Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Tongass and Bristol Bay protection can help Biden meet new climate goal, fishing and conservation advocates say

May 10, 2021 — The Biden administration issued a conservation plan Thursday called “America the Beautiful.”

At 22 pages, it’s more of a statement of principles. The centerpiece is a goal of conserving 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030, in part to combat climate change.

Republicans in Congress immediately criticized it as vague and an attempt to lock up natural resources.

Meanwhile, conservation groups are eyeing parts of Alaska they’d like to see protected. Their eyes are on salmon.

“It’s hard to think of two better candidates than the Tongass in Southeast Alaska and Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska,” said Tim Bristol, executive director of Salmon State.

He said conservation measures in the Tongass and Bristol Bay would protect fish, wildlife and save thousands of jobs which depend on renewable resources.

Read the full story at KTOO

Is That Steller Sea Lion in Distress? Waving? Or Is It …Thermoregulation?

May 7, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Imagine that you are enjoying a wonderful day along Alaska’s rocky shores when suddenly you see something strange in the water. Is that an orca? You look through your binoculars and realize it is a Steller sea lion. You see its flipper in the air, and it only surfaces its head to breathe once in a while. Is it sick or injured? Or is this normal behavior?

NOAA Fisheries often receives reports of Steller sea lions exhibiting this behavior from concerned citizens who think the sea lion may be in distress.

“When people get hot or cold, they can remove or add a layer of clothing,” explains Steller sea lion expert Kim Raum-Suryan of NOAA’s Alaska Regional Office. “Since Steller sea lions don’t have this option, they do something a little different. They instead have this amazing ability to use thermoregulation—in other words, to regulate their own body temperature. “

A Steller sea lion’s core body temperature is about 100°F. Heat loss in water is about 25 times faster than in air. Steller sea lions deposit most of their body fat into a thick layer of blubber just under the skin. This blubber layer insulates the sea lion’s body from the cold water and provides an excess energy reserve.

However, the flippers are poorly insulated, with the blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. Sea lions often regulate their own body temperature by lifting and exposing one or more flippers as they are floating on the surface of the water. The blood vessels just under the skin dilate and either absorb heat from, or release heat to, the environment. Absorbed heat is then circulated to the rest of the body.

If you ever see a stranded, injured, entangled, or dead Steller sea lion or other marine mammal, please call the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Statewide 24-hour Stranding Hotline at (877) 925-7773. But the next time you see a sea lion or a group of sea lions with their flippers extended out of the water, there’s no need to call. This is just normal sea lion behavior … but you can wave back if you want to!

Read the full release here

North Pacific Council’s New Public Comment Policy Triggers Intense Reactions

May 6, 2021 — Personal attacks and profanity laced five of the 250 written comments submitted to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council last month on just one of the half dozen issues before the Alaska fisheries management panel. Council staff pulled the comments after they’d been live for a few hours and reached out to each author to ask them to resubmit their comments without the offensive language. Only one did.

The issue was abundance based management (ABM) of halibut in the Bering Sea, where far more halibut is taken as incidental bycatch in bottom trawls than by halibut quota holders with their longline gear, and salmon bycatch in mid-water trawls in an area that has seen precipitous drops in Chinook returns. Public testimony during the meeting was intense but for the most part civil. ABM and bycatch is one of a few lightning-rod issues — like the on-shore/off-shore fight over the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island fisheries and others — that the council has faced in the nearly half century it has managed Alaska’s federal fisheries.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Stakeholders worry after profanity prompts federal fisheries council to tighten comment policies

May 6, 2021 — For all the controversy and high-strung emotion that can accompany fisheries decision-making bodies, the federal council that manages fisheries in the North Pacific says it hadn’t ever received public comments with explicit language… until last month.

North Pacific Fishery Management Council members like Bill Twiet said at the council’s April meeting they worried that crude language and personal attacks could prevent people from speaking up.

“We lose collectively — the council loses, but also the council family loses — when people choose not to engage with us because they look at some of that testimony and they think ‘If that’s the cost of speaking up, I don’t want to,’” Tweit explained.

Council members say five of the nearly 600 comments submitted to the council last month contained vulgar language or personal attacks. The council’s executive director says his staff reached out to the commenters and asked them to resubmit, sans swearing. One did.

