Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers Launch GoFundMe After Snow Crab Closure

November 15, 2022 — Non-profit trade association Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers has launched a GoFundMe following the Alaska snow crab closure announcement.

“No one ever wants to face the day you’re on the verge of losing the job you love that shapes your identity, supports your family, and gives you purpose,” the fundraiser reads. “Unfortunately, Bering Sea crab fishermen are facing that day. Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab fishery is closed for the first time in U.S. history and Bristol Bay red king crab is closed for the second year in a row.”

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) announced the cancellation of the snow crab season and Bristol Bay red king crab season in mid-October. The decision stemmed from trawl survey results, which found that the stock was estimated to be below the regulatory threshold for opening a fishery.

Read the full article at Seafoodnews.com

Did climate change really kill billions of snow crabs in Alaska?

November 7, 2022 — The disappearance of billions snow crabs from the Bering Sea has captivated the world’s attention since Alaska shut down the fishery for the first time in October 2022. But where exactly did these snow crabs go? And what caused them to vanish so quickly?

Scientists are still grappling with these questions, but climate change is the most cited hypothesis for the species’ retreat. Erin Fedewa, a research fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said the decline of the species, Chionoecetes opilio, coincided with a marine heat wave that swept through the Bering Sea between 2018 and 2019, which possibly caused the species to experience starvation, increased disease or predation.

Some fishers and crab experts put forward a different idea: They’ve suggested that fishing, particularly the unintentional capture of crabs in fishing gear known as trawls, also contributed to the loss of the snow crab, or at the very least, impeded the species’ recovery from low population levels.

The snow crab fishery’s closure has amplified a chorus of concerns around Alaska’s trawling industry — mainly from within the fishery sector itself — and the knowledge gaps around its potential impact on fisheries.

Read the full article at Mongabay

Bering Sea crabbers’ emergency action plea opens for public comment

October 31, 2022 — The National Marine Fisheries Service has opened a review and is taking public comment on Bering Sea crabbers’ request to take emergency action to close the Red King Crab Savings Area and the Red King Crab Savings Subarea to all fishing gear that comes into contact with the ocean bottom.

The request from the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers is dated Sept. 29, after the association failed to sway the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to take new steps for setting aside crab habitat and further reducing bycatch from other fisheries.

Warning signs months before pointed toward declining snow and king crab numbers, and on Oct. 10 Alaska state officials announced sweeping closures in response to dismal survey results. Crab fleet advocates predict direct revenue loss of $500 million from losing the 2022-2023 season and possibly twice that in broader economic impact.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Fisheries disaster declaration sought in Bering Sea crab fishery

October 25, 2022 — With a virtually complete shutdown of Bering Sea crab fishing at hand, fishermen, and Alaska communities are seeking an expedited fishery disaster declaration from the federal government.

The emergency is felt acutely on St. Paul Island, where the largely Aleut community of about 400 live on an economy dependent on the now-closing snow crab fishery.

“We’re predicting a 90 percent loss from two years ago and 85 percent of revenue from last year, said Ray Melovidov, chief operating officer of the Central Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association based in St. Paul.

Other revenue streams come in from pollock and cod fishing, but crabbing carries the freight for St. Paul. The money pays for fully funded preschool programs, home heating aid for residents, and community-wide broadband internet access among others said Melovidov, who serves on the city council.

Revenue from the big boats help maintain a local halibut fleet of 15 boats and about 80 crewmembers, a subsidy to buy their catch at prices competitive with other ports, said Melovidov.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Disappearance of Alaska snow crabs means some businesses might disappear, too

October 25, 2022 — Some seven billion snow crabs have disappeared from the waters around Alaska. Experts are still investigating the cause, but rapid warming in the Bering Sea is a likely factor.

Alaska has canceled the snow crab harvesting season for the first time ever, and commercial crabbers and the economies that depend on the species stand to lose millions.

Just a few years ago, Alaska’s snow crab population was booming. Jamie Goen with the industry group Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers said businesses were making big investments.

Read the full article at Marketplace

ALASKA: Bering Sea king and snow crab seasons canceled amid population declines

October 13, 2022 — For the first time ever, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery will not open for the upcoming season. Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game announced the closure Monday afternoon. The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will also be closed this year — for a second year in a row.

Gabriel Prout co-owns the F/V Silver Spray with his dad and brothers. The Silver Spray is a 116-foot steel crabber that’s homeported in Kodiak.

