December 12, 2023 — After a significant pollock purchase of USD 1.75 million (EUR 1.6 million) in November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is seeking to buy more wild Alaska pollock with a deadline to receive bids of 13 December.
Simultaneously, the agency awarded a significant walleye contract worth more than USD 1.4 million (EUR 1.3 million).
December 11, 2o23 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees the quota of the Alaskan pollock industry, decided to maintain the same quota for the species in 2024 at its recent meeting on 9 December – despite industry calls for a higher catch.
The council’s latest meeting decided that the total allowable catch (TAC) of pollock for the Eastern Bering Sea would be 1.3 million metric tons (MT), the same quota that it had last year. The flat quota is in spite of increases in biomass, which has increased the allowable biological catch (ABC) to 2.31 million MT – up from 1.9 million MT last year.
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.
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.
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
August 18, 2023 — At entertainment and sports venues across the United States, where fans often enjoy pizza, hot dogs, nachos, and other stadium cuisine staples, seafood is typically absent from arena menus.
A newly minted partnership is on a mission to change that, however, and has picked a seafood-loving city to launch its innovative campaign: Seattle, Washington.
July 27, 2023 — McDonald’s China recently announced that it will now include the blue Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) eco-label on its Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, Double Fish burgers, and Kids Fish Fillet burgers, served in more than 5,000 restaurants nationwide.
The initiative, according to Gu Lei, chief impact officer of McDonald’s China, “will continue to help protect the vitality of the ocean.” Gu described McDonald’s China as “actively building a sustainable supply chain to reduce damage to the environment through its seafood procurement.”
May 17, 2023 — Fresh and frozen seafood inflation at U.S. retailers declined in April, but sales still continued to drop last month.
Due to inflation and concerns about the federal government raising the borrowing cap, U.S. consumer sentiment plummeted to a six-month low in April, according to a University of Michigan survey. The overall index of consumer sentiment is at 57.7 this month, the lowest reading since last November and down from 63.5 in April, according to Reuters.
February 14, 2023 — Convenience store chain 7-Eleven is bringing back its Alaska pollock fish sandwich it featured during the 2022 Lenten season.
Via a partnership with Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based Trident Seafooods is supplying the fish for the sandwiches, the company’s vice president of communications, Alexis Telfer, confirmed to SeafoodSource. The sandwich will feature garlic- and herb-flavored Alaska pollock fillet topped with American cheese and tartar sauce and served on a brioche bun.
January 17, 2023 — The challenge to get observers for the pollock fishery in Alaska’s Bering Sea led to the use of electronic monitoring technologies, which are empowering the pollock fleet.
The Alaska pollock fishery is one of the most valuable in the world, and that may explain why it has been at the core of some experimental projects that aim to allow for better management of resources while minimizing impacts to other species, like the Chinook salmon, that are commercially and culturally valuable species. According to NOAA, “the pollock fishery has a very low rate of bycatch (less than 1 percent)” but, still, there is, says the agency, “a cap on Chinook bycatch. When it’s met, the fishery for pollock is closed.”
The system has worked well. NOAA noted, recently, that “the pollock fishery in Alaska’s Bering Sea is rationalized, which means each vessel/permit holder is allocated a certain amount of catch for the season. But the Gulf of Alaska pollock fishery is open access, with every vessel racing against the others for catch.”