Saving Seafood

Conservationists Say Salmon Fishing Plan Imperils Whales

March 19, 2020 — The government allowed salmon fishing in Alaska at rates its own reports said will push endangered Southern Resident killer whales closer to extinction, environmental groups claim in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Salmon born in the rivers and streams of Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia migrate to the Pacific Ocean and through the Gulf of Alaska, home to a major troll fishing fleet. In southeast Alaska, 97% of the Chinook salmon fishermen harvest were born elsewhere. The fish they take never make it back to their home waters, where they could have been dinner for the 72 remaining Southern Resident killer whales – a genetically distinct group of orca that are starving due to a lack of their main prey.

“It is reckless and irresponsible for NOAA to approve this harvest, these salmon don’t belong to Alaska, they belong to Southern Resident killer whales, indigenous peoples, and fishing communities down the coast,” Kurt Beardslee, Wild Fish Conservancy’s executive director, said Wednesday in a press release.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Alaska shellfish farmers and divers object to paying for federally required lab tests

March 18, 2020 — Alaska shellfish farmers and divers fear they won’t be “open for business” much longer if they’re forced to pick up the tab for federally required lab tests as outlined in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget.

The Department of Environmental Conservation has proposed shifting the cost to the harvesters, which last year totaled almost a half million dollars.

Geoduck clam divers in Southeast Alaska, for example, pay about $150,000 each year to collect samples that are sent to the single federally approved laboratory in Anchorage and tested for paralytic shellfish poison and other toxins. Divers also pay $20,000 for water quality samples twice a year, and $8,000 to test for inorganic arsenic.

“And then we pay the Alaska Department of Fish and Game about $25,000 a year for them to do the management and assessment of the geoduck resource,” said Phil Doherty, co-director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Association.

The geoduck divers also tax themselves 7% to cover SARDFA’s $50,000 administrative costs. In all, Doherty said it adds up to $266,00 a year.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Seafood Shipping Concerns Rise Amid Coronavirus Outbreaks

March 18, 2020 — There’s no denying that coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has had a massive impact on the world. Here’s an overview of the ramifications on seafood shipping and related topics.

Demand and customer levels are down

Industry experts say the coronavirus factors into a downward trend related to demand. For example, Alaska’s Sitka Sac Roe Herring Fishery likely won’t happen this year. The department overseeing fish and game in the state reportedly contacted all processors with an assumed interest, and the response was that none intended to purchase herring this year.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Alaska Halibut Season Opens March 14

March 18, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

From Southeast Alaska to the Bering Sea, Alaska fishermen are heading out to catch halibut with the March 14 opening of the 2020 halibut season.

This season’s regulations were adopted at the annual meeting of the International Pacific Halibut Commission last month and are included in a Final Rule NOAA Fisheries filed with the Federal Register. They go into effect immediately.

Included in this season’s federal regulations are the catch limits established by the IPHC, and basic regulations for the commercial and sport halibut fisheries. Overall, the 2020 catch limits for the combined commercial and charter halibut fisheries in Alaska are 9 percent lower than the 2019 limits.

This final rule also implements management measures for the charter halibut fisheries in Areas 2C and 3A. These measures are necessary to keep charter harvests to within their respective allocations under a catch sharing plan with the directed commercial fishery.

Charter management measures in Area 3A (Gulf of Alaska) are more restrictive than 2019. All Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be closed to halibut retention in Area 3A. There is a daily bag limit of two halibut, but one fish must be no greater than 26 inches.

In Area 2C (Southeast Alaska), charter anglers are restricted to one halibut per day, with a reverse slot limit where retained halibut must be less than or equal to 40 inches, or greater than or equal to 80 inches.

Unguided halibut sport fishers in Alaska will continue to observe a daily bag limit of 2 fish of any size per person per day.

Alaska commercial IFQ halibut season dates are March 14 through November 15, 2020 for all IPHC management areas in Alaska.

Endangered Cook Inlet belugas continue to decline, scientists aren’t sure why

March 17, 2020 — Cook Inlet beluga whales are continuing to decline in number, according to a NOAA abundance estimate released last month. From Alaska’s Energy Desk, Kavitha George has the story of how the decline in belugas is both controversial and largely unexplained.

The decline of the white whales in the inlet in view of Anchorage has been going on for decades. In the 1970’s they numbered around 1400. In 2008, Cook Inlet belugas were listed as endangered, and still numbers continued to drop. With new analysis methods today there are even fewer whales than previously thought — less than 300, and steadily declining from there.

Still, the reasons why Cook Inlet belugas are disappearing are still largely a mystery to researchers.

