Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Indigenous leaders, scientists, and policy makers call for bold actions to address Yukon River salmon crisis

August 5, 2025 — Tribes should be allowed to harvest the same number of Yukon River chinook salmon that trawlers scoop up in the Bering Sea as bycatch, and an independent review is needed to better manage the salmon crisis on Alaska’s longest river. These are just two of the recommendations outlined in a recent policy brief that looks at near-term strategies for addressing the crisis on the Yukon.

Doug DeMaster, a retired biologist who spent nearly two decades with the top federal fisheries agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), co-authored the brief published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research (AAAR).

“What we tried to do in this brief is put together a document that identifies what’s needed, what’s wanted, and tries to do it in a way that’s easily amenable to Congress, and politicians, and both state and federal agencies,” DeMaster said.

The two-page document was assembled by a mix of tribal leaders, scientists, and policy makers. It boils down potential factors driving crashes for both chinook and chum salmon on the Yukon River. Among them: bycatch and ecosystem changes in the Bering Sea driven by the pollock fishery, warmer water temperatures, competition with hatchery salmon, the Area M intercept fishery, and increasing rates of parasitic infection in Yukon River chinook.

Read the full article at KYUK

ALASKA: Alaska experts recommend management overhaul to rescue Yukon River salmon runs

August 4, 2025 — A management overhaul is needed to address the faltering salmon runs in the Yukon River and the widespread harms that have resulted from shortages of fish along the river’s basin, according to a report by Indigenous leaders and Alaska scientists.

The report, a peer-reviewed policy brief published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, proposes an independent review of Yukon River chinook and chum salmon issues by an entity like the National Academy of Sciences. It also recommends bigger management and science roles for Indigenous residents who live along the river, which flows nearly 2,000 miles from Canada’s Yukon Territory to the Bering Sea.

Building relationships between tribal members and government managers will likely require long-term effort, says the report, which has co-authors from various organizations, including the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Trust between Indigenous communities and fisheries scientists and managers needs to be enhanced by continuously, transparently, and equitably combining quantitative fisheries analyses with Indigenous Knowledge,” the report says.

The report recommends a “cultural exemption” for small-scale personal harvests by river residents to help address inequities between commercial and subsistence fishermen.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

NPFMC says pelagic trawl gear impact needs further evaluation

June 17, 2025 — Federal fisheries managers have given the Bering Sea pollock industry until the December of 2025 to develop spatial closures for the 2026 groundfish A season to protect Bristol Bay red king crab.

The decision reached by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) at its June meeting in Oregon is based on new winter pot surveys, tagging data and other recent data sources, the council said in its motion of June 8. The council requested information from the industry to be presented at its December meeting in Anchorage.

The council also acknowledged the lengthy Pelagic Trawl Gear Innovation Discussion Paper available in May and requested an update on the progress of that initiative at its meeting of April 2026, by which time the field study portion of the protect for catcher processors is expected to be complete.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times

Ice all but disappeared from this Alaskan island. It changed everything.

April 28, 2025 — This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures — 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days — when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck.

It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground.

Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them.

Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last.

The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres — the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era — including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul’s largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Federal judge denies tribal claims in suit against federal fisheries managers

March 19, 2025 — A federal district court judge has denied a claim made by two regional tribal consortiums in Western Alaska that fisheries management in the Bering Sea violated environmental law.

United States District Court Judge Sharon Gleason denied the claims made by the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) and Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC) in a judgement on March 11.

The Association of Village Council Presidents – the regional tribal consortium for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta – and the Tanana Chiefs Conference – the regional tribal consortium for much of western Interior Alaska – had sued the National Marine Fisheries Service, which manages fisheries in the federal waters outside of Alaska. Two fisheries trade organizations with ties to the pollock industry – the At-Sea Processors Association and United Catcher Boats – joined in defense of federal fisheries managers.

The tribal organizations, along with the City of Bethel, claimed that recent groundfish harvest management in the Bering Sea wasn’t properly taking into account major changes to the ocean ecosystem, including fisheries collapses on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, and thus violated federal law under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Read the full article at KYUK

Judge upholds decisions of federal trawl fishery managers amid Bering Sea salmon crisis

March 17, 2025 — Federal fisheries managers did not mishandle trawl fishing rules amid Alaska’s ongoing salmon subsistence crisis, a federal judge in Anchorage has ruled.

In a 45-page order published Tuesday, Judge Sharon Gleason ruled against the Association of Village Council Presidents and the Tanana Chiefs Conference, which sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2023 over its management of Bering Sea trawl fisheries in the years since a marine heat wave.

