Saving Seafood

Alaska wary of federal push for marine aquaculture

September 6, 2018 — During a recent stop in Juneau, NOAA Fisheries chief Chris Oliver said that wild seafood harvests alone can’t keep up with rising global demand.

But there’s another way.

“Aquaculture is going to be where the major increases in seafood production occur whether it happens in foreign countries or in United States waters,” Oliver told a room of fishermen, seafood marketing executives and marine scientists.

Aquaculture is a broad term: it’s farming in the sea. That could be shellfish like oysters or seaweed which Alaska permits. But it also includes fish farms — which Alaska does not allow.

The nation’s federal waters are vast. They begin 3 miles offshore and extend 200 nautical miles. There isn’t any aquaculture in federal waters — yet.

Acting U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce Timothy Gallaudet said during a Juneau visit that streamlining regulations and boosting aquaculture production – both part of the Commerce Department’s 2018-2022 strategic plan – could help change that.

Read the full story at KTOO

Here’s how smartphones are being used to track lost fishing gear

September 5, 2018 — Cell phones are being used by fishermen to bounty hunt for lost fishing gear for pay.

California fishermen created the retrieval project last year along with the Nature Conservancy to get ropes, buoys, pots and anchors out of the water after the dungeness fishery so they wouldn’t entangle whales, and Washington and Oregon quickly followed suit.

“They are using their cell phones and its GPS to take a picture of what the gear looked like, tell when they found it, and any identifying markings on the buoy – the vessel, the ID number, and also the latitude and longitude of exactly where they found it,” said Nat Nichols, area manager for groundfish and shellfish at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game office in Kodiak. He added that gear loss rates in different fisheries can be “anywhere from 3 to 23 percent.”

Under a special permit, the West Coast bounty hunters head out two weeks after the dungeness crab fishery closes to search for derelict gear.

“Dungies tend to be in shallower water and that means there is more wave energy and the gear can get lost or rolled up on the beach. A lot of it has a tendency to move around because it’s in the tidal surge,” Nichols said.

The fishermen get paid $65 for every pot they pull up. The gear then goes back to the original owners who pay $100 per pot for its return.

Saving whales was the prime motivator for pot retrievals on the West Coast. In Alaska’s crab and pot cod fisheries, it’s ghost fishing and gear conflicts.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Alaskans worried by prospect of deep-sea fish farms

September 4, 2018 — In a Centennial Hall listening session, Alaskans raised concerns about federal plans to boost open-ocean fish farms under a new strategic plan for the U.S. Department of Commerce.

On Friday afternoon, Tim Gallaudet, acting undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, hosted a listening session at the end of a weeklong gathering of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts in Juneau.

NOAA is an agency of the Department of Commerce, and Gallaudet is among the figures hosting meetings across the country as part of the process that creates the strategic plan.

In a speech opening the listening session, Gallaudet said the strategic plan is an “initiative to grow the American ‘blue economy.’”

That phrase is used as an umbrella term that includes fisheries, oceanic tourism and other aspects of the national economy that relate to the oceans.

Gallaudet echoed the familiar refrains of the Trump Administration, saying the department is interested in deregulation and “reducing the seafood trade deficit.”

President Donald Trump’s trade war with China has resulted in Chinese tariffs on Alaska seafood exported to that country, and American tariffs on processed Alaska seafood products imported from China.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

ALASKA: Groups claim feds glossed over public concerns in Pebble mine report

September 4, 2018 — Groups fighting the Pebble gold and copper prospect on Friday swiftly condemned a new federal report summarizing public concerns about the project after a three-month comment period, asserting that the report glosses over key issues.

Supporters of the project shot back, saying the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has undertaken painstaking efforts to gather information before it prepares an environmental review of potential development scenarios.

The Corps released the report on Friday.

Deantha Crockett, executive director of Alaska Miners Association, said the Corps has shown its willingness to listen, allowing a 90-day period to take public input on the Southwest Alaska project, instead of the original 30.

“We’re happy we’re seeing progress (on the project),” she said.

Read the full story at Anchorage Daily News

Alaska: What risk do hatchery fish pose to Prince William Sound’s pinks?

August 31, 2018 — Recently, an argument over whether hatcheries are causing more harm than good has been heating up. The debate is nothing new. But an Alaska Department of Fish and Game study is about to take a step toward answering a question central to the debate: do hatchery fish that spawn with wild populations pose a threat to those stocks?

“You want to make two cuts: one to get at the heart and one to get at the otoliths,” Pete Rand told a group of new filed staff.

Rand is a research ecologist with the Prince William Sound Science Center, and he’s explaining how to sample pink salmon carcasses on the banks of Hartney Creek just outside of Cordova.

Rand picks up one of several pinks lined up on the rocks in front of him and cuts just behind its gills before using a pair of tweezers to tear off a tiny piece of its heart. Then, he cuts into the skull or “brain case” as he calls it and extracts two white otoliths or ear bones. They’re smaller than the head of a pin.

“I put my fingers in the eye socket and you basically want to take the top of the head off,” Rand said as his knife crunched into the decomposing skull of a pink salmon.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

Alaska: Pink salmon harvest below forecast, slightly up from 2016

August 31, 2018 — Though pink salmon harvests are ahead of what they were in 2016, the last comparable run-size year, they are still significantly below the forecast level.

