Saving Seafood

Study shows connection between recent marine heatwaves and Western Alaska chum salmon declines

December 6, 2023 — For newly hatched Western Alaska chum salmon, there is no time to waste when it comes to making their way to the open ocean. The tiny fry begin their journey from their natal streams just days or weeks after being born. When they finally reach the Bering Sea, sometime from mid-June to mid-July, their priority becomes consuming marine prey and building the energy reserves that will carry them through their first winter. Throughout their years in the ocean, the Western Alaska chum will travel extensively between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.

Unfortunately, simultaneous warming trends in the Bering Sea and the gulf appear to have come as a double whammy for Western Alaska’s juvenile chum salmon. A new study by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game shows a possible link between a period of exceptionally warm ocean temperatures and chum crashes seen across Western Alaska.

“Loss of sea ice is having an impact on various ecosystems. And so with warming we’re seeing a change in the food web,” said Ed Farley, lead author of the study and head of NOAA Fisheries Ecosystem Monitoring and Assessment Program. “That food web is less energetic. It’s poorer-quality prey. And it’s impacting juvenile salmon, especially juvenile chum salmon in the northern Bering Sea. It’s impacting their fitness prior to winter.”

By “poorer-quality prey,” Farley primarily means jellyfish, also known as cnidaria. Jellyfish have been shown to proliferate when ocean temperatures warm.

“There are more cnidaria in the ecosystem of the Northern Bering Sea during warm years, but there was significantly more during this most recent anomalously warm period,” Farley said.

Read the full story at KYUK

 

ALASKA: Battle flares anew over Alaska subsistence fisheries

November 13, 2023 — Abysmal chinook and chum salmon returns to Western Alaska have made the state’s jurisdiction in fisheries management a prominent target on the legal radar again. Though Alaska’s subsistence challenges have been the bane of salmon management in some areas for more than a half century, recent run failures on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers have rekindled arguments in the courts.

Most recently, a case filed in 2022 has gained momentum and will argue whether the State of Alaska and the Alaska Division of Fish and Game, or the federal government, calls the shots in setting subsistence openings and closures on a 191-mile stretch of the river. 

“They’re literally fighting over crumbs here,” says Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola, D-Alaska.  “This is a legal battle over crumbs. All subsistence harvesting captures less than 1 percent of Alaska’s resources. When I was growing up it was 2 percent, which was negligible; now it’s less than 1 percent, and when you’re talking about subsistence on federal land, that’s infinitesimal.”

The case is the latest in court gyrations that promise to test the validity of a landmark court ruling that was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction in the 1990s. That case, commonly referred to as “Katie John,” was named after the woman who challenged a state law of 1964 which prevented her from operating a fish wheel for her winter’s salmon. That ruling was supposed to have defined “subsistence priority” in fisheries management.

The suit, originally filed in 1985 by Katie John and other parties, challenged the state management system in a plea for subsistence rights. What ensued since then has been a fight between state and federal courts in defining what constitutes public lands, submerged lands, navigable waters on those lands and which government (state or federal) has rightful management of those waters to comply with language in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). 

An equally hefty argument has been the definition of who among Alaska residents has rightful access to natural resources – and when. As the Katie John case gained momentum in federal courts, an Alaska state Supreme Court decision in another case, McDowell v. State, had rendered that natural resources are the property of all residents: urban, rural, Native and non-Native, and that relegating rights to specific groups violated the state constitution.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

ALASKA: North Pacific Council’s science committee voices concerns over chum bycatch plan

November 1, 2023 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting held at the Anchorage Hilton in October was not just one meeting – it was three meetings. In addition to the council itself, there was a meeting of industry stakeholders called the Advisory Panel, and a meeting of scientists called the Scientific and Statistical Committee – or SSC.

This fall the council tasked the SSC with reviewing a 120-page preliminary analysis of Bering Sea Chum Salmon Bycatch Management, and providing input on the “relative scientific uncertainty of management options.”

