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.
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.
November 13, 2023 — While the “Gathering Place” at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation hospital in Bethel is often bustling with people who have come in from the region’s villages for medical appointments, on Nov. 10 they came to talk about salmon.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, acting as vice chair of the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, hosted a field hearing and listening session addressing a topic at the core of daily life in the region. The title of the hearing was: “The Impact of the Historic Salmon Declines on the Health and Well-Being of Alaska Native Communities along Arctic, Yukon, and Kuskokwim Rivers”.
Association of Village Council Presidents CEO Vivian Korthuis said that the tribal organization has been pushing for this type of hearing for two years. It’s a chance to gather first-hand accounts from the people impacted the most by the decline in salmon.
November 13, 2023 — Abysmal chinook and chum salmon returns to Western Alaska have made the state’s jurisdiction in fisheries management a prominent target on the legal radar again. Though Alaska’s subsistence challenges have been the bane of salmon management in some areas for more than a half century, recent run failures on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers have rekindled arguments in the courts.
Most recently, a case filed in 2022 has gained momentum and will argue whether the State of Alaska and the Alaska Division of Fish and Game, or the federal government, calls the shots in setting subsistence openings and closures on a 191-mile stretch of the river.
“They’re literally fighting over crumbs here,” says Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola, D-Alaska. “This is a legal battle over crumbs. All subsistence harvesting captures less than 1 percent of Alaska’s resources. When I was growing up it was 2 percent, which was negligible; now it’s less than 1 percent, and when you’re talking about subsistence on federal land, that’s infinitesimal.”
The case is the latest in court gyrations that promise to test the validity of a landmark court ruling that was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction in the 1990s. That case, commonly referred to as “Katie John,” was named after the woman who challenged a state law of 1964 which prevented her from operating a fish wheel for her winter’s salmon. That ruling was supposed to have defined “subsistence priority” in fisheries management.
The suit, originally filed in 1985 by Katie John and other parties, challenged the state management system in a plea for subsistence rights. What ensued since then has been a fight between state and federal courts in defining what constitutes public lands, submerged lands, navigable waters on those lands and which government (state or federal) has rightful management of those waters to comply with language in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).
An equally hefty argument has been the definition of who among Alaska residents has rightful access to natural resources – and when. As the Katie John case gained momentum in federal courts, an Alaska state Supreme Court decision in another case, McDowell v. State, had rendered that natural resources are the property of all residents: urban, rural, Native and non-Native, and that relegating rights to specific groups violated the state constitution.
November 10, 2023 — The Pacific Marine Expo kicked off its second day with an educational session, “Alaska Fisheries: Separating fact from fiction.” The panel was moderated by Kate Naughten, Director of Communications at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Panelists included Janet Coit, Assistant Administrator at NOAA, Robert Foy, Ph.D., Director of AK Fisheries Science Center (NOAA), and Jon Kurland, Alaska Regional Administrator (NOAA).
Naughten addressed the crowd, “We’re going to start on the present state of Alaska fisheries, the future of the stocks that are in flux, management responses to the changes of climate and markets, how climate change has impacted Alaska’s markets and ecosystems and how that affects fisheries, and the impact of extreme events on stocks that were already in decline and recent increases in recruitment.”
Janet Coit was the first to speak, expressing her sincere appreciation for getting to work with the members of the fishing community who share a love for the ocean. She emphasized NOAA’s national seafood strategy, launched last summer, which is meant to put in one place the administration’s commitment to fisheries and to demonstrate their priorities moving forward. “Events like this are really important to me, and they provide an opportunity for me to hear from and learn from the fishing industry and to talk about our mutual priorities, the challenges, and opportunities before us.” She continued, “The seafood sector supports over 1.2 million jobs, and generates $165 billion in sales in seafood across the broader economy,” Coit said. “Our nation harvests and farms about 10 billion pounds of seafood annually, with a dockside value of over $6 billion.”
November 9, 2023 — Serena Fitka sat in the cabin of a flat-bottomed aluminum boat as it sped down the Yukon River in western Alaska, recalling how the river once ran thick with salmon. Each summer, in the Yup’ik village of St. Mary’s where Fitka grew up, she and her family fished for days on end. They’d catch enough salmon to last through winter, enough to share with cousins, aunts, uncles, and elders who couldn’t fish for themselves.
“We’d get what we need, and be done,” Fitka said, raising her voice above the whir of the outboard motor and the waves beating against the hull. “But now there’s nothing.”
The boat skirted the river bank as Fitka glanced out the window, her face shielded from the mid-July sun. Gray water, thick with glacial silt, lapped against the land’s muddy edge below a summer palette of green: dark spruce needles, light birch leaves, and willows a shade in between. A bald eagle soared 10 feet above the river, scanning the water.
“I thought this wouldn’t happen in my lifetime,” Fitka said. “I thought there would always be fish in the river.”
November 8, 2023 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will investigate 6PPD-quinone, a chemical found in most tires that is toxic to salmon, under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
The action is in response to a petition brought by environmental group Earthjustice on behalf of the Yurok, Port Gamble S’Klallam, and Puyallup Tribes to ban the use of 6PPD in and for tires. While the EPA didn’t outright ban the chemicals, it has granted the tribes’ petition and will issue an advance notice of proposed rulemaking for 6PPD and “initiate additional data gathering activities.”
November 6, 2023 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will begin the process to limit and possibly eliminate a chemical commonly used in car tires, after scientific studies found that the chemical — commonly known as 6PPD — is fatal to salmon.
The EPA announced its regulatory plans Thursday, answering a petition from three Native Tribes in the Pacific Northwest. The states of Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut also supported the petition.
November 6, 2023 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s 2024 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon forecast is once again calling for a smaller run than the year prior.
ADF&G is predicting a run in Bristol Bay of 39 million sockeye, down from the 54.5 million run in 2023.
November 3, 2023 — Alaska fish-harvesting employment declined in 2022, a continuing yearslong slide caused by a variety of factors, according to an analysis by the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
Employment for people harvesting seafood dropped by about a quarter from 2015 to 2022, according to the analysis, published in the November issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the department’s monthly research magazine.
The industry lost ground compared to other sectors of the Alaska economy, the analysis found. Seafood harvesting accounted for 7.3% of Alaska jobs in July of 2021, but only 5.7% of Alaska jobs were in seafood harvesting in the following July. Fishery work is highly seasonal, and July is the peak month for it.