction model the Board of Fisheries placed on the East Side setnetters, when the king salmon sportfishery is completely closed, they are too. Setnetters have not been in the water since July 20, and they have watched the peak weeks of the Kenai River sockeye run swim past. Aug. 2 saw the highest daily passage to date: 151,525 sockeye passed the sonar, according to ADFG.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Unprecedented salmon declines force fish donations to Alaska’s Yukon River villages

August 3, 2021 — For 47 years, Jack Schultheis has spent fishing season around the mouth of Yukon River.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Schultheis said from Emmonak, where he is general manager of Kwik’Pak Fisheries, a commercial enterprise set up to help the regional economy in the Lower Yukon. In a regular season, the operation would be involved in commercial fishing, buying fish, and processing.

But this year, returns of staple salmon species are abysmal, prompting the state, regional non-profits, and processors to coordinate deliveries of fish from other parts of the state. Kwik’Pak isn’t fishing at all. Which means local residents aren’t earning cash to put towards essential needs, including gas and supplies for their own subsistence activities.

Communities up and down the Yukon are coming to terms with a collapse in key stocks, and now confronting the prospect of a winter without enough food. Tribal groups working in the region say the situation is dire, and are scrambling to find alternative ways to get protein and assistance to some of the most rural households in the state.

Runs of kings and chum salmon on the Yukon have been so low that subsistence fishing for both have remained closed. In the case of kings, the number of fish in the river has been in decline for decades, along with the average size of fish harvested, according to decades of data compiled by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Kuskokwim Fishermen Appeal To Gov. Dunleavy To Investigate Commercial Bycatch Impact On Subsistence

August 3, 2021 — Kuskokwim River fishermen want information on how commercial bycatch could be affecting Kuskokwim subsistence salmon runs, and they’re asking Gov. Dunleavy for help.

The Kuskokwim River Salmon Management Working Group is a group of local subsistence fishermen who advise state fishery managers. On July 28, the group unanimously voted to send a letter to the governor asking him to direct the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to provide the group information on how chum and king salmon bycatch in state commercial fisheries along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands could be affecting Kuskokwim salmon returns. This is the area commonly referred to as Management Area M.

It also asks for information on chum and king salmon bycatch in the federally-managed Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery.

Read the full story at KYUK

What’s to blame for Alaska’s poor king salmon runs? Submarines, suggests Rep. Young.

August 3, 2021 — Chinook salmon runs are in decline across Alaska, and research suggests a host of factors are to blame, from ocean predators to warmer streams and excess rain. But Alaska Congressman Don Young recently added a novel suspect to the list: nuclear submarines.

“We have to figure this out. Have to work on it and make sure there’s not something going on,” he said of the poor runs. “Is it climate change? Are they moving north? Is there a nuclear sub stuck out there somewhere?”

Young spoke at a subcommittee hearing Thursday, and acknowledged his theory sounds unusual.

“Everybody laughs at me but at one time I counted 64 nuclear subs from Russia,” he said. “We kept track of them as they came off the coast of California.”

A spokesman said Young was referring to matters like those described in a 2020 BBC article on radioactive submarine wrecks.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

US government makes bid request for nearly 8 million pounds of Alaska pollock

July 30, 2021 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new massive bid request for 7.942 million pounds of frozen Alaska pollock will push the agency’s pollock purchases to near-record levels.

With the latest acquisition, the agency will have purchased nearly 18.3 million pounds of Alaskan pollock for the fiscal year 2021, Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) CEO Craig Morris told SeafoodSource.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Alaska’s Bristol Bay sees record return of sockeye salmon. The warming climate may have helped.

July 30, 2021 — Amid a fierce June storm that whipped up 8-foot waves, Robin Samuelsen told his four young crew members to let out the gillnets behind his 32-foot boat in the Nushagak district of Bristol Bay.

