Saving Seafood

Gov. Dunleavy’s office announces formation of Alaska Bycatch Task Force

November 30, 2021 — Fishing vessels cast wide nets, and they often catch more than the species they’re targeting. That’s bycatch: one of the longest-running controversies in the fleet and a vexing problem for fisheries managers. Now, the Dunleavy administration is wading into the debate by naming a task force to study the issue and find ways to make it better for everyone working on the water.

Governor Mike Dunleavy’s office recently announced it’s setting up a task force to tackle the thorny issue of bycatch.

Federal data show trawl fisheries this year in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska have caught tens of thousands of Chinook salmon, millions of pounds of halibut, and in the case of the Bering Sea trawl fisheries, hundreds of thousands of crabs.

Stocks of staple species like Chinook salmon, red king crab, and halibut have been on the decline, forcing subsistence, sport and commercial fishermen to pack up nets or reduce harvest.

Read the full story at KNBA

Alaska lawmakers in both parties demand action on excessive fisheries bycatch

November 23, 2021 — A grilling on fish that is taken as bycatch didn’t satisfy the appetites of a bipartisan group of Alaska legislators at a special hearing on Nov. 15 by the House Fisheries Committee.

“We probably could not be more diametrically opposed on many things but we are frustrated with the waste of the resource and we are in lockstep. It’s all about the best economics and the best stewardship of our resources,” said Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, who devoted his entire November Capital Report to the topic.

“The fish don’t care if you’re red or blue,” said Sarah Vance, R-Homer, the catalyst behind the bycatch hearing. “We lay aside everything else and focus on good stewardship and making sure that every fisherman is able to get fish in the freezer and food on the table.”

The bycatch issue came to a head this summer when all Yukon River salmon fisheries were canceled due to so few returning chinook and chums. Along with ocean and climate impacts, villagers questioned the takes by huge trawlers that catch and process fish at sea.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

New Conservation Calculator Helps Protect Vital Nearshore Habitat in Puget Sound

November 16, 2021 — The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe is cleaning up and restoring past environmental degradation in Port Gamble Bay. The Tribe plans to remove an old and decrepit pier and boat launch and install a new one in a more accessible location.

Though mostly elevated, the new boat ramp and floating dock system would affect nearshore habitat. These are the rich shoreline areas where young Puget Sound Chinook salmon and steelhead put on their last growth before entering the open ocean. The impact meant that the Tribe had to work with NOAA Fisheries to assess habitat impacts using the new Puget Sound Nearshore Habitat Conservation Calculator.

NOAA Fisheries developed and introduced the Conservation Calculator last year as a science-based tool to assess the impacts of shoreline development on nearshore habitat. Nearshore developers now have two main choices. They must either:

  • Avoid or minimize the impacts of such development
  • Compensate for the impacts by restoring comparable habitat elsewhere in the same marine basin in Puget Sound, so that it benefits the same salmon populations.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

 

A court decision may help endangered orcas, but Alaskan fishermen are wary

November 8, 2021 — The southern resident killer whale population, three pods of orcas that ply the coastal waters between Monterey, California, and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, has dwindled to only 73 members. Scientists believe this endangered species, which relies almost exclusively on Chinook — or king — salmon, which are also in steep decline, is basically starving its way to extinction.

This past September, however, the U.S. District Court in Seattle seemed to offer the marine mammals a lifeline when it issued a preliminary decision that might make more Chinook available to orcas. Responding to a lawsuit filed by the Wild Fish Conservancy, the court found that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the agency responsible for management of both fisheries and endangered marine species, had violated the Endangered Species Act when it determined that commercial harvest of Chinook off southeast Alaska would not jeopardize southern residents or endangered king salmon populations.

But while the court decision is expected to help orcas, it may be bad news for fishermen, as NMFS will likely need to rethink Chinook harvests.

Read the full story at FERN News

 

Survivor salmon that withstand drought and ocean warming provide a lifeline for California Chinook

November 2, 2021 — In drought years and when marine heat waves warm the Pacific Ocean, late-migrating juvenile spring-run Chinook salmon of California’s Central Valley are the ultimate survivors. They are among the few salmon that survive in those difficult years and return to spawning rivers to keep their populations alive, according to a study published October 28 in Nature Climate Change.

The trouble is that this late-migrating behavior hangs on only in a few rivers where remain cool enough for the fish to survive the summer. Today, this habitat is primarily found above barrier dams. Those fish that spend a year in their home streams as juveniles leave in the fall. They arrive in the larger and more likely to survive their one to three years at sea.

Researchers led by first author Flora Cordoleani, associate project scientist with the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries, based their findings on an analysis of the ear bones of , called otoliths. These bones incorporate the distinctive isotope ratios of different Central Valley Rivers and the ocean as they grow sequential layers.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

 

California, Hoopa Valley Tribe try to save salmon and a way of life

October 22, 2021 — California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials are completing an unprecedented effort to save more than 1 million Chinook salmon, a campaign that also may help preserve a way of life for a Native American tribe.

