Saving Seafood

ALASKA: A Canadian gold mine spill raises fears among Alaskans on the Yukon River

July 30, 2024 — A cyanide spill at a major gold mine in the Yukon Territory, high in the Yukon River watershed, has sparked widespread concern in Canada.

But Alaska salmon advocates say the mishap isn’t just a problem for Yukoners. The spill happened upstream of a tributary of the Yukon River. The Yukon is Alaska’s biggest transboundary waterway, and residents along its shores who have depended on salmon for generations are already suffering amid crashes of multiple species.

Officials on both sides of the border say it’s too early to know the full impact of the spill, which happened in late June. And they’ve advised that there likely isn’t a health risk to residents along the Yukon.

Still, some advocates fear that the pollution, which has not been fully contained, could make matters worse for the Yukon River’s struggling fish.

Still, some advocates fear that the pollution, which has not been fully contained, could make matters worse for the Yukon River’s struggling fish.

“Now we have a new threat to our salmon,” said Brooke Woods, a tribal member and salmon advocate in Rampart, an interior Alaska village on the upper Yukon River.

Read the full article at KYUK

ALASKA: Bristol Bay sees smallest sockeye sizes on record, despite large run

July 30, 2024 — This year in Bristol Bay, fishing crews have noticed that sockeye salmon were on the small side — an observation confirmed this month by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Fish and Game officials say that at this point in the 2024 season, the sockeye returning to Bristol Bay are on average the smallest they’ve ever seen. This continues a decades-long trend.

So far, the average weight of Bristol Bay sockeye was 4.2 pounds this year. Fish and Game biologist Stacy Vega said that’s the smallest average weight on record.

“Fish are smaller, weigh less than, than they have in the past and against our historical averages,” Vega said.

Read the full article at KDLG

US promises $240 million to improve fish hatcheries, protect tribal rights in Pacific Northwest

July 26, 2024 — The U.S. government will invest $240 million in salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest to boost declining fish populations and support the treaty-protected fishing rights of Native American tribes, officials announced Thursday.

The departments of Commerce and the Interior said there will be an initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization made available to 27 tribes in the region, which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.

The hatcheries “produce the salmon that tribes need to live,” said Jennifer Quan, the regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. “We are talking about food for the tribes and supporting their culture and their spirituality.”

Some of the facilities are on the brink of failure, Quan said, with a backlog of deferred maintenance that has a cost estimated at more than $1 billion.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

The Supreme Court’s trawl bycatch decision casts a wide net

July 24, 2024 — A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision could have important implications for fisheries in Alaska.

Last month, the Supreme Court overturned a legal principle called Chevron deference, named after the case that established it. For 40 years, that principle gave federal agencies wide authority to interpret the gray area in laws passed by Congress. Now, more of that authority will go to judges.

The decision came after a legal battle over who should pay for bycatch monitors on trawl boats. The potential effects extend to all federally regulated industries — including fisheries.

Many trawl boats are required to have bycatch observers onboard. And in Alaska, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council can have trawl boats pay for those observers. That’s the law. It’s spelled out in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs commercial fishing.

But that act is not clear on who should pay for bycatch observers elsewhere. In the Atlantic, a federal agency created a similar funding program and a trawling business sued.

“And so (the National Marine Fisheries Service) used its agency authority to interpret the statute and fill in the gap and say, ‘Well, you know, we’re going to do what we do in the North Pacific region here in the Atlantic region.’ And the court said, ‘Nope, you can’t do that,’” said Anna Crary, an environmental lawyer at the firm Landye Bennett Blumstein LLP in Anchorage. She’s been watching that court case.

That Supreme Court decision, in a case known as Loper Bright, was a reversal of policy the Court formed in a 1984 environmental lawsuit called Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council.

That doctrine said that when federal laws are vague, federal agencies should fill in the gaps, and courts should defer to the expertise of those agencies. Crary said that understanding of agency power has become a baseline assumption.

“Administrative law, unbeknownst to many people, really forms the backbone of what we perceive as our everyday life, as modern society. But the extent to which this decision destabilizes that, I think is quite profound,” Crary said.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

9th Circuit hears appeals in Southeast Alaska king salmon troll fishery lawsuit

July 23, 2024 — On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard cases for and against a lower court ruling that threatened to halt Southeast Alaska’s troll fishery for king or chinook salmon. Although there’s no decision yet, a panel of judges expressed sympathy for the coastal communities that could be hurt by the order.

With an opener the first week of July, Southeast Alaska trollers already got to fish for kings this summer. But the future of their fall season is in the balance at a courtroom over a thousand miles south, in San Francisco, California.

