Saving Seafood

Studies aim to restore habitat of imperiled Northwest fish

February 8, 2016 — BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Scientists in the Pacific Northwest are studying more than a dozen watersheds to develop templates on habitat restoration that could be used in similar streams to bolster struggling fish populations.

The federal government lists 28 populations of salmon and steelhead on the West Coast that need protections due to low numbers despite spending millions of dollars every year on restoration efforts.

 The studies aim to make those efforts more successful. They focus on 17 watersheds in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Northern California and British Columbia and examine the benefit of everything from dam removal to building artificial beaver dams in tributaries.

Creating templates for habitat restoration could save time and money by using strategies known to produce good results in similar habitats in the region, said George Pess, a research fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The overall goal is to learn enough to be smart about our restoration,” he said, noting that the studies will offer recommendations to private, tribal and government entities but won’t produce any legally binding regulations.

 

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Houston Chronicle

ALASKA: Halibut commission boosts catch limits for most of the coast

February 1, 2016 — The International Pacific Halibut Commission on Friday approved an increase in halibut catch limits for most of the coast.

The joint U.S. and Canadian body oversees management of the prized bottom fish from California to Alaska. The commission held its annual meeting in Juneau last week.

Commissioners approved a coastwide catch of 29,890,000 pounds for 2016. That’s an increase of 2.2 percent from last year’s limits.

Commission chair Jim Balsiger of Juneau said the decisions were not easy.

“The discussions focused quite a bit, both in the public and in our executive sessions about the trade-offs we have to make between rebuilding the stocks and capturing some revenue in the fisheries now when things look a little bit better,” Balsiger said. “I’m happy where we ended up so I think it was a good meeting.”

Read the full story at KTOO Public Media

Toxic pollutants found in fish across the world’s oceans

February 1, 2016 — When you go out for seafood, are you aware of what that fish on your plate might have been exposed to while swimming around in the world’s oceans? According to new research, fish populations around the world have been contaminated with industrial and agricultural pollutants known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego examined hundreds of peer-reviewed reports that stretched from 1969 through 2012. Some of the pollutants that were identified in the study included 20th century “legacy” toxins like DDT, which is banned in the U.S. and no longer widely used worldwide, and mercury, as well as more contemporary pollutants like coolants and other industrial chemicals like flame retardants.

“Based on the best data collected from across the globe, we can say that POPs can be anywhere and in any species of marine fish,” study co-author Stuart Sandin said in a press release.

However, there were some signs of improvement. The researchers found that the concentrations of pollutants contaminating fish populations have been dropping at a consistent rate over the past 30 years.

Read the full story at CBS News

Seven Fishing Associations File an Amici Brief to U.S. Supreme Court in Shark Fin Lawsuit

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — January 28, 2016 — Seven fishing associations have filed an amici brief in support of the Plaintiffs’ petition for certiorari in Chinatown Neighborhood Association, et al. v. Kamala D. Harris, which seeks to overturn California’s shark fin possession ban.  The Sustainable Fisheries Association, Rhode Island Fisherman’s Alliance, Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, Garden State Seafood Association, North Carolina Fisheries Association, Virginia Seafood Council and America Scallop Association take the position that the ban frustrates the purpose of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA).

The Plaintiffs’ suit claims California’s shark fin law directly affects the fisheries of abundant, sustainably federally managed shark species such as Atlantic spiny dogfish and winter skate. According to the brief, “The California shark fin ban directly conflicts with the basic purpose of commercial fishing – allowing commercial fishermen to possess, and to place in the stream of domestic and international commerce, legally harvested fish.”

The brief argues that the California law conflicts with commercial fishing regulations that are governed and sanctioned by the MSA and should be preempted by the federal law. Commercial fishermen may catch Atlantic spiny dogfish and winter skate but the ban outlaws the fins from those legally caught sharks from being possessed in or shipped through California. According to the brief, this arrangement “creates an impermissible conflict by frustrating a primary purpose of MSA.”

The fishing associations argue that the law also conflicts with existing treaties between the United States and foreign countries by stopping fins from sharks like Atlantic spiny dogfish and skate at the California border, barring access to the ports and airports of California and ultimately prohibiting commercial fishermen from conducting foreign trade. The suit considers this a direct assault on the MSA and lawful businesses.

According to the brief, “the shark fin possession ban is not only ‘an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress’…but it frustrates treaties and overtly blocks international trade,” and harms the members of the fishing associations.

View a PDF of the amici brief

 

California legislators call on Gov. Jerry Brown to declare crab fishery disaster

January 25, 2016 — A group of nine California legislators sent a bipartisan letter to Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday calling for him to declare a crab fishery disaster in order to help secure financial assistance for the state’s impacted fishing industry.

North Coast Senator Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) and Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg) were among the letter’s signatories.

“The delayed crab season is unprecedented in duration and magnitude and California crabbers need our help now more than ever,” McGuire said in a statement. “For the past three months, we have all been hopeful that we could kick off the harvest, but as the holidays came and went and acid levels remained too high, the statewide impact has been catastrophic.”

Read the full story at Eureka Times-Standard

 

Feds Dive Into Giant Tuna Price-Fixing Case

January 22, 2016 — SAN DIEGO (CN) — An ongoing antitrust case against seafood giants got even bigger as the federal government has intervened in litigation against the likes of Bumble Bee, Tri-Union Seafoods, StarKist, and others.

U.S. District Court Judge Janis Sammartino held a status conference Wednesday in a room filled to the brim with more than 50 lawyers from around the nation, hoping to move the case forward.

The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed an unopposed motion to intervene in the lengthy litigation on Jan. 13. The feds are seeking a limited stay of discovery to aid in an ongoing federal grand jury investigation in the Northern District of California, into whether the biggest canned tuna producers violated the Sherman Act by conspiring to fix prices.

