Saving Seafood

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

Changing Climate, Oceans and America’s Fisheries

December 19th, 2016 — 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.

Read the full story at Marine Technology News 

RUSSELL F. SMITH: US takes stronger role in international fisheries

December 16th, 2016 — On the high seas, the U.S. has all hands on deck. Congress just passed landmark legislation giving the U.S. a formal role in international organizations that govern vastly important areas of the North and South Pacific Ocean, including the high seas adjacent to Alaska and the Pacific Islands and American Samoa, respectively.

Further, sweeping improvements were made to existing international fishery management in the Northwest Atlantic, which includes waters off the coasts of New England and Canada. Collectively, this week’s passage of three major bills demonstrates a renewed commitment to sustainably manage fisheries on the high seas and to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems from the effects of adverse fishing practices.

While the United States has long worked with other nations to improve international fisheries management, the new legislation ensures our country will fully and formally participate in developing standards for best fishing practices in two new international organizations in the North and South Pacific, respectively.

Until now, our status with these organizations has essentially been that of observer. With the new legislation, the U.S. will speak with an active global voice. We have new opportunities to learn, and a proud track record to share and leverage.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News 

Bering Sea groundfish looks strong as warming Gulf sees cuts

December 12, 2016 — Bering Sea fish stocks are booming but it’s a mixed bag for groundfish in the Gulf of Alaska.

Fishery managers will set 2017 catches this week (Dec.7-12) for pollock, cod and other fisheries that comprise Alaska’s largest fish hauls that are taken from three to 200 miles from shore.

More than 80 percent of Alaska’s seafood poundage come from those federally-managed waters, and by all accounts the Bering Sea fish stocks are in great shape.

“For the Bering Sea, just about every catch is up,” said Diana Stram, Bering Sea groundfish plan coordinator for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

There are 22 different species under the Council’s purview, along with non-targeted species like sharks, octopus and squid. For the nation’s largest food fishery — Bering Sea pollock — the stock is so robust, catches could safely double to nearly three million metric tons, or more than six billion pounds!

But the catch will remain nearer to this year’s harvest of half that, Stram said, due to a strict cap applied to all fish removals across the board.

“That means the sum of all the catches in the Bering Sea cannot exceed two million metric tons,” she explained.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Comment Federal judge tosses another fisheries management rule

December 9th, 2016 — Federal judges keep smacking down the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s decisions.

For the second time in the last three months, a federal court has overturned a management decision made by the North Pacific council and enacted by the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS. The United States District Court of Washington overturned a 2011 decision relating to halibut quota shares harvested by hired skippers on Nov. 16.

Federal courts have overturned several council decisions in recent years. In September, a the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the council’s 2011 decision to remove Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound and Alaska Peninsula salmon fisheries from federal oversight.

In this case, the North Pacific council made a decision in 2011 regarding which halibut quota holders can use a hired skipper instead of being required to be on board the vessel. Due to the court’s ruling, NOAA will have to open that group back up after limiting it in 2011.

Julie Speegle, the NMFS Alaska Region spokesperson, said the agency will change the impacted halibut fishermen’s quota shares to reflect the court’s ruling and that the council itself will review the issue.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire 

Commercial Cod Fishermen Get More Space in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay

December 7th, 2016, Seafoodnews.com — Commercial groundfish fishermen in Kachemak Bay will get more space to operate after the Board of Fisheries redefined the closed waters in the area.

In Lower Cook Inlet, commercial fishermen are allowed to use pots to fish for Pacific cod and have been allowed inside Kachemak Bay west of the Homer Spit and along the southern shore of the bay near Seldovia. However, the main section and a swath extending westward in the center of the bay have been closed by regulation because of concerns for the Tanner crab population, which has dropped off significantly in Kachemak Bay in the last two decades or so.

The fishery is mostly small boats, and because the fishery takes place in the fall on the edges of Kachemak Bay, they run the risk of bad weather, so to avoid the poor weather, they have limited area, said AlRay Carroll, the proposer to the Board of Fisheries, during his public comments during the Board of Fisheries’ meeting in Homer on Wednesday.

“More area, less crowding of gear, less tangled pots, less gear loss,” he said during his testimony.

The original proposal would have expanded the area by approximately 44 square nautical miles. Fish and Game opposed the original proposal because of the risk to Tanner crab, which Carroll acknowledged. However, the fishermen are targeting Pacific cod, not crab, and the fish prey on young Tanner crab, so allowing the fishermen to take Pacific cod could help the Tanner crab population, he said.