For the 70-year-old, a veteran of more than a half-century of fishing, this was a tough day to start the 2021 sockeye salmon harvest. But soon the crew, all of them his grandsons, were dancing on the back deck as they spotted splash after splash made by sockeye hitting the net’s mesh in a surprisingly strong display of abundance so early in the season.

In the weeks that followed, storms often returned to make fishing miserable, and at times dangerous. Through it all, the salmon kept surging back from their ocean feeding grounds in what — by this week — developed into a record return of more than 65.5 million sockeye to the Bristol Bay region.

“It was pretty rough out there. It was really rough out there,” Samuelsen said. “But it was a fabulous year here in the Nushagak.”

The massive return once again demonstrated Bristol Bay’s stunning sockeye productivity at a time when these fish are struggling in other parts of North America, in part due to climate change, which can increase the temperature of the rivers adults must navigate to their spawning grounds. It can also reduce food for them in the ocean.

Read the full story from The Seattle Times at the Anchorage Daily News

‘We want our fish to be wild’: Alaska congressman floats new bill to block offshore aquaculture

July 30, 2021 — Alaska’s longtime Republican Congressman Don Young has yet again introduced the Keep Fin Fish Free Act, legislation prohibiting the Secretary of Interior and the Secretary of Commerce from authorizing commercial finfish aquaculture operations in the Federal Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) unless specifically authorized by Congress.

Young said the state’s residents are opposed to what he described as “hatchery fisheries” in the state.

“We don’t want that. We want our fish to be wild,” he said Thursday during a hearing held by the US House Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife.

Young said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be focusing on issues with Alaska’s ocean, and why fishermen are seeing fewer kings and other salmon during summer fishing seasons.

Read the full story at IntraFish

Major quake hits off the coast of Alaska, triggers tsunami warnings but no large waves

July 30, 2021 — A major earthquake struck near the Alaska Peninsula at 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, triggering tsunami warnings for much of the Gulf of Alaska coastline, but no large waves.

The magnitude-8.2 quake hit roughly 60 miles offshore of the tiny community of Perryville, reported the U.S. Geological Survey.

“This is the largest earthquake to happen in the Alaska region since 1965,” said Michael West, state seismologist with the Alaska Earthquake Center.

There were no immediate reports of major injuries or damage, but officials said that could change as people get a better look over the next few days.

After the initial tsunami warnings late Wednesday, the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer said at midnight that the waves caused by the quake were likely to be smaller than a foot.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Harmful algal blooms can be lethal for humans. Scientists wonder if they cause seabird die-offs, too

July 29, 2021 — Paralytic shellfish poisoning, caused by eating seafood contaminated with toxins from harmful algal blooms, can be deadly to humans. Now, using marine samples from Unalaska, scientists are trying to understand if those harmful algal blooms could also be responsible for seabird die-offs.

There’s not much data on how saxitoxin — a harmful compound produced by algal blooms that cause PSP — spreads through the larger food web. But in July, a group of biologists with the United States Geological Survey visited Unalaska to collect samples of plants and animals in hopes of learning more about how saxitoxin levels magnify and diminish as they move through the food chain, from phytoplankton to mussels and up to seabirds.

“We don’t really know how this toxin moves through the food web,” said Sarah Schoen, a USGS wildlife biologist that recently collected marine samples in Unalaska. “There’s still a lot of unknowns, but the more information we can collect about it, the more we’ll understand it.”

Schoen said the project started about five years ago when a major heat wave, known as “the blob,” hit the ocean. Around the same time, there was a die-off of an estimated million common murres — a northern seabird — from Alaska down to California.

Read the full story at KTOO

Alaskan processors dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks through salmon season

July 29, 2021 — The Alaska summer salmon season is riding another large catch of Bristol Bay sockeye and a recent spike in pink salmon harvests to decent overall harvest numbers, but surging numbers of COVID-19 cases have created some concern for the state’s seafood processors.

According to figures provided by McKinley Research, the summer’s total salmon harvest is already up 5 percent over last year, driven in part by a second straight week of good pink harvests after a slow start.

Read the full story at Seafood Source