May 5, 2023 — A U.S. district judge in Washington state has affirmed a controversial recommendation that could shut down summer trolling for king salmon in Southeast Alaska this summer.
Judge Richard A. Jones signed the two-page order on Tuesday. It requires the National Marine Fisheries Service to remedy a violation of the Endangered Species Act concerning a threatened population of killer whales in Puget Sound.
May 1, 2023 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will reconsider certain aspects of the Pebble company’s permit application to build a large gold and copper mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay. The 81-page report comes just three months after the Environmental Protection Agency vetoed the mine in a separate process.
“It’s a bit surprising and a bit confusing,” said Dennis McLerran, who worked as the regional EPA administrator during the Obama administration.
The EPA in January determined that the mine would have “unacceptable adverse effects on salmon fishery areas.” Using its powers under the Clean Water Act, it essentially vetoed the mine plan, and any future plan that would have a similar impact on the same waterways. Many opponents of the project hailed that as the final blow.
McLerran said the EPA decision nullifies any permit the Army Corps could issue.
April 28, 2023 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will review its 2020 permit denial of the Pebble Mine plan, potentially giving the project a longshot chance at survival.
After an appeal by the Pebble Limited Partnership, the agency’s reviewing officers issued an 81-page report April 24 that faulted some aspects of the permit decision by the Corps’ Alaska District. The administrative finding means the issue will be remanded back to the district for further consideration.
The Corps in 2020 rejected the Pebble partners’ application for permits to build an open-pit gold and copper mine upstream from tributaries to Bristol Bay, famed as the world’s most productive wild salmon fishery grounds, where activists for a decade had opposed mining.
The fortunes of Pebble backers have swung back and forth through three presidential administrations. In January 2023 the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration found the mine proposal to be incompatible with the federal Clean Water Act, precluding mineral development that would affect those salmon streams.
The Pebble Limited Partnership continues its legal appeals, but faces other barriers alongside the EPA decision. In December the Pedro Bay Corporation and Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust finalized land conservation easements that would effectively block the Pebble developers’ preferred road route to the mining site.
Read the full story at National Fisherman
April 27, 2023 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will review its denial of a key federal permit for the proposed large Pebble mine project in southwest Alaska, the agency announced April 25. Brig. Gen. Kirk Gibbs, Division Engineer at the corps’ Pacific Ocean Division, said he found certain parts of an appeal to the denial by Pebble Partnership Ltd., the developer, to have merit.
Gibbs’ decision sends the matter back to the corp’s Alaska District for reconsideration. The Alaska District had denied a U.S. Clean Water Act Section 404 dredge and fill permit for Pebble Partnership Ltd., which hopes to develop a large copper, gold and molybdenum deposit near Iliamna, southwest of Anchorage.
It its appeal, Pebble Partnership said the corps’ evaluation was flawed and showed factual inconsistencies with data compiled in a Final Environmental Impact Statement done by the agency for the Pebble project.
“My decision to remand permit application back to the Alaska District is not a permit authorization,” Gibbs said in a statement. “The (Alaska) District has been asked to re-evaluate specific issues with the administrative record to ensure the decision is well-supported.”
April 26, 2023 — As wild salmon stocks continue to struggle across Alaska, advances in research are creating a clearer picture of the many factors contributing to lower returns, lowers sizes and lower survivability.
That’s the good news, by the way — that there’s a greater understanding of all the bad news impacting wild salmon stocks.
“If really the question is, ‘Do I think that we’re just sort of in a down cycle? The bright side is coming next year or some year down the road?’ I don’t think so,” said Dr. Peter Westley, associate professor of fisheries with the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.
April 25, 2023 — Bristol Bay saw a record-breaking harvest of more than 60 million sockeye last summer. The fishery provided roughly two-thirds of the global sockeye supply. It also made up most of the state’s largest harvest on record, which was up 40% from the year before.
“That’s a lot more fish to sell through the system,” said Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association’s executive director, Andy Wink, at a virtual presentation on market conditions earlier this month.
The huge volume of sockeye from 2022 means companies are still selling off those fish, which has tamped down this year’s market, and some processors are still waiting for money from last year’s harvest.