Janet Rumble, the groundfish area management biologist for Cook Inlet, told the Board of Fisheries during the deliberation process Friday that increasing the area for the Pacific cod fishery may increase mortality by an unknown amount, both in bycatch and in handling mortality. The last regular commercial fishery on Tanner crab in Kachemak Bay was conducted in 1994, and the population has continued to drop since then, she said.

The proposal had support from the Homer Fish and Game Advisory Committee and the North Pacific Fisheries Association, a Homer-based commercial fishing organization, as well as from a number of attendees at the meeting. After the committee discussion Thursday, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game worked with Carroll and the supporters to amend the proposal, striking a compromise and giving the fishermen a little more space in Kachemak Bay.

“It adjusts the current boundaries and will provide more (Pacific) cod fishing area, but it also changes the boundaries that were initially proposed to include some of the higher abundance areas of Tanner crab,” Rumble said. “So these boundaries were changed … and it was an agreement between us and the stakeholders.”

Over time, Kachemak Bay has transitioned from a habitat dominated by crab and shrimp to one dominated by pollock and Pacific cod, Rumble said.

“There’s a lot of feeling, which was supported by some of our pollock issues in the past, that catching (Pacific) cod and pollock would actually boost up the Tanner crab populations,” she said. “I don’t have any information about that, but that is the feeling of this place.”

The department will monitor the catch to see what is coming up with the pots, Rumble said. Unlike in federal waters, there is no mandatory on-board fisheries observers in state waters.

Carroll said after the vote that the fishermen were happy with the decision. Most of the local commercial fishermen grew up as crab fishermen and know how to handle the crabs when they come up with the pots. Losing gear is not only frustrating, but costly — some of the pots can cost between $800 and $1,000 each, he said.

The board also approved another proposal allowing sablefish fishermen to connect pots while they are fishing. Fishermen are allowed to use pots to fish for sablefish, sometimes called black cod, but no one has ever done in it Cook Inlet, Rumble said. They have all stuck with longlines.

However, elsewhere in the state, fishermen are using pot gear to ward off pilfering whales. Whales have begun to catch on to longline fishing gear and are stripping the black cod from the lines before fishermen can pull them up. Pots are protected and keep the whales from stealing the catch.

Dropping one pot at a time is inefficient and the change would bring Cook Inlet in line with other areas of the state, said Randy Arsenault, the proposal’s author, during his public comments Wednesday.

The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council changed its regulations to allow pots to be used in longline fisheries in federal waters, Rumble told the board Friday. Fish and Game struck a compromise with Arsenault on an amendment, setting a limit of 15 groundfish pots on a single longline with one buoy on each end of the longline.

“This is because of whale depredation that has been going on for awhile and whales learning how to strip lines,” she said. “Pots don’t have this kind of problem.”

Two requests from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game also won approval from the Board of Fisheries. Sablefish and rockfish commercial fishing vessels will now have to give Fish and Game a six-hour warning before landing so the biologists can get a port sampler out to the landing port to get size, weight and samples.

Rumble said this is important because the department wants to collect more information on rockfish and sablefish species, but when the vessel lands late at night or early in the morning in Seward, it is difficult to get a sampler there. It takes at least four hours to get to Seward from Homer, where the management office is. Other areas have these requirements, known as prior notice of landing requirements. Lower Cook Inlet managers have required them by emergency order for the last few seasons and it helped significantly, she said.

“Having this prior notice of landing will assist in achieving our sampling goals, particularly because there’s been a decline in effort and harvest in the sablefish fishery in recent years, which has resulted in a protracted season with fewer deliveries during a given time period,” she said.

Fish and Game can also waive the six-hour notice in certain situations, such as if a fishing vessel needs to land to avoid a storm or the biologists have already reached their sampling goals. The requirement provides flexibility to sample fish in a fishery without directed stock assessment, Rumble said.

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

Alaska Continues to Lead All States in Volume of Seafood Landings

December 1, 2016 — A new federal report on the nation’s fisheries confirms that Alaska, with six billion pounds, led all states in volume of seafood landings in 2015, and that seafood consumption by the average American rose by nearly a pound.

The National Marine Fisheries Service report on Fisheries of the United States rounded out the top five states in harvest volume with Louisiana, 1.1 billion pounds; Virginia, 410.3 million pounds, Washington, 363 million pounds, and Mississippi, 304.1 million pounds.

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for the 19th consecutive year, was the leading US port in quantity of commercial fishery landings, with 787 million pounds, followed by Kodiak, Alaska, 514 million pounds; Aleutian Islands (Other), Alaska, 467 million pounds; Intracoastal city, Louisiana, 467 million pounds, and Empire-Venice, Louisiana, 428 million pounds.

