Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: Start of commercial crab season to be delayed

November 6, 2019 — Another year, another delay to the start of commercial crab season..

This year’s commercial Dungeness crab season will be pushed forward a week to Nov. 22 in an effort to decrease the chances of whales currently off the coast getting ensnarled by fishing lines, according the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

California’s famed Dungeness crab extravaganza has in recent years been a tale of great anticipation, felled hopes, occasional health warnings, season-opener delays and more. Last year, after a three-year spate of seasons put on hold, the commercial season got underway in mid-November, again marked by high hopes for the fisherman shoving off from Half Moon Bay.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

California commercial Dungeness crab season may be delayed

November 4, 2019 — The state may delay California’s commercial Dungeness crab season. The season, which was due to open Nov. 15 on the coast south of the Mendocino-Sonoma County line, could now begin on Nov. 23.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife made the announcement Friday in response to a settlement with an environmental group over whale entanglements in commercial Dungeness crab fishing gear. It will make the final decision on Nov. 4. Recreational season will begin as scheduled on Nov. 2.

Even if the eight-day delay to the commercial season happens, it should not disrupt the Bay Area tradition of cracked Dungeness crab on the Thanksgiving table, said Noah Oppenheim, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. However, it would cut into a peak period for the local fishing fleet, which has already lost millions of dollars when three of the last four commercial seasons were delayed because of domoic acid contamination from algal blooms.

In its 2017 lawsuit against the state over gear entanglements, Oakland’s Center for Biological Diversity claimed the state was not doing enough to prevent the deaths of endangered whales, which reached record levels in 2015 and 2016. The organization settled the lawsuit last spring, which required the state to take steps to mitigate risk of entanglement of the marine mammals. That included ending last season’s Dungeness crab season three months early, on April 15.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

PFMC: Groundfish Stock Assessment Process Review Webinar to be Held Friday, 12/13/2019

October 30, 2019 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:

Participants in the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s (Pacific Council’s) 2019 groundfish stock assessment process will hold a meeting via webinar to review and evaluate the 2019 stock assessment review (STAR) process.  The webinar will be held on Friday, December 13, 2019 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) or until business for the day has been completed.  The goal of the webinar is to solicit process improvements to recommend for future groundfish stock assessments and STAR panel reviews.  Process recommendations will be provided to the Pacific Council at their March 2020 meeting in Rohnert Park, California.

Please see the Groundfish Stock Assessment Process Review Webinar Notice on the Council’s website for participation details.

For further information:

  • Please contact Pacific Fishery Management Council staff officer John DeVore  at 503-820-2413; toll-free 1-866-806-7204.

California Vintner Steps Forward to Protect Endangered Salmon

October 22, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

A vintner in Northern California is upgrading a concrete fish barrier to return native salmon and steelhead to valuable spawning habitat that has been blocked for nearly a century. A cooperative “Safe Harbor” agreement between the landowner Barbara Banke, Chairman and proprietor of Jackson Family Wines, and NOAA Fisheries and other state and local agencies has fostered the improvements. These agreements provide incentives to private landowners who help recover threatened and endangered species.

The story begins in the late 1800s, when two real estate speculators, F.E. Kellogg and W.A. Stuart, bought part of a Spanish land grant in Sonoma County and built a post office, general store, school, cottages, a hotel, and a diversion structure on a nearby stream to provide water for residents and visitors to the town.

Bypassed by the railroads, however, the little town of Kellogg eventually faded away, its remains razed by a wildfire in the 1960s that left only a handful of homes, agricultural buildings, and the water diversion structure and associated water system. Like many such remnant barriers, the concrete barrier reduced stream flow and blocked native fish, such as Central California Coast (CCC) steelhead and CCC coho salmon, a critically endangered species, from reaching their spawning habitat.

Read the full release here

Rep. Huffman files bill to protect, bolster salmon rivers

October 18, 2019 — A California congressman on Thursday, 17 October filed a bill in Congress that he claims would restore and protect the country’s salmon rivers and watersheds.

By drafting H.R. 4723, dubbed the Salmon Focused Investments in Sustainable Habitats (Salmon FISH) Act, U.S. Representative Jared Huffman in a statement said he wants to make the rivers that support salmon populations more resilient. The Democrat’s bill would call on NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate core abundance areas as “Salmon Conservation Areas” and the purest ones as “Salmon Strongholds.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Will new gray whale migration season prove as deadly as the last one?

October 18, 2019 — Gray whales had a rough go last season as they made their annual migration — skinny, emaciated, even dead whales showing up along the West Coast prompting concern over the health of the species.

With the new season’s first gray whales being spotted in recent weeks off the South Bay, Long Beach and Orange County, whale researchers and enthusiasts are hopeful for a healthier season, one that would indicate the whales found enough food to forage in Alaska as they make their trek to the warm waters of Baja, Mexico.

A young gray whale was spotted last week by Harbor Breeze Cruises, which followed it from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Long Beach. Another was seen off the PV Peninsula earlier in the month, and another around Torrance Beach.

Orange County’s first gray whale sighting was reported Tuesday, Oct. 15, first by a diver near the Newport Pier and then by a Dana Wharf boat captain.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

Crabbing industry up to challenge of reducing whale entanglements

October 18, 2019 — Oregon’s commercial crabbing industry prides itself on sustainability. Though Dungeness crab has been harvested commercially since the late 1800s, this population is considered to be stable to increasing along the West Coast — thanks to commercial and recreational regulations that protect the breeding population and ensure the state’s official crustacean will be conserved for future generations.

