Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Alaska’s salmon fishery passes MSC audits, marking 25 years of certification

February 18, 2025 — The Alaskan salmon fishery has met all Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard requirements related to its hatcheries after a recent audit, allowing it to continue possessing its certification.

MRAG Americas, an independent assessment body, determined Alaska’s salmon fishery met the MSC’s hatchery management standards, which include comprehensive marking of hatchery-produced salmon to track the origin of fish to certain hatcheries. The tracking is designed to allow fishery managers to assess and regulate fishery contributions and interactions between hatchery salmon and wild salmon.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Native communities in Alaska face crisis as integral way of life disappears: ‘I look at salmon as my ancestors’

September 17, 2024 – Native communities in Alaska are facing scarcities of salmon — an animal integral to their lives and cultures — as warming waters from an overheating planet harm these fish.

What’s happening?

BBC reported on the salmon shortages, which are being attributed to warming rivers and overfishing. While some salmon are migrating to cooler waters to the north, others are simply dying because of the heat.

Why are salmon shortages concerning?

The crisis is putting an immense strain on Native villages, the inhabitants of which have relied on wild salmon for subsistence and as an important cultural symbol for generations. Eva Dawn Burk, a Native Alaskan from the Nenana village in the Yukon, told BBC that half the state’s tribes are in a salmon crisis.

“You have so much respect for living beings as a Native person,” Burk told the publication. “I look at salmon as my ancestors, and then as my children and grandchildren. The salmon relatives and my relatives have been living in relation for all these years.”

Read the full article at TCD

ALASKA: Down year for Alaska salmon fishery may spell end of some Alaska seafood businesses

August 21, 2024 — Salmon catch totals and fish sizes have been disappointing thus far in the U.S. state of Alaska’s summer season, potentially accelerating the ongoing shakeout taking place in Alaska’s seafood sector.

Around 87 million salmon have been caught in Alaska this summer, far short of the 230.2 million salmon harvested in 2023 and tracking well below the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) forecast of 135.7 million fish by season’s end. While part of that has to do with the two-year cycle of pink salmon returns in Alaska, catches for every salmon species in Alaska are down this year.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: A new nominee to the Bering Sea fisheries management council would tip its balance toward tribes and away from trawlers

March 27, 2024 — Tribal and environmental advocates calling for a crackdown on salmon and halibut bycatch are set to gain a new ally on the federal council that manages Alaska’s lucrative Bering Sea fisheries.

Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee last week nominated Becca Robbins Gisclair, an attorney and conservation advocate, to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

If U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo accepts Inslee’s recommendation, Gisclair, senior director of Arctic programs at the environmental advocacy group Ocean Conservancy, would assume one of the council’s 11 voting positions.

She would replace Anne Vanderhoeven, a previous choice of Inslee’s who works at Seattle-based Arctic Storm Management Group. Arctic Storm’s parent company owns vessels that participate in the trawl industry, which sometimes accidentally scoop up salmon in their nets while they’re trying to catch pollock, a whitefish that goes into fish sandwiches sold by McDonald’s and other companies.

Inslee’s choice comes amid an intense fight at the council about tighter regulation of bycatch, and after what advocates described as a last-minute flurry of lobbying in an effort to convince Inslee to pick an ally of one side or the other in that dispute.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Amid salmon crash, Alaska’s Yukon River residents say a new pact with Canada leaves them behind

March 19, 2024 — This reporting was supported by a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship.

Writers Olivia Ebertz and Bathsheba Demuth boated more than 1,000 miles up and down the Yukon River last summer, hearing the stories and perspective of residents and Tribal leaders along the way.

ALONG THE YUKON RIVER — The midsummer air is hot after a long day of sun and stillness in the middle river village of Grayling, and the cutbanks seem to slouch closer toward the Yukon River below. Rachel Freireich says her mother moved here permanently from the Athabaskan village of Holikachuk, up a nearby tributary, in the 1960s to be closer to schools and salmon eddies.

“They came over with steamboats every summer to fish the salmon,” said Freireich, a resident of Grayling her entire 43 years.

In summers while she was growing up, Freireich says the village was a ghost town.

“The whole community would become kind of abandoned, because everybody would bring their whole families out and they went to the fish camp. Everybody was busy,” she said.

But in the summer of 2023, fish camps are empty. The few boats in the lower river are mostly in a search party looking for a missing person. From the mouth of the Yukon at the Bering Sea to the river’s headwaters in Canada, no one is fishing — the consequence of the second-lowest king salmon run on record. The worst was just a year prior, a grim milestone in the wake of decades of ebbing runs that have robbed Indigenous residents of both traditions and nourishment.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Alaska salmon 2024: Markets still flooded as next harvest forecasts come in

February 3, 2024 — Even though the forecast for this year’s salmon production in Alaska is down from last year the harvest, especially sockeye coming out of Bristol Bay, will be headed for markets still flooded with last year’s product.

Overall, values for all species of Alaska salmon are down. The 2023 statewide commercial harvest tallied up to 230.2 million fish, for a 43 percent increase in production over the 167 million fish of 2022. But revenues for 2023 ($398.6 million) came in at roughly half of the $720 million that was generated in 2022.

That inversion of volume over value promises to perplex the industry going into this year’s season.

“I’m hearing that these are some of the worst market conditions in 20 years, 30 years, or even more,” says Greg Smith, communications director with the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, in Juneau. “It’s not just one species; it’s many species, and it’s not just Alaska seafood. It’s domestic seafood, and seafood globally.”

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game prediction for Bristol Bay’s 2024 total sockeye run has been set at 39 million. Given the confidence levels in the modeling, the industry can expect a range of 24 million on the low side of the prediction – and more than 53 million fish in the most optimistic scenario.

