September 2, 2016 — The following was released by NOAA:
The Council meets the week of October 3, 2016 at the Hilton Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska.
The AGENDA and SCHEDULE are now available. Alaska Airlines offers Travel Discounts to the meetings. Documents will be posted through the links on the Agenda. The deadline for public comments is 5:00 PM (AST) Tuesday, September 27, 2016.
Submit comments to npfmc.comments@noaa.gov
September 1, 2016 — Wheels are already in motion to provide two measures of relief for Alaska’s pink salmon industry, which is reeling from the lowest harvest since the late 1970s.
Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, began the process last week to have the Walker Administration declare the pink salmon season a disaster, which would allow access to federal relief funds.
Pinks are Alaska’s highest volume salmon fishery and hundreds of fishermen depend on the fish to boost their overall catches and paychecks. So far the statewide harvest has reached just 36 million humpies out of a preseason forecast of 90 million. That compares to a catch of 190 million pinks last summer.
“This is the worst salmon year in nearly 40 years, and that’s huge,” she said. “It doesn’t just affect the fishermen; it’s a trickle-down effect on the cannery workers, the processors, and nearly all businesses in the community. It’s a disaster, there’s no other way to describe it.”
Stutes, who chairs the House fisheries committee and is known as a straight talker, said she has gotten very positive response from the state Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development.
“They are on it and already moving forward,” Stutes said.
August 25, 2016 — KENAI, Alaska — A few Kenai-area residents turned out Aug. 18 to offer their advice on a draft environmental impact statement for a proposed oil and gas lease sale in Lower Cook Inlet.
The draft, prepared by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal agency that oversees oil and gas leasing in federal waters, outlines a proposed sale in an area of Cook Inlet beginning south of Kalgin Island and ending at a line extending westward from Seldovia. If the Secretary of the Department of the Interior approves the plan, a lease sale would take place in June 2017.
Mark Storzer, the regional supervisor for BOEM’s Office of Environment in Anchorage, said the EIS will simply set up the structure for a lease sale to take place in the future.
“We always make sure to emphasize with people that this does not mean a lease sale is going to take place,” Storzer said.
The current plan presents 224 blocks, each nine square miles, in the region that would be offered for lease. A number of alternatives accommodate critical habitat for endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales, threatened Northern sea otters and the drift gillnet fishery that operates in the area north of a line extending west from Anchor Point.
August 22, 2016 — Researchers are developing a field test kit that would make it easier to monitor for paralytic shellfish poisoning.
Project partners include NOAA researchers from the Lower 48 as well as community testers based on Kodiak Island and in the Alaska Peninsula.
Despite the high level of toxicity found in shellfish in the Kodiak Archipelago, people still harvest them.
Julie Matweyou, who works in the Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program and has been a long-term researcher of PSP, said a person becomes sick when they eat shellfish that have consumed toxic plankton.
She explains paralytic shellfish poisoning is exactly what it sounds like.
“The PSP toxins can cause tingling of the mouth, paralysis, tingling of the extremities, nausea, headache, people describe a floating sensation,” she said. “And in a severe toxin event, the person would experience paralysis of the limbs, which would progress into paralysis of your diagram, which would cause respiratory paralysis.”
A faster, cheaper way to monitor for PSP could prevent sickness in harvesters and even save lives. The testing also would be helpful in collecting more data about when toxicity peaks and when it declines.
August 22, 2016 — Alaska’s 2016 pink salmon fishery is set to rank as the worst in 20 years by a long shot, and the outlook is bleak for other salmon except sockeyes, too.
“Boy, sockeye is really going to have to carry the load in terms of the fishery’s value because there’s a lot of misses elsewhere,” said Andy Wink, a fisheries economist with the Juneau-based McDowell Group.
The peaks of the various salmon runs have passed. The pink salmon catch so far has yet to break 35 million during a year when the forecast called for 90 million fish. Last year, 190 million were harvested.
Weekly tracking through Aug. 15 shows:
— The king salmon harvest (341,000) down 42 percent from last year in net fisheries (though the troll-caught catch is strong);
— Silvers (fewer than 2 million) down 20 percent;
— Chums (12 million) down 25 percent. “We’re probably looking at the second-worst harvest in the past 10 years,” Wink said.
August 18, 2016 — The following was released by the Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center:
The Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center (PCCRC) is requesting Letters of Intent for projects to receive funding in 2017.
PCCRC has $500,000 available to fund projects that will begin in 2017. PCCRC projects must include a PI who is associated with one of the University of Alaska campuses but may include co-PIs from other institutions or organizations.
Click here for details on how to apply and all other relevant information. The deadline for submission is September 26, 2016.
August 1, 2016 — Who knows more about local salmon and their habitats than Alaska fishermen? That’s the impetus behind a new information-gathering project spawned by United Fishermen of Alaska (UFA) that aims to provide useful and timely news about the health of the state’s salmon runs.
The Salmon Habitat Information Program (SHIP) launched last week with an online survey to provide commercial fishermen with a way to share their local intelligence.
“We are asking people what issues they are most concerned about in their region,” said SHIP manager Lindsey Bloom.
“We also ask what sources they use to get habitat related information, such as newspapers, websites, or social media, and who they trust and are listening to for information as well.”
UFA wants to recognize and tap the wisdom and knowledge of Alaska’s 10,888 current salmon permit owners in 26 distinct fisheries to ensure that the SHIP information is useful and relevant. Bloom said the survey results also could be helpful in shaping fishery rules and regulations.
“Fishermen are some of the smartest and best equipped people to guide fish policy,” Bloom asserted.
“With the multi-generational nature of salmon fishing in Alaska, they are grounded in community and family and sustainability and stewardship. We believe that by working together, fishermen can be powerful advocates for pro-salmon policies that ensure commercial fishing jobs remain strong for generations to come.”
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
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.
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.