  The original class action complaint was filed in San Diego by Olean Wholesale Grocery Cooperative on Aug. 3, 2015. Dozens of lawsuits over price-fixing by the three biggest packed-seafood companies have since trickled into San Diego Federal Court after being transferred from other courts across the nation.

     The three companies control 73 percent of the U.S. market: Bumble Bee, 29 percent; StarKist, 25.3 percent; and Tri-Union, 18.4 percent, according to the complaint.

     Both Bumble Bee and Tri-Union Seafoods, which makes Chicken of the Sea brand shelf-stable tuna, are headquartered in San Diego – once the tuna-fishing capital of the world.

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

U.S. to pull out of Pacific tuna treaty

January 19, 2016 — The U.S. State Department has announced its intention to pull out of a nearly 30-year treaty that allowed American boats to fish tuna in a vast area of the Pacific Ocean.

Prompted by some U.S. boats saying they could not pay fees to a cluster of Pacific island nations, the 37-boat fleet — many with ties to San Diego — were not issued licenses at the start of 2016.

The department gave formal notice this week to island nations in the South Pacific Tuna Treaty that it planned to pull out of the world’s biggest tuna fishery.

Pressure on the island nations will likely build as Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, plans to introduce legislation in Congress at the end of this week to cut $21 million in foreign aid to 15 of the countries in the treaty.

Brian Hallman, executive director of the San Diego-based American Tunaboat Association, said the treaty has one year to expire and he was hopeful a new deal could be worked out.

“During that year, I believe there will be efforts and negotiations to try to get a restructured treaty,” Hallman said Tuesday, “and we support that.”

He said it was hard to say how many American jobs would be lost because many local fishing captains can transfer to boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean. However, he said the U.S. territory of American Samoa employs thousands who work in canneries and other jobs related to the U.S. fleet.

Read the full story at The San Diego Union-Tribune

 

To Save Its Salmon, California Calls in the Fish Matchmaker

January 15, 2016 — HORNBROOK, Calif. — On a frigid morning in a small metal-sided building, a team of specialists prepared to orchestrate an elaborate breeding routine. The work would be wet and messy, so they wore waders. Their tools included egg trays and a rubber mallet, which they used to brain a fertile female coho salmon, now hanging dead on a hook.

Diana Chesney, a biologist, studied a piece of paper with a matrix of numbers, each one denoting a male salmon and potential match for the female coho.

“This is the bible,” she said of the matrix. “It’s what Carlos says.”

John Carlos Garza, a geneticist based a day’s drive south in Santa Cruz, has become a key figure in California’s effort to preserve its decimated salmon stocks. Using the latest genetic techniques, he and his team decide which individual fish should be bred together. At several major state conservation hatcheries, like the coho program here at Iron Gate, no two salmon are spawned until after Dr. Garza gives counsel — a “salmon mating service,” he jokingly calls it.

His painstaking work is the latest man-made solution to help fix a man-made problem that is about 150 years old: dams, logging, mining, farming, fishing and other industries have so fractured and polluted the river system that salmon can no longer migrate and thrive. In fact, today, owing to the battered habitat, virtually all salmon in California are raised in hatcheries.

Traditionally, the practice entailed killing fertile salmon and hand-mixing eggs and male milt, or sperm, then raising the offspring packed in containers or pools. When they were old enough to fend for themselves, they were released to rivers or sometimes trucked or ferried to release points to find the ocean on their own, a practice that gave them a necessary transition before they hit saltwater and a semblance of the quintessential salmon experience of migrating to the sea and back. To that end, they eventually swam back to hatcheries, where they became the next breeders in the cycle.

While hatcheries have helped propagate the species, they have also created new problems. The salmon they produce can be inbred and less hardy through domestication, hurting their chances for surviving and thriving in the wild.

Read the full story at The New York Times

California temporarily curbing water to spare vanishing fish

January 15, 2016 — SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Saying current water conditions pose particular peril for the state’s tiny, disappearing Delta smelt, federal officials moved Thursday to temporarily reduce water deliveries for farmers and millions of other Californians.

Especially muddy water from winter storms is among the factors that risk sweeping some of the world’s few remaining Delta smelt off course and into giant water pumps that draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin river deltas, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials said.

The pumps are part of federal and state water projects that provide water for up to 25 million Californians. Wildlife experts believe the pumps are one of the main threats to native fish, including the once-plentiful Delta smelt, now nearly extinct, and endangered runs of native salmon.

The federal wildlife service’s determination on Thursday means federal authorities will reduce water flows temporarily starting Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Rep. Duncan Hunter to Kerry: Help save US tuna jobs

January 5, 2016 — U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter wants the U.S. State Department to step in to assist American tuna boats — many with ties to San Diego — that are shut out of a large area of the Pacific Ocean for the first time in nearly 30 years.

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, given to The San Diego Union-Tribune on Monday, Hunter writes that the U.S. government must act fast to help the tuna fleet.

Last week, administrators of the South Pacific Tuna Treaty — a 27-year-old accord among 17 nations governing waters in the western Pacific — refused to issue 2016 licenses on Jan. 1. It said American boats must pay millions of dollars in fees, they agreed to in August, to fish international waters.

Some of the tuna boat operators in the 37-boat fleet say a bad 2015 fishing season has left them unable to pay the first quarterly payment of $17 million.

“An extended prohibition against the U.S.-flag tuna fleet fishing in the treaty area may well bankrupt the fleet and jeopardize the thousands of American jobs it supports,” wrote Hunter, R-Alpine.

Read the full story at The San Diego Union-Tribune