Saving Seafood

Dire drought warning: California says ‘nearly all’ salmon could die in Sacramento River

July 9, 2021 — The drought is making the Sacramento River so hot that “nearly all” of an endangered salmon species’ juveniles could be cooked to death this fall, California officials warned this week.

In a brief update on the perilous state of the river issued this week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife made a dire prediction about the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon and its struggles against consistently hot weather in the Sacramento Valley.

“This persistent heat dome over the West Coast will likely result in earlier loss of ability to provide cool water and subsequently it is possible that nearly all in-river juveniles will not survive this season,” the department said.

Given that the salmon generally have a three-year life cycle, a near-total wipeout of one year’s run of juveniles “greatly increases the risk of extinction for the species,” said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The winter-run salmon endured two years of severe mortality during the last drought as well.

Read the full story at The Sacramento Bee

Canada announces big cuts to commercial fishing to protect wild salmon that Washington’s orcas eat

June 30, 2021 — Canada is slashing and closing commercial coastal fishing on more than 100 salmon stocks and permanently downsizing the fleet through voluntary license buybacks in an urgent effort to protect wild salmon from extinction.

Stating Pacific salmon are in long-term decline with many runs on the verge of collapse, Bernadette Jordan, minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, announced Tuesday that bold action is needed now to stabilize and rebuild stocks before it is too late.

Salmon managers on the U.S. side of the border also are taking steps in an effort to respond to dwindling salmon stocks upon which endangered southern resident orcas rely, including increasing funding to certain hatcheries to increase production.

Some of the Canadian reductions announced in a video news conference Tuesday went into effect immediately. The cutbacks are part of a broader $647 million initiative to save wild salmon, including habitat improvements and a reconsideration of Canada’s aquaculture industry in B.C. waters.

The closures and reductions affect commercial salmon fisheries and First Nations communal commercial fisheries.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

JAMES POGUE: Salmon is an indicator species for California’s water crisis. It’s not looking good

June 30, 2021 — In mid-June, California’s State Water Resources Control Board wrote a tragic letter. The board, which has significant powers under California’s Constitution to manage water for the benefit of California’s people and ecosystems, wrote that it would approve a plan for water releases out of Lake Shasta that risk destroying the Sacramento River’s iconic winter-run Chinook salmon population forever.

The winter-run Chinook population has already declined by 99%, down to a few thousand fish that manage to run out of the San Francisco Bay and return to spawn below a dam near Redding. Baby salmon need cold water to hatch from their eggs and grow until they’re ready to migrate to the ocean. But in this drought year, the Federal Bureau of Reclamation has proposed drawing down the levels in Lake Shasta — California’s largest reservoir — to deliver water to irrigators in the Central Valley, allowing the diminished reservoir to heat up over the summer to temperatures that when released into the river “could increase the risk of extinction significantly,” as the board’s own letter put it.

The board, whose members are appointed by the governor, could have modified the plan. Even keeping a small fraction of the water sent for irrigation to be released later could have a dramatic impact on the survival rates of young salmon hatching later in the summer. But holding back water to save fish would have set up a conflict with powerful business interests in the Central Valley.

The board seems to have been more willing to risk the extinction of a salmon run than they were to risk angering landowners and lobbyists. To save even some of the Sacramento River’s salmon population, in a year where pumping water to farms has resulted in dangerously low water flows, California has had to resort to hauling millions of young fish raised in state-run hatcheries via tanker trucks to the Golden Gate. But trucking fish is a desperate measure, one that conceals a larger crisis that is likely to make the fate of fish into one of the key political issues of California’s drought-stricken future.

Read the full opinion piece at the Los Angeles Times

California’s latest bid to bolster its economy? Releasing 17 million fish into the San Francisco Bay.

June 10, 2021 — California is rolling out a fresh strategy to keep its economy afloat — releasing 17 million salmon into the San Francisco Bay.

Millions of Chinook salmon raised in hatcheries will bypass California’s drought-stricken riverbanks to be released directly into colder, downstream sites in the San Francisco Bay, in an attempt to maximize their survival rate amid some of the most extreme environmental conditions the state has ever faced.

By the end of June, around 16.8 million young adult salmon, also called smolt, will travel more than 30,000 miles by truck from hatcheries to direct release sites around the coastline.

At the release sites around the San Francisco, San Pablo, Half Moon, and Monterey bays, the salmon will be set free to make their way into colder ocean waters.

Read the full story at Business Insider

Canada launches C$647 mln strategy to stave off Pacific wild salmon collapse

June 9, 2021 — Canada launched a C$647.1 million ($535.10 million) strategy on Tuesday to restore Pacific wild salmon stocks that are on the brink of collapse due to climate change, habitat degradation and harvesting pressures.

The investment, first announced in the federal budget in April, will be the largest ever government contribution to efforts to save the species, which has huge cultural and ecological significance on the west coast.

“Many Pacific wild salmon are on the verge of collapse, and we need to take bold, ambitious action now if we are to reverse the trend and give them a fighting chance at survival,” Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan said in a statement.

The government’s Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative will focus on stronger science and habitat restoration, stabilizing and growing the salmon populations, modernizing fisheries, and deeper coordination between stakeholders including indigenous people and the fisheries industry.

Read the full story at Reuters

How to track salmon catches and market trends for every region of Alaska

June 8, 2021 — Buyers are awaiting Alaska salmon from fisheries that are opening almost daily across the state, and it’s easy to track catches and market trends for every region.

