Saving Seafood

Alaska mariculture task force get closer to industry plan

January 24, 2017 — Gov. Bill Walker signed an administrative order in early 2015, creating a mariculture task force in hopes of boosting aquatic farming and fisheries. The task force has been examining all areas of the mariculture industry and will present a comprehensive plan to Walker in 2018.

The 11-member panel has split its resources into five advisory committees over the past year.

Among the many issues the committees have taken on are investment, infrastructure, regulatory, environmental and marketing.

Task force member Heather McCarty explained that the committees’ recommendations will be presented to Walker in spring 2018.

“The advisory committees have some of the task force on them, but they also have people from outside the task force, people who have specialties in various areas,” she said. “We’ve tried to bring in communities, travel groups, academia (and) regulatory groups.”

She said some pieces of the plan are already in action such as SB 172 and HB 300. Both are shellfish hatchery bills that were proposed last year and would allow Alaskans to establish nonprofit shellfish hatcheries.

Read the full story at KTOO

Disaster Declared for West Coast Fisheries

January 23, 2017 — SEATTLE — Nine West Coast salmon and crab fisheries have been declared a disaster, allowing fishing communities to seek relief from the federal government.

Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker declared the disaster on Jan. 18.

Nine salmon and crab fisheries in Alaska, California and Washington suffered “sudden and unexpected large decreases in fish stock biomass or loss of access due to unusual ocean and climate conditions,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

The fisheries include Gulf of Alaska pink salmon, California Dungeness and rock crab, and several tribal salmon fisheries in Washington.

Read the full story at Courthouse News

ALASKA: Strong harvests, more oversight marked 2016 groundfish fisheries

January 23, 2017 — Last year was a good year overall for groundfish fisheries in the region.

With a few standout harvests and favorable proposals with the Board of Fisheries, managers are feeling optimistic heading into the new year.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game oversees several groundfish fisheries within the Cook Inlet Management Area, which extends outside of Kachemak Bay to the north Gulf coast.

“These fisheries include Pacific cod, sablefish, a directed pelagic shelf rockfish fishery, lingcod, and a small commissioner’s permit Pollock fishery,” said Jan Rumble, Fish and Game area groundfish management biologist.

Pacific cod stood out in 2016 as it was open all year long for pot and jig gear in either a parallel or state waters fishery, Rumble said.

Despite the extended opening, the state waters fishery only reached 83 percent of its guideline harvest level, or GHL.

Read the full story at KTOO

Alaska’s US senators push Trump nominees to guard fisheries, rural areas while cutting regulations

January 23, 2017 — WASHINGTON — Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan pressed Cabinet nominees to consider Alaska’s uniqueness, the difficulties of rural areas and the nation’s largest fisheries at a spate of confirmation hearings this week.

Senators can publicly question President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections when they sit on the committee holding a confirmation hearing. For Murkowski, that means the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which held the first of two confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services nominee Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., on Wednesday, and a hearing for Education nominee Betsy DeVos on Tuesday night.

For Sullivan, that meant a hearing for Commerce secretary nominee Wilbur Ross, and the Environmental Protection Agency administrator-to-be, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt.

Several of those nominees faced controversy and opposition from Democrats. Hallways were packed with supporters and protesters Wednesday in a Senate office building where three hearings were happening simultaneously.

Murkowski pressed her nominees on how they would adjust some their conservative stances to meet her needs for rural and Native populations in Alaska. Sullivan focused on the state’s fishing industry. Both urged peeling back regulations they said are onerous and often a barrier to economic growth or healthy public services.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

Fisheries disasters declared for 9 species on United States West Coast

January 19, 2017 — The United States Secretary of Commerce declared nine salmon and crab fisheries in Alaska, California and Washington as fisheries disasters on Wednesday, 18 January, opening federal coffers for relief assistance.

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced each of the fisheries covered by the decision had “experienced sudden and unexpected large decreases in fish stock biomass due to unusual ocean and climate conditions.”

