April 30, 2024 — U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has approved a federal disaster declaration for the Kuskokwim River because of the failure of multiple salmon fisheries in 2022.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy requested a disaster declaration from federal authorities for 2022 chinook, chum, and coho fisheries on the Kuskokwim after the fisheries experienced a 100 percent loss in commercial revenue and significant economic and cultural losses due to a depressed subsistence fishery.
April 28, 2024 — Trident Seafood’s Ketchikan processing plant has officially changed hands. It was announced last month that Sitka-based Silver Bay Seafoods would be acquiring the plant the seafood processing giant, Trident, put up for sale late last year.
The two companies announced the finalized acquisition in a joint statement on April 24th. Trident spokeswoman Alexis Telfer said the move promises “exciting opportunities and growth for the Ketchikan community.”
April 28, 2024 — Alaska’s fight against burdensome seal protections continued Thursday, when attorneys for the state and federal government debated whether the feds properly allocated a vast coastal area under the Endangered Species Act.
In April 2022, the National Marine Fisheries Service — also known as NOAA Fisheries — designated critical habitat off the coast of Alaska for Arctic ringed seals and the Beringia distinct population segment of bearded seals as required by the Endangered Species Act. The move came 10 years after the agency listed both species as “threatened” under the act, as actions to designate critical habitat for the seals were deferred when NOAA’s proposed listings were challenged in court.
NOAA’s legal challenges led to a settlement that allowed the agency to complete a final determination of critical habitat in 2022. But now that NOAA has designated critical habitat — 257,000 square miles for the ringed seal and 273,000 square miles for the bearded seals — Alaska claims too much land was designated and that the species are not even threatened.
“By comparison, the state of Texas contains 268,000 square miles while California contains 163,000 square miles,” Alaska wrote in its 2023 complaint. “All of this critical habitat is occupied by members of the two seal species, which are among the most common marine mammals found in the Arctic region.”
April 25, 2025 — Three fishermen are facing federal charges after being accused of illegally transporting more than 7,000 pounds of crab harvested in Southeast Alaska to Seattle in hopes of getting better prices there.
Instead, federal prosecutors say, much of the haul was wasted upon arrival in Washington state because the crab had either died or were suspected of being diseased.
Corey Potter, Justin Welch and Kyle Potter were indicted last week on charges they violated the Lacey Act. The law makes it a federal crime to break the wildlife laws of any state, tribe or foreign country, and then move or trade the wildlife across U.S. borders.
April 25, 2024 — Alaska’s three-member, bipartisan congressional delegation is siding with boosters of the major proposed Donlin mine in an ongoing lawsuit filed by tribal governments that seeks to invalidate the Southwest Alaska project’s federal environmental approvals.
Republican U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, in documents filed in federal court late Tuesday, called the proposed Southwest Alaska mine one of the state’s “most important and necessary economic development projects.”
And they say that blocking the mine’s construction would stop one of the state’s largest Alaska Native-owned corporations, Calista, from “developing its natural resources in defiance of the commitment to economic self-determination” contained in the federal legislation that settled Indigenous land claims.
April 24, 2024 — Officials at Peter Pan Seafoods in Anchorage have reached an agreement with Silver Bay Seafoods to operate Peter Pan’s facilities in Port Moller and Dillingham this summer, but have
announced no plans for the future of its historic processing facilities at King Cove.
Peter Pan had announced earlier that the processing plant at King Cove would not be open for
the groundfish A season, leaving King Cove residents hoping that there would be processing for the B season and other fisheries as well.
Then on April 4, Peter Pan posted a notice on Facebook saying that the company was saddened to share that Peter Pan would be halting operations at its processing plants, leading to discontinuation of both summer and winter production cycles for the foreseeable future.
April 23, 2024 — Processors are going out of business, fishermen are scrambling to upgrade their onboard freezing equipment to meet higher standards, and politicians are at loggerheads regarding a proposed aid package.
This is the current situation of the salmon industry in the U.S. state of Alaska, on the cusp of the 2024 season.
April 23, 2024 — The state of Alaska is appealing its defeat in a lawsuit brought by the federal government over control of salmon fisheries on the Kuskokwim River in Southwest Alaska.
In a notice published Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for Alaska, the Alaska Department of Law said it was appealing Judge Sharon Gleason’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
April 23, 2024 — When you think of “free fish,” you’re likely to remember those generous fishermen who dropped a fresh silver salmon on your doorstep or loaded your freezer with offerings of halibut, cod and crab.
But when Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) uses the term, it’s in the context of “Communist fish,” which he links to Russia (the former Soviet Union) and China.
Appearing at two ComFish events last weekend, Sullivan touted some of the work he and his colleagues have been doing in Washington, D.C., including the passage of legislation that placed an embargo on Russian fish products coming into this country.
“It took too damn long, but we finally got it done,” he said, to applause.
To no avail, Sullivan and his colleagues tried to get the Obama and Trump administrations to put an embargo on imported Russian fish.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the Biden administration was putting together “a big sanctions package, I went to the White House and said, ‘Now is the time to fix this to a level playing field.’ To their credit they did it. It took a war to fix this,” Sullivan said.
April 22, 2024 — The Alaska Senate has proposed a new aid package for the state’s fish processing companies — some of which have been teetering among a crash in prices that’s caused an industry-wide crisis.
The Senate, in its capital budget passed last week, included the $7.5 million grant to a nonprofit organization called SeaShare. Most of the cash would go toward buying out what SeaShare calls an “oversupply” of seafood from last year’s harvest, which it says is costing processing companies money to store in freezers.
The program would add to more than $100 million in salmon and Alaska pollock purchases — more than 1,500 truck loads — announced earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
SeaShare would use the state money to support smaller Alaska processingcompanies that couldn’t match the scale of the federal purchases, said Hannah Lindoff, the organization’s executive director.
The seafood purchases would then be donated to Alaska food programs and food banks, she said. A smaller share of the grant would also pay for the purchase of new freezers in communities around the state that could store more fish in the future.