California Archives - Page 4 of 106

California fishery trials ‘whale-safe’ crab gear with big results

September 2, 2025 — The latest and largest full-scale trial of pop-up fishing gear in the California commercial Dungeness crab fishery has concluded with strong results, indicating the gear is both effective for harvest and significantly reduces the risk of whale entanglements.

Conducted under a California Experimental Fishing Permit (EFP), the spring 2025 trials involved 12 commercial crab fishermen operating out of ports from Morro Bay to Crescent City. The project tested ropeless “on-demand” gear developed by Sub Sea Sonics and Guardian Ropeless Systems, which eliminates vertical lines in the water column by keeping lines and buoys stored with the traps until activated by an acoustic signal.

The traditional spring fishery off Central California has been effectively closed for six years due to the risk of whale and sea turtle entanglements. Pop-up gear presents a potential path to reopening these waters while meeting conservation goals.

According to project data, over 120 fishing trips were completed, involving 1,163 gear strings and a total of 25,721 traps. Crabbing was conducted at depths ranging from 27 to 392 feet. Fishers landed more than 217,000 pounds of crab with an estimated value of $1.4 million. The gear achieved a 98% reliability rate, and all gear strings were recovered — either through standard operation or backup retrieval methods — resulting in a 100% recovery rate and a gear loss rate of just 0.2%. In comparison, conventional single-trap gear can see annual gear loss rates between 5% and 10%.

Khevin Mellegers, a crab fisherman out of Santa Cruz who has participated in the EFP since its inception, said, “My intentions were to do this for myself, my family, and also to help provide something for a lot of the other smaller boats.” Reflecting on his experience, he added, “Out of the deployments that I’ve done over the three years, I think I’ve had two failures.” He has completed 568 gear sets.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

CALIFORNIA: Mysterious ‘ghost ship’ lurks off Northern California coast. What happened to missing captain?

August 27, 2025 — Joel Kawahara’s fishing boat, the Karolee, traveled down the coast from Washington toward California waters, keeping a steady course that offered no hint that something had gone terribly wrong.

But when Coast Guard crews boarded the boat this month in Northern California, officials found no one on board. Its captain was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere along the roughly 400-mile journey, the 70-year-old Kawahara was lost.

“It’s a strange case,” said U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Steven Strohmaier. “There were no signs of distress, no signs of debris.”

Read the full article at the The Press Democrat

US FDA recalls more shrimp after discovering radioactive contaminant

August 22, 2025 — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced a voluntary recall of frozen shrimp products due to possible contamination with Cesium-137 (Cs-137), a man-made radioisotope that can elevate cancer risks through longer term, repeated low dose exposure.

The announcement comes shortly after U.S. Customs and Border Control (CBP) detected Cs-137 in shipping containers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Houston, Savannah, and Miami, with agents finding evidence of the radioisotope in a single shipment of frozen bread shrimp. The discovery led the FDA to issue an alert for frozen shrimp supplied by Indonesia-based PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati to Walmart and sold under the “Great Value” brand name.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

CALIFORNIA: Pop-up crab traps aim to save Central Coast’s struggling fisheries and its threatened whale population

August 11, 2025 — This spring, while the Dungeness crab fishery was closed along the California coast to prevent whale entanglements, fisherman Stephen Melz made a third of his annual income pulling up traps filled with the purple and red crustaceans.

Melz, a 40-year industry veteran who fishes out of Half Moon Bay, was one of around a dozen participants throughout the state able to legally fish for Dungeness crab as part of a trial program using pop-up gear, also known as “ropeless” or “on-demand.”

Between April and June, Melz made around $145,000 from spring crab fishing, a season that has been dramatically shortened or completely closed to all commercial fishers for the past nine years. “That pays some bills,” he joked. “We will absolutely keep using them in the spring.”

Read the full article at Lookout Santa Cruz

Ropeless fishing gear for catching crabs shows positive results

August 8, 2025 — Ropeless fishing gear is proving effective at avoiding whale entanglements without sacrificing yields for commercial fishermen harvesting Dungeness crabs, according to research findings released by the State of California, nonprofit groups and and industry partners.

In a third consecutive year of state-sponsored trials where Northern California fishermen used what is often called “pop-up gear,” researchers found that 12 boats landed more than 217,000 pounds of Dungeness crab with an estimated value of about $1.4 million, or 18,100 pounds per vessel. Each boat made an average 12 fishing trips along a roughly 130-mile coastal region otherwise closed to Dungeness crab fishing due to risk of whale entanglements, according to researchers.

“The results of this spring’s pop-up gear testing are nothing less than wildly successful. Even with a vast increase in the amount of gear each fisherman was allowed to use, not a single string of fishing gear was lost,” said Geoff Shester, a senior scientist and campaign director with Oceana California, in a news release.

