Saving Seafood

The fight of the Salmon People

December 29, 2022 — April 2022, early spring Chinook season

Total tribal catch in 2021: 1.605 million pounds, including the worst spring season in 22 years

The salmon were late and the nets were empty.

Two weeks had passed since the Yakama Nation opened its ceremonial and subsistence spring fishing season on the Columbia River. Randy Settler and Sam George had spent $400 on gas for their boats, and had just two fish so far to give to their tribe for ceremonies.

This year’s salmon fishing was forecast to be better than last year’s. But it was the slowest start to a season that Settler could remember. It was also his first season without his mother, Mary Goudy-Settler, who died in October 2021.

Settler was sitting in the riverside house that used to be hers, reflecting on all that had been taken from his family, all his parents had done to claw back what they could. They had fought for their right to fish, a right the U.S. government promised to honor more than 150 years ago and then violated generation after generation through laws, policies and flat-out discrimination. He inherited that fight. Now, with climate change threatening the remaining salmon runs, he thinks about the legacy they left for him, the one he’ll pass down to his nephew, George, and to George’s 10-year-old daughter.

“Áwna sɨ́nwit UllaQut’.” His eyes welled up when he introduced himself by the Yakama name his mother gave him.

“But I’ve never claimed that name,” Settler, 67, later said.

The name, UllaQut’, translates to “frog.” It means more than that.

Mary Goudy-Settler and tribal elders bestowed it in a traditional ceremony when her son was 42, the same year he was elected to the governing council of their tribe.

It is a variant on the name of a famous war chief, one that Settler is tied to through his family’s lineage. To carry that name, he said, “you have to be a big deal in Indian Country.”

He has spent a lot of his life trying to live up to it.

Read the full article at OPB

Saving salmon: Chinook return to California’s far north — with a lot of human help

December 10, 2022 — Winter-run Chinook were federally listed as endangered in 1994, but recent years have been especially hard for the fish. Facing severe drought and warm river conditions, most winter-run salmon born naturally in the Sacramento River have perished over the past three years.

So restoring Chinook to the McCloud has become an urgent priority for state and federal officials. In the first year of a drought-response project, about 40,000 salmon eggs were brought back to the McCloud, a picturesque river in the wilderness of the Cascade mountains.

Iconic in Northern California, Chinook salmon are critical pieces of the region’s environment. They are consumed by sea lions, orcas and bears, and they still support a commercial fishing industry. Chinook remain vital to the culture and traditional foods of Native Americans, including the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, whose historical salmon fishing grounds included the McCloud River.

Conservation experts say the McCloud’s cold, clean water holds great promise as a potential Chinook refuge — and perhaps even a future stronghold for the species. Restoring salmon there is considered critical to the species’ survival, since they now spawn only in low-lying parts of the Central Valley near Redding and Red Bluff, where it’s often too hot and dry for most newborn fish to survive.

Read the full article at ABC 10

Chinook salmon lawsuit still looms over Alaska trollers

September 22, 2022 — A lawsuit filed against the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020 reared its head in a U.S. district court in Washington state on 8 August, 2022, and it could spell changes in fisheries management for Southeast Alaska trollers.

The case stems from a suit brought by the Wild Fish Conservancy that challenges the biological rationale in setting allocations of Pacific Salmon Treaty chinooks that local trollers catch.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Chinook lawsuit still looms over Alaska trollers

September 7, 2022 –A lawsuit filed against National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020 reared its head in a Washington district court on Aug. 8, and it could spell changes in fisheries management for Southeast Alaska trollers.

The case stems from a suit brought by the Wild Fish Conservancy that challenges the biological rationale in setting allocations of Pacific Salmon Treaty chinooks that Southeast trollers catch.

The premise of the case is that NMFS, in its biological opinion, did not consider a portion of the commingling stocks as forage fish for a pod of 74 killer whales in Puget Sound, rendering the agency out of compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

Like other legal battles between the fishing industry and environmental groups, this case stems from differing interpretations of the data.

The Wild Fish Conservancy contends that 97 percent of the troll-caught chinooks originate in drainages outside of Alaska. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, meanwhile, estimates those numbers between 30 and 80 percent, and that the percentages vary each year.

Though some feared that a subsequent injunction filed by the conservancy could stop the fishery after the initial case was filed in 2020, that didn’t happen.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Judge faults federal plan to protect orcas from Southeast Alaska salmon harvests

August 12, 2022 — A U.S. District Court judge in Seattle has found the National Marine Fisheries Service has failed to ensure that Southeast Alaska salmon harvests not harm protected Pacific Northwest chinook and endangered southern killer whales that prey upon them.

The Monday ruling came in a brief summary judgment from U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones. It is a significant victory for the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, which argued that the National Marine Fisheries Service approved a flawed plan to compensate for the harvest by increasing hatchery release of chinook.

“We applaud Judge Jones’ ruling that is finally calling into question decades of unsustainable Chinook harvest management in Southeast Alaska,” said Emma Helverson, Wild Fish Conservancy executive director, who in a statement called the decision a “watershed moment” for efforts to recover southern resident orcas and wild chinook.

The southern resident killer whales are an endangered community native to the Pacific Northwest that consists of 73 members across three pods: J, K and L, which have struggled amid a decline in wild chinook populations that are a key part of their diet. Some whale advocates have long looked with concern to Southeast Alaska harvests of the salmon.

It is still uncertain what the judge’s ruling will mean for Southeast Alaska fisheries catching salmon that would eventually head south to British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest to spawn.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Judge blasts ‘mitigation’ that would imperil both orca and salmon

August 11, 2022 — A federal judge has rejected the National Marine Fisheries Service’s “mitigation” for allowing continued “maximum” commercial harvests of the endangered Chinook salmon the imperiled Southern Resident killer whales need to survive — among the mitigations, that the agency will figure out better mitigations before the orcas go extinct.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones accepted a magistrate judge’s recommendation for summary judgment in a lawsuit filed by Wild Fish Conservancy in 2020. The recommendation revealed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries agency violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by authorizing commercial salmon harvest at levels that are pushing protected wild Chinook salmon and Puget Sound orcas to extinction.

The Washington-based nonprofit challenged the authorization of the Southeast Alaska Chinook troll fishery, which the agency approved based on vague plans to fund production of 20 million young salmon annually to increase prey for the orcas by 4 to 5%. But the agency had no plans for where to get the young fish, who would release them and where, the age of the fish at release, the juvenile-to-adult return ratio, how many fish would be needed for future broods and whether all of this would be enough to sustain the orca in the long term.

Read the full article from Courthouse News Service

ALASKA: Tale of two salmon fisheries: Bristol Bay breaks record, but Yukon River collapses

July 25, 2022 — In the Bristol Bay region, the sockeye salmon run and harvest amounts set new records, as was predicted in the preseason forecast. As of Monday, the run had totaled over 73.7 million, with a harvest of over 56.3 million. The previous record was set just last year, with a 67.7 million run of sockeyes and a third-biggest-ever harvest of nearly 42 million of the fish.

But along the Yukon River, a prized salmon run is heading toward a worst-ever season.

The number of Chinook counted by sonar while swimming up the river at Pilot Station, a village near the Bering Sea coast, was the lowest on record for this time of the year, the department said. Things are looking grim for the rest of the summer, Fish and Game said in its most recent update; “the drainage-wide run may be under 50,000 fish, which is so small that escapement goals may not be met in any tributaries,” the update said. Chinook fishing has been closed all along the river and its drainages.

Opponents of the controversial Pebble Mine say two consecutive years of record sockeye runs demonstrate the value of protecting the Bristol Bay watershed, site of the world’s biggest sockeye runs, from that proposed development. They are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands-fill permit for the mine.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

CALIFORNIA: Endangered salmon will swim in California river for first time in 80 years

July 19, 2022 –California’s Chinook salmon haven’t been able to reach the McCloud River since 1942, when the construction of Shasta Dam blocked the fish from swimming upstream and sealed off their spawning areas in the cold mountain waters near Mount Shasta.

After 80 years, endangered winter-run chinook are about to swim in the river once again.

State and federal wildlife officials collected about 20,000 winter-run salmon eggs from the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery near Redding and drove them for three hours to a campground on the banks of the McCloud River.

Members of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, who have long sought to return salmon to the river where their ancestors lived, held a ceremony as the eggs arrived in a cooler.

During the ceremony, Sisk and others sang as two women carried the cooler with the salmon eggs, leading a procession around a fire as children followed.

Taylor Lipscomb, the hatchery’s manager, reached into the cooler and lifted out a cup filled with orange salmon eggs, then handed it to one of the children.