He said he wasn’t surprised that Fish and Game closed the king crab fishery — in a normal year, he’d go out for king crab, too. But numbers have been on the decline and that fishery didn’t open last year, either.

“The real shocking part is the total and complete collapse of the snow crab fishery which no one expected last year when it happened, and a complete closure this year was equally as shocking,” Prout said.

Read the full article at KTOO

ALAKSA: Surveys bode bad seasons ahead for Bering Sea crabbers

July 27, 2022 — Alaska’s Bering Sea king crab crash has reached proportions it hasn’t known since 1994 and 1995, when the population surveys warranted a shutdown of the fishery. The outlook appears equally dismal for Bering Sea opilio crab.

In last year’s 2021-2022 red king crab season the fleet stood down after trawl surveys indicated that the biomass had fallen below the threshold of 8.4 million mature females. Though complete data for this year’s surveys won’t be out until sometime in September or October, preliminary data from the first of three surveys indicates another season in which crabbers will stay tied to the docks.

“We’re seeing some preliminary information that shows that we’re going to continue to be low in abundance,” says Mark Stichert, a groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, in Kodiak. “We’re seeing some very similar trends. The number of mature females is going down, and mature males are slightly up. What we’re not seeing is the entry of small crab into the fishery.”

The Total Allowable Catch (TAC) is based upon data gleaned from three phases of trawl surveys conducted in late summer. In the 2008-2009 season the TAC was set at around 20 million pounds. In the last decade the TAC’s have risen from 7.8 million pounds in the 2011-2012 season to 9.97 million pounds in the 2015-2016 season, then declined.

The TAC for the 2017-2018 season had been set at about 3 million pounds and was reduced to the 1.2 million pounds in the 2020-2021 fishery.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Management council declines action on Bering Sea bycatch to address Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon subsistence worries

June 22, 2022 — Despite hours of testimony from residents of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers who called for urgent action to curb the salmon bycatch by Bering Sea trawlers, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council decided to approach the problem more methodically.

In a unanimous vote near the end of its five-day meeting in Sitka, the Council recommended further study of salmon declines in the Bering Sea, and a closer look at their connection to climate change.

Salmon abundance in the Yukon River, the third-largest river in North America, has dropped sharply in the past two years.

The forecast is no better this season.

Many Yukon and Kuskokwim River residents voiced concern during last Monday’s call.

“At this point, there should be alarm bells going off all over not only in our communities, but all over the state and federal government agencies,” said Vivian Korthuis, the chief executive officer for the Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of 56 federally-recognized tribes on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Scientists point to climate change as likely cause for Alaska snow crab decline

June 17, 2022 — Even as scientists are still trying to figure out why the Bering Sea snow crab stock crashed in 2021, federal managers are working on a plan to help rebuild it.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council last week voted to accept alternatives for analysis on its snow crab rebuilding plan — a middle step before implementing an actual plan that will change fishing regulations or openings. The council is on track to approve a final plan for action in December, which would then go to the Secretary of Commerce and through the federal regulation process before becoming official.

Data from last year’s survey at this point seems to confirm that there was a massive decline in the number of young snow crab in the Eastern Bering Sea — something like 99% fewer female snow crab showed up in the survey from 2021.

There’s no complete consensus about why the stock crashed in the first place. Increasingly, however, the models seem to indicate that it’s due to temperature increases linked to climate change.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Fishery managers call for deeper look at salmon bycatch, but decline to tighten rules

June 16, 2022 — Western Alaska villagers have endured the worst chum salmon runs on record, several years of anemic Chinook salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, harvest closures from the Bering Sea coast to Canada’s Yukon Territory and such dire conditions that they relied on emergency shipments of salmon from elsewhere in Alaska just to have food to eat.

Many of those suffering see one way to provide some quick relief: Large vessels trawling for pollock and other groundfish in the industrial-scale fisheries of the Bering Sea, they say, must stop intercepting so many salmon.

Advocates for tighter rules on those interceptions, known as bycatch, made their case over the past several days to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the organization that manages fish harvests in federal waters off Alaska.

‘Like fishing in the desert’

“The numbers are really low. There’s nothing out there. It’s like fishing in the desert,” Walter Morgan, of the Yup’ik village of Lower Kalskag, said in online testimony to the council, which met in Sitka.

Read the full story at the the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman