Saving Seafood

In search of 10 billion missing snow crabs, scientists eye marine heat waves

October 23, 2023 — About 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from Bering Sea waters between 2018 and 2021, forcing fisheries to shutter in Alaska last winter and threatening the state’s economy. Now, scientists think they know what happened to them.

A study published Thursday in the journal Science suggests that the crabs likely suffered a mass starvation event touched off by seasons of extreme ocean heat.

The population crash — from its highest-recorded level in 2018 — shows how marine heat waves, which are made more likely by climate change, can scramble ecosystems and threaten human livelihoods that rely on ocean life.

Read the full article at NBC News

ALASKA: Bering Sea fishing group grapples with how to invest pollock profits in Western Alaska

October 23, 2023 — Michael Cleveland’s job is resuscitating the equipment essential to village life.

On a morning in late summer, inside a modest engine repair shop, Cleveland was juggling jobs fixing the transom of an aluminum skiff and stripping a four-wheeler down to the guts.

Mechanics here fix snowmachines, boat motors, the occasional car, dirt bikes and anything else with an engine. In a part of Alaska without roads, these are the vehicles vital to everyday life — getting to the airstrip, going hunting and fishing, traveling to other communities across the flat terrain of the Kuskokwim Delta.

Cleveland, 33, grew up in this predominantly Yup’ik part of Southwest Alaska and has been employed at the shop for around two years.

“For me, I’m learning while I’m working,” he said.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News 

ALASKA: Alaska Native leaders call for legal overhaul to protect traditional fish harvests

October 23, 2o23 — The crash of salmon stocks in Western Alaska’s Kuskokwim River has sparked a bitter court fight between the federal and state governments, and now Alaska Native leaders are calling for congressional action to ensure that Indigenous Alaskans have priority for harvests when stocks are scarce.

The conflict has gripped this year’s Alaska Federation of Natives convention underway this week in Anchorage, where delegates expressed anger over state policies and fears for the future of fish and wildlife upon that they and their ancestors traditionally harvested.

A resolution introduced at the convention urges the federal government to “aggressively protect our hunting and fishing rights in court” against a state government that is “actively undermining Alaska Natives’ rights to subsistence.” The resolution also calls for Congress to strengthen federal law to “permanently protect the right of Alaska Native people to engage in subsistence fishing” in Alaska waters.

Subsistence is the term that describes traditional harvests of fish, game and plants for personal and noncommercial use. Salmon has traditionally been a subsistence staple.

For Alaska Natives, subsistence is of cultural as well as practical importance. Within the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, a sweeping federal law passed in 1980, there are subsistence harvest protections for residents of rural Alaska – regions where communities are largely Native – but not for Native people specifically.

It is time to change those terms to explicitly protect Native traditions, convention attendees said. The sentiment was particularly strong among residents of the affected Kuskokwim River area.

“After decades of failed and broken promises, we urge Alaska’s state and federal policymakers to recognize and protect Alaska Native rights to subsistence uses of fish and game. We ask that they act quickly to stop the physical and cultural starvation of our people,” Curt Chamberlain, an attorney for the Yup’ik-owned Calista Corp., said during a three-hour session Friday afternoon on subsistence problems.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

Billions of crabs went missing around Alaska. Scientists now know what happened to them

October 22, 2023 — Billions of snow crabs have disappeared from the ocean around Alaska in recent years, and scientists now say they know why: Warmer ocean temperatures likely caused them to starve to death.

The finding comes just days after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced the snow crab harvest season was canceled for the second year in a row, citing the overwhelming number of crabs missing from the typically frigid, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea.

The study, published Thursday by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found a significant link between recent marine heat waves in the eastern Bering Sea and the sudden disappearance of the snow crabs that began showing up in surveys in 2021.

Read the full article at CNN

ALASKA: Alaska Native advocates and leaders call for expanded federal subsistence protection

October 22, 2023 — Advocates for Alaska Native interests say they see an opening to significantly broaden a key federal subsistence protection across Alaska amid a court dispute between the state and the federal government over that protection.

With support from Alaska’s 200-plus tribes, Congress could expand the protection to new swaths of Alaska, say attorneys with the Native American Rights Fund and Alaska Native groups.

They want the protection, which provides a fishing priority in times of shortage for rural residents who are typically Native, to expand beyond sections of rivers associated with federal lands such as refuges, where the law currently applies.

They want it to cover the entirety of rivers, including sections of rivers associated with state lands.

“Up and down the river,” is how it would be applied, not just on part of a river, said Heather Kendall-Miller, a part-time attorney with the Native American Rights Fund.