“This suit arises from the apparent tension between federal defendants’ management of the fishery and the needs of Alaskan communities in times of significant change in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region,” Gleason wrote.

Read the full article at the Anchorage Daily News

New study shows impact of ocean acidification on Bering Sea red king crab

February 27, 2025 — Ocean acidification appears to be a driver in the decline of Bristol Bay red king crab, a highly value wild Alaska seafood that has for years been threatened by climate change.

“There’s always been a high demand for Alaska crab,” said Jamie Goen, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, in October 2024. “It’s a matter of having the crab to harvest.”

The red king crab fishery was closed in 2021 and 2022, then reopened in 2023 with 31 vessels fishing down from 47 vessels, she said.

The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery experienced record landings every year from 1977 to 1980, peaking in 1980 with a record total harvest of 130 million pounds. Then the fishery collapsed in 1981 and 1982, leading to closure in 1983.

A new report published on Feb. 7 in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science said that negative effects of acidification explained 21% of recruitment variability of Bristol Bay red king crab between 1980 and 2023, and 45% since 2000.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times

ALASKA: Fishery managers start a process to tighten salmon bycatch rules in Alaska’s Bering Sea

February 13, 2025 — Federal fishery managers took steps on Tuesday to impose new rules to prevent Alaska chum salmon from being scooped into nets used to catch Bering Sea pollock, an industrial-scale fishery that makes up the nation’s largest single-species commercial seafood harvest.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council advanced a suite of new protections intended to combat the pollock trawlers’ salmon bycatch, the term for the incidental catch of unintended species. Proposed steps in the package include numeric caps on total chum salmon bycatch, with varying allocations for different sectors of the pollock fleet; protective limits in corridors known to be used by salmon migrating through the ocean back to Western Alaska freshwater spawning areas; and provisions that would link new limits in the ocean to real-time salmon counts and conditions in the rivers.

The action followed years of complaints about ocean bycatch of chum salmon at a time when runs in Western Alaska rivers have dwindled, becoming so low at times that no fishing was allowed.

The council’s meeting in Anchorage, which started on Feb. 3 and wrapped up with the vote on Tuesday, was devoted almost exclusively to the problem of bycatch and its effects of chum salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems.

The vote to advance the protective package followed days of sometimes-emotional testimony from residents of rural Western and Interior Alaska villages who have long depended on chum salmon – one of the five species of Pacific salmon – as a food staple.

Residents who testified described the anemic salmon runs as a crisis threatening family well-being, local economies and Indigenous cultures and identities.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Bering Sea snow crab season kicks off for first time in three years

January 29, 2025 — Earlier this month, commercial snow crabs started hitting Unalaska’s docks again, for the first time in nearly three years.

The Bering Sea snow crab fishery reopened in mid-October, after billions of the crab disappeared and the fishery was shut down in October 2022. This season’s first catch was delivered on Jan. 15. Opilio, or snow crab, is generally fished in the new year and into the early spring. The season runs through May.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game Area Management Biologist Ethan Nichols said nine vessels are actively participating in the Bering Sea commercial fishery.

“The fleet is just getting started, for the most part,” Nichols said. “Fishing so far — the reports from the grounds — there seems to be good numbers of nice, new shell, large snow crab on the far northern portions of the grounds.”

Nichols said right now the number of keepers per pot, also known as CPUE or catch per unit effort, is somewhat low coming in at 134, but that will increase as the season progresses.

“That’s only coming from a handful of our first deliveries, and that includes some prospecting by vessels early on in the season,” he said. “So far, the highest CPUEs are being seen on the northern portion of the grounds. And as vessels get more dialed in on those hot spots or those productive areas of fishing, they’ll be coming with full loads of crab that are more reflective of the hot spots on the grounds.”

Read the full article at KYUK

Alaska cities reach agreement on Bering Sea snow crab harvest

January 9, 2025 — The cities of Unalaska and St. Paul in the U.S. state of Alaska have reached an agreement to share revenue collected from the processing of 1.6 million pounds of Bering Sea snow crab.

After two years of closures, NOAA Fisheries announced in October 2024 that it would be opening up the Bering Sea crab fishery for a limited harvest with a 4.7 million pound total allowable catch (TAC). Around 1.6 million pounds of that TAC was designated for the North Region, which, according to a framework agreed to by harvesters and processors in September 2024, had to be processed in St. Paul.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource