January 7, 2024 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) has posted a harvest guideline for the 2024 Sitka herring season of 81,246 tons, or approximately 162.5 million pounds.
“[The forecast] is greater than any prior forecast or estimate of spawning biomass for Sitka Sound herring,” ADF&G said in a 22 December advisory announcement.
January 4, 2024 — Alaska’s seafood industry is reeling after Trident Seafoods announced its plan to sell off several processing plants.
The Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based vertically integrated seafood harvesting and processing company, which has a huge footprint across Alaska’s seafood sector, announced on 12 December that it plans to divest itself of its Alaskan assets in Kodiak, Ketchikan, Petersburg, and False Pass, as well as the South Naknek Diamond NN cannery facility and its support facilities in Chignik.
January 4, 2024 — Yukon River chinook salmon boast the longest freshwater migration in North America, traveling more than 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) from their spawning grounds in Canada to the mouth of the Bering Sea in Alaska. A smolt preparing to enter the ocean is small enough to lay across the palm of your hand. But by the time it returns four or five years later to swim back upriver, it will be about a meter long (more than 3 feet), and weigh 14 kilograms (more than 30 pounds).
Not all Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) travel as far, or grow as big, as the Yukon River chinook (O. tshawytscha), but they all make the journey from freshwater spawning grounds to the ocean, then return to their natal streams to spawn and then die en masse. Those remarkable journeys connect and nurture distant ecosystems.
That’s because salmon gain most of their body mass in the ocean, and when spawning adults travel back inland to die, they ferry energy and nutrients from marine to terrestrial ecosystems. Those migrating salmon are eaten by bears, eagles and a slew of other predators. Scavengers devour carcasses left rotting in streambeds, or discarded in the forest along streams by other carnivores. Ultimately the nutrients diffuse throughout the ecosystem. The young return to the sea to reinvigorate the cycle, in a dance that has lasted unknown centuries — until modern humans began interfering.
Today, researchers can trace the pathway of these nutrients using the “salmon signature,” an isotope of marine nitrogen associated with the migrating fish. John Reynolds, a professor of aquatic ecology and conservation at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, has been searching for that salmon signature in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia’s central coast for more than 15 years.
His lab has published numerous studies showing that nutrient additions from salmon influence wildflower development; the productivity of salmon berry bushes; the territory size of Pacific wrens (Troglodytes pacificus); the density of salmon and other freshwater fish; and more. The salmon signature can even be seen from space: on satellite imagery, the greenness of riparian forests is higher following years of high salmon abundance.
January 2, 2o23 — The U.S. State Department has extended its territorial claims by over 1 million square kilometers, including large swaths of the Arctic and Atlantic seabeds.
Under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries have the right to claim any marine resources within their exclusive economic zone, which stretches 200 miles out from their coastline or halfway between two countries’ coastlines. Countries may also claim areas where the continental shelf originating within their existing boundaries extends into unclaimed areas. These claims include rights to resources on or below the seabed but not within the seas above, such as fisheries.
January 2, 2024 — U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent expansion of the country’s ban on certain types of Russian-origin seafood has garnered mixed reactions, with domestic seafood producers and Alaskan politicians celebrating the move but importers claiming it will have a negative impact on the U.S. processing industry.
Biden expanded the ban of Russian seafood under U.S. Executive Order 14068 to include seafood harvested in Russian waters, “even if these products are then transformed in a third country.”
December 31, 2023 — NOAA Fisheries released the 2023 Ecosystem Status Reports for the eastern Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska. The reports provide the basis for current conditions and trends for critical oceanographic, biological, and ecological indicators in marine ecosystems.
Every year, fishery managers at NOAA, U.S. federal and state agencies, academic institutions, tribes, nonprofits, and scientists contribute to the reports. The data and information from these reports support federal commercial fish and crab fisheries management. For nearly three decades, fishery management has relied on these reports to understand further how commercial fish and crab populations are affected by changes in the marine environment.
“Warming at rates four times faster than the rest of the ocean, Alaska’s Arctic ecosystems are a bellwether for climate change. Now more than ever, ecosystem and climate-related data and information are essential to support adaptive resource management and resilient commercial, recreational, and subsistence fisheries, and rural and coastal communities,” said Robert Roy, director of Alaska Fisheries Science Center.
December 31, 2023 — A new federal report on Alaska ecosystems warns that the current El Nino status and associated warming surface waters predicted for the winter and spring of 2024 may result in reduced availability of Gulf of Alaska needed by many groundfish and reduced quality of that zooplankton itself.
According to NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, the overriding message from this year’s report card is that now in the time for action.
“NOAA and our federal partners have ramped up our support and collaboration with state, tribal and local communities to help build climate resilience,” Spinrad said. “At the same time, we as a nation and global community must dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are driving these changes.”
The 2023 Gulf of Alaska Ecosystem Status Report is part of NOAA’s 2023 Arctic Report Card, a cooperative effort of federal and state agencies and numerous other collaborators.
December 31, 2023 — The Bering Sea fleet fished on a total allowable catch (TAC) quota of 2.15 million pounds of red king crab in October. Though the regulatory season runs until Jan. 15, the 2023-2024 fishery just lasted until Nov. 18, with 31 vessels delivering nearly all the quota.
Weighing in at an average 6.6 pounds each, the crabs were a bit larger this year than the average 6.11 pounds during the 2020-2021 fishery.
Biomass estimates from National Marine Fisheries Service trawl surveys conducted last summer put the crab population above the threshold to set a quota and warranted the season this year. The fishery had been closed since the 2020-2021 season. Ex-vessel prices averaged $8 per pound.
“Overall, most vessels reported good fishing and did not have trouble catching this year’s small quota,” says Ethan Nichols, area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Dutch Harbor.
December 28, 2023 — The waters off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands registered the warmest winter temperatures in over a century, part of a decade-long period of warming, according to a report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The record-high temperatures in the western and central Aleutians moderated later in the year but warmer-than-normal conditions persisted for the rest of the year throughout the waters around the 1,100 mile chain extending from southwestern Alaska, according to the 2023 NOAA Fisheries Ecosystem Status report for the region.
The Aleutians report is one of three annual ecosystem status reports issued by NOAA Fisheries for marine areas of Alaska. The reports, compiled by large teams of scientists, were released earlier this month and presented to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the panel that sets regulated commercial fishing in federal waters off Alaska.
December 28, 2023 — A 10-year loophole that allowed Russia to export seafood to the U.S. and undercut Alaska harvesters and processors has finally been closed, but the effort faced opposition within the U.S. from seafood importers who wanted access to cheap Russian fish.
Russia has flooded world markets with crab, cod, pollock and salmon to detriment of Alaskan harvesters and seafood companies, and coastal communities, Sen. Dan Sullivan said in a Dec. 31 briefing for reporters.
A U.S. Treasury Department order banning seafood harvested in Russia or by Russian vessels, even if the product is exported to a third country for processing and then reexported to the U.S. went into effect Dec. 23, Sullivan said.
China and Russia have the worst environmental and sustainability policies in the world with harvesting and processing while Alaska has the best, Sullivan said.
On top of that, China employs forced labor in its processing plants, usually from the repressed Uighur minority, the senator said.