“It’s such a frustration to not be able to really understand why the population is not recovering,” said Paul Wade, a NOAA researcher who has done aerial surveys of Cook Inlet belugas since the 1990s. “So we are just stuck with hypotheses that we really cannot yet prove or disprove.”

Read the full story at KNBA

In Bristol Bay, America’s largest salmon fishery, preparations begin for coronavirus prevention ahead of the season

March 17, 2020 — Around Bristol Bay, community leaders, health facilities and local entities are working to coordinate their preparations for the coronavirus.

Thousands of fishermen, processors, and cannery workers will travel to Bristol Bay in the coming months to participate in the commercial fishery. As of Thursday afternoon, no one in the region had been tested for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Alaska’s first known case of the disease was announced Thursday afternoon.

The Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation can now send Q-tip swabs to commercial labs to test for the disease. Dr. Cathy Hyndman is the clinical director for BBAHC.

“Once again, you still have to get the Q-tip in the viral juice to keep it alive until it gets down to the testing center,” Hyndman said. “And there are time limits on how quickly the thing must get there. It seems to be within 72 hours of obtaining the sample. Which is a challenge in the bush.”

Hyndman said they are discussing ways to get the swabbing materials needed for testing out to village clinics if necessary. BBAHC is holding continual education meetings with health aides on prevention, who needs to get tested, and how to administer the test.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

NOAA Fisheries Part of International Team to Study Salmon in Gulf of Alaska Under Continuing Warm Conditions

March 13, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries scientists are part of an international team that set sail on April 11. They are studying the impacts of continued warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska on Pacific salmon survival.  It has been estimated that one-third of all Pacific salmon spend the winter in the Gulf of Alaska. While reduced in size compared to previous years, the current marine heatwave affecting the Gulf remains one of the top five largest heatwaves on record in the North Pacific in the last 40 years.

“Salmon affect more people culturally, economically, and recreationally than any other fish in the world,” said Doug Mecum, Deputy Regional Administrator for NOAA Fisheries Alaska Region. “This International Year of the Salmon expedition in the Gulf of Alaska expands international salmon research on the high seas to build understanding of how a changing climate may influence salmon ocean habitats, distributions, and productivity.”

Scientists suspect young salmon that can find sufficient food and experience enhanced early marine growth are those that best survive their first winter at sea. The survival of these fish largely determines the size of subsequent adult salmon populations. So, scientists think that environmental conditions have the greatest influence on salmon survival during their first year at sea.

“We know that ocean and climate conditions play a major role in regulating salmon abundances,” said Wess Strasburger, who will serve as chief scientist on the first leg of the survey. “But we don’t have a good understanding of the mechanisms regulating salmon abundances in the ocean.”

Read the full release here

ALASKA: RFM Certification for Gulf of Alaska Cod Remains, While MSC Certification is Suspended

March 11, 2020 — For the next 33 days, Alaska processors who sell Pacific cod from the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) under the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification program will be switching from packaging and promotions that use the MSC logo to those that don’t.

But the state’s other certification program, Responsible Fisheries Management (RFM), will not be suspended on April 5, 2020. Pacific cod from the GOA, no longer certified as sustainable by MSC, continues to be labeled sustainable under RFM without interruption.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Helping Scientists Protect Beluga Whales with Deep Learning

March 11, 2020 — In the U.S., there are five populations of beluga whales, all in Alaska. Of those five, the Cook Inlet population is the smallest and has declined by about seventy-five percent since 1979. Subsistence hunting contributed to this initial population drop, but this practice was regulated starting in 1999, with the last hunt in 2005. Still, the beluga whale population in Cook Inlet has yet to recover. This population was listed as an endangered species in 2008, with hopes that the population would begin to recover in the near future, but more than a decade later they continue to decline, with a current population estimate of 328 whales.

Like other toothed whales, beluga whales rely highly on sound. They produce acoustic signals to find prey and to communicate; consequently, scientists can use acoustic recordings to study beluga populations and behavior. In 2008, the NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) Alaska Fisheries Science Center, in partnership with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, put together an acoustic research program to continuously monitor beluga whale habitat. This program has two main objectives: (1) studying beluga whale behavior and population size, and (2) understanding the extent to which human-generated noise is disrupting beluga populations.

In the past, with raw audio recordings collected by underwater moorings, NOAA scientists used a very basic detector — based on energy levels in certain frequencies — to detect acoustic signals from beluga whales. This detector was tuned toward high recall, i.e., it was tuned to make sure that it didn’t miss any beluga sounds, but consequently allowed many sounds to pass through that were false positives, i.e. uninteresting background noise. Consequently, manual validation was required for each of those detections. This validation process is very time-consuming and labor-intensive, which limits the number of sensors that the team can deploy, and also limits the speed with which the team can provide answers to critical conservation questions.

Read the full story at Medium