Each child participated, lowering a cupful into the water and tipping it until the eggs tumbled out and settled on a metal screen.

Last year, the water flowing from Shasta Dam got so warm that the Sacramento River turned lethal for winter-run salmon eggs. Most of the eggs and young fish died. State biologists estimated that only 2.56 percent of the eggs hatched and survived to swim downriver, one of the lowest estimates of “egg-to-fry” survival yet.

Read the full article at The Columbian

ALASKA: Area M, Where Alaska commercial and subsistence fishing interests collide

July 14, 2022 — There have been clashes over regulating Area M for decades, but the battle heated up after the Yukon-Kuskokwim chum crashes began. This is the first in a three-part series.

Kuskokwim fisherman Fritz Charles grew up in Tuntutuliak, on the lower river. There were so many fish then that his parents would put away literal barrels of them. His job as a child was to pack the dry fish tight in the barrels using a special method.

In 2021, chum runs took a sharp downward turn. It was the worst year on record for them on the Yukon River, and it’s the same story on the Kuskokwim. This year, the runs on both rivers are at their second lowest.

In 2021, 153,497 summer chum salmon swam up the Yukon River. That’s compared to an average of about 1.7 million summer chum. The river was missing about 1.5 million fish.

At the same time, Area M commercial fishermen caught 1,168,601 chum at sea while subsistence fishing on the rivers was closed. In the midst of the smallest chum run western Alaska subsistence users had ever seen, Area M fishermen were catching more than ever before.

Do the subsistence fishermen in the Y-K Delta or the commercial fishermen in Area M have a greater claim to the chum? About a decade ago, a comprehensive salmon genetics study of the Area M fishery confirmed that most of the chum caught in the region, around 60%, are bound for coastal Western Alaska. But when you start to break that number down further, that’s where things get complicated.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: New genetic data fuels debate over Bering Sea salmon bycatch

July 6, 2022 — The contentious issue of chinook and chum salmon that are taken as bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock and groundfish trawl fisheries reached a new order of magnitude as the North Pacific Fishery Management Council grappled with concerns over declining salmon fisheries at its June meeting in Sitka.

The council and its scientific committees are no newcomers to the controversy pitting the Bering Sea trawl fleet against commercial and subsistence salmon fishermen along Alaska’s western coastline and the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers.

Genetic sampling and stock composition modeling of salmon caught in the trawl fisheries has been conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service since 2011. Late last year ADF&G released new information to supplement those studies as an ongoing effort to combine state and federal scientific resources. “We want to work in a more unified front in presenting this information,” says Dianna Stram, a senior scientist with the North Pacific council, in Anchorage.

Random sampling of one in ten chinooks in 2021 rendered genetic material from 2,614 fish, of which 52 percent were linked to Coastal Western Alaska. The 52 percent was higher than the previous 10-year average of 44 percent. And of that 52 percent, an estimated 2 to 4 percent were headed to Middle and Upper Yukon River tributaries. Breaking those percentages down to the actual numbers of fish, scientists estimate that 16,796 chinooks were Coastal Western Alaska stocks, and of those, 670 chinooks were stocks bound for the Middle Yukon, with 729 fish headed for the Upper Yukon.

In response to the higher bycatch, the North Pacific council called upon Rachel Baker, who represents the State of Alaska in federal fishery management issues on behalf of ADF&G, to present a list of actions put forth by the council’s science and statistical committee.

Those actions include the implementation of new chum salmon avoidance strategies immediately; formation of a working group of scientists, fishermen and industry and tribal leaders to examine causes of declining western Alaska salmon; updating a 2012 analysis of chum salmon bycatch; and research focused on correlations between seawater temperature, forage species and young salmon.

Gruver and partner John Gauvin, fishery science project director with the Alaska Seafood Cooperative, have been working for years in the development of the salmon excluders used in trawls. Early models destroyed the netting in the trawls, or made the trawls fish incorrectly, which meant starting over on the new prototypes and subsequent test sessions in a giant glass tank made for trawl development in Newfoundland.

Gruver reports that the excluders had an 80 percent success rate in the Gulf of Alaska and ranged from 30 to 50 percent success rates during trials in the Bering Sea.

At the same time, many other salmon-dependent communities beyond 50 miles inland got cut out of the 10 percent allocated to CDQ groups. The seasonal run of chinooks and chums are all they have.

Read the full story at National Fisherman