Now, the fishing industry is facing a new environmental challenge — whale entanglements in crabbing gear. Before 2014, such entanglements were rare, numbering about 10 annually off the entire West Coast. Since then, entanglements have become more common, peaking at 55 in 2015 and numbering 46 off the West Coast last year, according to NOAA.

Forensics of each entanglement tell us that about half of them can be attributed to fishing gear, a third to Dungeness crab gear. Most of the crabbing gear entanglements are attributed to California fisheries, but Oregon gear has been confirmed in several entanglements over the past few years. Whales can be disentangled in some cases, and fishermen and other ocean users know to immediately report incidents to a hotline or hail the U.S. Coast Guard to initiate a response from NOAA’s disentanglement team.

Read the full story at The Newport News Times

A vast heat wave is endangering sea life in the Pacific Ocean. Is this the wave of the future?

October 17, 2019 — A vast region of unusually warm water has formed in the northeastern Pacific Ocean, and scientists are worried that it could devastate sea life in the area and fuel the formation of harmful algal blooms.

The broad swath of warm water, now known as the Northeast Pacific Marine Heat Wave of 2019, was first detected in early June. Now data from weather satellites and buoys show that it measures six to seven times the size of Alaska, which spans more than 600,000 square miles.

Given its size and location, the marine heat wave rivals a similar one that arose in 2014 and persisted for two years. That heat wave, known simply as “the blob,” occupied roughly the same region of the Pacific and became known for triggering widespread die-offs of marine animals including sea birds and California sea lions.

“The moms were going out to get food, but when they couldn’t find anything, they swam off and the babies were just left dying,” Andrew Leising, an oceanographer at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, said of the sea lions and their inability to find enough squid and fish to feed on.

Read the full story at NBC News

CALIFORNIA: Sides battle over Monterey Bay’s anchovy population

October 16, 2019 — A fishing industry group says it has new findings supporting its contention that there is a healthy population of anchovies, which is counter to a nonprofit’s lawsuit challenging how the number of anchovies are determined. Meanwhile, Monterey fishermen say there are tons of the little guys in the local fishery.

Gino Pennisi and Neil Guglielmo have been fishing out of Monterey for years, in Guglielmo’s case, since 1956. Both say anchovies are plentiful.

“They were so thick for a while you could walk up them,” Pennisi said, adding that right now they have moved north to Moss Landing and San Francisco. “They have tails; they move.”

But the nonprofit group Oceana argues the number of anchovies federal agencies state are not accurate and as a result can misstate the population and allow limits greater than the population would support.

Anchovies are critical to marine life in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Pelicans, sea lions and humpback whales all depend on the Northern Anchovy as a food source.

The California Wetfish Producers Association, a fishing industry trade group, on Thursday released data showing California anchovies are at record levels. The data was compiled by the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, a partnership of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Read the full story at The Monterey Herald

New Data Make Case for Anchovy Abundance as Oceana Lawsuit Continues

October 14, 2019 — The following was released by the California Wetfish Producers Association:

New, preliminary data from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) have provided further evidence that California’s anchovy population is now at record high levels. The data come amid a renewed lawsuit by the environmental group Oceana that seeks to unnecessarily reduce the already very limited amount of anchovy caught commercially in California.

The preliminary data from the Southwest Fisheries Science Center Larval Lab weekly report on September 16 show that the 2019 spring CalCOFI survey documented the highest abundance of larval anchovy off the coast of California ever recorded, nearly double the record amount from the mid-1960s. And this did not even include the tens of thousands of tons of anchovy that fishermen have reported in nearshore waters since 2015. This is the latest piece of evidence that the anchovy population is far more resilient than Oceana alleges.

Scientists have found that anchovy undergo large dynamic population swings naturally, even without fishing, and the precautionary fishing limits allowed have not harmed the ecosystem. But despite the latest evidence of anchovy abundance, Oceana is suing  to further limit California’s small anchovy fishery.

Members of the California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA) have long held that massive schools of anchovies, particularly in California’s inshore areas, have not been properly counted. CWPA has worked to confirm the observations of its members in cooperative surveys with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. These nearshore surveys add evidence to the preliminary CalCOFI data: there are tens of thousands of tons of anchovies in inshore California waters in addition to record abundance offshore. This explosion occurred in the presence of this small, historical fishery.

“There is an increasingly large body of evidence showing that anchovies are far more abundant than the allegations in Oceana’s lawsuit recognize,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of CWPA. “It’s why efforts to further restrict anchovy fishing are both unnecessary and harmful to West Coast fishing communities.”

However, Oceana again seeks stricter limits on the allowable catch of the central subpopulation of northern anchovy, which is currently set at 23,573 metric tons annually as a result of prior court rulings.  The fishery typically catches less than 10,000 metric tons annually of this legally allowed amount.

In August, CWPA filed to intervene in Oceana’s latest lawsuit, in order to participate in the proceedings and represent the interests of its members and fishing communities before the court. CWPA believes that the additional restrictions on the anchovy harvest being sought by the lawsuit are unnecessary, and would result in significant job loss and economic hardship for California’s wetfish fishermen and processors, and by extension, California communities and the state’s fishing economy.

“We believe that the evidence will show that anchovy is being managed precautionarily and with the conservation of the species in mind,” said Pleschner-Steele. “Best management practices and the best available science do not support the claims of overfishing made in the lawsuit.”

About the California Wetfish Producers Association

The non-profit California Wetfish Producers Association (CWPA) was established in 2004 to promote sustainable fisheries and foster cooperative research. Voluntary membership includes the majority of wetfish harvesters and processors operating in California.