Read the full article at E&E News

CALIFORNIA: Whale-safe pop-up gear could bring crab back to Monterey Bay markets

August 5, 2025 — Pop-up fishing gear is one step closer to becoming available to local crab fishermen.

“We hope to see Monterey Bay fishermen really get back out on the water and keep bringing in crab in a way that’s whale-safe,” said Geoff Shester with Oceana.

In recent years, Monterey Bay has seen the Dungeness crab fishing season closed down or shortened due to the risk of whale entanglements in fishing ropes. The closures have put a financial burden on local fishermen.

“We’ve lost a good number of fishermen who have either retired or stopped fishing and taken land jobs,” said Gasper Catanzaro with Monterey Fish Co.

The pop-up gear is designed to keep whales safe while letting fishermen get back on the water.

“The way the pop-up gear works is all of the lines and buoys stay down with the trap. The fisherman is actually able to push a button on their tablet, see everyone else’s gear as well, and then retrieve the gear,” Shester said. “So, it pops up.”

Shester said Oceana’s most recent trial for the gear was their most successful yet; it brought in $1.4 million worth of crab this past spring.

“We were able to get out on a fishing boat, and every time it popped up, all the fishermen yelled, ‘Science!’” Shester said.

Read the full article at KSBW

CALIFORNIA: First salmon in nearly 100 years found in Northern California river

July 30, 2025 — An endangered species has returned to its Northern California river habitat for the first time in almost a century, wildlife officials said.

Winter-run chinook salmon — one of nine species considered to be most at risk of extinction by NOAA — have been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 1994. But new concerns for the species came to light after California’s historic statewide drought between 2012 and 2016, when the fish all but vanished from the McCloud River, which flows through Siskiyou and Shasta counties.

How a marine heatwave transformed life along the Pacific coast

July 24, 2025 — Between 2014 and 2016, something very unsettling happened off the west coast of North America. For over two years, ocean waters from California to Alaska were unusually warm – 3.6°F to 10.8°F hotter than normal.

This wasn’t a one-off fluke or a seasonal shift. It was the longest and most intense marine heatwave ever recorded in the region.

The heat lingered, spreading across thousands of miles of ocean. This event reshaped life in the water in devastating ways.

Kelp forests collapsed and entire food chains were thrown off balance. Animals appeared in places they had never been spotted before, and many of them died.

An ongoing coastal crisis

The warm water pushed marine life out of their comfort zones – literally. According to newly published research, 240 species were found far beyond their usual ranges during the heatwave, many of them showing up more than 600 miles farther north than normal.

Northern right whale dolphins and small sea slugs like Placida cremoniana were spotted well outside their typical territory. For some species, the shift was temporary. For others, it hinted at a more permanent change.

As ocean waters heat up, many organisms are following the temperature they’re adapted to – heading toward cooler, northern waters in a bid to survive. But during the historic heatwave in the Pacific, some animals could not move fast enough.

Read the full article at Earth.com

Del Mar Seafoods expanding operations with new facility

July 15, 2025 — Watsonville, California, U.S.A.-based Del Mar Seafoods has expanded its operations with the lease of a new facility.

Founded in 1988, Del Mar Seafoods is a vertically integrated seafood producer and processor in California that produces and supplies over 30 million pounds of squid, anchovies, and other wild-caught species per year. The company was a part of collaboration to obtain Marine Stewardship Council certification for the California squid fishery, which was ultimately granted in 2023.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Vitamin deficiency is killing salmon in California

July 1, 2025 –A vitamin deficiency linked to an enzyme found in anchovies that breaks down Vitamin B1, or thiamine, is threatening the survival of Chinook salmon in California and far beyond.

“An interesting piece of the puzzle is that we don’t have evidence for diminished sources of thiamine in the ocean food web,” said Nathan Mantua, a research scientist with NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif. “Instead, we have evidence that anchovy carry an enzyme called thiaminase that destroys thiamine in the predator’s stomach when the anchovy is digested.”

Mantua is part of the team of 37 coauthors of a new research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that links Vitamin B1 deficiency to the anchovy-dominated diet that likely resulted in the death of nearly half of California’s wild winter-run Central Valley Chinook salmon fry in 2020-2021.

“It has been a fascinating five years of research working with an entirely new group of people for me in our ongoing investigations into thiamine deficiency in California’s salmon,” said Mantua.

The issue came to their attention just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in January of 2020, so they had to develop a research program at a time when there were lots of big changes happening to the way they worked in the office, on the ocean, and in rivers. In spite of all those hurdles, the group came together to rapidly develop a research network that worked together really well, he said.

A research summary released by NOAA Fisheries on June 25 notes that thiamine deficiency is linked to large-scale shifts in the ocean ecosystem, shifts that changed the prey adult salmon consume before returning to West Coast rivers to spawn. Longtime loss of habitat and water has already weakened many California salmon populations, and further declines from thiamine deficiency or other impacts may lead to their extinction, the report said.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman