Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Northern Bering Sea trawl survey shows fisheries in flux

November 19, 2019 — Norton Sound red king crab are moving, Arctic cod numbers have dropped significantly and Pacific cod are continuing to increase as the Northern Bering Sea ecosystem undergoes drastic change. That’s all according to preliminary results from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration trawl survey this summer in the Northern Bering Sea (NBS).

Before Lyle Britt even began leading the NOAA Fisheries’ study of the NBS in September, he anticipated seeing more warm water fish in a region that stretches from Nunivak Island north to the Bering Strait.

“We can tell that the ecosystem is very much in flux up here,” Britt said. “We’re seeing expansion of ranges of some fish and invertebrates, and we’re seeing the retraction of others. Now how permanent or ephemeral those are, I think is still in question.”

As an example of a species that’s expanding its range based on what was discovered in the 2010 baseline survey of the Northern Bering Sea, Britt points to Pacific cod.

“Between 2010 and 2017 there was about a 900% increase in the amount of Pacific cod we saw in the Northern Bering Sea region, based on that biomass or total weight estimate,” he said. “That number sounds really dramatic in part because there were so few in 2010 and now there are some. That number increased between 2017 and 2019 by about 30%, so it’s continued to go up.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: City of Adak Asks Court for One-Year Stay to Keep Plant Open for Cod A Season

November 19, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Last week the city of Adak asked a federal court to stay their order from last March — until January 1, 2021 — so the city’s only processing plant can operate during the Pacific cod season next year.

The March 2019 court decision agreed with plaintiffs representing the Bering Sea bottom trawl fleets that target flatfish, mackerel and cod, that Amendment 113, setting a 5,000 mt cod set-aside for remote villages in the Aleutian Islands, was not compliant with the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

The court vacated Amendment 113 and instructed the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council to work on an amendment that would comply with the legislation in specific areas.

The Council took up the issue, beginning an arduous process of analysis, developing alternatives, and public comment that will take at least another 18 months.

Meanwhile, representatives of the Adak plant, central to the economy of the 350-resident community, began an ambitious effort to find a pathway that would allow the set-aside to continue while the Council worked on corrections to a new amendment. But their efforts fell short, whether it was a plea for emergency action or language in new federal legislation for a temporary fix, last summer.

Even though the Council asked industry sectors to work together for a solution that could keep the Adak plant viable, there was no longer any authority providing a separate allocation for Adak, and little incentive to find an industry-based workaround.

In addition, all fleets targeting Pacific cod in the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands were well aware of the recent situation for cod stocks. Recent scientific assessments indicate the biomass is increasing in the northern Bering Sea and decreasing in traditional areas. Was the biomass moving north? How fast? Could the fish be crossing over to Russian waters? The ‘race for fish’ nature of the BSAI fishery made even the previously acceptable 5,000 mt set-aside — now vacated and available to anyone — more valuable than it was a few years ago.

Last Wednesday’s Memorandum in Support of Defendant-Intervenors’ Motion for Limited Relief From Judgment and Indicative Ruling included declarations of support from Adak as well as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Golden Harvest plant owner Jason Ogilvie, the Adak School District, and other private enterprises that rely on the winter operations of the plant.

City Manager Lyle Lockett noted that without continuous operation of its sole fish processing plant, Adak will see cascading economic impacts causing irrepairable harm to the community, including the city stopping subsidies to the school district, the medical clinic, the library, the gymnasium, and the community center.
“Shutting down the City Hall building would force all of these services to scramble to find a new location on the island, perhaps in private residences, which would be disruptive and likely expensive for Adak’s residents,” according to the memorandum.

Adak’s only school serves 19 students, 13 whose parents are employed directly or indirectly through the Adak plant. If enrollment drops to 10 or less, the state of Alaska’s subsidies stops and the school shuts down.

Both the crab and cod fleets that deliver to Adak would have no option other than Dutch Harbor to deliver their catch to — a 450-mile one-way trip.

The request asks the court to respond by January 10, 2020, ten days before the A season begins next year.  The motion supporting the stay was filed while the original decision is under appeal, and would be subject to that ruling if it came before.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

NOAA proposes humpback whale habitat protections

November 11, 2019 — NOAA’s fisheries division, the National Marine Fisheries Service, has proposed creating a number of critical habitat sites ranging from the Channel Islands in southern California to the Bering Sea, including the waters off Juneau.

The critical habitats, created with the aim of protecting the feeding areas of three separate groups of humpback whales, or Megaptera novaeangliae, will not affect anything except for federal agencies seeking to use those waters for other purposes, said Lisa Manning, an official with NOAA. Her presentation to the public on the proposed habitats was held at University of Alaska Southeast on Thursday evening, and was attended by more than 30 people.

“A critical habitat does not establish a sanctuary or preserve. It does not affect recreational activities. It does not affect private lands,” Manning said. “It only affects federal activities.”

The proposed habitats, which cover 175,182 square nautical miles in total, are the traditional feeding areas of three of the 14 major humpback whale distinct population segments (DPS), Manning said. The three groups that come to Alaska and California to summer and feed spend the rest of their time west of Mexico, west of Central America and east of Taiwan respectively. These three groups are currently threatened, and protecting their feeding areas may help them to regain their footing, Manning said. Some of these groups may number 2,000 whales or less.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

Why Are Birds and Seals Starving in a Bering Sea Full of Fish?

November 4, 2019 — The shipment arrived airfreight: 47 seabird carcasses collected by the Bering Strait villagers of Shishmaref.