Historical records since 2001 show that on the average the department has underestimated runs by 15 percent. Subtract the escapement to the bay’s nine major river systems, and fishermen can expect to harvest in the neighborhood of 25 million sockeyes.

Among the major production districts, run projections for the Naknek-Kvichak have been pegged at 15 million, with the fabled Nushagak set at around 12 million sockeyes and potential harvests at Egegik and Ugashik districts estimated at around 5 million each.

That’s a lot of fish, and though the onslaught of the run lies months away, questions loom of whether there will be a fleet to catch them and enough processing capacity to put them up.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Tribal groups applaud Alaska Native appointments to federal fisheries advisory panel

January 9, 2024 — Amid alarmingly low salmon returns in Western Alaska, calls have grown for tribes to have a greater say in the way fisheries are managed. Many say that the recent appointment of three Alaska Native members to the panel tasked with advising the top regional federal fisheries council could be a step in the right direction.

A recent press release from the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Tribal Consortium, representing 98 tribes directly impacted by salmon crashes in Western Alaska rivers, said that it was encouraging to see more Alaska Native faces than ever before on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Advisory Panel. But it also called out the council for having a “voting majority with an economic interest in the trawl fleet,” as well as a total lack of Alaska Native representation.

“It’s something that we’ve been fighting for and asking for for many years. The fight for Alaska Native subsistence rights is getting a lot of attention right now because things are crashing,” said Eva Dawn Burk, who was recently appointed to a three-year term on the advisory panel, holding its first-ever designated Alaska Native seat.

“I sit on at least four Alaska Native advisory councils, and it’s like, yeah, I’m an advisor, but I don’t have decision-making power,” Burk said.

Read the full article at KYUK

As salmon disappear, a battle over Alaska Native fishing rights heats up

December 24, 2o23 — When salmon all but vanished from western Alaska in 2021, thousands of people in the region faced disaster. Rural families lost a critical food source. Commercial fisherfolk found themselves without a major stream of income. And Alaska Native children stopped learning how to catch, cut, dry, and smoke fish — a tradition passed down since the time of their ancestors.

Behind the scenes, the salmon shortage has also inflamed a long-simmering legal fight among Native stakeholders, the Biden administration, and the state over who gets to fish on Alaska’s vast federal lands.

At the heart of the dispute is a provision in a 1980 federal law called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which gives rural Alaskans priority over urban residents to fish and hunt on federal lands. Most rural families are Indigenous, so the law is considered by some lawyers and advocates as key to protecting the rights of Alaska Natives. State officials, however, believe the law has been misconstrued to infringe on the state’s rights by giving federal regulators authority over fisheries that belong to Alaskans.

Now, a lawsuit alleges the state has overstepped its reach. Federal officials argue that state regulators tried to usurp control of fishing along the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska, where salmon make up about half of all food produced in the region. The suit, originally filed in 2022 by the Biden administration against the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, escalated this fall when the state’s lawyers effectively called for the end of federal oversight of fishing across much of Alaska. Indigenous leaders say the state’s actions threaten Alaska Native people statewide.

Read the full article at the Grist

Alaska salmon woes, extreme precipitation, tundra shrub growth part of Arctic transformation

December 14, 2023– The collapses of Western Alaska salmon runs have been among the most consequential climate change impacts in the rapidly warming Arctic over the past two years, according to an annual report assembled by a federal agency.

The 2023 Arctic Report Card, released on Dec. 12 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), includes a special chapter on Alaska salmon among its updates to sea ice, air temperature, and permafrost conditions in a region of the world that is warming up to four times as fast as the global average.

Western Alaska salmon runs provide a “particularly clear picture” of how ocean warming affects ecosystems, said Daniel Schindler, a University of Washington fisheries expert who was a contributing Arctic Report Card author.

Climate change in Alaska is not simply something expected in the future, said Schindler, who spoke Dec. 12 at a news conference held at the American Geophysical Union’s annual gathering in San Francisco, California.

“It’s happening now. It’s been happening for decades. Whether you’re talking about fish or people or birds, there are real impacts that we need to deal with right now,” Schindler said.

Rick Thoman, of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), delivered a similar message at the news conference.

“As Alaskans, as people of the Arctic, we are living this change every day. We have no choice, no choice at all, other than to work with what is happening,” said Thoman, one of the Arctic Report Card editors.

Read the full article at KYUK

Environmental and tribal groups add support to lawsuit calling federal fisheries management into question

December 12, 2023 — Five environmental and tribal organizations have signed their support onto a lawsuit against federal fisheries managers. The suit alleges that the National Marine Fisheries Service has violated environmental policies by using outdated data to guide the way it regulates the trawling industry in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Chain fisheries. This includes the Alaska pollock fishery, responsible for the vast majority of salmon bycatch in the region.

“There’s so many factors as to why salmon declines are where they’re at right now in our rivers,” said Laureli Ivanoff, the executive director of Native Peoples Action, one of the supporting organizations. “We know it’s not just the pollock industry. However, if the analysis and if the environmental impact statement that they use for analysis and for decision-making was updated, there would be a more complete picture of what’s happening in the ocean to base their decisions on.”

The lawsuit calls into question the use of environmental impact statements dating back to 2004 and 2007. It was originally brought in April by the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) and Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), tribal non-profit organizations that together represent the vast majority of communities hit hardest by salmon crashes in Western Alaska. The groups are being represented by the national environmentalist law organization Earthjustice.

In early December 2023, five Alaska Native and fisheries conservation organizations: Native Peoples Action, Ocean Conservancy, the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, SalmonState, and the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, filed what is known as an amicus brief on the same side as the original two plaintiffs. It is a way for parties with a stake in the outcome of a lawsuit to offer additional information that courts may consider before ruling.

Read the full article at KYUK