Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Much of Juneau’s king salmon fishery will close this summer, because of a 2020 landslide

June 24, 2024 — Sport fishermen in Juneau may be disappointed come Monday, because king salmon will largely be off limits this summer. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has announced an emergency closure for most near-shore fishing areas around Juneau.

Douglas Island Pink and Chum, or DIPAC’s executive director Katie Harms said hatchery returns are expected to be quite low this year. That’s because most of the chinook that were supposed to come back were killed when a landslide severed the hatchery’s supply of freshwater from Salmon Creek during an atmospheric river in December 2020 that caused flooding and mudslides across the city.

“We had to prematurely release all those chinook salmon that were in raceways at the time,” Harms said. “They entered saltwater before they were biologically able to process saltwater and likely, mostly died.”

Read the full article at KTOO

ALASKA: Federal case challenging Donlin mine’s environmental impact statement heads to court

June 24, 2024 — The environmental review process for proposed mining projects is a lengthy one. But Bethel’s Orutsararmiut Native Council and five other tribes from the region are suing the United States Army Corps of Engineers, saying the federal agency failed to consider important information in its review of the Donlin Gold mine project.

The suit focuses on three main points.

The first, the tribes assert, is that the Army Corps didn’t model a large enough potential spill from the tailings pond that would hold the mine’s waste material. Earthjustice attorney Maile Tavepholjalern represents the six tribes in the case.

“The Army Corps looked at a tailings spill of just 0.5% of the dam capacity,” Tavepholjalern said. “That’s even though larger tailings spills have happened, including during the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process for this mine – that was when Mount Polley’s dam failed, spilling out more than 30% of its contents.”

Second, the tribes allege the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t look closely enough at the health impacts of a massive mine in the region. They point to an unreleased state report, which outlined the mine’s potential positive and negative impacts including diet and food security, marine traffic, and local economies.

The third point of contention is the impact of Donlin’s barging plan on the Kuskokwim, which could more than double the number of barges on the river during the spring and summer. The tribes argue that the Army Corps didn’t properly consider or mitigate the impact of increased barging on Kuskokwim rainbow smelt – an important subsistence food for communities up and down the river.

“Despite knowing about these impacts, the Army Corps of Engineers relied on ineffective measures to try to prevent those impacts,” Tavepholjalern said. The environmental review takes into account a barge communication plan with subsistence users, a monitoring program for rainbow smelt, and subcommittees to help coordinate communication.

Read the full article at KYUK

New Evidence of Seasonal and Temperature-Driven Movement of Alaska Pollock across the U.S.-Russia Maritime Boundary

June 22, 2024 — Scientists placed specially designed moorings, equipped with sonar, on the seafloor to acoustically monitor pollock abundance and movements between U.S. and Russian waters. They found that a substantial amount of pollock travel between the two exclusive economic zones (EEZs) seasonally.

The study was conducted from summer 2019 to summer 2020. During this time, pollock moved southeast over the maritime boundary in winter as the sea ice formed. They were largely absent in late spring when ocean temperatures were near freezing and the sea ice was still present. They subsequently migrated northwest in late spring and early summer as waters warmed. The extent of the movement between EEZs) appears to be partially driven by water temperature.

When the moorings were deployed in summer 2019 the area was unusually warm. Following the winter migration into U.S. waters, conditions were cooler in summer 2020. Over the year of observations, 2.3 times more pollock moved into the U.S. EEZ in fall and winter then exited during the subsequent spring and summer. Scientists believe the cooler conditions in 2020 led to fewer pollock moving into Russian waters than had the previous year.

“There are some important implications for pollock management,” said Robert Levine, physical scientist and lead author on a new paper published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science. “Our research suggests that in years when water temperatures are warmer than average, the proportion of fish moving across the boundary will be greater.”

Scientists suspect that continued warming in the eastern Bering Sea will increase the proportion of the pollock stock found in Russian waters. Currently, pollock support the top U.S. commercial fishery, which harvests more than 1 million metric tons annually.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

ALASKA: Invasive European green crabs are expanding their territory in Southeast Alaska

June 19, 2024 — Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced on Friday that shells of the invasive European green crab were spotted along the shores of Bostwick Inlet on Gravina Island near Ketchikan.

European green crabs have the potential to wreak havoc on commercial and subsistence fisheries in Alaska — the crabs are highly competitive and very hungry. They eat clams, oysters, scallops, other crabs and are known to rip up seagrass in their search for food. Fish and Game said that as a result, they can displace local crab populations like the Dungeness crabs in Bostwick Inlet. They can also decimate eelgrass and saltmarsh habitats, disrupt ecosystem balance, and cheapen overall intertidal biodiversity.

According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, they have even been reported in British Columbia eating juvenile salmon. The International Union for Conservation and Nature ranks them as one of the top 100 worst invasive species in the world.