The newly designated fisheries disasters are:

In Alaska:
• Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fisheries (2016)

In California:
• California Dungeness and rock crab fishery (2015-2016)
• Yurok Tribe Klamath River Chinook salmon fishery (2016)

In Washington:
• Fraser River Makah Tribe and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe sockeye salmon fisheries (2014)
• Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay non-treaty coho salmon fishery (2015)
• Nisqually Indian Tribe, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, and Squaxin Island Tribe South Puget Sound salmon fisheries (2015)
• Quinault Indian Nation Grays Harbor and Queets River coho salmon fishery (2015)
• Quileute Tribe Dungeness crab fishery (2015-2016)
• Ocean salmon troll fishery (2016)

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Important Fish Habitat Formed by Slow-growing Corals may Recover More Slowly in Warming Climate

January 13, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Managing fisheries means more than managing fish. To keep fisheries sustainable, managers need to make sure the ecosystems that support fish production stay healthy. An important part of Alaska’s marine ecosystems is the corals that create habitat for fish and their prey.

Coral gardens provide refuge for fish, but may be vulnerable to fishing gear and warmer temperatures. How long it takes for coral habitat to recover from injury depends on how fast corals grow and reproduce.

A new study led by Bob Stone of NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Fisheries Science Center reveals just how slowly some corals grow, and provides insight on how they might respond to seafloor disturbance and ocean warming.

How the garden grows

Watching coral grow may sound like restful work. Not the way Stone does it.

Every year for five years, Stone’s team travelled to remote areas of Southeast Alaska and dove into frigid waters to observe corals in their natural environment.

“Several of the dive sites were very remote, so just getting there was quite a challenge,” says Stone. “Sometimes we enjoyed the comfort of the NOAA ship John N. Cobb, but other times we had to take a small (26 foot) boat over 80 miles to the sites. Occasionally we had to use float planes.”

Often the last 25 meters of the trip was the biggest challenge.

“Diving conditions were quite unpredictable,” Stone explains. “We needed to work during the same time every year, but you never know what you are going to get for weather or dive visibility.”

Once they made it to the seafloor, the most exciting part of the work began: “finding the coral colonies from year to year. Just think, small coral colonies with little tags at the bottom of the ocean in a remote place. You find one and your heart starts beating fast.”

To monitor the environmental conditions experienced by the corals, the team deployed temperature loggers and current meters at each study site.

They tagged a total of 93 healthy coral colonies at three locations. Each year they video recorded each of these colonies against a centimeter measuring grid. Later, in the laboratory, they analyzed the video using computer image analysis to measure the length of colony branches to the millimeter.

Coral growth hits a new slow

Stone’s team found that the corals grew an average of 6 millimeters, less than a quarter of an inch, a year. At that rate it would take 60 years to grow to maximum size. That’s important, because fully grown coral makes the best habitat for fish.

“We were surprised that these particular corals grow so slowly — slower than any other species we have looked at in the north Pacific Ocean,” Stone says.

Injured colonies, especially those chronically injured in areas of frequent disturbance, grew more slowly. Those in warmer ocean conditions also had reduced growth. That double whammy could affect the ability of corals to recover from disturbance if ocean warming continues.

The shallow water populations that Stone observed are not at risk from disturbance by commercial fisheries, but deeper (greater than 80 meters) colonies of the same species are periodically disturbed in some regions. Most Alaska corals are found only in very deep waters. The species Stone studied lives at depths of 15-512 meters in Alaska and Canadian waters. Because its shallower depth range is accessible to scuba divers, it provides a rare opportunity to learn about coral growth rates.

Right now, damage to this species from trawls is low (3 percent) and there is no evidence of damage from long line fishing. Stone’s study gives fisheries managers information they need to protect this important resource in the future. Stone explains:

“We know that corals provide important habitat for some species of managed fish and crabs, and we know that in some places in Alaska there are interactions between fishing gears and coral habitat. Better management of both resources is possible by knowing the recovery rates of the coral habitat. This study demonstrated that not all corals in Alaska grow at the same rates, and we need to consider this in our management strategies.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Effort continues to replace humans with cameras on fishing boats

January 9, 2017 — Several years into the controversial effort to bolster Alaska’s fisheries observer program, a top federal fisheries official defended the work at a Seattle gathering of fishermen.

