Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Yukon River communities continue to balance conservation and survival in fifth year of near total salmon fishing closures

June 10, 2024 — As the 2024 Yukon River salmon season kicks off, there will once again be little to no opportunity for communities along the Western Alaska river to harvest any actual salmon.

One small exception is summer chum. If the run hits half a million fish, residents of the lower reaches of the Yukon may have the chance to take to the river with dipnets and other non-traditional gear for a brief window like they did in 2023.

But as Holly Carroll, the Yukon River subsistence fishery manager for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service noted in April, these types of opportunities may not be worth the effort for many along the river.

“Who’s going to spend nine bucks a gallon to go out fishing with a dipnet?” Carroll asked. “It might take them four or five hours to get seven chums. Whereas if they had been given their six-inch gillnet, they put it out for a minute, minute and a half, and they’re done. They’ll have 100. Then they’ll spend the next couple of days cutting and smoking, and they’re done for the season.”

While communities cannot count on these types of heavily restricted opportunities to meet their subsistence needs in 2024, one thing they can count on is a total closure of chinook salmon fishing for the next seven years. Carroll said that the recently signed Alaska-Canada agreement was overdue.

“For me as the federal manager, I see this as the bold step that needed to be taken. We’re just not seeing the returns off those runs that we would have liked. I really felt that it was time,” Carroll said. “I also think we really needed to listen to our tribal stakeholders who have been telling us for years that this annual approach is not a great way to manage.”

Read the full article at KYUK

NOAA finds Alaska Chinook salmon may need to be ESA-listed

June 10, 2024 — A preliminary review by NOAA Fisheries found that Alaska Chinook salmon may need to be listed as threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA).

“This is an encouraging first step in what we hope will be a listing of Southeast Alaska Chinook under the Endangered Species Act,” Wild Fish Conservancy Senior Ecologist Nick Gayeski said. “Listing should provide the many at-risk Chinook populations in this region stronger protection from harm in the near term and initiate the development of scientifically credible recovery plans.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Commercial drift fishing outlook published by Fish and Game ahead of opening

June 6, 2024 — Local commercial drift gillnet fisheries open later this month, and an outlook for the fishery published by the State Department of Fish and Game on Monday says around 5.7 million sockeye are expected to return to Upper Cook Inlet, with 3.7 million of those fish available for harvest across all user groups.

The document says that drift gillnet vessels cannot participate in both state fisheries and federal fisheries on the same day, specifically citing the Cook Inlet exclusive economic zone, which is newly under federal management this year. This year, commercial fisheries are expected to open June 20 by regulation or June 19 by emergency order.

Drift gillnet openings will be Monday and Thursday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the recently passed Kenai River Late-Run King Salmon Stock of Concern Management Plan closes all drift gillnet fishing within 2 miles of the Kenai Peninsula shoreline.

Read the full article at Homer News

ALASKA: Report: Half of vessels in federally managed Alaska fisheries had observer coverage in 2023

June 5, 2024 — In fishing vessels harvesting seafood from federal waters off Alaska, key information about performance and rule compliance comes from employees who observe the catches or from electronic equipment that monitors the amount and types of marine life that are brought aboard.

Because of concerns about salmon bycatch and the fishery-related deaths of marine mammals, there have been calls to increase observer coverage in the federally managed fisheries off Alaska.

About half the 463 vessels engaged in those federally managed fisheries last year had either human observers or electronic monitoring systems on board, said an annual report presented to fishery managers meeting this week in Kodiak. About 44% of the vessel trips were covered by such observations, the report said. Those percentages were a bit higher than those recorded in 2022, when about 44% of vessels had human observers or electronic monitoring, and about 40% of trips were covered.

The 2023 annual report for the North Pacific Observer Program was presented on Monday to the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and on Tuesday to the council’s Advisory Panel. It is also to be presented in the coming days to the full council.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Yukon River Fishery Update says chum salmon will be available for harvest

June 5, 2024 –No chinooks, but chum salmon will be available for subsistence harvest in the Yukon River this year.

Each year the salmon runs are meant to bring much needed food for folks that rely on subsistence fishing along the Yukon River. These runs have struggled to do just that in recent years as the chinook salmon runs have been well below average and smaller than the minimum escapement goals for the Yukon River Fishery. Such being the case, there will be no chinook salmon harvest once more.

There is work underway to better understand the decreasing runs.

Read the full article at Newscenter Fairbanks

Commercial fishing groups bring new legal action over Cook Inlet’s federal waters

June 5, 2025 —  Two commercial fishing advocacy groups based on the Kenai Peninsula are again taking the federal government to court over its proposed management strategy for fishing in Cook Inlet’s federal waters.

The United Cook Inlet Drift Association and the Cook Inlet Fishermen’s Fund filed a complaint Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for Alaska. They allege that an amendment approved in April to the fishery plan for the inlet’s federal waters defers the federal government’s management responsibilities, in violation of the federal Magnuson-Stevens Act.

The affected waters, called the Exclusive Economic Zone, run from Kalgin Island south to about Anchor Point.

Read the full article at KDLL

ALASKA: Alaska’s seafood industry is in trouble. Processors and policymakers blame Russia.

June 4, 2024 — Alaska waters produce the most seafood in the country, and many of the state’s coastal communities depend on commercial fisheries to sustain their economy.

But Alaska’s fisheries are facing a massive economic slump right now, and policymakers are increasingly blaming flooded global markets. The private sector and federal policymakers are teaming up to try to stop the bleeding.

Last year was brutal for the seafood industry. Processing companies and fishermen alike suffered amid cratering prices, and they blamed Russia for flooding markets. Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, from Alaska, pointed his finger at the country at a news conference on May 23.

“Russians have essentially admitted they’re not just at war in Ukraine, they’re at war with the American fishing industry,” he said.

Alaska’s other federal delegates, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Mary Peltola, shared similar sentiments at ComFish, a fisheries trade show in Kodiak.

The U.S. and Russia have been fighting over their seafood trade for years.

Recent highlights include a Russian ban on American goods in 2014.

The U.S. government didn’t put its own ban on Russian goods in place until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Despite that embargo, there was a loophole in the U.S. restrictions, at least for seafood. Russian-caught fish processed in third-party countries, namely China, could still be sold in American markets.

That lasted until late last year. Then, amid intense lobbying from the U.S. seafood industry, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that finally closed the loophole and any chances for Russian fish getting to America.

The move could boost demand for Alaska fish in the U.S., but America is just one of three major markets for Alaska seafood — it’s sold all over the world.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Environmental groups file new challenge to yet-unbuilt Alaska LNG export project

June 3, 2024 — Two environmental groups filed a new legal challenge to the Biden administration’s approval of a yet-to-be-built project that would send the Alaska North Slope’s vast reserves of natural gas to markets.

In a petition filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club argued that federal agencies failed to properly consider harms that the massive natural gas project would cause to Endangered Species Act-listed animals living in the affected marine areas: polar bears, Cook Inlet beluga whales and Eastern North Pacific right whales.

The petition was filed against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, along with the agencies’ parent departments, the Department of the Interior and Department of Commerce.

The Biden administration last year renewed an approval of exports from the project, which has been pursued in various forms since the 1970s but never built. The current plan is being promoted by the state-owned Alaska Gasline Development Corp. It proposes a 42-inch-diameter pipeline running about 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope to tidewater at Cook Inlet, where a new facility would convert the product to liquefied natural gas and load it onto tanker vessels for export to Asian markets.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon