Saving Seafood

Feds must decide on protections for Chinook salmon

June 30, 2025 — In a move environmentalists are hailing as an important victory for Chinook salmon conservation, the federal government has agreed to decide this year whether the fish warrants federal protections.

By Nov. 3, the National Marine Fisheries Service must decide whether so-called Oregon Coast and Southern Oregon and Northern California Coastal varieties of Chinook salmon warrant protections under the Endangered Species Act.

By Jan. 2 of next year, feds must do the same for Washington Coast spring-run Chinook salmon, according to a settlement agreement from Thursday.

The Center for Biological Diversity — joined by the Native Fish Society, Umpqua Watersheds, and Pacific Rivers — in February sued the service and two top officials after the service failed to issue 12-month findings on the groups’ petitions to list the fish.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Anchovy Dominated Diets off the West Coast Pose New Dangers for Salmon

June 26, 2025 — A vitamin deficiency likely killed as many as half of newly hatched fry of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River in 2020 and 2021. These new findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The deficiency of thiamine, or Vitamin B1, is linked to large-scale shifts in the ocean ecosystem. These shifts changed the prey adult salmon consume before they return to West Coast rivers to spawn, scientists reported. They said the longtime loss of habitat and water has already weakened many California salmon populations. Further declines from thiamine deficiency or other impacts may lead to their extinction.

The deficiency syndrome can also affect salmon runs like the Central Valley’s fall-run that once supported valuable commercial fisheries across California. They have since dwindled to the point that commercial ocean salmon fishing in California has been closed for the last 3 years.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

CALIFORNIA: California closes Dungeness crab fishery to protect whales from entanglement

June 19, 2025 — The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has announced the closure of the Commercial Dungeness Crab Fishery in the Northern Management Area to protect whales from entanglement. This decision, assessed under the Risk Assessment Mitigation Program (RAMP), affects Fishing Zones 1 and 2, spanning from the California-Oregon border to the Sonoma-Mendocino County line.

Marine scientists at Oceana have highlighted the severe damage that entanglement can cause to whales.

“Whales, in particular Humpback Whales, are getting entangled in trap fisheries in that line gear, which then wrap around their flukes or around their fin and cause them injuries and reduced feeding and potentially reduced reproduction as well,” said Oceana’s Campaign Manager & Marine Scientist Caitlynn Birch.

Read the full article at KRCR

CALIFORNIA: California to close final sections of commercial Dungeness crab fishery

June 17, 2025 — The U.S. state of California is set to close the final two areas of its commercial Dungeness crab fishery following a confirmed case of a humpback whale becoming entangled in gear from the fishery.

“On 13 June 2025, I evaluated entanglement risk for the commercial Dungeness crab fisheries,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Director Charlton Bonham said in a memo. “Upon evaluation of the management considerations pursuant to [state law], I have determined that the management action listed below protects humpback whales based on the best available science.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

CALIFORNIA: California to shutter last open Dungeness crab fishing zones

June 16, 2025 — The remaining spots along California’s coast still open for commercial Dungeness crab fishing will close on June 20, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Friday.

The closure of the area between the California/Oregon border and the Sonoma/Mendocino county line stemmed from the entanglement of a humpback whale earlier this month. This area was the only one that remained open to commercial fisheries, as the area from the Sonoma/Mendocino line to the Mexico border closed in April.

Oceana, an ocean conservation group, said state and federal efforts to free the juvenile humpback haven’t yet worked.

“This unfortunate news of another humpback whale entangled in Dungeness crab gear dispels the narrative that whales don’t get entangled off Northern California,” said Caitlynn Birch, Oceana campaign manager and marine scientist, in a statement. “It is time to learn from these tragic entanglements, many of which could have been avoided.”

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

A data-driven model to help avoid ecosystem collapse

June 16, 2025 — Tipping points are the death of ecosystems. So scientists watch as warning signs gradually worsen until an ecosystem reaches the point of no return, when animal populations suddenly collapse. While tipping points can sometimes be predicted, what comes next is often shrouded in mystery, stymying efforts to prevent the impending disaster or prepare for what’s to come.

A new study by a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) introduces a method for modeling the murky future beyond a tipping point. The paper, published on June 13 in PNAS, demonstrates how this model can act as a “crystal ball” into the future of ecosystems—providing enough lead time to intervene before there’s nothing left to save.

“It gives us this fundamental insight into predicting what’s going to happen in the future,” said Eric Palkovacs, a senior author on the paper and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “That allows us to either do the things necessary to avoid that transition, or if we’re going to experience it, to plan for it and figure out the best ways to cope with it.”

Seeing the future

In healthy ecosystems, species populations fluctuate in predictable ways: Sea urchins feed on a kelp forest, otters then feed on the urchins, and the kelp regrows. But if the ecosystem loses equilibrium, disaster can suddenly strike. If warming waters drive sea urchins to kill off a kelp forest, the ecosystem suddenly crosses a tipping point that can doom all the species it supports. The result is a new regime of population fluctuations that can be hard to correct.

“You have many of these cases where the system can live in different states. You have a state with lots of kelp, and a state without kelp,” said Lucas Medeiros, the study’s lead author and a former postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Cruz.

Currently, researchers have some methods for predicting what lies beyond an ecosystem’s tipping point, but each approach has its tradeoffs. Some existing methods make predictions using machine-learning algorithms. However, these approaches require large datasets, which often don’t exist for research on ecosystems, where data might be collected yearly or even less frequently.

Read the full article at UC Santa Cruz

CALIFORNIA: California removes limits on sardine fishing after domoic acid concerns pass

June 16, 2025 — The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has removed limits on sardine fishing in Southern California, declaring the fish once again safe for human consumption.

The state had initially limited sardine fishing from Point Conception south to the Mexico border after the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the State Public Health Officer at the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) determined that elevated levels of domoic acid in sardines posed a risk to human health. Domoic acid, which is a naturally occurring neurotoxin emitted by marine algae, can accumulate in fish and cause several health issues, even proving fatal in some cases, for humans.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Justice Department says Trump can cancel national monuments that protect landscapes

June 11, 2025 — Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s administration say he has the authority to abolish national monuments meant to protect historical and archaeological sites across broad landscapes, including two in California created by his predecessor at the request of Native American tribes.

A Justice Department legal opinion released Tuesday disavowed a 1938 determination that monuments created by previous presidents under the Antiquities Act can’t be revoked. The department said presidents can cancel monument designations if protections aren’t warranted.

The finding comes as the Interior Department under Trump weighs changes to monuments across the nation as part of the administration’s push to expand U.S. energy production.

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Natural Resources Committee, said that at Trump’s order, “his Justice Department is attempting to clear a path to erase national monuments.”

Trump in his first term reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments in Utah, calling them a “massive land grab.” He also lifted fishing restrictions within a sprawling marine monument off the New England Coast.

Former President Joe Biden reversed the moves and restored the monuments.

The two monuments singled out in the newly released Justice Department opinion were designated by Biden in his final days in office: Chuckwalla National Monument, in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park, and Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, in Northern California.

The Democrat’s declarations for the monuments barred oil and natural gas drilling and mining on the 624,000-acre Chuckwalla site, and the roughly 225,000 acres Sáttítla Highlands site near the California-Oregon border.

Chuckwalla has natural wonders including the Painted Canyon of Mecca Hills and Alligator Rock, and is home to rare species of plants and animals like the desert bighorn sheep and the Chuckwalla lizard. The Sáttítla Highlands include the ancestral homelands of the Pit River Tribe and Modoc Peoples.

Read the full article at The Associated Press

Op-ed: Save California’s Crab Culture From Drowning in Regulations

June 4, 2025 — It’s 5 a.m. when my alarm goes off. I roll out of bed and put on a long-sleeve shirt, a hoodie, a puffer jacket, and the thickest pants I own—it’s gonna be cold out there. My dad’s waiting for me in the kitchen with a tumbler of coffee, a piece of peanut butter toast, and a big smile on his face.

“Are you ready to bring home some crab?” he asks.

We drive to meet my grandpa on his boat, docked in the Sausalito harbor, 30 minutes north of San Francisco. It’s still dark out, but my grandfather’s energy says otherwise. The motor is already running, and we take off. Streaks of sunrise peek out from the horizon as we pass under the Golden Gate Bridge. The pots have been soaking, sitting on the ocean floor since yesterday morning, and they should be full of Dungeness crabs that fell for our delicious trap of stinky old chicken meat.

My grandpa, Stanley Ross, a self-identifying fisherman living in my hometown of Oakland, has fished these waters for over 40 years. Crabbing is more than a hobby for him, me, and other recreational fishers; it’s a cultural touchstone in the Bay Area, a way we connect to the natural rhythms of the region. Our winters and springs have been marked by celebratory crab dinners, friends and family squeezing around a dining room table covered with butter-stained newspapers.

Read the full article at Civil Eats

CALIFORNIA: Juvenile salmon released at the Pillar Point Harbor

June 2, 2025 — For the 14th year, the Coastside Fishing Club is releasing salmon smolt into the Pillar Point Harbor in efforts to boost the state’s beleaguered salmon population.

“We’ve seriously made a difference in the past,” Tom Mattusch, San Mateo County Harbor District commissioner and board member of the Coastside Fishing Club, said. “For a long time, our progress was one of the most successful. Now it’s being copied in other areas.”

Commercial salmon season in the state will be closed for a third year in a row in 2025, largely due to grim forecasts of Chinook salmon stock.

The idea behind the volunteer release efforts is both to increase the general salmon population and encourage salmon to return to the harbor once they have matured, ostensibly creating a new fishery at Pillar Point, Mattusch said.

Read the full article at The Daily Journal