Saving Seafood

America’s Stay-at-Home Seafood Binge Now Faces Virus Threat

June 15, 2020 — Every summer, the vast watershed of winding streams and rivers that flow into the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea become a magnet for homing salmon. And for the scores of daring men and women — more than 10,000 in all — who pour into the remote region of Bristol Bay, Alaska, to take their shot at scoring big paydays as seasonal fishermen and industry workers.

This year’s rush, wedged in the middle of a pandemic, will be more dangerous than ever, though. The bunkhouses and boats that house the fishermen are tightly packed — just the sort of environment where the coronavirus thrives. The seasonal workers will face a mandatory 14-day quarantine when they enter the state, but locals fear that won’t be enough to keep the virus in check.

“It’s a migrant work camp, basically — the reality of that is what makes it so dangerous,” said Katherine Carscallen, a commercial fisherman and boat captain from Bristol Bay, which supplies half the world’s wild sockeye salmon. “It is hard to imagine how we are going to pull this off without having some major outbreaks among the fishermen alone and among the processing workers. It’s a huge risk.”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

‘I thought it was going to be much worse’: Travelers landing in Anchorage navigate Alaska’s new COVID-19 testing rules

June 12, 2020 — Omar Jackson’s COVID-19 testing swab occurred just a few minutes after waiting in line near the Alaska Airlines baggage claim on Thursday at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

“My boys and I were pretty spooked about it,” Jackson said. “We thought it would be a big Q-tip, like, all the way up to the brain,” he said. “But it went pretty smooth.”

The 28-year-old from Portland, Oregon, had come to Alaska for a summer job as a seafood processor. He’s one of hundreds of new travelers to Alaska who are now having to navigate the state’s updated health mandate addressing interstate and international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the revised mandate, which went into effect on Saturday, out-of-state travelers who test negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of boarding a plane to Alaska will be able to avoid the state’s 14-day quarantine requirement. Travelers can also get tested when they land and quarantine until they get a negative result.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Questions surround Pebble Mine’s environmental review

June 12, 2020 — Just months away from deciding whether to permit construction of the proposed Pebble Mine, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is wrapping up its environmental review. In early April, USACE received the last round of feedback from a selection of federal, state, local, and tribal groups. Some of that feedback — recently acquired and released by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) using the Freedom of Information Act — is quite pointed.

Reviewing the released critiques, Dennis McLerran, who from 2010 to 2017 ran the Environmental Protection Agency office in the region that includes Alaska, says that stakeholder agencies think USACE is taking too narrow of a view of the Pebble Mine’s potential environmental impacts, and isn’t addressing fundamental issues with the project even at this late stage.

The Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP) plans to build an open-pit mine in a largely undeveloped stretch of southwest Alaska to extract a fraction of what may be the world’s biggest unexploited deposit of copper and gold. The proposed site for the mine lies under two rivers that drain into Bristol Bay, home to one of the world’s most productive wild salmon fisheries. That geography has contributed to a long and heated battle over the proposed mine, which has gained new momentum under the Trump administration.

Read the full story at the High Country News

As COVID-19 spikes in Alaska, Kenai Peninsula emerges as virus hotspot

June 12, 2020 — COVID-19 has spread quickly in recent weeks on the Kenai Peninsula, which now has a per capita infection rate that’s three times the one found in Anchorage and 62 active cases as of Tuesday, according to state data.

While the Kenai transforms into a tourism and fishing hub during the summer, officials there don’t blame the high case rate on any particular factor — though they say some cases are tied to residents who continue to gather in group settings in spite of public health recommendations against that.

In recent weeks, state health authorities have been forced to enlist workers from other parts of Alaska for the painstaking work of tracking and monitoring the close contacts of sick people on the Kenai, said Leslie Felts, a state nurse manager. As of Wednesday, the state was monitoring 300 people there, she added. (That number includes both confirmed cases and the “close contacts” of those people.)

“Early on, Ketchikan had a lot of activity when we first started down this road with COVID,” Felts said. “Then there was some activity up in the Fairbanks area. Now, it seems like it’s our turn down here on the Kenai Peninsula.”

Read the full story KTOO

Pacific reopens some plants after COVID-19 outbreak; Icicle reports new cases in Alaska

June 12, 2020 — Pacific Seafood has reopened some of its five facilities in Newport, Oregon, U.S.A., that were hit by a coronavirus outbreak last week, with 132 of its workers testing positive for COVID-19.