Read the full article at KTOO

ALASKA: An influx of chum salmon in the Canadian Arctic could be the same fish missing from Western Alaska

June 17, 2024 — Johnnie Storr grew up fishing with his dad in the hamlet of Aklavik, a small town on the Mackenzie River delta in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Depending on the season, they looked for Arctic char, Dolly Varden or whitefish.

“We fished for char in the fall time,” Storr said. “Soon as there was enough ice we walked out and set nets for whitefish.”

Storr is Inuvialuit and Gwich’in, and heads the local Hunters and Trappers Committee, which helps manage Indigenous hunting rights in the region. He said elders say chum salmon have always lived in small numbers in the Mackenzie River, but in the last decade there has been a clear uptick.

“I think it was 2019 where we have seen a big jump,” he said. “I think we had at least 300 salmon brought into the Hunters and Trappers Committee.”

In recent years, all five salmon species have shown up in rivers from northeast Alaska to Nunavut, in Canada’s eastern Arctic. Chum salmon, one of the most cold-tolerant salmon species, are the most commonly found.

Storr said some people eat them, but personally he doesn’t prefer salmon.

“We were releasing them just because we really prefer char around here,” he said.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

NOAA finalizing impact analysis of Alaska’s troll fishery on Southern Resident killer whales

June 17, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries is finalizing documents that will serve as a response to a lawsuit that resulted in the near-cancellation of Southeast Alaska’s commercial Chinook salmon fishery in Southeast Alaska in 2023.

The announcement is the latest development in an ongoing lawsuit between environmental group Wild Fish Conservancy (WFC) and the U.S. government. WFC sued NOAA Fisheries in 2020, claiming that the commercial Chinook salmon harvest and government-funded hatchery programs were taking prey needed by Southern Resident killer whales, starving them in the process. In 2021, a district court ruled in favor of WFC, finding flaws in the official documentation and that analysis was needed to allow commercial fishing operations.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Feds declare economic disaster for 2023 east Cook Inlet set net season

June 14, 2024 — The federal government declared another economic disaster for Cook Inlet’s east side set net fishery this week, the third in three years.

The U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo issued the disaster determination for the 2023 fishing season Monday, in response to a request from Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Dunleavy’s support came following advocacy from local governments and fishing groups.

Revenue in the Kenai Peninsula fishery has been declining for years, because of low harvests and a drop in sockeye value. During the 2023 season, set netters weren’t allowed to fish at all. The state closed the fishery before the season began because of concerns about low returns of king salmon, which sockeye fishers sometimes catch accidentally.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Alaska Gov. Dunleavy picks second ex-talk radio host for lucrative fish job after first rejected

June 14, 2024 — In May, the Alaska Legislature narrowly rejected a conservative talk radio host’s appointment to a highly paid position regulating the state’s commercial fisheries.

Now, after the failure of that pick, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has chosen a new appointee with a similar — though not identical — background for the six-figure job at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, or CFEC.

In an unannounced decision, Dunleavy selected Rick Green last month, according to a letter to Green that the governor’s office released Wednesday as part of a response to a Northern Journal public records request.

Green’s first day on the job is July 1, according to the commission’s chair, Glenn Haight; Green will serve at least through the Alaska Legislature’s next round of confirmation votes in the spring of 2025.

On the airwaves for more than 15 years, Green was known as Rick Rydell during a colorful career as a talk host. His on-air character was that of an “unabashed redneck,” according to one of the books he wrote.

One of those books also chronicled how, with two other hunting enthusiasts, Rydell once attempted to shoot, legally, 30 bears in a single long weekend.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

Silver Bay Seafoods acquires Alaska salmon plant from Trident Seafoods

June 13, 2024 — US-based company Silver Bay Seafoods has bought an Alaskan processing facility from local peer Trident Seafoods.

The plant, located in False Pass, is dedicated to processing salmon. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The facility is located close to Silver Bay Seafoods’ own processing plant in False Pass, which opened in 2019.

Silver Bay Seafoods, which is owned by 600 fishermen, is a processor of frozen salmon, herring, whitefish and squid products for the US and for export markets.

Read the full article at Yahoo News!

ALASKA: Trawl industry responds to concerns of vessels fishing too close to Kuskokwim Bay

June 13, 2024 — Coastal communities near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River have expressed concern about bottom-trawling vessels operating in close proximity to where salmon enter the river. But trawl industry leaders say that this is nothing new.

In recent weeks, posts widely shared on a popular Facebook group critical of the trawl industry have raised issues with vessels apparently just a few miles offshore. The posts on the STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch page featured marine traffic maps showing the location of the trawlers, with one post reading “six trawlers right outside the mouth of Kuskokwim.”

Chris Woodley, executive director of Groundfish Forum, a trawl industry association that represents 17 catcher-processor vessels operating in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands regions, testified about the issue before the North Pacific Fishery Management Council during its June 7 meeting in Kodiak.

Read the full article at KYUK