As of Aug. 28, Alaska’s commercial pink salmon harvest was 38.2 million fish, about 4 percent ahead of the harvest in 2016. Pink salmon have a two-year life cycle, with large runs in even years and smaller runs on odd-numbered years, so the harvests are compared on every other year as compared to year-over-year like other species. Two years ago, the pink salmon runs returned so small that the U.S. Secretary of Commerce declared a fishery disaster on the Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fisheries.

The total harvest so far is slightly more than half of the forecasted 69.7 million fish for this season. Cook Inlet’s fishermen have harvested about 965,000 pinks, significantly more than the 465,000 in 2016. The vast majority of those — about 838,815 pinks — have been harvested in Lower Cook Inlet, largely the southern district bays around the lower edge of the Kenai Peninsula south of Kachemak Bay. The Port Graham Section alone has harvested 345,648 and the Tutka Bay Special Harvest Area has harvested 269,165, both of which have pink salmon hatcheries nearby.

Pink salmon harvest varies in other areas of the state. Kodiak’s harvest of pinks so far is behind the forecast but significantly better than in the 2016 disaster year. The Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands and Bristol Bay are both behind both their forecasts and the 2016 harvest. Southeast’s pink salmon is about 67 percent below its normal even-year harvest, with about 7.3 million pinks harvested so far compared to the 18.4 million harvested in 2016.

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion    

 

ALASKA: Southeast pink salmon catch lowest in over four decades

August 30, 2018 — Southeast Alaska’s commercial pink salmon catch will wind up way below forecasts, the lowest harvest in more than four decades. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s pink and chum salmon project leader for Southeast Andy Piston said the region’s commercial catch this summer is 7.3 million fish.

“And that would be the lowest region-wide harvest since 1976,” Piston said. “And our Southeast purse seine catch, and that’s the gear group that catches most of our pink salmon, is about 6.5 million which again is the lowest we’ve seen since the mid-1970s.”

It’s not the lowest catch ever. There were a handful of years in the 1960s and 70s with lower. The fishery is essentially over and the total catch is not expected to increase very much. This year’s harvest is well below the department’s pre-season forecast of 23 million fish. Two years ago, when the parents of this year’s run spawned, the catch was 18 million and the federal government declared a fishery disaster.

Recent even years have seen very poor returns to inside waters in northern Southeast. Managers were forecasting better runs in the southern Panhandle but those runs fell short. Piston said restrictions on fishing time did allow enough pinks to return to their spawning streams at least on the southern end.

“That’s a positive,” Piston said. “Obviously from a harvest perspective it looks poor but I guess the good thing is that we, it appears we have enough fish in our streams in southern Southeast that if survival rates turn around it gives you the potential to spring back pretty quickly. If you see a turnaround in survival you have enough eggs in the gravel that you can have a turnaround quickly.”

Read the full story at KFSK

Tariffs set to take toll on Alaska seafood exports and imports

August 30, 2018 — More seafood tariffs in Trump’s trade war with China are hitting Alaska coming and going.

On July 6, the first 25 percent tax went into effect on more than 170 U.S. seafood products going to China. On Aug. 23 more items were added to the list, including fishmeal from Alaska.

“As of right now, nearly every species and product from Alaska is on that list of tariffs,” said Garrett Evridge, a fisheries economist with the McDowell Group.

Alaska produces more than 70,000 metric tons of fishmeal per year (about 155 million pounds), mostly from pollock trimmings, with salmon a distant second. The pollock meal is used primarily in Chinese aquaculture production, while salmon meal goes mostly to pet food makers in the U.S.

In 2017 about $70 million worth of fishmeal from Alaska pollock was exported to China from processing plants all over the state.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Chinese buyers hesitant to buy Alaska seafood as U.S. weighs another round of tariffs

August 28, 2018 — In the first round of what seems to be an escalating trade dispute between the U.S. and China, tariffs have been levied on billions of dollars worth of goods in both countries. The Alaska fishing industry, which harvests roughly 60 percent of all wild seafood in the U.S., has been caught in the crosshairs of that disagreement.

But it’s not the Chinese tariffs that’s giving the industry heartburn. It’s a proposed tariff on seafood imported from China.

The Alaska seafood industry has a unique relationship with China. Nearly $1 billion worth of Alaska seafood was exported into the country in 2017, but that’s just the first step in a global supply chain.

“So much of our exports to China are reprocessed and re-exported,” Garrett Everidge, a fisheries economist with the McDowell Group, said.

Everidge explains that after those fish are reprocessed, they’re exported into markets around the world, including the U.S. Although, it’s hard to discern from trade data just how much winds back up in the U.S. market.

China kept its relationship with the Alaska seafood industry in mind when it levied a 25 percent tariff on U.S. seafood earlier this summer.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Locals catch and chow down on invasive species in Kodiak

August 28, 2018 — An informal sport fishery has popped up in Kodiak. For crawdads.

They’re crustaceans that look like little lobsters, and they’re native to the Pacific Northwest, but not Alaska. In 2002, they were found scuttling along the bottom of a popular fishing area near Kodiak, in the Buskin River watershed, mainly in the lake.

Now, a local tribal organization is studying their movement, distribution, and diet.

They are concerned the crawdads could be snacking on salmon and disrupting their natural environment.

In a parking lot next to Buskin Lake, four guys pull on neoprene wetsuits and snorkeling masks. They’re gearing up for the hunt.

“Man, I’m ready to slay some frickin’ crawdad right now.”

That’s Ryan Gabor. He and some friends have put aside the day to snorkel for the mud-colored crustaceans.

They’re called a variety of names throughout the world including: crawfish, crawdads, and crayfish.

Read the full story at KMXT