Saving Seafood

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

Bristol Bay data show widening gap in fishermen’s earnings

February 7, 2025 — Last year’s lower-than-average Bristol Bay salmon harvest likely went a long way toward long-term polarization of the drift fleet between fishermen earning the highest and lowest revenues. As a trend, drift fishermen with the highest production in the fleet typically made double the earnings of fishermen with the lowest production.

More recently, however, a dwindling number of top producers have been earning five times more money than fishermen at the bottom of the scale, A more dispiriting trend is how an increasing number of fishermen are falling from the middle into the bottom tier when it comes to their seasonal earnings. 

“The Bristol Bay fishermen we’ve spoken with seem to have done very well or very poorly, with not much in the middle,” says Sharon Lechner, president and CEO of the Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank (CFAB) in Anchorage.

For those not familiar with fisheries economic tools, the State of Alaska’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission (CFEC) keeps tabs on earnings in many state-sanctioned fisheries including salmon via data sets known as quartile tables. The tables break out the number of permit holders comprising the top 25 percent, the upper and lower middle 50 percentiles and the lowest 25 percent of the season’s revenues.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Alaska’s pink returns cause a low salmon harvest year overall

December 3, 2024 — Alaska’s commercial salmon harvests plummeted this year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The department’s annual report shows that the statewide harvest of just over 100 million fish was the third lowest on record. And the pounds harvested — 450 million — were the lowest on record. The numbers came with a decline in the fishery’s overall value, too.

The poor harvest results were driven mostly by weak pink salmon returns statewide. Bristol Bay’s annual sockeye run – the most valuable salmon fishery in the state at $128 million – saw another good year. The Southeast region saw lower runs across the board, except for chums. But pink salmon, which are harvested in the millions across the state, drove the overall harvest numbers way down.

Pinks run on a two-year cycle and even years are always lower than odd years. But 2024 saw a dramatic swing. The overall harvest was 42% below projections.

“So that was a bit unexpected,” said Forrest Bowers, the state’s Deputy Director of the Division of Commercial Fisheries. “Even with that awareness of the distinct, even odd year cycle of pink salmon, returns for pink salmon were poor in 2024, even for an even year.”

Read the full story at KFSK

ALASKA: Bristol Bay fishermen faced ‘more stagger than swagger’ this season

September 4, 2024 — Even though the final days of the sockeye salmon season in Bristol Bay hadn’t yet been fished, fishermen felt a mood swing reminiscent of last season in terms of what went into their wallets. To some, the prospects of fishing the Bay each season may come down to crunching out the cost of maintaining the commercial fishing lifestyle.

“I have a headline for this year’s Bristol Bay season,” texted a fishermanwho was running his boat toward the yard for dry dock storage. “More stagger than swagger as fishermen leave Bristol Bay.”

Last year it was the gut punch of low ex-vessel prices. This season’s base prices of 8o cents per pound among brick-and-mortar processors was slightly higher than last year’s 50 cents, and some of them bumped prices to $1.40 per pound for late fish in hopes of putting up a bigger pack. But for all sectors of the industry, the harvest volume just wasn’t there.

The total run forecast for the Bay in 2024 had been set at 39 million, which was down from the 10-year average by about a third. Of that 39 million, the harvest projections had been set at 25 million. This season’s harvest (preliminary) came in above the projections at 31.5 million.

As for the harvest breakdowns by district, the fabled Nushagak District hit 11.9 million. The Naknek-Kvichak District produced 9.1 million. Egegik came in at 5.1 million, with Ugashik District kicking in another 4.3 million fish.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Bristol Bay sees smallest sockeye sizes on record, despite large run

July 30, 2024 — This year in Bristol Bay, fishing crews have noticed that sockeye salmon were on the small side — an observation confirmed this month by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Fish and Game officials say that at this point in the 2024 season, the sockeye returning to Bristol Bay are on average the smallest they’ve ever seen. This continues a decades-long trend.

So far, the average weight of Bristol Bay sockeye was 4.2 pounds this year. Fish and Game biologist Stacy Vega said that’s the smallest average weight on record.

“Fish are smaller, weigh less than, than they have in the past and against our historical averages,” Vega said.

Read the full article at KDLG

Citations surge during Bristol Bay sockeye season

July 12, 2024 — Commercial fishing citations during the Bristol Bay sockeye season are ramping up. During the sockeye run, Alaska State Troopers come to the area from all around the state to patrol the commercial fishermen and ensure all rules and areas are followed. Due to the many regulations, some waters remain closed during certain periods while others are open. State Troopers reported that most of the violations in the area are due to commercial fishing in the closed areas.

