Saving Seafood

46 people rescued from sinking vessel off Alaska

July 28, 2016 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Latest on the rescue of 46 crew members who abandoned a fishing vessel in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on Tuesday (all times local):

9 p.m.

Officials say two Good Samaritan vessels have rescued 46 people who abandoned a fishing boat in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Lauren Steenson says there were no reports of any injuries as the crew members were transferred from life rafts to the vessels in a fairly calm Bering Sea.

She says the ships then embarked on a 13-hour voyage to Adak, Alaska, a port in the Aleutians.

The Good Samaritan ships Spar Canis and the Vienna Express rushed to the scene as did two other merchant vessels, all responding to a Coast Guard’s emergency broadcast for help.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard-Times

New and rare whale species identified from carcass found in Pribilofs

July 27, 2016 — A stroll on the beach of a remote Bering Sea island two years ago has produced a scientific breakthrough — the discovery of a previously unidentified species of beaked whale that dwells in the deep waters of the North Pacific Ocean.

The conclusion, described in a study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science of the California-based Society for Marine Mammalogy, stems from the 2014 discovery of a beached whale carcass by a local monitoring program called Island Sentinel. Karin Holser, a teacher on St. George Island in the Pribilofs, alerted authorities, and Michelle Ridgway, a Juneau-based biologist involved with a Pribilof science camp, responded quickly.

“She was the one who said, ‘This looks like a Baird’s beaked whale, but it doesn’t,'” said Phillip Morin, a research molecular geneticist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the new study.

The whale was about two-thirds the size of a Baird’s beaked whale, which typically grows to 35 or 40 feet, Morin said. It was clearly not a juvenile, as its teeth were worn and yellow, “so they were not baby teeth,” he said. Its skull had a distinct slope and its dorsal fin was different from that of the typical Baird’s beaked whale.

Tissue samples were sent to the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California, where Morin works and where the world’s most extensive collection of cetacean tissues is kept. The whale’s skull was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington — and students from the Pribilofs visited the lab there to take part in the examination.

DNA analysis showed it was a species different from the 22 previously known species of beaked whales in the world and the two known to swim in the North Pacific.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News

Rescue Ships Arrive After 46 Abandon Fishing Vessel in Alaska Waters

July 27, 2016 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Latest on the rescue of 46 crew members who abandoned a fishing vessel in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on Tuesday (all times local):

Officials say two Good Samaritan vessels have rescued 46 people who abandoned a fishing boat in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Lauren Steenson says there were no reports of any injuries as the crew members were transferred from life rafts to the vessels in a fairly calm Bering Sea.

She says the ships then embarked on a 13-hour voyage to Adak, Alaska, a port in the Aleutians.

The Good Samaritan ships Spar Canis and the Vienna Express rushed to the scene as did two other merchant vessels, all responding to a Coast Guard’s emergency broadcast for help.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Bloomberg

ALASKA: Court sides with state, dismisses lawsuit challenging Gov. Walker order

July 25, 2016 — A Juneau Superior Court judge has sided with the state, dismissing a lawsuit that challenged Gov. Bill Walker’s administrative order to reorganize the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Commission, an autonomous state agency that’s been under fire the past few years.

“… the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the matter. At this current time, any alleged conflict between the (administrative order) and the CFEC is purely hypothetical,” Judge Louis Menendez wrote in a decision Thursday and sent to attorneys representing the plaintiffs and the state Friday.

Administrative Order 279, issued in February, would transfer functions of the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. CFEC was established in 1973 by the Alaska Legislature to limit how many people can participate in the state’s commercial fisheries.

Commercial fisherman and lobbyist Robert Thorstenson Jr. and commercial fishing trade organization United Fishermen of Alaska filed a lawsuit against Walker and the state calling the administrative order invalid.

The plaintiffs claimed the order “unconstitutionally takes authority from the Alaska Legislature to amend statutes and policies related to the operation and management of the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission.”

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

AL BURCH: Governor should recognize value of Alaska groundfish industry

July 25, 2016 — My brother and I were some of the pioneers of the trawl fishery here in Kodiak. We started from scratch when the United States claimed a 200-mile zone. I remember the foreign fleets off our shores, and once they were replaced by U.S. vessels like ours, I remember how the trawl fishery for pollock and cod helped put the town back on its feet after the collapse of the crab and shrimp fisheries in the late 1970s. I am proud of the fact that the fishery I helped pioneer now supports a year-round fishing economy here in Kodiak.

Although I am retired now, I continue to follow how the fishery is run. And I am concerned.