Fishery managers forecast a statewide catch topping 190 million salmon this year, 61% higher than the 2020 take of just over 118 million. But globally, the supply of wild salmon is expected to be down amid increased demand.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Run Forecasts and Harvest Projections for 2021 Alaska Salmon Fisheries and Review of the 2020 Season provides breakdowns for all species by region.

And salmon catches are updated daily at Fish and Game’s Blue Sheet, found at its commercial fisheries web page. They also post weekly summaries of harvests broken out by every region along with comparisons to past years.

Predictions for the 2021 mix of fish call for a catch of 269,000 Chinook salmon, up slightly from 2020 but 25% below the 10-year average.

The projected sockeye harvest of 46.6 million will help replenish low inventories that saw strong export prices in early 2021 and “a continued promising market,” said Dan Lesh, a fisheries economist with the McKinley Research Group who compiles weekly updates during the season for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Salmon virus has spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific

May 27, 2021 — Wild Chinook salmon are more likely to be infected with Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) the closer they are to salmon farms. This finding indicates that farms are spreading the virus to wild salmon – a theory that is further supported by the results of a recent genomic analysis.

Dr. Gideon Mordecai is a viral ecologist at the University of British Columbia who led the study.

“Both our genomic and epidemiological methods independently came to the same conclusion, that salmon farms act as a source and amplifier of PRV transmission,” said Dr. Mordecai. “Because separate lines of independent evidence all point to the same answer, we’re confident in our finding.”

In collaboration with researchers from the Strategic Salmon Health Initiative, the UBC team traced the origins of PRV to Atlantic salmon farms in Norway and found that the virus is now widespread across salmon farms in British Columbia.

After sequencing 86 PRV genomes, the researchers estimated that the lineage of the virus that is now present in the Northeast Pacific diverged from the virus in the Atlantic Ocean approximately 30 years ago. This suggests that the introduction of PRV to British Columbia, and the infection of wild Pacific salmon, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Read the full story at Earth.com

Community Steps Up to Continue Yukon River Salmon Research During Pandemic

May 20, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

On the Yukon River, Chinook salmon are woven into the fabric of life and culture. They are a resource that indigenous people have harvested for more than 1,000 years. But over the last 20 years or more, the Chinook populations have declined dramatically. Fewer Chinook are returning to the river each year, and those that do are smaller and younger than they have been in the past. This has created hardship for the people who rely on this resource. It is nurturing a strong desire to understand and contribute to solutions to address the dwindling returns.

Ragnar Alstrom, Executive Director of Yukon Delta Fisheries Development Association, explains it this way: “We want to be a part of figuring out why our Chinook aren’t returning. Instead of standing by and waiting for someone else to figure it out, we want to be engaged in the science.”

So began a special partnership between NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and local fishermen from the villages of Emmonak and Alakanuk. Starting in 2014, the Yukon Delta Fisheries Development Association (YDFDA) worked with scientists to identify nine permanent sampling stations on the three main lower Yukon distributaries. Each summer, local fishermen and NOAA Fisheries biologists work together. They set and retrieve salmon sampling nets, identify and count the catch, and measure water temperature and depth. They send salmon samples to the NOAA Fisheries Auke Bay Laboratories where their diet and body condition are analyzed.

Read the full release here

North Pacific Council’s New Public Comment Policy Triggers Intense Reactions

May 6, 2021 — Personal attacks and profanity laced five of the 250 written comments submitted to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council last month on just one of the half dozen issues before the Alaska fisheries management panel. Council staff pulled the comments after they’d been live for a few hours and reached out to each author to ask them to resubmit their comments without the offensive language. Only one did.

The issue was abundance based management (ABM) of halibut in the Bering Sea, where far more halibut is taken as incidental bycatch in bottom trawls than by halibut quota holders with their longline gear, and salmon bycatch in mid-water trawls in an area that has seen precipitous drops in Chinook returns. Public testimony during the meeting was intense but for the most part civil. ABM and bycatch is one of a few lightning-rod issues — like the on-shore/off-shore fight over the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island fisheries and others — that the council has faced in the nearly half century it has managed Alaska’s federal fisheries.

Read the full story at Seafood News

ALASKA: Commercial and subsistence harvesters speak out against trawler bycatch of Chinook salmon

April 22, 2021 — Alaska’s commercial fishermen have been speaking out against big trawlers for years, complaining that the large vessels in federal waters are scooping up mature and juvenile fish. The regional council that manages federal fisheries recently heard from hundreds concerned about the number of salmon and other species that end up as bycatch in trawl nets.

For Alaska’s troll fleet, king salmon is their money fish. In state waters, small crews on these 40 to 50-foot boats — or even small skiffs — will catch a fish at a time, and it’s worth it: Chinook salmon can fetch $6 a pound from a processor.

But there’s another big-money fish in Alaska: Pollock. It’s the white fish found in a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish® or an imitation crab stick. And the factory trawlers that ply the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska in search of pollock and other groundfish scoop up Chinook salmon and other species in their wide nets.

Federal fisheries data show trawlers in the North Pacific took about a tenth of the Chinook — or king salmon — caught by Alaska’s commercial salmon fleet last year. And those numbers are tracking the same this year. But none of that catch happens on purpose.

Preliminary ADF&G data show about 263,000 kings were commercially harvested last year statewide. As of last week (April 15), bycatch in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska areas for 2021 was around 16,000 fish, over six percent of last year’s statewide commercial harvest. Last year’s trawler bycatch was 26,000 kings, or about a tenth of the 2020 commercial Chinook harvest in-state.

Read the full story at KSTK