Other Pacific Northwest ports included among the top 20 for quantity were Alaska Peninsula (Other) 268 million pounds; Naknek, 176 million pounds, Cordova, 162 million pounds; Seward, 94 million pounds; Astoria, Oregon, 92 million pounds; Sitka, 87 million pounds; Ketchikan, Alaska, and Westport, Washington, 84 million pounds; and Petersburg and Bristol Bay (Other), 70 million pounds each.

Read the full story at Fishermen’s News

ALASKA: The next generation of ocean specialists

November 28, 2016 — Alaska’s university system is ramping up programs to train the next generations of fishery and ocean specialists — and plenty of jobs await.

Since 1987, the College of Fisheries and Ocean Science, or CFOS, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has offered undergraduate and graduate degrees in Fisheries Science, complete with paid internships to help prepare them for positions in the state’s largest industry.

“It’s a degree path preparing students for what I call fish squeezers — they’re going to go to work for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, or NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or some other type of agency where they’re going to be primarily out doing field work, traditional fish biologist types,” said Trent Sutton, a Professor of Fisheries Biology and Associate Dean of Academics.

Due to student interest, the college broadened the fisheries degree this fall to include ocean sciences, and opened more oceanography and marine biology classes to undergraduate students. The new degree combo program attracted 53 students, Sutton said.

The college also is a center for ocean acidification studies, which is a big student draw.

“You hear all the concerns regarding climate change and marine mammals and fisheries and sea ice — all of those garner interest from students because there are job opportunities down the road to deal with these issues,” Sutton explained.

The CFOS also is the only school in the nation to offer a Bachelor of Arts degree in fisheries for students interested in seafood sciences and technology, and marine policy. Another focus of the B.A. track is in rural and community development where students can get the degree at home.

“A student in Bethel or Dillingham can stay home and take 100 percent of their courses either through video conferences or online or by some other distance delivery technology. They can get a degree that is tied to fisheries and it will help them have a good career and become leaders in their communities,” Sutton said.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce 

How the privatization of our oceans is sinking fishermen

November 28th, 2016 — The town of St. George, off the Bering Sea near Alaska, was long home to some of the most robust pollock fishing in the country. But due to a fishing rights management scheme called “catch shares,” the town has no rights to fish its own waters and regularly watches their former industry literally pass them by.

“Every year, the industry takes about $2 billion in gains out of this fish resource on the Bering Sea,” St. George Mayor Pat Pletnikoff tells Lee van der Voo in “The Fish Market.” “Not one plug nickel sticks to St. George.”

Catch shares work by dividing our oceans just like any other physical property, creating theoretical property lines. Then the rights to fish different species in various sections are awarded to applicants — which could be individuals or companies — based on how much fish they catch over a certain period of time. These rights are given by eight fishery councils throughout the country, which also place restrictions on how much of any species can be fished.

While catch shares are credited with greater species management — the US government found in 2007 that of 230 species of fish, 92 were going quickly extinct due to overfishing — the catch-shares program has virtually privatized our oceans, destroying the livelihoods of many lifelong fishermen and other small businesses in the process.

Read the full story at The New York Post 

VOICES OF ALASKA: Alaskans must unite to protect salmon

November 25, 2016 — As commercial, sport and personal use fishermen, we often have passionate disagreements about decisions that must be made regarding the management of our salmon. But today we are uniting as residents of our Nation’s last great salmon state by asking the Alaska Board of Fisheries to take action to protect the fish that is so intimately tied to our identity, culture and economy.

Whether it’s making a living by set netting for wild salmon in Cook Inlet, feeling the thrill of a silver salmon leaping at the end of your line, or experiencing the satisfaction of filling your freezer with salmon that will feed your family all winter; salmon are an essential part of life for so many of us in Alaska.

Unfortunately the primary law that is designed to protect the rivers and streams which salmon rely on hasn’t been updated since statehood and leaves our salmon resource — and the jobs, culture, food, recreation and economic activity it creates – at risk. If we do not take the opportunity now to update this law, we stand to repeat the mistakes that have decimated salmon runs throughout the rest of the country and lose one of the top reasons Alaska is such a special place to call home.

This law is known as “Title 16,” and is Alaska’s fish habitat permitting law. Currently, the law contains only two sentences guiding how decisions are made on development projects that could harm salmon habitat. These projects include proposals like Pebble Mine and Chuitna Coal, where a company proposes strip mining through nearly 14 miles of wild salmon stream.

Read the full op-ed at the Peninsula Clarion