In the past, when we were struggling to build the fishery, the state of Alaska was on our side. We worked hard together to build a fishery that was managed by scientific principles and research, with no overfishing. We pioneered putting observers on U.S. vessels, and unlike a lot of other fisheries here in Alaska we have had observers for roughly 30 years. We worked alongside the state and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to meet conservation and management challenges together, to ensure practical solutions that ensured an economically sustainable fishery for Kodiak and other Alaska coastal towns.

But now it seems that the state of Alaska is not concerned about the impacts of its decisions on the hard-working participants in this fishery and communities like mine that are dependent on groundfish.

Read the full opinion piece at Alaska Dispatch News

ALASKA: State to argue for dismissal of suit over governor’s commercial fisheries order

July 19, 2016 — JUNEAU, Alaska — A judge is set to hear arguments in a case brought by the Alaska Department of Law that seeks the dismissal of a lawsuit against the state regarding the management of the state’s commercial fisheries.

The case is scheduled to go before Juneau Superior Court Judge Louis Menendez on Tuesday, according to The Juneau Empire.

At the center of a case is an administrative order issued by Gov. Bill Walker in February that calls for several functions of the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission to be transferred to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Walker’s administration has said moving administrative and research functions, like licensing and permitting, to Fish and Game could save the state more than $1.3 million a year.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

ALASKA: Sea Share steadily expands donations of fish to the needy

July 18, 2016 — The decades long “bycatch to food banks” program has grown far beyond its Alaska origins.

Today, only 10 percent of the fish going to hunger-relief programs is bycatch — primarily halibut and salmon taken accidentally in other fisheries. The remainder is first-run products donated to Sea Share, the nation’s only nonprofit that donates fish through a network of fishermen, processors, packagers and transporters.

Sea Share began in 1993 when Bering Sea fishermen pushed to be allowed to send fish taken as bycatch to food banks — instead of tossing them back, as required by law.

“Back then, that was the only thing that we were set up to do, and we are the only entity authorized to retain such fish. It became a rallying point for a lot of stakeholders, and from that beginning we’ve expanded to the Gulf of Alaska, and grown to 28 states and over 200 million fish meals a year,” said Jim Harmon, Sea Share director.

Some seafood companies commit a portion of their sales or donate products to Sea Share. Vessels in the At-sea Processors Association have donated 250,000 pounds of whitefish each year for 15 years, which are turned into breaded portions. Sea Share’s roster also has grown to include tilapia, shrimp, cod, tuna and other seafood products.

Over the years, Sea Share has ramped up donations in Alaska, where halibut portions from Kodiak fisheries are used locally, in Kenai as well as being flown to Nome and Kotzebue, courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard. A new freezer container has been stationed at the Alaska Peninsula port of Dillingham, holding 8,500 pounds of fish, and several more are being added to hubs in Western Alaska, Harmon said.

“I think we’ll probably do 250,000 pounds in the state this year,” he added.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

Surveys off Alaska lead to new types of soft-bodied fish

July 13, 2016 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Federal biologist Jay Orr never knows what’s going to come up in nets lowered to the ocean floor off Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands, which separate the Bering Sea from the rest of the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes it’s stuff he has to name.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist is part of a group that uses trawl nets to survey commercially important fish species such as cod in waters off Alaska. Sometimes those nets come up with things no one has seen before.

With co-authors, Orr has discovered 14 kinds of new snailfish, a creature that can be found in tide pools but also in the deepest parts of the ocean. A dozen more new snailfish are waiting to be named. Additional species are likely to be found as scientists expand their time investigating areas such as the Bering Sea Slope, in water 800 to 5,200 feet deep, or the 25,663-foot deep Aleutian Trench.

“I suspect we are just scraping the top of the distributions of some of these deep-water groups,” Orr said from his office in Seattle.

Orr and his colleagues measure the abundance of rockfish, flatfish and other “bottom fish” for the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, the research arm of the NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The center studies marine resources off Alaska and parts of the West Coast.

Five boats with six researchers each surveyed Alaska waters in late June. The teams trawl on the Bering Shelf every summer and in either Aleutian waters or the Gulf of Alaska every other year.

Their findings on fish abundance are fed into models for managing fish populations.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Miami Herald

NOAA Fisheries Updates U.S. Congress on Deep Sea Coral Research

July 13, 2016 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A report to Congress submitted last month describes the 2014 and 2015 research activities on the nation’s deep-sea coral areas. The report also briefly describes progress during this period in MSA-related management actions that contribute to protecting deep-sea coral areas.

Feldwork in two regions was done during 2014-15. A survey of 31 submarine canyons between Maine and Virginia and the discovery of coral gardens just 25 miles off the coast of Maine was done by the Northeast Fieldwork Initiative.

In Alaska, images of the seafloor at more than 200 stations throughout the 1,200-mile Aleutian Islands chain were taken, confirming widespread corals and commercially important fish using the coral areas.

These initiatives tell researchers about many deep-sea coral communities that no humans had seen before. The involved scientists shared their findings and enabled the respective  management councils to act on the newest data.

NOAA’s Deep Sea Coral Research Program is a central partner for new research in the Pacific Islands region that began in 2015 and will continue until 2017. This research is also discovering deep-sea coral communities, and likely new species, in places never before surveyed.

Deep-sea corals can live for hundreds or thousands of years, creating remarkably complex communities in the depths of the oceans. Their habitat in the deep sea ranges from 150-foot depth to more than 10,000 feet.

Deep-sea coral habitats have been discovered in all U.S. regions on continental shelves and slopes, canyons, and seamounts. Their full geographic extent is still unknown, because most areas have yet to be adequately surveyed.

A few deep-sea coral species form reefs that, over millennia, can grow more than 100 meters (300 feet) tall. Many other coral species are shaped like bushes or trees and can form assemblages similar to groves or forests on the seafloor.

Nationwide, these complex structures provide habitat for many fish and invertebrate species, including certain commercially important ones such as grouper, snapper, sea bass, rockfish, shrimp, and crab.

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

CDC: Highest suicide rates found among fishermen, farmers, foresters

July 11, 2016 — Greg Marley has lived on the coast of Maine for 35 years, and in that time the licensed clinical social worker has seen a lot of sad things, including the death by suicide of too many of his hard-working neighbors.

“This is a field I’ve worked in for a long time,” Marley, the clinical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Maine, said recently. “I know fishermen, I know foresters, I certainly know people in the construction industry who have died by suicide.”

That’s why a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the suicide rates among people working in different occupationswasn’t surprising to the social worker, who’s part of the Maine Suicide Prevention Program. In the CDC’s weekly morbidity and mortality report on July 1, the agency found that persons working in the farming, fishing and forestry fields had the highest rate of suicide overall, with 84.5 deaths by suicide among 100,000 people. The second highest suicide rate was found among people who work in the field of construction and extraction, with 53.3 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people.

In sharp contrast, the lowest suicide rate was found in the education, training and library occupational group, with 7.5 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people — more than a tenfold decrease from the farming, fishing and forestry group.

“The study is interesting, and it’s useful,” Marley said. “But for me, heavily steeped in this field, I found little of surprise. It does tell me that, hey, maybe we need to do better or more active outreach in those areas.”

The CDC’s suicide rate report used data provided by 17 states in 2012. Maine wasn’t one of those states, because the state didn’t start participating in the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System until 2014. Still, Maine has some commonalities with some of the states that were included in the report, Marley said, especially Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Those are all places with a large rural population and where many farmers, fishermen or lumbermen work. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Maine is the most rural state.

Suicide is an important topic in Maine, where the suicide rate of people ages 10 and older is higher than the overall rate in the nation — 17.7 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in Maine compared to 14.6 deaths per 100,000 nationwide. Suicide also is the second leading cause of death among Mainers ages 15 to 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among Mainers ages 35 to 54. Men in Maine are four times more likely to die by suicide than women are, with firearms the most common suicide method used by men.

For the Pine Tree State, which has a rich and storied tradition of people — mostly men — working on the farm, on fishing boats and in the forests, the new study may highlight some old problems.

“I think there are a number of factors operating here,” Emily Haight, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maine, said. “Farmers, fishermen and foresters — they are largely male-dominated professions, and we know that males are more likely to complete suicide. Farmers, fishermen and foresters also probably have more access to firearms. And my other guess is that we’re dealing with factors related to isolation.”

Among those factors is the way many parts of rural Maine are underserved, with respect to mental health care, she said, and the stigma about seeking help that still exists in many places.

“Suicide is a very striking and disturbing occurrence,” Haight said. “We still regard it as not common. But as researchers we want to be very aware of risk factors.”

According to Marley, additional factors that likely play a role in the higher suicide rate among farmers, fishermen and those in the forestry industry include substance abuse and higher accident risks in those fields.

Agriculture, for instance, is one of the nation’s most dangerous industries, with the injury rate in 2011 over 40 percent higher than the rate for all workers, according to the United States Department of Labor. The fatality rate for agricultural workers was seven times higher than the fatality rate for all workers in private industry.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News