As KCAW’s Robert Woolsey reports, the committee of university, state, and federal scientists found a few things that were relatively uncertain.

At its October meeting the North Pacific Fishery Management Council  examined some potential management measures intended to reduce the amount of chum salmon caught by trawlers fishing for pollock in the Bering Sea. Many of those chum salmon – referred to as “bycatch” – may have been intercepted on their way to the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and other large river systems of Western Alaska, where chum salmon populations have crashed.

The council believes broader forces may be at work in causing chum salmon declines. The preliminary analysis prepared by the council’s scientists states that “declines in chum salmon populations appear to be driven by warmer water temperatures in both the marine and freshwater environments.”

Scientific and Statistical Committee member Dr. Ian Stewart, with the International Pacific Halibut Commission, had reservations about relying too heavily on temperature data.

Read the full at KCAW

North Pacific council declines hard cap for chum bycatch

October 17, 2023 —  Although it took steps to mitigate chum salmon bycatch in Bering Sea pollock trawls, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council fell short of imposing a hard cap at its meeting in October.

 A hard cap would restrict or shut down pollock trawling when the fleet reaches a maximum number of incidental salmon. The council’s inaction marks the latest round in a skirmish between trawling interests and local residents and fishermen living in western Alaska and from other regions in the state.

“We have submitted comments previously in support of a half-million chums,” says Tim Bristol, executive director of SalmonState, in Juneau. “We certainly don’t believe that’s a magic number, but a hard cap for trawlers, when essentially every other sector is facing some kind of restriction or closure, would have sent a message that the council is taking what is a crisis for many Alaskans seriously.”

For the past several years various conservation groups and fisheries associations have railed against the council’s failure to take more action in reducing the bycatch of salmon and crab, and impact on marine habitat. Recommendations by the groups have ranged from complete trawl closures in the Bering Sea to the use of hard caps.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Scientists observe chum salmon spawning in North Slope rivers

October 11, 2023 — University of Alaska Fairbanks associate professor of fisheries Peter Westley is clear that there’s nothing new about salmon straying into Arctic Ocean waters. Westley says the fish have long been occasionally observed and caught, but their numbers appear to be increasing.

“And we were interested in whether the change in the sort of frequency of salmon being encountered…is that a perhaps indicator that the salmon are not only showing up in the ocean but are showing up in rivers and are potentially working to establish populations in a new region,” Westley said.

Last month, Westley lead a team that aerially surveyed two Colville River tributaries, the Anaktuvuk and the Itkillik, and counted about 100 chum salmon equally split between the two Arctic rivers. He says movement of a species farther north is a clear signal of climate change.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media 

ALASKA: Four years into the Yukon salmon collapse, an Interior Alaska village wonders if it will ever fish again

September 18, 2023 — Without salmon, Gwichyaa Zhee is missing its heart.

“It’s just no good,” said Linda Englishoe, sitting on the sofa in her house not far from the Yukon River. An elder now, Englishoe has lived in the village for her entire life.

There are signs of fall in Englishoe’s house — a pan of apples and cinnamon on the stove, a tray of lowbush cranberries waiting to be processed. Fall usually also means the arrival of chum salmon on their journey upriver. But this year, the run is a fraction of the size it once was. As a result, federal and state fisheries managers have restricted most salmon fishing, cutting the village off from its traditional harvest.

Without fish, Englishoe said, nothing in the village is the way it’s supposed to be. The smokehouses, normally full of salmon drying for the winter, are empty. Even the smell of town is different.

“It used to smell so good, smelling those fish,” Englishoe said. “Ooh, I used to just sit outside, smelling.”

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Dunleavy again vetoes research project on salmon bycatch

June 23, 2023 — Among the projects Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed from the state budget on Monday was salmon research to help determine the causes of the chinook and chum crisis in western Alaska.

Dunleavy vetoed $513,000 for research on the origins of salmon caught by accident in the Bering Sea pollock fishery, as well as the origin of salmon intercepted by fishermen off the Alaska Peninsula in what’s known as “Area M.” Dunleavy vetoed the project last year, too.

“You never know what’s going to come of these budgets. But this is quite a disappointment, again,” said Karen Gillis, program director of the Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association. The association was to receive the money and pass it on to a partnership of federal and university scientists.

Read the full article at KYUK

Disaster aid for Alaska crab, salmon fisheries in spending bill

December 23, 2022 — Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo on Dec. 16 announced approval of fishery disaster requests for crab and salmon fisheries in Alaska and Washington over the last several years.

The declarations are for poor or closed Alaska harvests going back to 2020. They cover failures in the crab fisheries for this season and last season, including the recently canceled Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red crab harvests, as well as the closure of king crab fishing in Norton Sound in 2020 and 2021, the collapse of chum and coho harvests in the Kuskokwim River area, the poor salmon returns in the Chignik area in 2021, and low returns of pink and coho salmon om the Copper River and Prince William Sound areas in 2020.

For Washington, fishery disaster declarations were approved for the 2020 ocean salmon fisheries and the 2019 Columbia River, Willapa Bay, and Puget Sound Salmon fisheries.

“America’s fisheries are a critical part of our national economy and directly impact our local communities when disasters occur,” Raimondo said. “These determinations are a way to assist those fishing communities with financial relief to mitigate impacts, restore fisheries and help prevent future disasters.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

WASHINGTON: Fishing Washington’s urban wilderness

December 14, 2022 — Muckleshoot tribal fisherman pursue chum salmon along the heavily industrialized Duwamish River  

Clouds blanket Puget Sound and the rain starts at dawn. “Do you have oil gear?” Leeroy Courville asks as we sit in the wheelhouse of his boat, the High Liner.

“Just this Red Ledge.”

Leeroy laughs and digs out some Grundens gear for me. It’s a good thing too, because the rain starts to beat down.

The High Liner lies tied to the Muckleshoot tribal dock in a heavily industrialized stretch of the Duwamish River. A pair of 454 Mercruiser gas engines power the 32-foot by 11-foot bow picker, but one is broken down. Nonetheless, one is enough to get us out to Elliot Bay, where Courville hopes to gillnet a few more chum salmon before the Tribe closes the season.

“This could be the last day,” he says. “I might just make one set and come in. But if I get 40 fish, I’ll make another set. A hundred fish is $2,000.”

Leeroy bought the boat from his father. “I had that one over there,” he says pointing at a nearby bowpicker. “I sold it and my father gave me this one. I just bought that gray bowpicker over there for my kids.”

Leeroy’s son Kobe arrives with a skiff, and I get into the open boat with him to follow his father out to the fishing grounds. “Only people from the Muckleshoot Tribe can go on our boats,” Leeroy has informed me. The Muckleshoot are among the tribes whose ancestral fishing rights were recognized by the 1974 Boldt decision, a federal court ruling that upheld Washington tribes’ treaty fishing rights.

“My father was fishing before that,” Leeroy says. “And he has some stories.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Hatchery Chums are Returning Strong in Southeast Alaska

August 2, 2022 — While chum salmon runs in the western part of the state are crashing, hatchery chum salmon returns in Southeast are strong. The runs this year are promising to either meet or exceed expected numbers.

Southeast’s main hatchery operators are private non-profits that rear and release salmon to supplement commercial fisheries. Hatchery chums in the region are genetically indigenous fish but they’re raised in captivity and the fry are released into the ocean by the tens of millions. A small percent return three to five years later, nearly all of them caught by seiners, gillnetters, and trollers.

Hatchery chums are worth millions of dollars every year. The top season was in 2012, when they were valued at nearly $63 million.

Last year’s haul was worth about $25 million. This year will probably be better.

Read the full article at Seafoodnews.com