Marine biologist Gay Sheffield drove to the airport on an August day to pick up the grisly cargo and bring it back to a laboratory just off the main street of this northwest Alaska town.

Inside a cardboard box, Sheffield found mostly shearwaters, slender birds with narrow wings — also kittiwakes, crested auklets, thick-billed murres, a cormorant and a horned puffin. Most were painfully skinny, bones protruding like knife-edged ridges.

“They starved to death,” Sheffield said. “Why?”

The birds should have been able to fatten on small fish, krill and other food that typically abound in the northern Bering Sea, a body of water so rich in marine life that gray whales, after they winter off Mexico, swim more than 5,000 miles north to feed here each summer.

But as climate change warms the die-offs of seabirds and marine mammals have been on the rise. The grim tally includes a nearly fivefold increase in ice-seal carcasses spotted on shore, strandings of emaciated gray whales, and near the St. Lawrence Island village of Savoonga, a discouraging spectacle: auklets abandoning seaside nests as their chicks succumb to hunger.

Read the full story at the Pulitzer Center

Agencies still looking for answers in marine mammal die-off

November 4, 2019 — The National Marine Fisheries Service is still trying to figure out what is causing marine mammals to die at high rates in Alaska.

In September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an unusual mortality event for three types of seals in the Arctic, including bearded, ringed and spotted seals in the Bering and Chukchi seas.

“Our normal stranding numbers for ice seals is about 20 to 30 a year,” said NOAA Marine Biologist Barbara Mahoney. “So we are dealing with more than five times the dead animals that we’ve had in the past.”

But it isn’t just seals.

In May, NOAA declared an unusual mortality event for gray whales along the West Coast from Mexico to Alaska. As of Sept. 30, the agency reported a total of 121 dead gray whales in 2019.

Read the full story at KTVA

NOAA trawl surveys estimate more cod, pollock in Bering Sea

October 29, 2019 — The results from recent US government trawl surveys of the Bering Sea are in and they estimate the biomass of pollock and Pacific cod have risen relative to previous years.

Two vessels — Alaska Knight and Vesteraalen — completed summer surveys of the eastern and northern Bering Sea from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

The AFSC said in a presentation that the trawl surveys led scientists to estimate the pollock biomass at 5.46 million metric tons for the Eastern Bering Sea, a 75% year-on-year rise and 1.17m metric tons for the Northern Bering Sea, compared to the last major survey, which was performed in 2017.

For Pacific cod, the surveys led to an increased biomass estimate of 517,000t in the Eastern Bering Sea, a 2% y-o-y rise and an estimate of 368,000t for the Northern Bering Sea, up 30% from 2017.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Genetic studies confirm Alaska cod stocks pushing north

October 25, 2019 — Biologists were shocked in 2017 when they found that the numbers of Pacific cod had risen exponentially in the northern Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. Now, researchers at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center have used genetic testing to prove that those fish, enabled by warming waters and a lack of sea ice, have moved north from the southeastern Bering Sea.

Surveys as recent as the 1970’s revealed “trace amounts” of cod in the northern Bering Sea, according to a brief released by NOAA. Major Alaska cod fisheries in the past decades have operated in the southeastern Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska, which meant management biologists conducted only sporadic bottom trawl surveys in the north.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ALASKA: Black cod bycatch in the Bering Sea surges

October 22, 2019 — Trawlers in the Bering Sea have hauled up some 2,500 metric tons of black cod in bycatch circa the end of last month, according to a NOAA fisheries report.

An Alaska Public Media report suggests that small-boat fishermen who have bought black cod (also known as sablefish) fishing rights are frustrated that there will be fewer fish to harvest after the accidental catch of the trawlers.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

A fish mystery solved using genetic testing

October 17, 2019 — The population of cod in the Northern Bering Sea has increased immensely since 2010, and scientists are using fish DNA to find out why.

Think of it like a genetic ancestry test, but for fish.

Until recently, pacific cod were rarely found in the Northern Bering Sea. A 2010 survey showed cod made up only three percent of the entire fish population. That’s been changing, fast.

A survey in the summer of 2017 showed that number shot up 900 percent.

Ingrid Spies is a research fisheries biologist who led the way on this research to determine whether the population spike is evidence of a growing population or of an existing population migrating from elsewhere?

One thought was that cod could have migrated from Russia or the Gulf of Alaska, where they observed cod numbers decline significantly in 2017. Scientists were able to come to a conclusive answer to the question using genetic testing.

Read the full story at KTUU

ALASKA: There’s a new fight over Bering Sea black cod. Warming water may be to blame.

October 10, 2019 — Fish politics in Alaska usually get serious when there aren’t enough fish to go around. But a new fight is brewing over black cod because there are so many of them – possibly as a result of the ocean’s warming waters.

Record numbers of young black cod, also known as sablefish, are swimming off Alaska’s coast; scientists estimate that this group of fish, which had huge reproductive success in 2014, is twice the size of the next-largest on record, from 1977.

The small-boat fishermen who catch black cod, many of whom live in Southeast Alaska, are eagerly waiting for the young fish to grow larger and commercially valuable. But they’re getting frustrated seeing increasing numbers of black cod caught accidentally, as bycatch, by the Seattle-based trawlers that target lower-value species in the Bering Sea, like the pollock that go into McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.

“This recruitment event is what we’re counting on to keep the fishery going for the next 10 or 15 years,” said Tad Fujioka, a Sitka fisherman who decided to buy black cod fishing rights a few years ago, in part because of the boom in their numbers. “We need to save these fish for years to come.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media