The Alaska Trollers Association, the State of Alaska, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or NOAA — and other entities appealed a lower court ruling that found NOAA broke the law by letting Southeast trollers catch too many kings — to the detriment of a population of endangered killer whales.

The Washington District Court order would have effectively stopped Southeast trollers from fishing for kings. But the case is now on hold in the appeals process and in the hands of judges Mark Bennett, Anthony Johnstone, and Milan Smith Jr.

Attorney Laura Wolff, who represents the State of Alaska, argued that keeping Southeast king trollers off the water wouldn’t only injure the region’s economy. She said it could demolish an entire way of life.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: In an Alaskan town, generations of fishers face industry’s death

July 22, 2024 — Alaska’s fishing industry has faced major challenges this past year. Low fish prices and high overhead costs have led some of the industry’s biggest players to sell or shutter their processing plants, sending shock waves through the coastal communities that rely on those canneries.

Perhaps no other community has been harder hit than the small city of King Cove, near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula, 600 miles from Anchorage, the closest major city.

Its only seafood processor closed almost overnight this spring, and the city is reeling, not only from the loss of 75% of its revenue, but from the larger questions of the city’s survival.

King Cove didn’t even exist until 1911 when a seafood company, Pacific American Fisheries, opened a salmon cannery and Alaska Native folks moved in from surrounding villages to work there.

That fish processing plant grew to become one of Alaska’s largest. Peter Pan Seafood Co. employed about 700 seasonal workers at its King Cove facility during a typical summer. That meant housing 700 people in company bunkhouses and feeding those people daily.

Read the full article at Marketplace

Chinese military vessels spotted in Alaskan waters, drawing US Coast Guard response

July 22, 2024 — On 6 and 7 July, the United States Coast Guard encountered three Chinese military ships in the Bering Sea near the U.S. state of Alaska in the U.S.’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

The U.S. Coast Guard Kimball vessel reported detecting three Chinese vessels about 124 miles north of Amchitka Pass in the Aleutian Islands, and an HC-130J aircrew from Kodiak Air Station detected another vessel about 84 miles north of Amukta Pass. All four of the Chinese vessels were transiting in international waters but still inside the U.S. EEZ, which extends 200 nautical miles from the U.S. coast.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

NOAA recommends $18M to Yurok Tribe-led restoration project

July 19, 2024 — The NOAA‘s Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience program recommends $18 million for a Yurok Tribe-led restoration project.

The project aims to restore critically important segments of multiple Upper Klamath River tributaries.

This follows the progress of the Klamath River Renewal Project taking out four dams along the historic Klamath River.

Read the full article at KOBI

Ninth Circuit unsure of court’s efficacy in Alaska killer whale conservation case

July 19, 2024 — The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing how effective its opinion will be in a lawsuit over how Chinook salmon fishing affects Southern Resident killer whales — and judges on Thursday wondered whether the effort would be rendered moot by a pending government agency action.

The Wild Fish Conservancy sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020, accusing the agency of violating the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act in its 2019 Southeast Alaska Biological Opinion and incidental take statement by bypassing public notice and opportunity to comment on the actions.

Alaska and the Alaska Trollers Association, a representative of the commercial fishing industry in the state, intervened as codefendants.

Chinook salmon are the primary food source for Southern Resident killer whales, which were placed on the endangered species list in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones remanded the biological opinion and vacated the portions of it that authorized commercial harvest of Chinook salmon during winter and summer seasons. The ruling would have prevented Southeast Alaskan trollers from fishing for Chinook salmon, but the Ninth Circuit issued a stay, allowing commercial fisheries to continue harvest while the parties appealed.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

9th Circuit Court of Appeals to hear oral arguments on Southeast king salmon troll fishery lawsuit

July 17, 2024 — A panel of federal judges will hear oral arguments on Thursday, July 18, in an appeal of a lower court ruling that threatened to halt the Southeast troll fishery for king salmon.

The Alaska Trollers Association, the State of Alaska, and other entities are appealing a Washington District Court ruling that found NOAA Fisheries violated endangered species and environmental laws. The ruling says they did so by allowing the Southeast trollers to harvest king salmon at rates that harmed a small population of endangered killer whales in Puget Sound, as well as well as several king salmon populations from the lower Columbia River.

That ruling would have effectively stopped Southeast trollers from fishing for kings — at least, until the National Marine Fisheries Service corrects its environmental analysis. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on the lower court order in June of 2023, allowing the fishery to stay open — for now.

The Washington-based conservation group Wild Fish Conservancy filed the initial suit four years ago. The organization’s case rests on the idea that the trollers are intercepting salmon that would otherwise feed the Puget Sound killer whales. The Wild Fish Conservancy has since petitioned the federal government to give Endangered Species Act protections to king salmon across the entire Gulf of Alaska.

Read the full article at KFSK