Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Pink salmon catch up 43 percent in Alaska, with average season predicted for 2024

November 30, 2023 — Entering an off year, Alaska’s pink salmon fishery is forecasted to have an average-sized harvest in 2024.

Alaskan fishermen caught 152.4 million pink salmon in the 2023 season, valued at USD 113.7 million (EUR 103.5 million), far above the prediction of 122 million fish. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), due to the species’ two-year life cycle, the coming season will see a lower harvest of around 19 million fish – about average, it said in its 2024 pink salmon forecast for Southeast Alaska.

Read the full article SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Search continues for the missing after landslide leaves 3 dead in Alaska fishing community

November 25, 2023 — Searchers with heat-sensing drones and a cadaver-dog kept up the search Wednesday for three people missing in a landslide that barreled down a mountain and slammed into homes in a remote Alaska fishing community, leaving three confirmed dead.

Monday night’s slide churned up the earth from near the top of the mountain down to the ocean, tearing down a wide swath of evergreen trees and burying a highway in the island community of Wrangell, about 155 miles (250 kilometers) south of Juneau. Rescue crews found the body of a girl in an initial search Monday night and the bodies of two adults late Tuesday.

Around 54 homes are cut off from town by the landslide, and roughly 35 to 45 people have chosen to stay in that area, interim borough manager Mason Villarma said. Boats are being used to provide supplies, including food, fuel and water, and prescription medications, to those residents. Given the geography of the island — with the town at the northern point and houses along a 13-mile (20.9-kilometer) stretch of paved road — currently “the ocean is our only access to those residences,” he said.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

ALASKA: 3 dead and 3 missing after landslide rips through remote Alaska fishing community

November 23, 2023 — Three people were killed and three were missing after a landslide barreled down a heavily forested, rain-soaked mountainside and smashed into homes in a remote fishing community in southeast Alaska.

The slide — estimated to be 450 feet (137 meters) wide — occurred about 9 p.m. Monday during a significant rain and windstorm near Wrangell, an island community of 2,000 people some 155 miles (250 kilometers) south of the state capital of Juneau.

Rescue crews found the body of a girl in an initial search and late Tuesday the bodies of two adults were found by a drone operator. Searchers used a cadaver-sniffing dog and heat-sensing drones to search for two children and one adult unaccounted for after the disaster, while the Coast Guard and other vessels looked along a waterfront littered with rocks, trees and mud.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

ALASKA: Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers Receive Vital Support from Community

November 18, 2023 — Grundens threw quite the Cappy Hours at this year’s Pacific Marine Expo (PME) on Wednesday and Thursday of the show. They offered beer, hats, and a Yeti cooler filled with both Grundens and Yeti swag throughout all three days of the expo. Though the beer and hats were free, they were accepting donations to raise money for the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers (ABSC). PME generously matched the funds raised during both the Cappy Hours and Grundens x Yeti Raffle. They ended up raising $2,860, which comes to a grand total of $5,720 for Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers.

ABSC is a non-profit organization seeking to provide economic stability to the crab industry and Alaska’s coastal communities, promote safety at sea, and produce premier crab products for American and global customers. They have been actively involved in all aspects of crab fishery research, sound management, and marketing. They are tireless advocates for the Alaska Bering Sea crab fisheries and continue to make positive impacts on the fishing fleets and families that depend on these fisheries for their livelihoods.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Scientists say warming seas helped cause Alaska’s snow crab crash

November 18, 2023 — When scientists estimated that more than 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the Eastern Bering Sea between 2018 and 2021, industry stakeholders and fisheries scientists had several ideas about where they’d gone.

Some thought bycatch, disease, cannibalism, or crab fishing, while others believed it could be predation from other sea animals like Pacific cod.

But now, scientists say they’ve distinguished the most likely cause for the disappearance. The culprit is a marine heatwave between 2018 and 2019, according to a new study authored by a group of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mike Litzow is a co-author of the study and the director for NOAA’s Kodiak lab. He said starvation mediated by increased temperatures caused the collapse.

“Really the crab were not able to get the food they needed,” Litzow said. “They were just outstripping the resources that were available to them.” 

According to Litzow and his fellow researchers, the crab faced a number of compounding factors: First, higher temperatures meant increased metabolism so they needed more food; on top of that, there was less space for the crab to forage that food; and finally, the crab were just smaller than usual.

Researchers took data from the many possible hypotheses for the disappearance and they examined it alongside the data they have on the collapse. They examined possible mortality from a range of sources, including directed fishing from the snow crab industry as well as bitter crab syndrome — a fatal disease among crustaceans caused by parasites — and trawl bycatch.

“The take-home message is really that none of those other proposed mechanisms explains the collapse with the data we have,” Litzow said.

He said it’s tough to know what the collapse from increased ocean temperatures could mean for other species, but it’s safe to say we’ll probably see more marine heatwaves like this, and they’re likely to be bigger and more frequent, as the world continues warming.

Read the full article at KYUK

Sockeye nuggets, breakfast sausage win Alaska Symphony of Seafoods awards

November 16, 2023 — Ocean Beauty Seafoods’ Echo Falls Smoked Wild Alaskan Sockeye Nuggets and Trident Seafoods’ Kraken Stash IPA Beer Battered Wild Alaska Pollock Fillets won the retail and foodservice awards at the 2023 Alaska Symphony of Seafoods.

The Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation (AFDF) announced the winners at the Pacific Marine Expo on 9 November. The competition, organized by the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation since 1994, is for commercial-ready, value-added products, with the goal of promoting new products made from Alaska seafood.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

US Senate holds field hearing on impact of Alaska salmon declines on tribes

November 16, 2023 — U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) held a field hearing in Bethel, Alaska, U.S.A. last week to hear concerns about how declining salmon runs are affecting native communities.

“It is significant and historic to bring the Senate Indian Affairs Committee to Bethel to understand how the salmon crashes in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region are affecting those of you who live here,” Murkowski, the vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indians Affairs (SCIA), said. “I have heard how the lack of salmon is affecting your ways of life and the need for the federal government to pay attention, to understand, and to act. We brought the committee to Bethel so those in the region and surrounding villages who are most impacted can be heard and offer potential solutions on the official record.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Debate over Pebble mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region moves to dueling Supreme Court briefs

November 16, 2023 — The company trying to build a huge copper and gold mine in the salmon-rich Bristol Bay will keep fighting for the project, despite a decision by the federal government to keep the proposed development site off-limits to large-scale metals mining.

John Shively, chief executive officer of the Pebble Limited Partnership, made that vow in a presentation at the Alaska Miners Association annual convention in Anchorage.

He said the Pebble mine had the potential to transform the economy and improve lives in the rural Bristol Bay region, just as he said the Red Dog Mine, one of the world’s biggest zinc producers, has done in Northwest Alaska.

“That’s why we’re still fighting this. The resources are there. We’re still here. We’re not going anywhere,” he told the convention audience in his presentation on Thursday.

The company’s fight is backed by the administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy. At his direction, the state in July filed a lawsuit directly to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to overturn a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency that bars permitting for any Pebble-type mine in key areas of the Bristol Bay watershed.

Dunleavy, in brief remarks earlier this week at the miners’ convention, expressed pride in his support of the controversial project.

“I was told if I supported Pebble, I would never win another election. Well, I don’t know. I’m here. I’m still here,” he said on Tuesday, drawing applause from the audience. The Republican governor was handily reelected last November.

The EPA decision invoked a rarely used provision in the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands permit for the project. The agency determined that the Pebble mine posed an unacceptable risk to the Bristol Bay watershed, essential to a region with the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs and with major fisheries and wildlife populations that depend on that salmon.

To help reverse that decision, the Pebble Limited Partnership and its owner, Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., in September filed an amicus brief in support of the state’s Supreme Court effort. Filing supportive briefs, too, were the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and numerous Alaska and national resource-development groups.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

Finite supply fuels US market for king and snow crab, defying seafood category dip

November 15, 2023 — Limited availability of king crab and snow crab has boosted U.S. buyer interest, in defiance of a downward sales trend across the seafood category.

On 15 October, the red king crab fishery in Alaska’s Bristol Bay officially opened with a 2.2-million-pound quota, following a two-year closure. As recently as 2016, the total allowable harvest was set at 8.47 million pounds; in 1980, it was 130 million pounds.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Cordova kelp farmers need to process their harvest. A scientist is piloting a solution.

November 16, 2023 — Sean Den Adel and his fiance Skye Steritz live in Cordova and are among a handful of small-scale seaweed farmers in Prince William Sound.

They’ve been harvesting mostly sugar kelp on about five acres of water since 2022. Den Adel said he’s excited about the future of the industry, which he sees as more sustainable – ecologically and economically – than the fisheries that have supported Prince William Sound for generations.

“I really do think it’s going to create a lot more jobs in coastal communities, and it already is doing that,” he said.

But in order to grow the industry, Cordova’s kelp farmers need a way to process seaweed locally.

Prince William Sound has experienced five fisheries disasters since 2016, in part because of climate change. These disasters put a major economic strain on coastal communities. Growers like Den Adel are hoping seaweed can help bolster and diversify the region’s economy.

Cale Herschleb, another Cordova-based kelp farmer with Royal Ocean Kelp Company, has commercially fished for salmon in Prince William Sound for the last 15 years. The fisheries disasters have been challenging and the future of salmon fishing feels uncertain, he said, and growing kelp makes sense as an off-season occupation.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media