Also, the priority for rural residents should be expanded to include Alaska Natives, to ensure it benefits Indigenous people living in urban and rural areas, they say.

State officials said Thursday those proposals, if Congress approved, would allow federal authority to supplant state authority on rivers across the state.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: As the once-lucrative Bering Sea crab harvest resumes, Alaska fishermen face challenges

October 19, 2023 — In the short term, Alaska crab fishermen and the communities that depend on them will get a slight reprieve from the disastrous conditions they have endured for the past two years, with harvests for iconic red king crab to open on Sunday.

In the long term, the future for Bering Sea crab and the people who depend on it is clouded by environmental and economic upheaval.

The decision by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to open harvests of Bristol Bay red king crab after an unprecedented two-year shutdown was a close call, a state biologist told industry members during a meeting Oct. 12.

In the short term, Alaska crab fishermen and the communities that depend on them will get a slight reprieve from the disastrous conditions they have endured for the past two years, with harvests for iconic red king crab to open on Sunday.

In the long term, the future for Bering Sea crab and the people who depend on it is clouded by environmental and economic upheaval.

The decision by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to open harvests of Bristol Bay red king crab after an unprecedented two-year shutdown was a close call, a state biologist told industry members during a meeting Oct. 12.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Alaskan seafood nabs higher profile at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena

October 18, 2023 — The Bristol Bay Native Corporation and the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association are getting a higher profile for Alaskan seafood at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

Timed with the Seattle Kraken’s first home game of the season on 17 October – a National Hockey League franchise that plays at the arena – BBNC’s Bristol Bay Wild Market is opening in a new, more prominent location in the arena.

Read the full article SeafoodSource

North Pacific council declines hard cap for chum bycatch

October 17, 2023 —  Although it took steps to mitigate chum salmon bycatch in Bering Sea pollock trawls, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council fell short of imposing a hard cap at its meeting in October.

 A hard cap would restrict or shut down pollock trawling when the fleet reaches a maximum number of incidental salmon. The council’s inaction marks the latest round in a skirmish between trawling interests and local residents and fishermen living in western Alaska and from other regions in the state.

“We have submitted comments previously in support of a half-million chums,” says Tim Bristol, executive director of SalmonState, in Juneau. “We certainly don’t believe that’s a magic number, but a hard cap for trawlers, when essentially every other sector is facing some kind of restriction or closure, would have sent a message that the council is taking what is a crisis for many Alaskans seriously.”

For the past several years various conservation groups and fisheries associations have railed against the council’s failure to take more action in reducing the bycatch of salmon and crab, and impact on marine habitat. Recommendations by the groups have ranged from complete trawl closures in the Bering Sea to the use of hard caps.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: At fishery council meeting, tribal groups and pollock industry at odds over how to limit trawl bycatch of chum salmon

October 16, 2023 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council approved options for limiting the Bering Sea pollock fleet’s take of chum salmon during an October meeting that displayed the fault lines separating the pollock industry and Western Alaska tribal representatives.

The council motion approved Sunday calls for consideration of caps ranging from a low of 200,000 chum to as many as 550,000 annually that could be incidentally taken by trawl vessels targeting pollock. It will be sent out for study along with a broader set of alternatives.

The council will be required to select an alternative and take a vote by December 2024.

Many Western Alaska communities have been buffeted by weak returns of salmon that have brought a sense of crisis as some commercial fisheries have been shut down and subsistence fishing opportunities have been reduced or in some cases eliminated.

Their tribal representatives backed a proposal to study a much lower range of caps for the trawl fleet — from 0 to 280,000 chum annually. That amendment was rejected by a council advisory panel and did not make it into the final council motion.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: A struggle to dodge salmon in pursuit of a massive pollock bounty

October 16, 2023 — Some 400 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, Bering Sea pollock congregated in spectacular fashion.

In the wheelhouse of this factory trawler, Captain Jim Egaas scanned a sonar displaying a dense red band that represented millions of fish in a school that stretched for miles.

He could see the pollock up close on another screen that relayed images from an undersea camera stitched in the mesh of a quarter-mile-long net. The video feed showed swarms of them deep in the funnel-shaped trap.

Once pulled on board, the tail end of the net bulged with more than 220,000 pounds of tightly packed pollock. A crewman unstitched a seam. Raised by a powerful winch, the net spewed a silver avalanche of fish into below-deck holding tanks to await processing in a plant primed to operate 24 hours a day.

Egaas was in hurry-up mode. Even before the last of this catch was shaken from the webbing, he called for crew members to unfurl a second net from a giant reel.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News