But those five comments were apparently enough to prompt changes to the council’s written comment policies. That includes a profanity filter, tighter deadlines for submitting comments and some discretionary power for Council staff to move — or remove — off-topic comments.

And that’s prompted outcry from longtime fisheries advocates. The head of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association Linda Behnken says she’s never seen the council move like that: “I mean, never seen them bring something up, take action, boom, done without more opportunity for meaningful engagement.”

Read the full story at KSTK

USDA’s Alaska pollock bid is third-largest in agency’s history

May 6, 2021 — The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has released a bid solicitation for 8.3 million pounds of Alaska pollock fish sticks and fillets for use in the National School Lunch Program and other Federal Food and Nutrition Assistance Programs.

The bid asks for more Alaska Pollock than USDA has ever purchased in an entire year besides 2017, 2019 and 2020, Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) CEO Craig Morris told IntraFish.

The products will be distributed to several states throughout the United States.

Acceptances will be announced by May 26. Deliveries are to be made between July 1 of this year through Feb. 28 of next year.

Read the full story at IntraFish

ALASKA: Kwik’pak Fisheries To Require Employees To Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19

May 6, 2021 — Kwik’pak Fisheries in Emmonak, the only fish buyer on the Yukon River mouth, is requiring its employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

General Manager Jack Schultheis said that Kwik’pak Fisheries employs up to 400 workers each day, all of whom will have to show their COVID-19 vaccination cards before beginning work this season.

“Customers are extremely concerned over who is manufacturing the food they’re buying from us,” Schultheis said. “So we’re trying to protect our workers, the community, and the people who eat the food we produce.”

Read the full story at KYUK

Salmon have shrunk so much that Whole Foods redid its guidelines

May 5, 2021 — At OBI Seafoods, a sprawling operation with outposts throughout Alaska, there’s all sorts of extra machinery for workers to master. At Whole Foods Market, there are new guidelines for purchasing salmon from wholesalers. And at Ivar’s, a fixture on Seattle’s waterfront for eight decades, the chef is sending back skimpy salmon delivered to his kitchen.

Behind all these changes is an alarming trend that’s been building for years: The giant schools of wild Pacific salmon that can turn southeast Alaska’s ice-cold waters into a brilliant orange blur are thinning out, and those that do survive are shrinking in size.

It’s the shrinking part that’s causing the biggest logistical snarl right now. Many salmon are so small they’ve thrown off OBI’s fish-sorting process and no longer meet the purchasing specifications at Whole Foods and culinary demands at Ivar’s. There, head chef Craig Breeden snaps photos of the fish next to his knife to illustrate their diminutive size before shipping them back.

Read the full story at The Oregonian

ALASKA: Human rights panel to weigh transboundary mining concerns

May 5, 2021 — A booming Canadian mining area known as the Golden Triangle is key to northwest British Columbia’s economy. But Southeast Alaska tribes, fishermen and other concerned citizens say that the Canadian mining sector enjoys all of the economic benefits, while those downstream bear most of the ecological risks.

Efforts to elevate the issue to the international level have had some success. And recently, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights informed a coalition of 15 tribes that it had agreed to take up the matter.

The Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission’s Tis Peterman told lawmakers at an April 27 meeting of the Alaska House Fisheries Committee that its most recent petition was submitted “which basically stated that the transboundary mining will have devastating effects on our way of life and downstream communities.”

The Washington D.C.-based IACHR is an arm of the 35-member Organization of American States, which Canada joined in 1990.

Formal cross-border efforts at the state and provincial level have been in place since 2015, when both sides signed an agreement pledging cooperation on transboundary resources.

Read the full story at KTOO

North Pacific Fishery Management Council Acts to Reduce Threatening Online Comments

May 5, 2021 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council has approved changes to its public input process after “instances of profanity or threats” were included in comments at a recent meeting.

The council — the primary entity that manages Alaska’s federal fisheries — made changes that included allowing staff to remove comments that are inconsistent with policy, such as those that use vulgar language, personal attacks, offensive terms, service or product promotions, unsupported accusations, or comments that are not related to fisheries or are off topic.

Read the full story at Seafood News