Saving Seafood

Bottom-trawl gear to blame for most of this year’s fishery-related killer whale deaths, NOAA says

December 5, 2023 — A federal investigation into the unusually large number of Bering Sea and Aleutian killer whales found dead this summer determined that most but not all of the deaths were killed by entanglement in fishing gear.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center on Friday released some details about the deaths in the Bering Sea and Aleutians, which had spurred sharp criticism of seafood trawling practices.

Of the nine killer whales that were found ensnared in bottom-trawling gear, six were killed by those entanglements but two others were already dead before they were netted, the investigation found. The other whale was seriously injured by the gear entanglement but escaped alive, the agency said.

In addition to the nine whales found in bottom-trawl gear, there were two other cases of dead killer whales found entangled in other types of fishing gear.

Read the full story at the Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers Receive Vital Support from Community

November 18, 2023 — Grundens threw quite the Cappy Hours at this year’s Pacific Marine Expo (PME) on Wednesday and Thursday of the show. They offered beer, hats, and a Yeti cooler filled with both Grundens and Yeti swag throughout all three days of the expo. Though the beer and hats were free, they were accepting donations to raise money for the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers (ABSC). PME generously matched the funds raised during both the Cappy Hours and Grundens x Yeti Raffle. They ended up raising $2,860, which comes to a grand total of $5,720 for Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers.

ABSC is a non-profit organization seeking to provide economic stability to the crab industry and Alaska’s coastal communities, promote safety at sea, and produce premier crab products for American and global customers. They have been actively involved in all aspects of crab fishery research, sound management, and marketing. They are tireless advocates for the Alaska Bering Sea crab fisheries and continue to make positive impacts on the fishing fleets and families that depend on these fisheries for their livelihoods.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Alaska fishermen will be allowed to harvest lucrative red king crab in the Bering Sea

October 10, 2023 — Alaska fishermen will be able to harvest red king crab for the first time in two years, offering a slight reprieve to the beleaguered fishery beset by low numbers likely exacerbated by climate change.

There was no such rebound for snow crab, however, and that fishery will remain closed for a second straight year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Friday.

“The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery for the prior two seasons were closed based on low abundance and particularly low abundance of mature-sized female crabs,” said Mark Stichert, the state department’s ground fish and shellfish management coordinator,

“Based on survey results from this year, those numbers have improved, some signs of modest optimism in terms of improving abundance in Bristol Bay red king crab overall and that has allowed for a small but still conservative fishery for 2023 as the total population size is still quite low,” he said.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

Activists urge reforms after Bering Sea trawlers haul up 9 dead orcas

September 28, 2023 — Federal officials are looking into the deaths of nine orcas that were hauled up by groundfish trawlers in Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands fisheries this year, and conservation groups say more needs to be done to prevent such deaths.

According to NOAA Fisheries, a tenth whale was released alive, but the nine other orcas incidentally caught in trawl nets weren’t so lucky.

“NOAA Fisheries is analyzing collected data to determine the cause of injury or death and determine which stocks these whales belong to through a review of genetic information,” said Julie Fair, public affairs officer with the federal agency’s Alaska office, reading from a statement published Thursday. She declined to be interviewed, except to read the statement aloud.

Killer whales are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which requires boat owners or operators to report the deaths and injuries of the mammals during commercial fishing and survey operations.

Fair said NOAA Fisheries monitors bycatch of protected species to determine whether the animals were dead before being caught or were killed or seriously injured by commercial gear.

The vessels involved in these incidents weren’t named, but Fair said the boats involved were all required to carry two federal observers on board.

This isn’t the first time killer whales have been caught in trawl gear off Alaska, but the numbers seem to have spiked this year.

Read the full article at KYUK

ALASKA: New quota system to start for trawl harvests of cod in Bering Sea and Aleutians

August 21, 2023 — Commercial fishermen netting Pacific cod from the Bering Sea and Aleutians region will be working under new individual limits starting next year designed to ease pressure on harvests that regulators concluded were too rushed, too dangerous and too prone to accidentally catch untargeted fish species.

The new system will require fishers who harvest cod by trawl – the net gear that scoops up fish swimming near the bottom of the ocean – to be part of designated cooperatives that will then have assigned quota shares. The fisheries service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it has notified eligible participants and is asking for applications.

The cod-trawling program, to start next January, is the first new fishery quota system started since 2012 in federal waters off Alaska, according to NOAA Fisheries.

The Pacific cod harvest is the second-biggest commercial groundfish catch in the waters off Alaska, after pollock, according to NOAA Fisheries. The 2021 commercial harvest totaled 330.4 million pounds and was worth $86.5 million, according to NOAA Fisheries.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: Alaskan city looks to join tribes’ Bering Sea groundfish lawsuit

August 8, 2023 — The city of Bethel, Alaska, U.S.A., wants to join a federal lawsuit against NOAA Fisheries led by two major tribal organizations.

In April, the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) and Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), which together represent around 100 Alaskan tribes, filed a lawsuit challenging NOAA Fisheries’ management of industrial trawl fisheries in the Bering Sea. The tribes, along with the nonprofit environmental law group Earthjustice, claim that the amount of salmon bycatch allowed in the pollock trawl fishery is reducing the king salmon and chum salmon populations, leading to restrictions on subsistence fishing in the Yukon and Kuskokwim regions.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: In the aftermath of the Bering Sea snow crab collapse, a ‘cultural, social, and economic emergency’

July 10, 2023 — My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village — a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast.

Some 330 people, most of them Indigenous, live in the village of St. Paul, about 800 miles west of Anchorage, where the local economy depends almost entirely on the commercial snow crab business. Over the last few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next.

The arc of St. Paul’s recent story has become a familiar one — so familiar, in fact, I couldn’t blame you if you missed it. Alaska news is full of climate elegies now — every one linked to wrenching changes caused by burning fossil fuels. I grew up in Alaska, as my parents did before me, and I’ve been writing about the state’s culture for more than 20 years. Some Alaskans’ connections go far deeper than mine. Alaska Native people have inhabited this place for more than 10,000 years.

As I’ve reported in Indigenous communities, people remind me that my sense of history is short and that the natural world moves in cycles. People in Alaska have always had to adapt.

Even so, in the last few years, I’ve seen disruptions to economies and food systems, as well as fires, floods, landslides, storms, coastal erosion, and changes to river ice — all escalating at a pace that’s hard to process. Increasingly, my stories veer from science and economics into the fundamental ability of Alaskans to keep living in rural places.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Crab Fishery Collapse Seen as Warning About a Changing Bering Sea

January 4, 2022 — Less than five years ago, prospects appeared bright for Bering Sea crab fishers. Stocks were abundant and healthy, federal biologists said, and prices were near all-time highs.

Now two dominant crab harvests have been canceled for lack of fish. For the first time, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in October canceled the 2022-2023 harvest of Bering Sea snow crab, and it also announced the second consecutive year of closure for another important harvest, that of Bristol Bay red king crab.

What has happened between then and now? A sustained marine heat wave that prevented ice formation in the Bering Sea for two winters, thus vastly altering ocean conditions and fish health.

“We lost billions of snow crab in a matter of months,” said Bob Foy, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, at a public forum held Dec. 12 at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. “We don’t have a smoking gun, if you will. We don’t have one particular event that impacted the snow crab — except the heat wave.”

That heat wave is now over, but its effects linger. A NOAA survey showed an 80% decline in Bering Sea snow crab, from 11.7 billion in 2018 to 1.9 billion this year. It could take six to 10 years to recover, experts told members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which wrapped up a 10-day meeting in Anchorage on Wednesday.

Snow crab may be the “poster child” of climate change, council member Bill Tweit said during deliberations on a rebuilding program that was ultimately approved at the meeting, but much more will be affected by the long-term changes in the ocean.

Read the full article at the Maritime Executive

The bottom of the Bering and Chukchi seas could become too warm for some important species

December 1, 2022 — There is danger lurking on the floor of the Bering and Chukchi seas for mussels, snails, clams, worms and other cold-water invertebrates, according to a new study led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.

If climate change continues its current trajectory, the Bering and Chukchi seafloor areas will be too warm for those creatures by the end of the century.

In turn, that means trouble for walruses and other marine species. Snails and mussels are particularly important to commercially harvested fish like halibut and yellowfin sole, along with being prey for the Pacific walruses that gather in the summer in the northern Bering and southern Chukchi seas. The Bering Sea is part of the North Pacific Ocean south of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia, while the Chukchi Sea is part of the Arctic Ocean just north of the strait.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Disaster requests for Bering Sea crabbers highlight difficulty of getting financial relief to fishermen

November 21, 2022 — Gov. Mike Dunleavy requested $287 million from the federal government last month for fishermen impacted by the Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab fisheries closures. The current process of getting financial relief to fishermen is cumbersome and takes a long time, but Bering Sea crabbers are hoping the plight of the snow crab population might change the way financial relief is delivered to fishermen.

Gabriel Prout is a second generation Bering Sea crab fisherman from Kodiak; he owns the F/V Silver Spray with his dad and brothers. He said there’s one big problem with the current process for handing out fishery disaster funding.

“If you’re going to have a fishery disaster request program, you should be able to make it so the money is getting into the hands of those affected very quickly,” said Prout.

Right now, it takes years for money to reach skippers and their crews.

After a governor requests a disaster declaration, it needs to be approved by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce – and Congress needs to appropriate funding. The money goes through several agencies on its way to fishermen, who have to apply for a slice of it. And most fishermen have to figure out how to stay in business years before the money hits their bank accounts.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media