Eileen Sobeck, the NOAA Assistant Administrator for Fisheries, took the stage this past Nov. 18 to talk to fishermen gathered for the annual Fish Expo event to recap the program.

Observers are the eyes and ears on boats, collecting a range of data, she explained.

“We have been monitoring fisheries for decades, and we do it in a lot of different ways,” Sobeck said.

But the details of the program have been under fire over the past few years. Federal efforts to put a human on smaller boats was met with concerns about safety and efficiency, and fishermen’s requests to use cameras have had logistical difficulties.

Over the past few years, the effort to use cameras has increased nationwide, and the National Marine Fisheries Service has been tasked with sorting out how to make that work, both logistically and cost-wise.

Over 10 years, the National Marine Fisheries Service has helped fund more than 30 electronic monitoring, or EM, pilot programs. Expenses include the cost of cameras, the cost to install them, and the cost of going through the immense amount of data they can collect.

“We have, collectively, an interest in being as cost-effective as we can possibly be,” Sobeck said.

That effort has translated into regional electronic monitoring plans that were finished more than a year ago, and are now being implemented with plans for regular reviews, said George LaPointe, one of the point people on the project.

Although monitoring in some fisheries has developed successfully, like in the groundfish fisheries, LaPointe said, the agency is still working toward certain implementation, such as in Alaska’s small boat fixed gear and pot fisheries, where the target date is 2018.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: North Pacific Fishery Management Council cracks up over catch shares

January 6, 2017 — Everyone in the Gulf of Alaska agrees on one thing: it was the other side’s fault.

Depending on who you ask, catch shares are evil incarnate or an angel of good management. Depending on who you ask, they’ll either save Kodiak or kill it.

Depending on who you ask, it’s either the State of Alaska’s fault or its credit for not allowing catch shares in the Gulf of Alaska’s groundfish fishery.

And depending on who you ask, they’ll either come up again or get sliced up into a handful of other little nibbles at the Gulf of Alaska bycatch problems.

Either sighs of relief or defeat leaked from every mouth in the room on this past Dec. 12 when the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees all federal fisheries from three to 200 miles off the Alaska coast, indefinitely tabled a complex range of options for the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries.

The tabled program has a long history of stops, false starts, foibles and thrown stones. This time, Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Sam Cotten charged the processor and trawl industry with refusing to bend — the same charge leveled at the state by the trawlers and processors.

“Had elements of the program not been so focused on privatizing and monetizing the fishery, there could have been the broad structure of a plan. But there was no acceptance for compromise,” said Jeff Stephan, a Kodiak fishermen and one of the council Advisory Panel’s most outspoken opponents of catch shares.

It was the state’s fault, others said.

“I seriously question how dedicated the state was to an outreach effort, as was pledged in Kodiak, when they never came prepared to talk about any changes they wanted to see to a proposed program,” said Heather Mann of the Midwater Trawlers Cooperative, a staunch catch share advocate.

Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries — Pacific cod, pollock, and flatfish — are one of the only groundfish fisheries in the North Pacific without a catch share or rationalization program.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

NMFS Chief Scientist Writes on Changing Climate, Oceans and America’s Fisheries

December 20th, 2016, Seafoodnews.com — Across America, changes in climate and oceans are having very real and profound effects on communities, businesses and the natural resources we depend on, according to Dr. Richard Merrick is the chief scientist for NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

 Fishing communities face extra challenges, as droughts, floods, rising seas, ocean acidification, and warming oceans change the productivity of our waters and where wildlife live, spawn and feed. And there is much at risk – marine fisheries and seafood industries support over $200 billion in economic activity and 1.83 million jobs annually.

NOAA last year set out a national strategy to help scientists, fishermen, managers and coastal businesses better understand what’s changing, what’s at risk and what actions are needed to safeguard America’s valuable marine resources and the revenues, jobs and communities that depend on them. Today, NOAA released regional action plans with specific actions to better track changing conditions, provide better forecasts, and identify the best strategies to reduce impacts and sustain our marine resources for current and future generations. Implementing these actions will give decision-makers the information they need now to sustain our vital marine resources and the many people that depend on them every day. 

We are seeing dramatic changes, particularly in cooler-ocean regions like New England and Alaska where warming waters over the last twenty years are pushing fish northward or deeper to stay in cooler waters. In New England, known for its cod and lobster fishing, ocean temperatures have risen faster than many other parts of the world. Changes in the distribution and abundance of these and other species have affected where, when and what fishermen catch, with economic impacts rippling into the coastal communities and seafood businesses that depend on them. With better information on current and future shifts in fish stocks, fisheries managers and fishing industries can better plan for and respond to changing ocean conditions.

But not all change is bad: As southern fish species like black sea bass spread northward along the East Coast, they may provide opportunities for additional commercial or recreational fisheries. Changing conditions may also stimulate more opportunities for other marine related businesses, such as fish and shellfish farming. Better information on when, where and how marine resources are changing is critical to taking advantage of future opportunities and increasing the resilience of our fisheries and fishing-communities.

 Communities and economies in southern states are also being impacted by changing climate and ocean conditions. Louisiana loses a football field size area of coastal wetlands to the sea every hour due to rising seas and sinking lands. The loss of these essential nursery areas for shrimp, oysters, crabs and many other commercial or recreationally important seafood species has significant impacts on fisheries, seafood industries and coastal communities. Better information and on-the-ground action can reduce these impacts and help sustain these vital habitats and the many benefits they provide. 

In the Pacific and Caribbean, we’re seeing bleaching and destruction of vitally-important coral reef environments associated with warming seas. Covering only one percent of the planet, coral reefs are the home to 25 percent of all marine species, and upwards of 40 billion people rely on coral reefs for the fish and shellfish they eat. The loss of coral reefs also makes coastal communities more vulnerable to storm events. Coral reefs in Puerto Rico, for instance, help prevent an estimated $94 million in flood damages every year.  NOAA’s Coral Bleaching Early Warning System has already helped decision-makers take action to try and increase resilience of valuable reef ecosystems to warming seas and other threats.

While these challenges may seem daunting, with better information on what’s changing, what’s at risk and how to respond decision-makers can find ways to reduce impacts, increase resilience and sustain America’s vital marine resources and the millions of people who depend on them.

We are committed to sustaining the nation’s valuable marine resources and the many people, businesses and communities that depend on them for generations to come.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Overall US seafood exports down slightly from last year

December 19th, 2016 — Updated numbers from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) indicated that the United States is exporting slightly less seafood this year than in 2015, while imports have seen a small bump.

A dismal Alaska pink salmon season may have contributed to the decline in overall exports. NMFS figures said pink salmon exports plummeted from 102,010 metric tons (MT) from January to October 2015 to 34,065 MT in the first 10 months of 2016. The poor season prompted Alaskan lawmakers to seek federal disaster relief funding for fisherman who depend on pink salmon runs.

In the same 10-month period, sockeye exports held almost steady from 2015 to 2016, hovering around 39,000 MT, while Atlantic salmon exports nearly doubled to 10,342 MT. Exports of chinook salmon caught in the U.S. also shot up from just 572 MT to 3,775 MT this year. However, the U.S. saw salmon roe exports nearly halved from 13,097 MT in 2015 to 7,330 MT this year.

The top flatfish export, yellowfin sole, retained robust numbers with nearly 59,000 metric tons shipped internationally, up about 4,000 MT from last year. The country’s largest yellowfin sole fishery is in Alaska’s Bering Sea.

With some species shuffling, tuna exports enjoyed an overall bump in 2016. While skipjack and yellowfin exports saw a year-on-year decrease, albacore exports were up nearly 40 percent to 14,242 MT in 2016 with total tuna exports at 16,654 MT.

Read the full story at Seafood Source