Saving Seafood

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

USDA to make big purchase of Alaska pollock

May 5, 2021 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture is asking Alaska pollock suppliers to bid on a contract for 8.325 million pounds of the fish – the third-largest bid invitation for Alaskan pollock in the agency’s history.

The USDA is also requesting bids on nearly 2.7 million pounds of catfish and said in a pre-solicitation notice that it plans to purchase canned tuna, haddock fillets, ocean perch fillets, wild salmon fillets, and canned pink salmon.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Off the hook: Slinky pots revolutionize Alaska’s blackcod fishery

May 4, 2021 — When Shawn McManus, skipper of the F/V Vansee, left Seattle in the spring of 2020 to longline for blackcod in Alaska, the outlook was not good. The burgeoning pandemic had injected uncertainty into a fishery that was already struggling with flagging prices and crippling whale depredation.

On the grounds, McManus and his colleagues estimated half their catch, sometimes more, was being snatched off hooks by orcas and sperm whales. Fishermen with bigger boats and more powerful hydraulics had long ago switched to whale-proof rigid pots, but they were not an option for smaller operations like the Vansee, a 107-year-old halibut schooner with limited deck space.

Veteran fisherman Buck Laukitis was among those who had switched to rigid pots. He looked on in dismay as depredation threatened not just individual boats but the fishery at large.

“We needed 75 or 80 percent of the fishing done by pots, or we were going to kill the resource off by feeding whales,” Laukitis said.

In a last ditch attempt to save his season, McManus threw in 50 so-called slinky pots before he left Seattle’s Fishermen’s Terminal. To him, it was a new and virtually unknown product, a lightweight collapsible pot that would fold flat and stack on deck, giving boats like his a chance to get off hooks and into pots.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Alaska’s Commercial Fisheries Division appears to be escaping budget cuts

May 4, 2021 — The budget for Alaska’s Commercial Fisheries Division won’t be cut for the upcoming fiscal year, assuming the current numbers make it through the Legislature.

“The governor’s proposed budget is at about $72.8 million, which is a slight increase from the FY21 approved budget. And most of that increase is due to our personnel services, cost of living increases and things like that that are funded by the administration generally. And also from some additional federal funds for training and things like that. So we’re looking pretty good compared to past years,” said Sam Rabung, director of the Commercial Fisheries Division, the largest within the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which employs just over 640 full-time, part-time and seasonal workers.

“We’re really relieved because we’ve been cut pretty close to the bone and any additional significant cuts would impact fisheries directly. We wouldn’t be able to do some of the assessment projects required for management and we would have to either close or severely restrict fisheries. And I think everybody understands that,” he said, adding that another bonus will be the reopening of the ADF&G office at Wrangell.

Rabung credited the Dunleavy administration for taking the time to dig into the details that clearly show Alaska’s fisheries “pay their own way.”

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

NOAA Fisheries releases new video looking at environmental conditions in the Gulf of Alaska in 2020

May 4, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

More than 90 researchers and local community members contributed knowledge and information to help NOAA Fisheries scientists generate an ecosystem status report for the Gulf of Alaska ecosystem last year. This new video captures some of the high points of that report.

“We are excited to offer another way of sharing what we learned about ecosystem conditions in the Gulf of Alaska last year,” said Bridget Ferriss, Gulf of Alaska Ecosystem Status Report editor. “This video is a nice complement to our other communications products.”

For decades, scientists at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center have been pulling together data for numerous indicators of ecosystem health including water temperature, plankton abundance, and seabird reproductive success. NOAA Fisheries and other scientists from other organizations monitor these indicators for the four marine ecosystems that surround Alaska–the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Arctic.

Every fall, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council sets catch limits for groundfish and crab in federal waters off Alaska for the upcoming fishing year. They base these decisions on scientific research and analysis including fish stock assessments, economic information on the commercial fishery, and these annual ecosystem assessments.

“Ecosystem assessments help us understand the context by explaining, among other things, how changes in the ecosystem might affect present and future abundance of commercially important fish and crab stocks,” said Ferriss.

For each of the Alaska Ecosystem Status Reports, a variety of indicators are evaluated annually. All of this information helps fisheries managers to determine what steps to take to ensure sustainable fish and crab fisheries while preserving the health of the overall ecosystem.

The goal of this video is to communicate our updated summary of ecosystem information beyond the Council, to the broader community.

Read the full release here