In June, salmon hatched at the Klamath River’s Iron Gate hatchery were temporarily trucked to a Trinity River hatchery in Northern California. The finger-length fish were held back from a scheduled release to the Pacific Ocean out of concern the river was too warm and too full of parasites for them to survive.

Over the past two weeks, they have been released as six-inch (150 mm) yearlings, when their natural mortality is lower and when the water is a little colder and to their liking.

It’s one step to address threats to fish populations that have declined since the Trinity and Klamath rivers were dammed in the 20th century.

Read the full story at Reuters

Trawler bycatch debate heats up after Alaska records dismal 2021 chinook salmon returns

October 15, 2021 — Fishermen are calling for state and federal fisheries managers to make changes to salmon bycatch limits for trawlers as chinook salmon numbers plummet across Alaska.

Chinook salmon returns were dismal virtually everywhere in Alaska this year, from Southeast to the Bering Sea, with few exceptions. That follows a trend, as abundance has declined over roughly the last decade. Commercial fishermen have lost most of their opportunity to harvest kings, and sport fisheries have been restricted. Now subsistence fisheries are being reined in to help preserve the runs.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is debating changes in its meeting this month. Trawlers, which use weighted nets to drag either along the bottom or in midwater, are permitted a certain amount of bycatch as they fish for their target species, the largest of which is pollock. Bycatch is always a heated issue, but it is especially so now.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game informed the council in a letter dated Sept. 23 that three index species that it uses to track king salmon runs in the Bering Sea — the Unalakleet, Yukon, and Kuskokwim rivers — didn’t reach a threshold necessary to maintain the current bycatch allowances. That threshold is set at 250,000 fish between the three rivers; this year, there were 165,148.

The Kuskokwim’s run came within its forecasted range, but the other two fell short.

The shortfall in salmon this year hit fishing communities hard, particularly among subsistence fishermen. Amos T. Philemenoff Sr., president of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, wrote to the board that the salmon shortages in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region this year have affected the island’s subsistence traditions. Donations of salmon from commercial harvesters to replace the lost food do not replace the traditions, he said.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Feds OK plan to cut salmon fishing when needed for Northwest orcas

October 13, 2021 — Federal officials have approved a plan that calls for cutting nontribal salmon fishing along the West Coast when the fish are needed to help the Northwest’s endangered killer whales.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries adopted the plan Sept. 14 as recommended by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. It calls for restricting commercial and recreational salmon fishing when Chinook salmon numbers are especially low.

It’s one of the the first times a federal agency has restricted hunting or fishing one species to benefit a predator that relies on it.

The southern resident killer whales — the endangered orcas that spend much of their time in the waters between Washington state and British Columbia — depend heavily on depleted runs of fatty Chinook. Recent research has affirmed how important Chinook are to the whales year round, as they cruise the outer coast, and not just when they forage in Washington’s inland waters in the summertime.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

Declining Salmon Population Threatens Fishing Tourism in Pacific Northwest

August 24, 2021 — Beneath the vacancy sign at the Salmon River Motel, a black and white placard reads “Salmon Lives Matter, Give a Dam.” For years the motel has been a profitable business in this canyon town of 400 three hours north of Boise, with a mile-long Main Street that swells each summer with visiting sport fishermen.

Now the motel and other businesses here are at risk, as the fish that drive the local economy shrink in both number and size.

This year, regional fish and wildlife agencies recorded one of the smallest counts of adult spring Chinook salmon in a generation in the Snake and Columbia river basin. Last year was worse. A wide body of research connects their decline to rising temperatures and climate change, which have compounded the damage done to fish populations by hydroelectric dams.

The impact of this decline ripples along this species’ entire migratory route, from the tourist economies and tribal communities of the inland Northwest to the $2 billion commercial fishing industry in ocean waters as far as Alaska, where state fisheries report total harvest weight has dropped by half since the 1960s.

Across the inland Pacific Northwest, dwindling salmon runs have emptied motel rooms, tackle shops and restaurants. Business in Riggins this summer beat expectations as pandemic fears eased, but the continuing decline of the sought-after Chinook—the largest of all Pacific salmon—threatens to devastate economies and tribes throughout the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal

When Yukon Chum Stocks Suddenly Collapsed, Yukon River Residents Received Donations From Bristol Bay

August 13, 2021 — For eight years, Tanya Ives has been traveling up from Washington each summer to work at the Yukon River’s only fish processing plant: Kwik’Pak Fisheries. The plant sits outside of Emmonak at the river’s mouth. Normally at this time of year, Ives would be packing up chum salmon harvested by commercial fishermen along the Yukon River to sell around the world. But this summer, she’s doing the opposite.

Read the full story at KYUK