The Pacific Surimi and Pacific Bio plants reopened in a limited capacity on Wednesday, 10 June, according to Pacific Seafood General Counsel Tony Dal Ponte. Pacific Fillet restarted some operations on Thursday, 11 June, and the Pacific Whiting and Pacific Shrimp facility remain closed, Dal Ponte said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Alaska halibut surveys reduced 30% due to COVID

June 11, 2020 — The annual three month survey of Pacific halibut will be about 30% lighter this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Alaska Fish Radio’s Laine Welch reports.

A total of 898 stations will be surveyed by longline gear, roughly 30% fewer than the usual 1,283 stations.

“We’re going to maintain sampling in the core regions where the vast majority of the stock resides,” David Wilson, director of the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC), told Welch. “So while it’s important to still sample those peripheries, we still are going to be sampling about 74% of the known distribution and biomass of the stock so it’s going to be a particularly robust survey.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

COVID-19 forces cancellation of annual Alaska fish and crab surveys

June 10, 2020 — Surveys of Alaska’s fish, crab and halibut stocks in the Bering Sea have been called off or reduced due to constraints and dangers posed by the coronavirus.

In what they called an “unprecedented” move, the fisheries division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in late May that five Alaska surveys will be canceled this summer “due to the uncertainties created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the unique challenges those are creating for the agency.”

NOAA said in a statement it found “no way to move forward with a survey plan that effectively minimizes risks to staff, crew, and the communities associated with the surveys.”

The annual surveys are the cornerstone of Alaska’s sustainable fisheries management and provide data on how fish stocks are trending, where they are and, ultimately, how much will be allowed for harvest each year.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: GAPP exploring how to best position pollock during COVID-19 recovery

June 10, 2020 — The nonprofit trade group Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) is trying to determine the best way to market its fish during the coronavirus crisis, which has caused a massive shift in seafood buying preferences globally.

The issue was explored in the most recent webinar in the GAPP’s summer series, “Post-COVID Communications and the Wild Alaska Pollock Toolkit,” which took place on 5 June. According to Caryn Leahy, the vice president of global public relations firm Ketchum, who presented during the webinar, Alaska pollock is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the current situation.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Study: Marine heat waves will decimate fish at twice the rate climatologists previously predicted

June 9, 2020 — Over the last decade, two massive marine heatwaves, better known as “blobs” swept the North Pacific Ocean, raising surface temperatures more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit causing blooms of toxic algae and major die-offs in the ecosystem. A new study from the University of British Columbia reports that as these heatwaves continue, they may have far more devastating implications to fisheries than previously predicted.

Climate scientists have known for years that global warming would have devastating long-term impacts on marine species. Already, fast-melting Bering Sea ice is threatening spotted seals and other marine mammals. Warming Gulf of Alaska waters wiped out cod eggs in 2019, causing a crash in cod stocks. Record warm waters in the Yukon River last summer killed thousands of migrating salmon with heat stress.

While climate change is steadily warming oceans all over the world, marine heatwaves, like the two North Pacific “Blobs,” are causing more dramatic swings in surface temperatures. In 2014 and again in 2019, ocean temperatures in Alaska rose as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

A Seattle fishing company has had more than 100 COVID-19 cases on its ships. They’re heading to Alaska this summer.

June 9, 2020 — As America’s meat producers contend with thousands of COVID-19 cases among processing workers, seafood companies have drafted rigorous plans to ward off similar spread of the disease as their summer season looms in Alaska.

But with that season still gearing up, the industry has already been shaken by its first major outbreak, aboard a huge vessel with an onboard fish processing factory. Last week, Seattle-based American Seafoods confirmed that 92 crew from its American Dynasty ship had tested positive for COVID-19 — nearly three-fourths of 124 people onboard.

Fishing executives had been working long hours to prevent just that type of disaster, and the news hit them hard.

“It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this.’ We had done so much — each company had worked so hard to try to avoid this happening,” said Brent Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats, a trade group whose members fish for pollock and cod off Alaska and another whitefish called hake off Washington and Oregon. “None of us have ever worked so hard in our lives than we have in the last two months, without a doubt.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media