“We have troopers in from Kodiak, other parts of western Alaska, as well as South Central and even interior Alaska, flown in during this special enforcement period, which occurs every year during the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world,” spokesperson Austin McDaniel told KDLG Dillingham, Alaska.

An estimated 2.2 billion dollars is earned annually from the Bristol Bay sockeye salmon industry. Over 1500 commercial fishing boats are registered in the bay, all competing for the 2024 catch. Before the season began, Silver Bay Seafoods posted a pre-season price for Bristol Bay sockeye, an unexpected move from a processor. They announced that fishermen delivering chilled Bristol Bay fish to their processing facility would receive $1.10 per pound, with a bonus on top of that price for fish that had been bled.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Bristol Bay sockeye season starting as predicted with lower catch

July 12, 2024 — Sockeye salmon fishing in Alaska’s Bristol Bay is, as predicted, off to a slower start this fishing season.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) 2024 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon forecast predicted a run of roughly 39 million sockeye salmon, down from the 54.5 million in 2023. AFD&G’s predicted run for 2023 was 49.7 million sockeye, and the state agency acknowledged that its preseason forecasts have generally under-forecast the actual run by 15 percent.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Fire reduces new Bristol Bay floating fish processor’s capacity

July 8, 2024 — An electrical fire has damaged one of three spiral freezers aboard Northline Seafoods’ new floating fish processor Hannah, which is anchored in Bristol Bay’s Nushagak district this salmon season.

The vessel is currently operating at a reduced capacity after Sunday’s blaze, and other processors are taking on some of Northline’s fleet.

During a recent visit to the Hannah, a steady stream of frozen, whole fish emerged from a large spiral freezer. Each fish landing on a conveyor belt was whisked away to the next stage in the production line.

These frozen fish were some of the first sockeye salmon deliveries of the season from Bristol Bay fishing vessels to the Hannah, Northline’s brand-new floating freezer barge in the region.

From there they made their way to grading belts, where they were sorted by size and then placed into cold storage for processing later in the year.

“So it goes through a spiral freezer, where it goes in the bottom, exits out the top, gets graded, and that goes into a box,” said Northline CEO Ben Blakey.

Blakey said it just takes a few hours for the spiral freezers to bring the fish down to their desired core temperatures. The idea is that freezing fish at these ultra-low temperatures — and freezing quickly — makes a big difference in maintaining quality.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Bristol Bay salmon would benefit from added protection in federal law

May 29, 2024 — As we write, tens of millions of salmon are swimming their way back to Bristol Bay. And for the second year running, those who work the 15,000 jobs the salmon provide each year can celebrate that the proposed Pebble mine no longer threatens to contaminate the headwaters of the greatest wild sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

At least for now.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued Clean Water Act protections for this amazing fishery in January 2023. That news was welcomed by residents of the region and scores of businesses that are reliant upon the Bristol Bay fishery, along with its $2.2 billion annual economic impact. Since then, Pebble and the state of Alaska have filed four lawsuits in an attempt to keep this ill-conceived, acid-producing mine on life support. Math and science aren’t on their side — not only would the mine irreversibly harm a fishery that could, if not contaminated, continue to produce and provide jobs for centuries to come, but the state of Alaska made a basic math error in one of its lawsuits, leading it to inflate the amount they’re suing American taxpayers for by $630 billion. Clearly, those seeking to exploit Bristol Bay at the risk of its sustainable fishery aren’t taking “no” for an answer.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

Peltola pushes bill to permanently block Pebble mine in Alaska

May 2, 2024 — Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska on Wednesday introduced legislation to permanently block mining in her home state’s pristine Bristol Bay, one of the world’s premier salmon fisheries.

Peltola’s “Bristol Bay Protection Act” would codify EPA’s veto last year of the proposed Pebble mine under the Clean Water Act in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska. EPA at the time said its decision was based on decades of research showing discharges tied to the mine would have adverse effects on salmon fishery areas within the Bristol Bay watershed.

“I came to DC to stand up for fish — to make fishing and the livelihoods of our fishing communities the national issue it deserves to be,” the congresswoman said, adding that entire communities rely on Bristol Bay’s watershed for subsistence, which is deeply interwoven into their social and cultural practices.

Read the full story at E&E News