“That big harvest from 2022 needs to sell to create working capital for 2023,” Wink said. “What’s left of it is just a cost, right? It costs money to continue to finance it, costs money to store it and ship it and all the things.”
April 24, 2023 — Bristol Bay should see relatively strong sockeye runs this summer, though they’re not expected to be near last year’s record-breaking run and harvest.
Around 50 million sockeye are forecasted to return to the bay, according to the state’s forecast for the 2023 fishing season. The total escapement is projected to reach 13 million with around 37 million fish available to harvest.
That’s a good deal lower than last year, and it’s also lower than the average over the last 10 years. But looking a little further back, this summer’s run is still expected to be 40% above the bay’s long-term average.
The University of Washington produced its own forecast for Bristol Bay’s 2023 season.
The strength of the salmon returns varies across river systems, and the Nushagak District, on the west side of the bay, has seen some of the biggest sockeye runs and highest harvests in recent years.
“I think the reason why we’re getting these big runs in the Nushagak is because the warmer winters allow for a longer growing season,” said Tim Sands, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s management biologist for the area, at a recent presentation in Dillingham. “So there’s just that extra growing period where there’s more food for them to eat. And they get a little bit bigger. And as they’re bigger going out to the ocean. They’re more competitive and they survive at a little higher rate.”
In the 2023 commercial fishing outlook, the department also raised concerns about fishermen under-reporting of king salmon harvests and said tenders should expect to be boarded and checked for undocumented king salmon.
Here’s a rundown of this summer’s forecasts and regulations by district.
April 23, 2o23 — U.S. Senators Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Brian Schatz (D-Hawai’i), and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) Thursday introduced S.1227, the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest (FISH) Act.
This legislation is to combat foreign illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing by blacklisting offending vessels from U.S. ports and waters, bolstering the U.S. Coast Guard’s enforcement capabilities, and advancing international and bilateral negotiations to achieve enforceable agreements and treaties.
The FISH Act would build on prior landmark legislation against IUU fishing, including the Maritime SAFE Act, authored by Senators Wicker and Chris Coons (D-Del.) and signed into law in December 2019 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
April 19, 2023 — It’s an unpleasant fact for everyone who eats fish in Alaska: Mercury is in the food chain, and it’s particularly prevalent in seafood.
And while the amount of mercury found in Alaska seafood remains far below dangerous levels, a pair of researchers want to keep an eye on it long-term. The best way to do this, they’ve found, is not by testing fish coming over the docks, but by testing human hair. They recently visited Sitka to report the findings of a pilot study begun five years ago.
Todd O’Hara is a veterinarian, but don’t bring him your cat to be spayed.
“I’m a veterinarian who has a PhD in toxicology,” he said. “I’ve never had any desire to be a clinical veterinarian. I’ve applied my veterinary degree to wildlife and fish research in toxicology and environmental agents of disease. So that’s how I got into this business.”
O’Hara is a researcher with Texas A&M and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. A lot of pathologists who study human disease are veterinarians, which is not surprising when you consider how closely humans and animals are linked on this planet.
April 19, 2023 — Eric Osuch has been outside the Capitol for more than a week, urging legislators and staff to take action against trawling
A man urging Alaska lawmakers to take action against trawling was removed from the state Capitol in handcuffs and banned from the building after disrupting a committee hearing on Monday.
After his removal, former fisheries worker Eric Osuch went to the nearby State Office Building and was arrested by the Juneau Police Department after a fight was reported there. He was charged with criminal trespass, the department said.
Osuch was the first person forcibly expelled from the Capitol in three years. Though legislators frequently deal with contentious and emotional topics, protests are typically orderly and held outside the front doors during the lunch hour.
Jessica Geary, director of the nonpartisan agency that operates the Capitol, said no one has received a trespass notice barring them from the Capitol since 2020, and before that, the most recent incident was in 2016.
“The process is outlined in the Capitol Complex Security Operating Procedures Manual. Capitol Security can verbally trespass someone for 24 hours; anything over that requires a formal trespass notice, which must be written and given to the subject with a copy retained for Legislative records,” she said by email.